Friday, March 13, 2009
Silver bullets
The Obama team is fond of saying that there are no silver bullets to solve our energy and economic problems. Generally good advice, but in fact there is a silver bullet for energy, and it even looks like a silver bullet!
The Lone Polistranger is showing an actual-size core section of a Hyperion mini-reactor. These are fully self-contained nuclear power capsules, developed at Los Alamos and already commercially available. Each reactor gives enough electricity for 20,000 average households. This means that Spokane could be fully powered with a field of 15 Hyperions. The reactor never needs to be opened; when its fuel is used up (perhaps 5 years) the whole module is pulled out and replaced with a new one.
Present cost is about $25 million per unit, which will presumably drop when larger-scale production is possible. ¶ 6:31 PM
The Lone Polistranger is showing an actual-size core section of a Hyperion mini-reactor. These are fully self-contained nuclear power capsules, developed at Los Alamos and already commercially available. Each reactor gives enough electricity for 20,000 average households. This means that Spokane could be fully powered with a field of 15 Hyperions. The reactor never needs to be opened; when its fuel is used up (perhaps 5 years) the whole module is pulled out and replaced with a new one.
Present cost is about $25 million per unit, which will presumably drop when larger-scale production is possible. ¶ 6:31 PM
