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.

Another place where small scale nuclear power systems would make a tremendous amount of sense is in developing countries like India. I've read that one of the greatest barriers to India becoming more of an economic superpower like China has become is that their power generation and distribution system is, charitably, a mess. All companies (and residences) have to accommodate the reality of unreliable power, and have their own backup generators, batteries, etc. Wouldn't it make more sense to provide power on the scale of a village or a single industrial complex?

Small scale nuclear power systems are only feasible because of advances in the last couple of decades in "inherently safe" nuclear technology. Part of that is pure technological advancement - better control systems, more sophisticated computer systems, better modeling of what can happen to make use of better monitoring capability, advanced telecommunications like Broadband Internet Access allowing monitoring to be done centrally instead of having (expensive) personnel onsite, etc.

Lastly... the waste issue. As I understand it, as a lay person, in the US we've figured out what we should do with our nuclear waste - entomb it in glass at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. We just lack the societal will to actually move ahead with that decision. But that's almost a side issue with small-scale nuclear power systems because they use a very small amount of nuclear material, and they're designed to last for decades - a reasonable payback period when you consider the value of providing electrical power on the scale of an entire village, industrial complex, or high-rise residential (or commercial) building.

By Steve Stroh

This article is Copyright © 2008 by Steve Stroh. Excerpts and links are expressly permitted (and encouraged).

Comments

[Rod Adams]

Steve:

Was this just a one off post? Do you intend to follow up?

I found you based on my new Google Alert for "small nuclear power". It is a topic that is coming up more and more often on my blog, podcast and on other blogs.

I want to encourage you to pursue your idea of a blog dedicated to the idea. It is one whose time has come.

Rod Adams
Publisher, Atomic Insights
Producer, The Atomic Show Podcast
Founder, Adams Atomic Engines, Inc.