Mini Nuclear Power Plants Could Power 20,000 Homes

Build a man a fire and you will warm him for a day. Expose him to enough radiation and you can warm him for the rest of his life.

Sorry, I couldn't resist. I is an interesting idea.

Tom

 

That's funny Tom. Yeah, I think it's an interesting idea as well. I'd like one the size of a suitcase to power my car. The concrete may require load range F tires though.

 

Had to laugh! The blue glow!

I suppose with how cheap companies are these days the guard would have to supply his own rad meter.

Seriously though, they have smaller nuclear batteries on space probes. Agree with the security issue. If the damn thing is buried, surrounded by an electric fence, closed circuit, you die if you touch it, who would need a guard?

You would think a country that sends probes to mars could come up with affordable non pouting energy. But I suppose the powers that be wouldn't be able to gouge us.

 

I want to believe in nuclear energy, I really do!
Energy that has no carbon footprint, no pollution and is too cheap to meter.
I really want to believe, but.....

 

Come on, help me with the math. This is too good to be true!!!

$25,000,000 for a reactor that will power 20,000 homes (per the article).

Add 3kW PV per home for another $120,000,000.

Add a 60,000 kW wind farm on the farm just outside town for another $35,000,000.

Now we have enough GREEN electrical production for 20,000 homes plus commercial usage plus nighttime recharging of 5,000+/- EVs all for $180 million or $9,000 per home or $3,800 per person. What would a similar size coal burning power plant cost???

All numbers are WAG. Your mileage may vary.

 

Speaking of math, am I off base by wondering how they get power for 20,000 average American sized homes from a 25MWe source. Seems to me this in 25,000,000 watts/20,000 homes = 1250 watts per home. Isn't that a bit low?

 

No and Yes.

1250 watts per home is an accurate number. I did a quick internet survey of reports from various electric utilities across the country and came across values ranging between 1000 watts and 1500 watts. Keep in mind that 1250 watts is a rate of power consumption averaged throughout the entire day. Peak usage could easily range from 5000 to 10,000 watts at certain times of day in certain houses. Imagine the power load of the A/C, a hairdryer, a microwave, a refrigerator compressor, a bathroom and kitchen fully lit up, and a large TV/Stereo turned on all at the same time! However, there will be long stretches of the day or night when the power rate will be a relative trickle (0 watts in theory, a couple hundred watts in practice)

Yes, there is a number problem with relation to the capacity of the plant to handle peak load. There are certain times of day when the average residential load will be 2000-3000 watts. See Figure 2 on the following webpage:

FSEC-PF-369-02

The 25 MW plant could not handle the peak residential load of 20,000 homes without some other means of storing/retrieving energy.

 

Hi All,

The only problem with this is what to do with the waste. Probably the only secure way to recycle nuclear fuel is if it could hapen automatically within the core somehow. We have to remember the guy who shut down the Breeder reactor concept in the US, was a Nuclear Engineer, besides being President Carter.

 

Nuclear power isn't free or cheap, it will be paid for by our grand kids and their grand kids. It's power on credit.

 

Even if we could ignore the disposal problem, nuclear isn't cheap.

If nuclear were cheap, then the investment community would be scrambling to get in on the action. Instead it is so expensive and fraught with danger that only governments will approach it. It is viewed as so dangerous that the insurance industry won't touch it. There are laws that limit the liability, so if there is an accident, not only are you screwed but you can't collect anything from those responsible. The free market has spoken, and the losers continually turn to government to override the fiscal irresponsibility of nuclear power.

 

Even if it were cheap, we can't ignore the waste/disposal problem. Does anyone think that any site any where storing anything can be secured against ALL comers for hundreds if not thousands of years? You don't think that every nutcase/terrorist of any description that you can think of now and forever won't, eventually figure out how to breach ANY security? Inside jobs, the lure or money or just laziness will demand a debt that our children's, children's children ad infinitum will have to pay!

Let's take advantage of the current economic situation and energy price swings to make the REAL changes we need to to make our collective future better.

Icarus

 

We still need to solve the baseload problem. With efficiency gains we could probably eliminate a large number of the oldest, most inefficient coal fired power plants, but efficiency alone is probably not enough. We still don't really have a baseload solution that can be deployed anywhere at a reasonable cost. There are a few smaller time players that can contribute (landfill gas, geothermal, biomass) to the solution, but at the present I don't see a combination that can handle the baseload. Nookular is a good bridge to a carbon free future. It's certainly not the best solution, but there are a variety of designs that can mitigate the waste storage issue.

 

This is one of those discussion where the face off is between what is possible vs. what is actually done. Right now we are in the second decade of storing waste on site while STILL trying to progress to storing waste in deep repositories.

All the nuclear proposals that are actually in the works depend on a waste disposal system not in operation yet. Would it be unreasonable to wait till we take care of the 1st generation waste before we start generating the 2nd generation waste?

 

Why not reprocess the 1st gen like the Frogs do?

 

Put it in a pond?
Hide it under a lilly pad?
Make a bomb?
Sink a ship in a New Zealand harbour?
Wondering what you mean

 

It makes the problem smaller, but does not change the end need for a very big hole in the ground to dump it. Presently France is planning on making this big hole at Bure. But just like the Americans, engineering something that will work for 1000's of years turns out to be vastly harder than originally planned.....so the French waste piles up locally as well.

IEEE Spectrum: Nuclear Wasteland

France Moves Ahead With Nuclear Waste Project : NPR

 

Not to belabor the point, but I would guess that it is going to be far easier to design long term containment to sustain any conceivable natural disaster,, earthquake, fire, flood, etc. than it is ever going to be to design against the man made disaster!

The worldwide political/social/religious climate, while fairly hot right now, could by any imagination be much hotter. The idea that over the half life of any waste, no rouge (person, organization, government) couldn't/wouldn't get their hands on the waste to make a dirty bomb is beyond the reasonable calculation.

As for reprocessing,,, doesn't reprocessing spent fuel turn it into plutonium? A far more dangerous product? The big dust up about Iran is that by reprocessing they would be making bomb fuel. Do we really want to go there on a world wide scale, and encourage the developing world that this is the way to go?

Wouldn't it be better to put our investment into real sustainable/renewable energy,,PV Wind, tide, etc, coupled with good conservation practices as well.

Icarus

 

There is no magic process that makes the spent fuel "safe." Various theoretical proposals are in place, but they remain theoretical. The use of Thorium will - theoretically - allow burnup and recycle of Plutonium, especially in the Canadian CANDU reactor designs

Article in IAEA-TECDOC--1319: Recent advances in thorium fuel cycles for CANDU reactors

Thorium

The Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility appear to approve the use of weapons grade plutonium and thorium in CANDU as a means to annihilate the plutonium

AECL Plans to Commercialize Plutonium and MOX Fuels

The Evolution of CANDU Fuel Cycles and Their Potential Contribution to World Peace

The one thing to keep in mind is that chemical reprocessing of spent bundles will tend to generate enormous quantities of dangerous waste. REDOX contributed vast amounts of liquid waste, and PUREX greatly reduced this contribution. Consider the Hanford site, in essence one giant CERCLA/SARA area

http://www.agls.uidaho.edu/etox/resources/case_studies/HANFORD.PDF

Not a happy legacy