(Pardon me for back-to-back promotions of VY diaries but BP has another good one. Dems take note what’s going on down here and Wall Street! – promoted by Christian Avard)
The business world this week is declaring longer term growth for Entergy “muted” due to market conditions and questions about nuclear power’s future. As Ed’s two Entergy Yankee diaries show, new large nuke construction is on hold, with the old ones future’s in trouble. These events show current size nuclear power plants becoming dinosaurs financially as well as in the engineering sense. But strangely a new nuke may be emerging, a greatly downsized unit. Generating 25 megawatts (VY is 620 megawatts ) on, or close to where the need is these micro plants are being marketed as a clean replacement for high greenhouse gas emission generating sources. The engineering of these plants is different from the giant versions but the sales pitch sounds ominously similar. It isn’t quite power-too-cheap-to-meter but it could drift into that sales pitch territory.
They are styled on a small reactor built and used by students of nuclear power ,23 are in operation today.Known as Training, Research, Isotopes,General, Atomics or TRIGA they use a different kind of fuel. It is said they are deigned to make a meltdown virtually impossible. In other words no containment buildings are needed. By the way aren’t the large nuclear generating plants also designed to make meltdowns virtually impossible? The entire apparatus is tamper proof and factory sealed before shipping. We hardly have the capacity to monitor the smattering of large nuclear plants in operation now, it is doubtful the same regulatory agencies could cope with thousand of little nukes shipped, scattered and operating through out the land. “All of our units will have remote sensors on them and they’re all monitored around the clock. And there’s on-site monitoring as well. We will know what’s going on with every one of those units at all times,” a spokesman maintains. ……………Thousands of TRIGAs out and about .
More below the fold.
Hyperion Power Generation Inc. has developed a garden shed-sized nuclear reactor that can produce enough heat to generate 25 megawatts of electricity for up to 10 years.That’s enough energy to power 20,000 homes, but still tiny by current nuclear standards. Hyperion, which calls its reactor as a “nuclear battery,” licensed the technology from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. It plans to sell the reactor for about $30 million (U.S.) and says there’s potential to sell 4,000 of them around the world by 2025. The company already claims more than $2 billion worth of orders in the pipeline and more than 100 “firm” orders.
TRIGA reactors use low-enriched uranium hydride as a fuel, which can’t be used to make a bomb, and they’re designed to make a meltdown virtually impossible. In other words, no containment building is required.”The secret of the fuel is that it cools itself off,” says a spokesman When uranium hydride gets too hot, above 550 degrees Celsius, it will shed hydrogen atoms. The hydrogen flows out of the core and is stored in special storage trays within the reactor. As the fuel loses hydrogen atoms it begins to naturally cool. As it cools, it will retrieve the hydrogen atoms from the trays.The whole process is self-limiting. A runaway chain reaction isn’t possible – at least that’s what the company claims. The company compares the reactor to lungs that inhale and exhale hydrogen in a natural balance that keeps the reactor at a fairly constant temperature.