NUCLEAR: A Portable Nuclear Power Plant In Your Basement !

For $27M, A Mini Reactor Can Be Installed Underground To Provide Enough Energy For 20,000 People

Danny Fortson
    John “Grizz” Deal wants to put a nuclear reactor in your back garden.
    Don’t worry, it’s safe. So he says. The technology his company, Hyperion Power Generation, is developing is licensed from America’s Los Alamos National Laboratory, birthplace of the atomic bomb.
    As nuclear plants go, these are tiny, about the size of a shed. They will be buried 6ft underground, can run virtually unmanned for a decade and provide enough power for 20,000 people. That’s the idea at least. Hyperion hasn’t built one yet. “Our goal,” said Deal, “is to take the benefits of nuclear power, make it safer and get it to the public.”
    The activity reflects nuclear power’s astonishing rehabilitation from pariah technology to potential climate saviour. This has already led to plans for new nuclear plants in Britain and America as well as in currently nuke-free countries such as Abu Dhabi. But these building programmes are for the huge reactors we are accustomed to.
    Deal and his ilk have boiled them down into highly simplified versions that can be built and sealed in a factory, trucked to the customer and dropped into place. Designs vary but the selling points are the same: price and simplicity. Big reactors can cost up to $8.08billion and take a decade to build. Hyperion’s could cost as little as $27m and if all goes to plan they would be churned out of factories. They can operate with minimal oversight and have fail-safe systems that make the possibility of meltdown remote.
    Backers claim that mini reactors are technologically feasible. But getting the public to accept the idea of small nukes sprinkled around the world will be a real battle.
    So how would it work? Much like today’s reactors. The technology behind the different models varies but they all draw on the fission process developed and honed over the past 50 years. Small reactors have been used for decades in universities and hospitals for research. So converting them to generate power is not the leap it might seem, said Rex Loesby, chief executive of Canadian Remote Power, a start-up firm.
    In fact, smaller models can be made much safer than traditional plants because they can be run at lower temperatures and will use the latest technology. Indeed, for remote regions where national electricity grids don’t reach, the only option is usually diesel generation, one of the dirtiest and most expensive power sources.
    Potential customers for the mini reactors include military bases, power-hungry industrial projects such as oil developments, or remote communities in the developing world. Councillors in Galena, Alaska, for example, an outpost of 675 people deep in the Yukon, have approved a plan to install one.
    It sounds promising but catastrophes such as Chernobyl and near-disasters such as Three Mile Island continue to guide perceptions.
    “There are a lot of advantages if people can get over the safety issue,” said Loesby. “Where sufficient safety regimes and containment structures are in place, the record is stellar.”
    Most of the small models envisaged are essentially boxes of uranium denuded of all but a few parts. Aside from radioactive waste, the only product of a nuclear reaction is extreme heat. In the most common pressurised reactor designs the heat is used to turn water to steam, which powers a turbine. This would be above ground. SUNDAY TIMES, LONDON