A nuclear reactor that could fit in the shed

Companies are rolling out plans to make thousands of mini power stations
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.”
Suprisingly, he is not the only one selling “nukes for the masses”. At least a dozen companies, from giants such as Toshiba-Westinghouse and General Atomics to start-ups such as Hyperion are working on plans to make mini reactors a reality. They vary from ones so small they could be put in the basement of a house to larger models that can be put into clusters of a dozen or so to give the output of a conventional power station.
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 £5 billion 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.
“Sellafield has 150 subsystems. Ours has 12,” said Deal. “Once it is switched on it mostly cooks along on its own, with a couple of people watching the dials.”
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.
Today there are 437 reactors in operation, mostly in North America, Europe and the former Soviet Union, all of them at heavily guarded complexes. Miniature versions could number in the thousands, from far-flung bush communities in sub-Saharan Africa to oil projects in the Arctic circle, or as Deal sees it, an eco-town in Britain. He plans to open an office here in the spring to use the country as a manufacturing base for Europe and Africa.
The plans are lofty but they remain theoretical. “This is Alice in Wonderland stuff,” said Ben Ayliffe, senior anti-nuclear campaigner at Greenpeace. “There is absolutely no guarantee that this won’t fall into the wrong hands and the idea that in this day and age we will be spreading thousands of nuclear reactors around the world beggars belief.”
Roger Barlow, professor of particle physics at Manchester University and chairman of Thorea, a group that researches alternative nuclear fuels, disagrees. “It is feasible. We are building on decades of experience here but we must have an honest nuclear programme that is not a front for the military as the first one was,” he said. The public will be rightly sceptical of a new nuclear programme, he added, but thought that their fears could be overcome.
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. “We are not competing with big plants producing power at 6 to 8 cents per kilowatt hour. They are running right at the limits of safety to get the thermal efficiencies of 40% or 50% they need,” said Loesby. “We can run at half the efficiency [of big plants] and still do better than diesel generators. That’s our competition.”
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 Toshiba’s 10MW 4S (Super-Safe, Small and Simple) design. General Atomics, the American nuclear giant, is working on converting its Triga research reactor for small-scale generation.
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.” According to the World Nuclear Association, 31 people have died from accidents at nuclear plants or uranium mines in the past 40 years. That compares with 6,400 fatalities in coal power stations and mines. Because of the lack of controls and infrastructure at Chernobyl, it is not counted in these statistics.
Most of the small models envisaged are essentially boxes of uranium that have been denuded of all but a few parts. Aside from radioactive waste, the only product of a nuclear reaction is extreme heat. In common pressurised reactor designs the heat is used to turn water to steam, which powers a turbine. This would be above ground.
No mini reactor design has been approved by nuclear regulators and most companies haven’t even applied for approval, which takes years to obtain. Companies are nonetheless ploughing ahead with development. Rosatom, Russia’s state-owned nuclear group, which is working on the world’s first floating nuclear plant in Siberia, signed a deal last month with EN+, an arm of oligarch Oleg Deripaska’s Basic Element, to develop small reactors based on submarine technology.
Nuscale, a firm started two years ago to commercialise technology developed at Oregon State University, is ahead of many others. It is working on 45MW reactors that can be put side by side in a traditional power plant set-up. Bruce Landry, head of business development, envisages up to a dozen sited together to generate 540MW, equal to the output of a gas-fired power station. Unlike Hyperion, which doesn’t expect to build its first reactor until 2013, Nuscale has already submitted its safety analysis and other technical data to the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission for approval.
For all of them, gaining acceptance will be an uphill battle, especially as the threat from terrorism remains such a concern. Ian Hore-Lacey of the World Nuclear Association dismisses the worries. “Reactor-grade material has never been used for weapons. It is spiked with gamma-emitters so that any bad guys would be zapped in a hurry,” he said. “Unless they had tens of tonnes of insulation material and industrial-size plants, the idea that they could take one of these plants off the back of a truck and use it for a weapon is inconceivable.”