This is a passionate team working on a very hard problem. They have guts and skills. I've always loved microreactors for fringe remote power where people are willing to pay 20x more than normal diesel generator prices. Like Antarctica, remote bases, the moon etc.
Trying to make microreactors cheap is super hard. We've obviously tried it many times, the most relevant being the truck-mounted military microreactor ML-1 (the only closed-cycle direct gas turbine reactor ever operated) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML-1.
Shielding is hard. Even a small reactor this size needs like 8 ft. of high density concrete on all sides, or equivalent, plus 4-6" of a heavy metal like tungsten to take down the gammas. You can't just put it underground because the neutrons activate the dirt. Driving it off afterwards is borderline impossible because you generally have to put the spent fuel in robust canisters that can handle collisions, rollovers, and RPG attacks.
But the hardest part is fuel cost. This reactor uses medium-enriched ('HALEU') fuel, which is super expensive, and then it packages it into TRISO form, which is about 100x more expensive to fabricate than regular UO₂ fuel. On the plus side, it's super robust and can minimize the need for other safety systems. Those prices could both go down, conceivably, but the fab process is pretty intricate, and it's hard to bring down enrichment costs. In my analysis, the fuel cost alone nearly makes this kind of reactor uncompetitive with a diesel generator in almost all applications. So even if the reactor is free (because you build it on an assembly line?), you're still out of luck.
Then there's thermal strain. When you're a small reactor you have big gradients. This bends things. Neutrons make it worse. Then you have a tiny box with electronics in it getting absolutely hammered by neutron dose. That does bad things too.
I hope they can find a way to bring fuel costs way down. I really like the people at this company, and I really like nuclear power and want to see it used in many new applications. I just don't quite see the path yet.
ortusdux · 7m ago
> I hope they can find a way to bring fuel costs way down.
I've spoke with some researchers and investors working on seawater uranium extraction and left quite optimistic.
philipkglass · 3m ago
Extracting uranium from seawater gives you natural uranium, which needs to be enriched for use in most power reactors. The reactor under discussion here needs more enrichment and more expensive fuel fabrication operations than common power reactors. Developing uranium extraction from seawater is a good long-term insurance plan for uranium availability, but it's not going to help this reactor get its fuel costs down.
no_wizard · 31m ago
Wonder if much of the world didn't turn away from nuclear power they way they did since the 1960s, if we wouldn't have solved alot of problems like these already given research was stagnant (relative to other research in power generation) for a very very long time.
acidburnNSA · 23m ago
It'd be a much different field if we had kept it up. I spend a lot of time in nuclear archival material, and facilities like CANEL in Middletown CT absolutely blow my mind. They had hundreds of people working on crazy reactor technologies. They were flowing white-hot lithium metal at 100 mph. But yeah we gave all that up. My friend wrote a pretty good article about this not long ago https://www.ans.org/news/2025-05-08/article-6961/hightempera...
binary132 · 5m ago
In order for this to happen, making websites and mobile apps is going to have to get a lot less lucrative.
cyberax · 5m ago
> On the plus side, it's super robust and can minimize the need for other safety systems.
Can it survive 20 kilos of TNT planted by a terrorist?
SoftTalker · 49m ago
Am I right that 1MW of solar generation would only take about a football field worth of panels? Of course that doesn't account for battery or other storage for nighttime, etc. but seems like it would be far cheaper and far less regulatory issues unless you really needed that much power generation in a very small footprint.
generalizations · 37m ago
"Only"
Looks like a giant part of the value is that it can be shipped in, dropped on the ground on site, turned on overnight, and it only takes up the footprint of a shipping container.
If you have 24 hrs to find an empty football field within a powercable's distance of what you're trying to power, and then fill it with solar panels and batteries, you're gonna have a bad day.
nehal3m · 13m ago
If you ship in a stack of panels, inverters and cables, sure. But maybe you could be a little smarter about it, like a container with all the electronics (inverters, batteries, management) and a bunch of folded, pre-cabled panels that you can pull out across a field. If you bring a couple of those covering a field in a few hours shouldn't be that hard and could be ready for use instantly provided the batteries are charged at delivery.
esseph · 36m ago
You're not accounting for location at all.
