Mini Nuclear Power Plants Could Power 20,000 Homes

It's "easy" to design systems, eg spatial sequences, to be resistant to most natural disasters.

It's almost impossible to design systems to be resistant to human actor influence. Imagine a global economic collapse, people are hungry. A terrorist group approaches a hungry guard, or scientist, at a research or waste facility.

Say the local currency has become worthless. Don't laugh, it could easily happen here, and it frequently happens in third world and second world nations. The terrorist group can present monitized units that are far more valuable than the worthless local currency, or offer food, security etc.

If your family is going hungry, or living in fear, what would *you* do to ensure their security and survival?

The guard, or scientist, can then use their legitimate access to "secure" areas to obtain access to dangerous materials. The terrorist group has promised to not use the materials locally or nearby, so that's good enough.

In the event of a catastrophic global economic collapse, it's also highly unlikely that the necessary maintenance of protective systems, and security systems, can be maintained. Most modern facilities are designed for minimal human attendance, depending on automation and remote monitoring, eg SCADA, to maintain operations and surveillance

Kind of a grim scenario, hmmm

 

Since when did governments or corporations ever worry about *that* problem?

 

Yes

Not only from an economic/ROI angle, but it's also *far* safer as well. Sure, a nutcase group could always blow up a large dam and flood a vast area, but there is little to be gained from going after PV panels

 

Wouldn't it be easier to toss these barrels of nuclear waste at the sun?

Assuming of course, we devise an environmentally sustainable method of transporting them into space.

That or we can store them, for the future, so that we may use them in fusion power plants.

 

That was my impression too. A plant of that size could supply enough energy (MWHours) over an extended period, but couldn't supply enough power (MW) to handle the peak loads without storage. I'm sure the utilities have the scaling all worked out for how much peak power is required for 20,000 homes, and I bet the number is a good bit larger than 25MW.

 

Perhaps a grid of these reactors spread out across the horizontal axis of the earth would balance the power requirements of one time zone with the power from surrounding zones.

I don't think nuclear is a viable long-term solution. Uranium is fairly rare. We simply don't have enough to power the earth for a long term, especially if more and more reactors are being built.

 

What is the "horizontal axis" of the Earth?

Everything is relative, it may be rare compared with silicon, but it's availability is on par with many other elements we take for granted. Most important, it takes an amazingly small amount of enriched Uranium to generate an enormous amount of power. There's plenty of identified uranium to power the existing nuclear power plants for at least 80 years. There was recently a long period of time where no Uranium exploration took place. 80 years is long enough to serve as a bridge until even more environmentally-friendly power sources (like Solar) become more economically viable. Also, over the next few decades, more efficient nuclear technologies will likely emerge, as well as publicly acceptable disposal methods.

Supply of Uranium : WNA
Abundances of the elements (data page - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

 

I'm a bit fuzzy with that. I'm going to assume you mean along a line of latitude.

We already have a nighmarishly complicated grid intertie system to allow power flow. More use of bipole HVDC would allow more efficient long distance transmission of power