Mini Nuclear Reactors Could Revolutionize The Energy Sector
Imagine a nuclear power plant the size of a garden shed able to power your house plus 20,000 of your neighbors houses. That type of machinery is on the horizon within the next five years according to scientists at Los Alamos. The mini-reactors will be completely self contained and sealed, with zero moving parts and be buried underground.
This tiny technology was originally developed by the US government’s Los Alamos laboratory, but the development rights have been licensed to New Mexico-based company Hyperion Power Generation (HPG), which has taken it’s first firm orders and plans to start mass production within five years.
“Our goal is to generate electricity for 10 cents a watt anywhere in the world,” said John Deal, chief executive of Hyperion. “They will cost approximately $25 million each. For a community with 10,000 households, that is a very affordable $2,500 per home.”
Nuclear power is actually a very safe and clean way to produce a lot of energy. Many people don’t understand how a nuclear power plant even works. Basically, the plants are just huge steam engines. Nuclear material heats water, which turns to steam in a boiler and is forced through a turbine. The spinning of that turbine is what actually generates the electricity.
One of the main arguments against nuclear power plants is the high cost of building a new plant. In fact, despite being relatively safe and clean, nuclear power has never been profitable. It always requires some form of government assistance to make it economically feasible. A traditional nuclear plant can cost around $5 billion dollars to build, and a huge amount of money to maintain, making it extremely difficult to just break even. A few years ago, the Department of Energy commissioned a financial report of the nuclear industry by Scully Capital Services, an investment banking and financial services firm. They determined that, without certain federal subsidies, the entire nuclear industry would “grind to a halt”. But the mini reactors will only cost $25 million each, which could change the whole financial picture of nuclear power.
Hyperion plans to set up three factories to produce 4,000 plants between 2013 and 2023. They already have more than 100 firm orders, largely from the oil and electricity industries, but the company is also targeting developing countries and isolated communities.
The reactors are only a few meters in diameter, and can be delivered easily on a truck, dropped off and buried with very little effort. They must be refueled every 5 to 10 years, depending on which source you hear it from. The waste is a softball-sized amount of recyclable material, but other than that, it’s completely pollutant free.
Some other companies are known to be designing micro-reactors. Toshiba is the most visible and has been working on their reactor for some time. They have been testing 200 kilowatt reactors measuring roughly six meters by two meters. Designed to fuel smaller numbers of homes for longer, they could power a single building for up to 40 years. Competition in this sector is ideal, since once more companies start getting involved, the quality of these micro-reactors will increase and the cost will go down. That’s when thing will really get interesting.
