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

[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.