Man, if they had missile technology good enough to destroy a reinforced bunker like that, They would be much better served going after the big modern nuke facilities like we have now. A lot more ratiation would be let loose using that method.

My thoughts are that this is the best thing I’v heard in a while, I’ve looked at wind energy, solar energy and nothing can really compete with the around the clock relaibility of radioactive decay. If we as a people fail to adopt a technology like this then we should be extinct on the merits of stupidity alone.

Congratulations for getting the debate rolling on nuclear energy and especially distributed nuclear energy.

I don’t believe that the ultimate goal of this technology should be to have a nuclear reactor on every street corner. I wouldn’t want that and I work in nuclear power. However, the construction of nuclear power units may be ready to naturally evolve from a construction project to the assembly line.

It may not be economical to build a number of small 5 to 10 mw mini nukes underground for major nuclear supply similar to what is required for Ontario. However, who says that the technology couldn’t one day evolve to where they could build a 100 mw reactor with minimal increase in size and do so right off an assembly line? All the other components such as security, containment, maintenance, monitoring, transmission links, etc would still be issues but the technology has the potential to eventually greatly reduce the one main sticking point of new nuclear power construction and that is the spectacular cost and lengthy time of construction.

The reasoning behind my thinking about the evolution of nuclear power to the assembly line is because is Westinghouse and AECL have already taken a page out of the automobile assembly handbook; they are constructing sub-assemblies or modules in factories and bolting them together on site. Therefore, the natural evolution of the Hyperion reactor to the assembly line.

Again, I DO NOT WANT MINI NUKES ON EVERY STREET CORNER. I know that nuclear power is safe and very effective at supplying base load but I don’t want reactors to become ubiquitious.

In your last paragraph you juxtaposed two different concepts as if they were the same. The Slowpoke Energy System is much as you describe it, but the link you provided to the nuclear battery concept is NOT the Slowpoke. The Slowpoke is a pool-type reactor whereas the nuclear battery used TRISO fuel in a graphite moderator with heat pipes to get the heat out of the core. The Slowpoke and the nuclear battery were two separate concepts.

abetterenergyplan.ca

Seeing that one of the big advantages of Clean Tech is its distributed nature, this is an intelligent way of trying to change Nuclear power to fit the future.