Nor is that generating electricity at night.
Plus battery storage.
And it's closer to 4-6x football fields if you did it in say, San Francisco. 4-5x football fields in Kansas City. 6-8x football fields in Chicago. Again, plus battery storage.
hinkley · 18m ago
How many power problems would be covered by making a battery the size of this device
esseph · 12m ago
zero
daemonologist · 24m ago
It depends on where you're at, but for a sunny place yes; somewhere like London a panel can harvest ~100 W/m^2 (0.5 MW for a football field with 100% panel coverage) averaged over the whole year, while in Arizona it's more like 230 W/m^2 (1.2 MW for a football field). NREL has some great insolation maps here: https://www.nrel.gov/gis/solar-resource-maps
For a permanent installation I would agree that solar would usually make more sense, but the mini reactor might be better in scenarios where it's replacing a diesel generator - emergencies, temporary events, confined spaces, etc.
asdfman123 · 37m ago
It requires space, setup time, and then there's the intermittency issues. You'd need enough batteries to store, what, 12 MWh? 20? More if you're accounting for cloudy days?
People just want a compact solution to generate power, not a whole separate project.
jonplackett · 37m ago
Wouldn’t the point be that it works at night too?
gmueckl · 18m ago
I'm not filled with optimism about this concept. Let's work backwards from crash safety (say a reactor on a truck getting t-boned by a freight train). The radioactive material needs to be held in an armored containment to avoid release. That would have to be roughly comparable to CASTOR containers in terms of its resilience. But these containers have limited capability of passive thermal energy dissipation (Google finds models that handle 10kW to 45kW thermal power generated in the interior). This would be approximately the ceiling for the direct thermal power output that is still reduced by limited efficiency of heat-to-power conversion.
This is admittedly napkin math, but it should be good enough to set expectations.
jauntywundrkind · 41m ago
Everything I've heard is that micro-reactors produce far worse waste situations than larger scale options.
I think there's a huge opportunity for nuclear power in the world today.
But: all these micro-reactor strike me as disastrously bad idea, that's all too likely to offload incredibly complex nasty gross problem to the future. Costs that alas will likely be handled as network externalities, as drains and damage against humanity and people and government, that the creators and purchasers of these device will skate through with comparatively little injury.
yongjik · 23m ago
Considering that fossil fuels "solve" the problem by literally dumping its waste onto the atmosphere, endangering the global ecosystem, and we're still merrily using them...
I think it's a bit melodramatic to say microreactors offload nasty environmental problem to the future. Also, their environmental problem is literally at the scale of "Drop them in an abandoned mine somewhere, where they cause zero harm to the world, and we will have a few centuries to figure it out."
generalizations · 35m ago
Counterpoint: we've been powering ships with microreactors for decades.
jauntywundrkind · 23m ago
And we're starting to have to decomission them! At absurd costs!
It require enormous care & effort. It's fantastically costly. Do I think it was worth it? For a mission like this: I think yes. For the good of a nation. And a Nation that hopes to still be around to take care of the problem, the complex decomissioning decades latter. But I have so little faith that private interests will endure and bear their own responsibility for this awesome but deeply corrupting irradiating force.
