Why I Started Small Nuclear Power

Welcome To Small Nuclear Power!

The initial idea for this blog came from a passing mention in a news item that I read that a Japanese company had proposed to provide an Alaskan village with a very small scale nuclear power plant. The company claimed that the system they were proposing was "inherently safe" - if something went wrong, the monitoring system removed power to the system and it would "coast to a stop" until someone could repair the problem.

Having spent some time in Alaska, such a system made tremendous sense to me, given that many Alaska villages got their electrical power purely from diesel-powered generators... and that diesel was often delivered by the barrel... by small planes!

Then I read about a different (I think) Japanese company that had begun marketing a similar small nuclear power plant that was designed to power a single urban high-rise building. That too made sense when it triggered memories of recent wide-area power outages that necessitated the evacuation of senior citizens and other vulnerable residents of high-rise residential buildings. Senior citizens especially need a lot of electrical power - they need their living space to be pretty warm, they use elevators a lot, they need things well-lit to see, they often use medical devices like oxygen generators, etc. They especially need their power system to be reliable.