Nuke to the Future

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The portable nuclear reactor is the size of a hot tub. It’s shaped like a sake cup, filled with a uranium hydride core and surrounded by a hydrogen


Invented by scientist Otis Peterson, Hyperion’s patent for a hydride reactor is still pending.
atmosphere. Encase it in concrete, truck it to a site, bury it underground, hook it up to a steam turbine and, voila, one would generate enough electricity to power a 25,000-home community for at least five years.

The company Hyperion Power Generation was formed last month to develop the nuclear fission reactor at Los Alamos National Laboratory and take it into the private sector. If all goes according to plan, Hyperion could have a factory in New Mexico by late 2012, and begin producing 4,000 of these
reactors.

Though it would produce 27 megawatts worth of thermal energy, Hyperion doesn’t like to think of its product as a “reactor.” It’s self-contained, involves no moving parts and, therefore, doesn’t require a human operator.
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LANL scientist Otis Peterson filed the patent for the nuclear fission reactor in 2003. In theory, the reactor uses uranium crystals and hydrogen isotopes to create an internal, self-regulating balance. Because it’s so new, anti-nuclear power activists aren’t quite sure what to make of it yet. But ‘skeptical’ is perhaps too gentle a word for their initial reactions to Hyperion’s claims of a “clean” energy source.
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“This whole idea is loony and not worthy of too much attention,” Los Alamos Study Group Executive Director Greg Mello says. “Of course, factoring in enough cronyism, corruption and official ignorance and boosterism, it’s possible the principals could make some money during the initial stages, before the crows come home to roost.”
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http://sfreporter.com/articles/publish/outtake-112107-nuke-to-the-future.php

Here's the companies web site: http://www.hyperionpowergeneration.com/

Well we haven't gotten flying cars but maybe we'll get the 'portable nuke reactor' SF trope.

I'm a supporter of the idea that we need to look to nuclear energy to at the very least get us through a crisis point, and of course the hype of this story would lead to excitment from that perspective. However, something doesn't sit right, certainly any fission, waste generating product needs much regulations and monitoring and to have such a device easily distributed and used worries me from the point of logistics of that regulations and monitoring. And I don't know enough about the tech to decide if it is even feasible and if feasible if it is reasonably safe, so I'd be interested in the more expert here make comment on those aspects.

I doubt that figure of 25k homes, though. That would require 30 megawatts of electrical output, assuming that these homes run about the US average. It may generate 27 megawatts of thermal energy, but converting that into electricity is lossy: you only get about a third as much of the total, so I would think around 9 megawatts electrical. This doesn't bother ordinary nuclear reactors because they're ridiculously overpowered, but it would limit the efficacy of this. Still, 9 megawatts from a self-contained power source isn't bad at all--it vastly outpaces anything else we've got on that scale, even large industrial generators.

From the article:
“The lab is doing a lot of work on oil shales and oil sands, but there’s no way to get power to those facilities,” Blackwell says. “So, this nuclear battery would be brought in and that would provide the power to run a small city of industrial use.”

Shale oil is extracted by heating up the shale until the oil melts and can be pumped out. They could use the heat directly from these reactors instead of converting it to electricity (and then back to heat). The article says they're going to build 4000 reactors, at 27MWt each that's 108GWt. Apply the EROEI factor for shale oil and convert to barrels of oil.

some info on shale oil: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_shale_extraction

When I read it first time, I thought it was a neat idea for comparatively
isolated communities but putting it to use for tar sands is a really *bad*
move for the planet ... but bound to be taken up ...
:-(