Our nuclear power mistake – the original design for power plants came from the military – used on submarines. When visionaries like Walt Disney pushed the idea of peaceful nuclear power, GE, Babcock & Wilcox and others basically just took the military version and scaled it up 100s of times larger. That would create something a large centralized electric utility would love.
China has been moving the opposite direction and Bloomberg has an article that companies are looking to try the approach here. Rather than building custom made multibillion centralized plants – whose technology is by its nature more risky and problematic…
Picture in your mind instead a nuke in a box – a unit more similar to what is on the scale of the original military design – a nuclear reactor that can fit on a truck. Its output could power a small town or a factory. It would use more current technology that limits the worst case scenario – with a total loss of cooling, the fuel doesn’t get hot enough to melt – it just gets really hot until the fission reaction stops.
Even in a worst worst case like a terrorist blowing one up, since it has only a fraction of the fuel a big plant has, the radiation damage would local in nature, not a Chernobyl.
Having been a commercial nuclear safety analysis engineer for the past 30 years, this is one of the few topics I have an informed opinion on (LOL!).
When judging the path the US took on nuclear power one has to understand the origins. Yes, navy nuclear reactors were the forefront of technology in the 1950’s. The commercial versions were similar on the outside but fundamentally different (and arguably much safer) than the navy reactors. Enrichment levels were very low so that there could be no chance of a nuclear explosion, and no chance that the fuel could be stolen and made into a bomb. Navy reactors on the other hand have high enrichments so that they can be smaller and require refueling far less often. At the time the US was scared to death of nuclear proliferation (which happened anyway despite precautions). Soviet spies stole nuclear secrets and suddenly the communists had the bomb. The US government decided that nuclear technology could not be trusted to the public. Thus we saw new agencies created such as the Atomic Energy Commission (which later split under Pres. Carter into the civilian NRC and the military Dept. of Energy) whose principal goal was to develop and CONTROL nuclear technology. Since the government wanted a centralized command and control concept for commercial nuclear power, that’s pretty much what we ended up with. It also didn’t hurt that the electrical utilities were already on board with this mindset, with their large hydro dams and huge super-critical coal plants. Thus the concept of neighborhood nuclear power generation has never really caught on in the U.S. There are just too many regulatory obstacles to overcome.
A final observation is that this is a case of “That was then, This is now.” The technology for small “inherently safe” nuclear reactors did not exist in the 1950s-1980s. It is a relatively recent development, largely unproven and untested in mass distribution. The big advantage is that it greatly reduces the number of large high-voltage transmission lines one has to string across difficult terrain (like in China). In the U.S. the electrical grid network already exists so the savings is not as much. The disadvantage is that you may suffer morons who “can’t read the instructions” and despite every design precaution you end up getting the local area contaminated with radioactive materials. The Chinese (like the old Soviet Union) have never been overly concerned about protecting human lives or the environment. The US nuclear industry on the other hand has always put safety and civilian protection at the forefront regardless of cost. Thus the difference between Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. Both reactors suffered catastrophic meltdowns due to a succession of rather unbelievable human errors. At TMI-2 not a single person was killed or injured and the only lasting effect on the “local environment” was economic because the plant was shut down for a long time for cleanup. At Chernobyl there were multiple casualties, long term cancer deaths, and the area is still quarantined. It also shows the true difference between U.S. style capitalism and communism. The Chinese have had similar catastrophic accidents with their coal plants but for some reason they go largely unreported in the western press.
With that said, if someone is selling neighborhood reactors, sign me up as a potential customer. I’ll happily put one in my back yard if I decide the design is safe!
I hadn’t read the article all the way to end – in the next to last paragraph, it mentions one of the forces pushing this idea is Bill Gates, of Microsoft fame. He’s got billions of dollars in his foundation that could make things happen. He seems guilt-ridden about subsaharan Africa for some reason. I could see that as the reason he would support this idea.