Peteragain · 9m ago
Yep. And the Russians have had pluggable nuclear power for years now.. on barges: wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov
Decommissioning no doubt will consist of scuttling them over a trench. Definitely going to wake the Kraken.
acidburnNSA · 32m ago
Most nuclear-powered ships have reactor powers in the 40-300 MWt range, a bit beyond the typical 10 MW limit for 'microreactors'
evan_ · 12m ago
This was new to me so I looked it up- "MWt" means Megawatts Thermal - e.g. the heat output of a reactor, which would be turned into a smaller value of MWe- Megawatts Electric
corranh · 29m ago
Hopefully this needs a smaller crew to operate than a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier.
dylan604 · 17m ago
The nukes on a carrier are a much smaller team within the carrier's full crew though. So if you extracted the guys that glow in the dark, it might be more inline
It's proof that you can build a robust and safe reactor, but like all things under triple constraints it will not be cheap.
acidburnNSA · 15m ago
Meh it's a little bit worse, because smaller reactors burn a smaller fraction of their fuel and therefore make more volume of high level waste per kWh generated.
But it's not THAT much worse. Nuclear waste is already ridiculously small in volume per kWh vs. any other fuel-burning energy technology. Right now all of the waste we've accumulated from making 20% of the country's electricity for decades fits on a football field 3 meters high (that's pellets only, if you include individual dry casks it's 135 meters). So if we make lots of small reactors that are a bit less fuel efficient we might need 2 big football fields deep underground rather than 1. Compared to all the particulate and CO₂ emissions other sources make I'm just not that worried about it. Recall that fossil kills ~6 million per year from particulate emissions alone. Commercial nuclear waste has never hurt anyone, and is unlikely to do so in the future.
DoctorOetker · 38m ago
From a humanistic species survival perspective, we should conserve nuclear energy for interstellar travel.
9dev · 29m ago
Interstellar travel to… where? It’s like saving your money for an immortality treatment that’ll eventually hit the market. Well yes it might, someday in the far far future. Practically speaking, this money should better be invested in your health now instead, aka. preservation of the only spaceship we have right now—Earth.
mikewarot · 1h ago
At this point, I'll assume that the relevant US regulatory agencies are competent, and skip the safety issues, etc.
What does it cost?
How much power can it deliver?
So what's the equivalent $/KWh?
jgeada · 50m ago
That used to be true, not so sure my trust in our institutions is high these days. Seems a few million $ donation to the right people can make all regulations just vanish.
dylan604 · 20m ago
That's pretty much always been the case. It's just much more flagrant and in the open now.
brink · 46m ago
> That used to be true
No, that used to be believed to be true. We're just seeing the curtain come down.
The food pyramid, the CIA's "war on drugs" in South America, the wars with Iraq, Libya.. Just to name a few. Why do we pretend like bribery and corruption is this new thing?
mrtesthah · 41m ago
That sounds like an excuse to abide the open corruption that's occurring under the right-wing regime in the US today.
brink · 38m ago
No it's not. I'm replying to the guy that said "That used to be true", because it's obviously not true.
rob_c · 31m ago
And that comment is overly-fastidious.
acidburnNSA · 31m ago
Yeah there's currently a large push to dismantle the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and give reactor regulation authorities to the states.
ranie93 · 18m ago
Could this be associated to a supposed recent State Department approval?
“I just approved a program to deploy small modular nuclear reactors built in the United States to an allied country to help with their sort of energy infrastructure.”
“Which allied country would that be?”
“I can't tell you. It's not public yet.”
From Interesting Times with Ross Douthat: The DOGE Alum Asking if Foreign Aid Is America’s Problem, Jul 31, 2025
trklausss · 1h ago
I'm skeptical, not because it can't be achieved, but because it's not that practical.
Diesel generators are "great" because diesel doesn't evaporate. You can have it there for years, and with good design, it just springs up the next day.
This nuclear reactor has to be connected for fleet monitoring if you want to operate it. Which excludes it from many real life scenarios where diesel generators are used.
Maybe for remote locations where constant power is needed (Antarctica and such), but I see their uses being very limited.
rich_sasha · 29m ago
I don't have any first hand experience with diesel generators, but I saw three cases where power was lost and diesel backup was switched on. In two of these three cases, the generator failed (once didn't start, the other time it ran for 30 mins). In both cases it was in scenarios where I'd imagine reasonable care and maintenance were applied.
p1mrx · 1h ago
If I Google "diesel shelf life", the most common answer is 12 months. Do you have a better source? Propane probably makes more sense for fuel that needs to sit around for years.
