Swerving a bit into technological developments today, I recently saw an article from the Guardian about shed-size nuclear reactors powering 20,000 homes per reactor:

Nuclear power plants smaller than a garden shed and able to power 20,000 homes will be on sale within five years, say scientists at Los Alamos, the US government laboratory which developed the first atomic bomb.

The miniature reactors will be factory-sealed, contain no weapons-grade material, have no moving parts and will be nearly impossible to steal because they will be encased in concrete and buried underground.

The US government has licensed the technology to Hyperion, a New Mexico-based company which said last week that it has taken its first firm orders and plans to start mass production within five years. ‘Our goal is to generate electricity for 10 cents a watt anywhere in the world,’ said John Deal, chief executive of Hyperion. ‘They will cost approximately $25m [£13m] each. For a community with 10,000 households, that is a very affordable $2,500 per home.’

The article mentions that safety is virtually a non-issue with these reactors:

‘You could never have a Chernobyl-type event – there are no moving parts,’ said Deal. ‘You would need nation-state resources in order to enrich our uranium. Temperature-wise it’s too hot to handle. It would be like stealing a barbecue with your bare hands.’

The nextbigfuture.com blog carries this story further by delving into the details of such a reactor.

Since President-elect Obama is going to be doing what most incoming Presidents do and rescind a number of Presidential Executive Orders, it is quite possible that he could replace the EO concerning offshore/other drilling; reactors such as this could be beneficial for stationary power use (though I’d suspect that oil prices would shoot up if a similar EO banning drilling were put back into effect).

-Phil