During the Cold War the USA's pentagon & DOE developed small nuclear reactors for use on Ships like aircraft carriers & nuclear submarines. Russia also developed city power levels reactors for remote towns & installed lots of fission reactors for nuclear weapons grade plutonium production & other radioactive isotope manufacturing for advanced physics & materials science & medical imaging & cancer treatments. Today most of the smallest reactors are located at universities where they make special medical isotopes not thermal processing heat or electricity. Think SMR or small modular reactors & MMR or micro modular reactors that fit into a shipping container.
While the DOD's small reactors are not feasible for electrical utility companies like PSE or Seattle City Light to apply for distributed generation upgrades to their respective power distribution networks, companies like X-energy are developing commercialized compact low cost reactors that private utility companies can buy outright for less than $20M & install in less than 24 months from the time of breaking ground to the time that heat & power output available for end users of that energy.
Scalability really the main idea with 4th Gen IFR, SMR & MMR fission energy reactor technologies.
$7 million for an SMR, its building & land & grid inter-tie connection to a substation
$100,000 for an MMR in a sealed shipping container lowered into a concrete pool structure for shielding & protection, that works 24/7 making 10kw of heat & 3kw of electricity, enough for a large home or multifamily complex or some businesses & commercial customers. A utility company can buy & develop many dozens or even hundreds of such units like the XE100 or equivalent & apply them in different zones of the utility coverage area to add UPS or uninterruptible power supply capacity to small substations & utility power conditioning & control sites.
Low cost fission reactors that private individual billionaires can buy, means companies like Amazon & Jeff Bezos or Microsoft & Bill Gates can privately buy a building & land & work with the NRC & one of the SMR developers & a utility customers to add more capacity. In the PSE network in Puget Sound Washington, they plan to phase out natural gas & convert restaurants & homes & other business to all electrical operation. Decarbonization means more loads for the grid & probably increasing electricity prices. PSE needs to add capacity to its network, more power production, especially 24/7 base load to support greater adoption of electric vehicles, since lots of people will be charging their latest model EV at home in the evening & at night when the sun is not shining on solar panels.
We need more energy storage capacity for solar & wind to work 24/7 & to compete against an SMR reactor nearly impossible in terms of cost per kWh in the contents of good uptime & good load following & good capacity factor so that electrical power available round the clock for police & fire & hospitals & companies like Amazon that operate continuously to serve up free two day shipping for Prime customers // Google, Microsoft, Boeing, Apple, Facebook, these companies have the money, talent & resources to work with a utility company & a nuclear SMR developer & the NRC to pipeline production & installation of sealed integrated SMR & MMR reactors to make heat & power 24/7 at distribution centers & warehouses, for cloud compute infrastructure, finance & accounting, banking & ATM & debit cards & credit cards & for everything to work whenever you need so you can run you washing machine or fridge or lights whenever you want, that works with your schedule & your not everyone. Some people work really strange & variable shifts, like many doctors & nurses working at your local hospital, police & fire too. We have to have 24/7 electricity for modern life to function
Adding millions of new EV's to the nations grids will stress the power distribution systems, & in the context of what's been happening to the grid power system in Texas lately, we know we need to upgrade the electrical distribution systems to N+1 capacity with backup routs for power to flow if a line downed by a tree brach from a storm system, where high wind & water causes trees to fall into the overhead power lines. We can also burry power lines into sealed conduit tubes, though at much greater cost.
Nothing free in physics & it will take people concentrating on SMR reactor commercialization to make something amazing like an MMR available to regular people with the means to buy one & install it in their specific application, with NRC approval. Think of streamlining NRC approval for MMR applications so that thousands of people can buy an MMR for their building or lot or land or home or business. Blending an MMR with solar rooftop PV, energy storage & wind power makes a stable safe electric power production blend, & the scalability of such systems all the way down to 1KW & as much as 10GW, means that nuclear fission offers a flexible distributed energy solution that utility companies can embrace with short built times & budgets as low as $20M
20 million might sound like a lot to a marginalized member of the USA's middle class, there are thousands of billionaires who can easy afford an MMR reactor installation, so why are non of them working to make MMR's available to customers ? Good question. Probably because most people are unaware of 4th Gen IFR breeder reactors that make more fuel than they consume & able to burn nuclear waste from Gen. 2 reactors common around the world. Today nearly 450 Gen. 2 reactors built with government funding are operating an inefficient fuel cycle that only uses 4% of the fuel rod energy to make steam or high temp gas to turn turbines to make electricity.