Do you know the shelf life of TRISO fuel? I imagine it doesn't matter because it would be very expensive to build a reactor and not switch it on.
lb1lf · 8m ago
Anecdotally, I came across a large (for a single user) quantity of diesel 9 years ago. (Nothing exotic - a company went titsup and I was the only one both bidding for and capable of removing the diesel from their premises within an acceptable time frame; I got approx 80% off the pump price at the time.)
I still run my tractor and Land Cruiser off the stuff; the tractor had an outing today. Granted, neither of those engines are very particular about the fuel they are given, but still...
(Water drained off every few months, also a biocide is added to keep the diesel gunk at bay.)
SR2Z · 1h ago
Diesel will degrade with exposure to oxygen, but a diesel engine can burn pretty much any flammable liquid that you can meter out. It really comes down to the engine itself and if it can handle less-than-perfect fuel.
whatever1 · 53m ago
It can even burn its own lubricant oil and die in a screaming runaway fashion!
rob_c · 30m ago
I'm sure a nuclear reactor can manage that too if it's a competition :p
whatever1 · 6m ago
Not sure it will sound as nice though. In fact I don't think I have heard the sound of a runaway nuclear reactor. Maybe due to the turbines it can sound exciting?
cyberax · 26m ago
> Diesel generators are "great" because diesel doesn't evaporate.
LOL, no. I see, you have never worked with large diesels meant for backup.
If you just leave diesel fuel alone, then over time (6-9 months) the residual water separates at the bottom of the tank. And then various microbial life springs into action, happily living off all of that free energy. While there's some dissolved oxygen, it will happily use it to oxidize the fuel. But even without oxygen, the bugs will try to live off energy produced by polymerization of unsaturated hydrocarbons.
Polymerization == gunk that clogs up your fuel filters.
So you have to periodically clean up diesel fuel by removing water and filtering the gunk out. It's called "fuel polishing". Large diesels will have fixed systems, for smaller diesels, sometimes mobile systems are used like these: https://fueltecsystems.com/equipment/pneumatic-systems-2/
Peteragain · 32m ago
Looks aspirational to me. 1Mw electricity at 30-100% efficiency (100??) and 1.9 Mw heat via air in the volume of a shipping container? That's moving a lot of air. And I'd want fail safe, passive control "rods" (what happens if the helium leaks out and the heat isn't being removed) before I'd sleep easy with one in my back yard.
linuxguy2 · 1h ago
How much does it cost? Would love to buy one with the HOA and run our own micro-grid while exporting electricity to the local utility.
unglaublich · 1h ago
When HOA gets too powerful.
salynchnew · 47m ago
When the DOE comes after your HOA.
dylan604 · 28m ago
meh, most HOAs can take on the DOD
ACV001 · 49m ago
A startup where most of the money were spent on that animation on the website.
dylan604 · 29m ago
You'd be surprised at what the CAD software can do now in 3D renders. You have to design the thing in CAD anyways, so it's not like the 3D team had to model it from scratch. You could probably just do this with a request on Fivr. These aren't your parents 3D prices any more
KaiserPro · 1h ago
From the headline I was assuming it was a tiny 20kw job.
But it being a 1.9mw(thermal) makes sense.
I wonder what the support requirements are, like how do you yeet the heat to make it efficient?
Also containing super heated helium seems hard for any length of time. I wonder what the operating lifespan is.
t0mas88 · 51m ago
They say it needs to be refueled after 5 years and that it can be done 4 times for a total lifespan of 20 years.
Reason077 · 49m ago
1.9 MWt still seems like a huge amount of energy/heat for something that fits on a truck and is supposedly air-cooled (they claim no water is required).
