This concept is astonishing to me. They claim to have practical nuclear power plants on a small scale with no moving parts or maintenance required that can power 10,000 homes for 7-10 years for $25M. Would you pay $250 to have free electricity for 7 years? This boggles the mind. If true (a big if certainly), this would seem to me to be unbelievably close to the energy Holy Grail. Am I missing something?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/nov/09/miniature-nuclear-reactors-los-alamos
Sounds like nuclear thermoelectric power, which has been used in things like satellites and space probes for decades.
These are fission reactors. They use Uranium Hydride, and produce a constant thermal power output over a fixed period of time (5 years). The Uranium Hydride core is self-moderating, and has a negative thermal coefficient, so fission slows down as it get hotter. It can’t melt down, and if the containment is compromised, the uranium hydride reacts to produce uranium oxides, which cannot be used in a weapon without full reprocessing (there were attempts to produce a uranium hydride bomb in the '50s, but they failed to deliver predicted yields). All you need to do is hook up a turbine and water, and you get power. The primary predicted use is in shale oil extraction, which requires large amounts of raw steam.
The device is produced by Hyperion.
Si
I didn’t thin that RTGs could put out that amount of power; this sounds more like the pebble-bed reactor.
Good info, thanks. So, are the claims implied by the article (250MW output with a footprint only a few meters in diameter, for only $25M) feasible?
Yeah, it looks like these reactors use a liquid metal cooling system, and the hot liquid metal would then be used to create steam to drive turbines, or to directly heat homes or to just create steam for steam reformation use in the oil sands. So the reactor itself is the size of a shed, but I imagine it would be buried under a small power station with a steam turbine electrical generator. It’s not just a box in the ground with some big electrical wires coming out of it.
This looks like a very cool technology. It looks exrtemely safe, and useless for terrorism. There’s plenty of yellowcake in the world, and the fuel in this reactor is no more dangerous than yellowcake. It would take the resources of a state to refine it into weapons-grade materials, and all states with that capability already have enough yellowcake tha this stuff would be a drop in a bucket. It can’t melt down, it can’t rupture. You buy it, stick it in the ground, and you have a 7-10 year constant source of power for 20,000 homes. What’s not to like?
the Czech Republic and Romania have signed up to purchase the first ones. They’re going to build distributed power grids with comunities all having their own local power generation. That makes a lot of sense, since they don’t already have good national power grids. This will save them a ton of money and a ton of time in getting a good, productive electrical infrastructure in place.
By the way, these things have been around for a long time, possibly right in your community, and you don’t even know it. Our university has been running one of these for decades - students get to use it. They are used to make radioisotopes for medical purposes, and these facilities exist in a number of places. They’re a damned safe reactor design. They use a lot less uranium than other nuclear plants, and the small footprint and unattended operation means there’s very little secondary waste, and the primary waste can be reprocessed.
This is where the future of our energy infrastructure is. It’s not in nation-sized wind farms or huge multi-kilometer solar collector sites. Those will play a part. But unless we’re very stupid or we have some very big wind and solar breakthroughs soon, we’ll be burying little boxes generating clean, nearly unlimited energy.
From the article linked in the OP:
$250 times 10,000 is $2.5 million, not $25 million.
Also from TFA:
I’ll have to check, but I’m pretty sure I’m paying less than that now.
You pay a price per unit of energy consumed; they’re talking about the price per unit of power delivered. Apples and cucumbers.
I read that the gizmo had no moving parts, which suggests that it is a sort of ‘hot box’ - and you use the heat to generate electricity separately.
Also I read that the same type of thing is in use in universities, which makes me reckon that Si Blakely’s version is the thing.
It certainly sounds a sensible alternative for producing electricity - and potentially hydrogen which could be combined to make more conventionally useable fuels.
I read $25m for 20,000 homes - it is a universal truth that journalists are not good at arithmetic 
Okay, it looks like $2500 per household, and I think I slipped a digit when I said 250MW output - I think it’s 25MW. And I think the $2500 figure is just for the nuke with additional cost for the steam turbine electrical generator. Any idea of what that would cost?
The issue that I see is that these things have a constant power output (ideal for oil shale extraction or desalination), and the 5 year lifetime is related to how long it can maintain a given level of power output. There is no peak load capability, and you need to have something useful you can divert off load generation to (hydro energy storage for peak load, maybe). This sort of switching makes local community systems more complex for the grid.
Plus the reprocessing issues at the end of life - there is heaps of U to be recovered from the unit, but it is contaminated with fission products, and until you open it up to stop the fission, you can’t let it decay down. Interestingly, they expect to produce a Thorium variant, but it runs much hotter, introducing engineering difficulties.
Si