Large nuclear reactors can also make heat to desalinate sea water to make fresh water. Electricity from the reactor can electrolyte the water to make green hydrogen & the green hydrogen & other electricity can be used to recycle scrap steel & to process concrete. I am imagining an integral plant that does all of these functions, inspired by the Palo Verde reactor in Arizona that uses domestic sewer as a coolant loop to dissipate low grade heat that's not profitable or feasible to utilize or export to distant customers.
Nuclear Steel Scrap Recycling
Nuclear Green Hydrogen Production
Nuclear Sea Water Desalinization & Purification to Clean Tap Water
Nuclear Medical Isotopes & Special Medals for NASA & Space Probes
Nuclear Materials for the Kilopower System of Artemis on the Moon
We can use Nuclear Breeder reactors with enough neutron flux to empower thorium into the commercial fuel cycle once its been activated by transmutation by neutron bombardment in the core of fission reactors where Thorium becomes a fissile element part of the fuel burn cycle able to contribute energy to the core in an ongoing chain reaction at the heart of all fission reactors ! IFR style reactors can take the spent nuclear waste from Gen. 2 reactors & burn the nuclear waste as new fuel. By over-parity enrichment & the transmutation of isotopes into fissile forms, nuclear energy can make heat & power & electricity for 10 billion people for thousands of years in Earth's biosphere, enabling society to become full electric & phase out carbon burning with extensive decarbonization efforts where gasoline & diesel vehicles are replaced with fully electric cars & SUV's & where natural gas replaced with electric power made from a mix of different generation sources.
Nuclear Energy Important for Human Activity
We need to stop adding toxic pollution to the biosphere of Earth. Polluting unethical & immoral because its sicken people & animals in nature with preventable diseases that form from exposure of those lifeforms to toxic pollutants. Pollutants are toxic because they causes cellular dysfunction, dysregulation of the immune system & other cytotoxic effects well elucidated & formally described by science in medicine & toxicology & ecology since the 1960's.
Ignorant about Need for Carbon Energy
People pretend like we are unable too move beyond burning carbon to make energy when there are at least 12 other more intelligent ways to make heat & power. Capturing heat & energy from the SUN with a Dyson sphere for example will require mankind to increase our collective industrial manufacturing capacity & space access technology. We need fully electric rail launch single stage to space launching capacity & nuclear metal alloy processing on grand scales nearly unimaginable to most people in the public today. I am talking about TW level reactors with integrated concrete, steels, desalination & hydrogen production in giant 4th Gen. reactors build by a consortium of public & private entities.
Abundant Solar Heat Available
Solar Thermal Energy systems that store the suns heat as molten salt are one example & new ceramics & insulator technology means low costs versions of these systems like the Ivanpah Heliostat plant, a solar electricity generating system based on concentrated solar thermal plant technology where 173,500 poll mounted computer controlled mirrors focus the suns light onto heat exchanger boilers located atop 3 different 459ft or 139m tall power towers, in the Mojave desert, USA. Think enhanced energy storage to make solar thermal plants with greater capacity factor & actually power output!
Cheap nuclear reactors made in a factory that produced sealed heat & power generator units for customers that can use 3kw of heat & 1kw electricity from a reactor that's smaller than a typical SUV, developed by Nasa for Kilopower program to power Artemis missions on the moon. Take the tech that NASA using & license & use it to make MMR reactors that the public can buy, with approval from an application the NRC for installation in substations, power plants of other kinds, multifamily complexes, factories, warehouses & other industrial users of electricity like petrochemical refining plants & gas processing plants that make specialty gases in high pressure cylinders. A MMR reactor sold by the thousands can literally empower human society with redundant always on heat & electricity essential to life & society today. We need more distributed generation capacity in electrical grids & Texas grid failures prove this in an undeniable way. We need more solar & wind & energy storage, but medium volume SMR & MMRs are actually less costly & have better capacity factor & load following, so people have access to locally made electricity 24/7, not just when the sun shining on solar panels or wind spinning their wind turbine energy generators.
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