Where does all that heat go?! They must have some very impressive fans.
tralarpa · 43m ago
Yes, that's crazy. They say up to 1 MW electric which would mean (33% efficiency) 2 MW of heat to get rid of with air cooling. Later they mention facility heating which sounds more realistic, I guess?
KaiserPro · 3m ago
I mean its not that much different from a diesel generator, they are around 30% efficient, so they'd also be kicking out the same amount of heat?
but then the heat profile is different I suppose, and the efficiency doesn't depend on being able to shed heat.
ChuckMcM · 36m ago
Looks basically like the TRIGA reactor design (without the water shielding). Seems to have similar challenges with rapid load changes. At one time I thought NASA was looking at something like this tied together with a battery pack that would allow for rapid changes in dynamic load without a lot of stress on powering up/down the reactor. And now I can't find it. Sigh.
If you're a billionaire building your bunker this would be the ultimate off-grid power source :-).
acidburnNSA · 29m ago
It's a lot different from a TRIGA. It doesn't have hydrogen in the fuel and it uses high temperature/high pressure helium gas as the coolant (vs. water in a TRIGA).
We did run a nuclear reactor in space once that did use TRIGA fuel. It was called SNAP-10A. More recently, the Kilopower test ran a reactor on land but intended for space with a U-Mo metallic fuel.
croes · 56m ago
If they go bankrupt who is responsible for the waste?
lawlessone · 34m ago
you are :D
yikes from their FAQ:
"The plan is for the small amount of spent fuel (the volume of the spent fuel in one reactor is equivalent in size to just two Walmart gas grill propane tanks) that comes out of our reactors at the end of their duty cycle to only be temporarily stored on-site until a federal repository or interim storage solution becomes available. "
They don't even have plan while the exist now.
dylan604 · 26m ago
> equivalent in size to just two Walmart gas grill propane tanks
Is this a real measurement in tank sizes? Why not just say two 20lb tanks? What if I bought my tank from Home Depot? Are they a different size? Do they think using Walmart makes it more relatable?
acidburnNSA · 28m ago
Well no one does. The feds cancelled Yucca mountain and so there's nowhere for anyone to put nuclear waste. By law it belongs to the feds.
So everyone just leaves it in the reactor's parking lot for now, in big concrete and steel dry casks.
gigel82 · 47m ago
That's the right question to raise up.
can16358p · 1h ago
Sounds too good to be true.
Hope it is true though.
EA-3167 · 1h ago
I have no idea if the testing will go well, if the regulatory/political environment will accept it, but as far as the company, the tech and the promise of testing?
I know that this is a joke, but reactors cannot scale down that far. Unlike an electrical source powered by radioactive decay (like certain pacemakers [1]), the minimum mass for a nuclear reactor includes several kilograms of core material. It's possible to shed neutron moderator mass by using high-purity fuel operating on fast fission, but these require more fuel to go critical so they still have multi-kilogram cores.
I have oil clients who would love this. they have to run expensive engines left and run on site
wewtyflakes · 50m ago
The poetic irony!
ggm · 29m ago
A flame chart of energy consumption to customer from well-head typically shows an astronomical amount consumed at head in the gas train. It can be a significant sub of the total available energy consumed at the head and in pipeline and shipping, to produce the output which can be sold.
Unfortunately much of it can't be sold or shipped off site and if it isn't used, will be fugitive gas emissions or flared.
Replacing the diesel and other fuels used on-site is good. But it's only part of the story. Running the train would certainly burn a lot of gas, so replacing that would be good.
(-not a fan of SMR for a variety of reasons, mostly political)
dsadfjasdf · 18m ago
Thoughts on using stranded gas as bitcoin miners?
ggm · 8m ago
Inventing reasons to perpetuate fossil fuel extraction is counter productive.
idontwantthis · 1h ago
Is it real?
cactacea · 1h ago
From their job listings:
> Additional Requirements
> Must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as necessary to accomplish our mission.
