Didn't Asimov write about "micro-piles" in The Martian Way?

[james_davis_nicoll]

Toshiba has [allegedly] developed a new class of micro size Nuclear Reactors that is designed to power individual apartment buildings or city blocks.

Seen via talheres

[Developed appears to mean "have a design but not an actual reactor]

[200 kW seems a bit powerful for a city block, at least one with homes on it. The average American household uses about 11,000 kW-hrs a year, according to the first site I found, which if I've done the math right is about 1300 Watts. 200 kW would power about 150 households. Looking at it another way, assuming three people per household, you'd need about 450 of these for Kitchener and once the system was mature, you'd be replacing about a dozen a year on average (One hopes that it doesn't work out so that the replacement rate is nearly zero until about 40 years after the reactors showed up, at which point it zooms up to nearly 100%)]

Comments

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

Considering how good my building management is at keeping the boilers in decent shape?

That scares the shit out of me.

[(Anonymous)]

Shiny, shiny, shiny. Why would you actually want one?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

One is no fun [1]. Lots of inexpensive nuclear reactors don't solve all of the problems of increasing conventional fuel costs [2] but they solve a lot of them.

1: Ignoring those researchers who would derive a great deal of pleasure from their own little reactor.

2: Short version: batteries suck, therefore cars will use something like gasoline for a long time to come.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

I probably couldn't convince the condo board to get one of those, even if the feds would allow it.

[liadra.livejournal.com]

Scary stuff.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

It sounds like a very excellent idea, as long as the design is like those of the pebble-bed reactors, where even a total coolant failure cannot result in a meltdown. OTOH, if the design is not as safe as that, then even if people use these things, they'll stop the first time one of them spews all manner of radiation around the vicinity. I'd love to see more nuclear power, as long as it's safe, well-designed, nuclear power.

In other news, solar isn't doing badly either, with $1 a watt solar power now being manufactured. Of course, I don't know how environmentally safe the manufacturing process is for the cells, so nuclear might be a considerably better option.

[phanatic.livejournal.com]

Can you buy those $1/watt solar panels?

[twoeleven.livejournal.com]

you jest. they claim they're selling only to "select wholesalers" or somesuch. this isn't too unreasonable, but one might think they would name them, so that retail customers would know who to buy from. they mention selling a 1 megawatt plant, but oddly don't say the selling price. equally oddly, they won't give out spec sheets except under non-disclosure arrangements. color me skeptical.

[keithmm.livejournal.com]

Apparently, based on what someone who seems to know what they were talking about, there are series problems with the manufacture of the panels, starting with the fact that they're basically hand-crafted, with a ton of wastage in order to make functional units. They can make one-offs, but large scale manufacturing is out of the question.

[phanatic.livejournal.com]

Try as I might, I can't find a reference to this reactor anywhere other than that page. Toshiba does have their '4S' reactor, which is a small one at 10MW, but this claims to be much smaller still. You'd think Toshiba would have something to say about it, but I can't find it. The 4S is about 5 years away from certification, and just certification isn't sufficient to allow it to be built here; each individual reactor has to be licensed for a specific site, and that takes years as well. The 4S is liquid sodium cooled, not lithium cooled.

Basically, I don't believe this article.

[rezendi.livejournal.com]

http://advancednano.blogspot.com/2007/12/micro-and-small-nuclear-reactors.html

[phanatic.livejournal.com]

Oh, so they're in the design process for such a reactor, and haven't even begun to build one, let alone "built" one, as the article claims.

[icedrake.livejournal.com]

Try as I might, I can't find any mention of said reactor actually coming *from Toshiba.* What I do find, however, is a ton of blogger coverage, virtually all of which is going back to the NextEnergyNews page. That, and the fairly reliable mention of the reactor being offered to Galena, AK, USA. Which, unfortunately, isn't a Lithium-6 reactor at all.

[nyrath.livejournal.com]

The same thing was noticed by the commentators at Slashdot as well. One would think that such a breakthrough would be mentioned on Toshiba's official website. It is suspicious that the only mention is on some rinky-dink blog.

[j-larson.livejournal.com]

I totally trust my landlord to run a nuclear reactor.

[j-larson.livejournal.com]

They don't even let the employees handle cash.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

No estimate of how much one of these things would cost, I notice--my gut instinct (note, not backed by research) is to think that the smaller a fission reactor is, the less cost-effective it would be, but I suppose if you could actually mass-produce them there would be efficiencies there.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Assume it generates 200 kW for 40 years at 5 cents a kWhr, that's 3.5 million dollars worth of juice. However much it costs is less than that.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

You know, it's surprisingly difficult to find a price tag for the Pickering reactors.

[nyrath.livejournal.com]

Yes, in The Martian Way spacecraft use a "proton micropile" to heat propellant.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

"Proton micropile" sounds kind of fusiony.

[scentofviolets.livejournal.com]

The proton micropile! I loved those guys! Sigh. Being, as they say, an advanced student in a rather backward school system, I got a lot of my 'science' from sf stories. Books like Leinsters' "Forgotten Planet", for example. It wasn't until much later that I actually started getting the real stuff - tip o' the hat to Asimov non-sf - and learning about the real problems with space flight. The proton micropile seemed to me at the tender age of eleven to be the way it would really happen, compact power source heating a large amount of cheap propellant (what could be cheaper than water?) Yeah, that was the real stuff, baby. It wasn't until a grade or two later that I learned about the extremely corrosive effects live steam tends to have machinery that I had to modify my sophisticated opinions.

[(Anonymous)]

Wait. Corrossion is the problem? Doesn't materials science offer any cure for that?

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Lem's Pirx used piles, I think.

[casaubon.livejournal.com]

The average American household uses about 11,000 kW-hrs a year, according to the first site I found, which if I've done the math right is about 1300 Watts.

If you're calculating how many you need to power a city you don't need to know the average usage, you need to know the peak.
But I assume these are designed to be in addition to the existing power grid with the owner selling spare power to the grid.

[cattitude.livejournal.com]

Their estimate for the city block may be from a different city. My building has over a hundred households in it, and there are seven buildings on my block. By Manhattan standards we're not high density at all.

[(Anonymous)]

To be honest, the killer app for "small, cheapish" reactors isnt powering buildings anywhere - its pretty much always going to be cheaper to hook them up to a "humongous, even cheaper" reactor. No, the killer app is shipping where you can simply use them as engines. Problem being that if I recall the reason the germans scrapped the idea of the nuclearpowered freighter wasnt reactor cost, but instead that the labour costs involved in getting docking permits for an atomic ship made it obviously uneconomic.

[timgueguen.livejournal.com]

Its funny to read about this when the former Soviet Union has problems with miniature nuclear power units used to power remote light houses and the like. They're radioisotope thermoelectric units similar to those used in deep space exploration craft. Unfortunately they're a risk because many of the sites have been abandoned, and the authorities aren't even sure where all of them are located.

[(Anonymous)]

Small fission piles are actually becoming a popular trend in the nuclear industry. Small clutches of micropiles are easier and safer to control than large traditional fission reactors. Unfortunately, Smaller piles are not as efficient as the larger arrays. While microreactor technology has been applied to some degree in military applications (such as submarines), the trick is designing a system that will function on its own without having to be constantly monitored. If each reactor needs to be coddled by trained technicians, the cost-effectiveness of the idea drops precipitously. Ideally, they will be able to manufacture a sealed system that can be switched out after their fuel is depleted like a battery. Don't expect many advancements from the US, however. We no longer posses the capability to cast reactor vessels at home and instead order them, ironically enough, from Japan.

Pardon my ramble.