So... not yet.
acidburnNSA · 27m ago
Yes it's real. There are a lot of good people who I know personally and a lot of funding going into this. They have a plan to get fuel and will try to turn the first one on in Idaho soonish (like next year)
kwhitefoot · 48m ago
I was hoping the FAQ would answer that but, as I expected, I was disappointed.
rob_c · 34m ago
Fantastic if true.
I'm sure there's a few catches or weed already have them back ordered globally but frankly anything that normalises using these self heating rocks to boil water gets my vote :)
Trying to make microreactors cheap is super hard. We've obviously tried it many times, the most relevant being the truck-mounted military microreactor ML-1 (the only closed-cycle direct gas turbine reactor ever operated) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML-1.
Shielding is hard. Even a small reactor this size needs like 8 ft. of high density concrete on all sides, or equivalent, plus 4-6" of a heavy metal like tungsten to take down the gammas. You can't just put it underground because the neutrons activate the dirt. Driving it off afterwards is borderline impossible because you generally have to put the spent fuel in robust canisters that can handle collisions, rollovers, and RPG attacks.
But the hardest part is fuel cost. This reactor uses medium-enriched ('HALEU') fuel, which is super expensive, and then it packages it into TRISO form, which is about 100x more expensive to fabricate than regular UO₂ fuel. On the plus side, it's super robust and can minimize the need for other safety systems. Those prices could both go down, conceivably, but the fab process is pretty intricate, and it's hard to bring down enrichment costs. In my analysis, the fuel cost alone nearly makes this kind of reactor uncompetitive with a diesel generator in almost all applications. So even if the reactor is free (because you build it on an assembly line?), you're still out of luck.
Then there's thermal strain. When you're a small reactor you have big gradients. This bends things. Neutrons make it worse. Then you have a tiny box with electronics in it getting absolutely hammered by neutron dose. That does bad things too.
I hope they can find a way to bring fuel costs way down. I really like the people at this company, and I really like nuclear power and want to see it used in many new applications. I just don't quite see the path yet.
I've spoke with some researchers and investors working on seawater uranium extraction and left quite optimistic.
Can it survive 20 kilos of TNT planted by a terrorist?
Looks like a giant part of the value is that it can be shipped in, dropped on the ground on site, turned on overnight, and it only takes up the footprint of a shipping container.
If you have 24 hrs to find an empty football field within a powercable's distance of what you're trying to power, and then fill it with solar panels and batteries, you're gonna have a bad day.
Nor is that generating electricity at night.
Plus battery storage.
And it's closer to 4-6x football fields if you did it in say, San Francisco. 4-5x football fields in Kansas City. 6-8x football fields in Chicago. Again, plus battery storage.
For a permanent installation I would agree that solar would usually make more sense, but the mini reactor might be better in scenarios where it's replacing a diesel generator - emergencies, temporary events, confined spaces, etc.
People just want a compact solution to generate power, not a whole separate project.
This is admittedly napkin math, but it should be good enough to set expectations.
I think there's a huge opportunity for nuclear power in the world today.
But: all these micro-reactor strike me as disastrously bad idea, that's all too likely to offload incredibly complex nasty gross problem to the future. Costs that alas will likely be handled as network externalities, as drains and damage against humanity and people and government, that the creators and purchasers of these device will skate through with comparatively little injury.
I think it's a bit melodramatic to say microreactors offload nasty environmental problem to the future. Also, their environmental problem is literally at the scale of "Drop them in an abandoned mine somewhere, where they cause zero harm to the world, and we will have a few centuries to figure it out."
We just awarded $0.5B to decommission the USS Enterprise (CVN 65), the first nuclear aircraft carrier. More will follow! https://theaviationist.com/2025/06/03/uss-enterprise-dismant...
The DoE has been helping to decomission Los Angeles class attack subs for a while now. Here's a piece on that: https://www.defense.gov/News/Feature-Stories/Story/Article/4...
It require enormous care & effort. It's fantastically costly. Do I think it was worth it? For a mission like this: I think yes. For the good of a nation. And a Nation that hopes to still be around to take care of the problem, the complex decomissioning decades latter. But I have so little faith that private interests will endure and bear their own responsibility for this awesome but deeply corrupting irradiating force.
And it is a money pit.
And then you have things like this: https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2019/01/10/two-sail...
It's proof that you can build a robust and safe reactor, but like all things under triple constraints it will not be cheap.
But it's not THAT much worse. Nuclear waste is already ridiculously small in volume per kWh vs. any other fuel-burning energy technology. Right now all of the waste we've accumulated from making 20% of the country's electricity for decades fits on a football field 3 meters high (that's pellets only, if you include individual dry casks it's 135 meters). So if we make lots of small reactors that are a bit less fuel efficient we might need 2 big football fields deep underground rather than 1. Compared to all the particulate and CO₂ emissions other sources make I'm just not that worried about it. Recall that fossil kills ~6 million per year from particulate emissions alone. Commercial nuclear waste has never hurt anyone, and is unlikely to do so in the future.
No, that used to be believed to be true. We're just seeing the curtain come down.
The food pyramid, the CIA's "war on drugs" in South America, the wars with Iraq, Libya.. Just to name a few. Why do we pretend like bribery and corruption is this new thing?
“I just approved a program to deploy small modular nuclear reactors built in the United States to an allied country to help with their sort of energy infrastructure.”
“Which allied country would that be?”
“I can't tell you. It's not public yet.”
From Interesting Times with Ross Douthat: The DOGE Alum Asking if Foreign Aid Is America’s Problem, Jul 31, 2025
Diesel generators are "great" because diesel doesn't evaporate. You can have it there for years, and with good design, it just springs up the next day.
This nuclear reactor has to be connected for fleet monitoring if you want to operate it. Which excludes it from many real life scenarios where diesel generators are used.
Maybe for remote locations where constant power is needed (Antarctica and such), but I see their uses being very limited.
Do you know the shelf life of TRISO fuel? I imagine it doesn't matter because it would be very expensive to build a reactor and not switch it on.
I still run my tractor and Land Cruiser off the stuff; the tractor had an outing today. Granted, neither of those engines are very particular about the fuel they are given, but still...
(Water drained off every few months, also a biocide is added to keep the diesel gunk at bay.)
LOL, no. I see, you have never worked with large diesels meant for backup.
If you just leave diesel fuel alone, then over time (6-9 months) the residual water separates at the bottom of the tank. And then various microbial life springs into action, happily living off all of that free energy. While there's some dissolved oxygen, it will happily use it to oxidize the fuel. But even without oxygen, the bugs will try to live off energy produced by polymerization of unsaturated hydrocarbons.
Polymerization == gunk that clogs up your fuel filters.
So you have to periodically clean up diesel fuel by removing water and filtering the gunk out. It's called "fuel polishing". Large diesels will have fixed systems, for smaller diesels, sometimes mobile systems are used like these: https://fueltecsystems.com/equipment/pneumatic-systems-2/
But it being a 1.9mw(thermal) makes sense.
I wonder what the support requirements are, like how do you yeet the heat to make it efficient?
Also containing super heated helium seems hard for any length of time. I wonder what the operating lifespan is.
Where does all that heat go?! They must have some very impressive fans.
https://www.generatorsindustrial.com/products/1mw-diesel-gen... has a simple radiator.
but then the heat profile is different I suppose, and the efficiency doesn't depend on being able to shed heat.
If you're a billionaire building your bunker this would be the ultimate off-grid power source :-).
We did run a nuclear reactor in space once that did use TRIGA fuel. It was called SNAP-10A. More recently, the Kilopower test ran a reactor on land but intended for space with a U-Mo metallic fuel.
yikes from their FAQ:
"The plan is for the small amount of spent fuel (the volume of the spent fuel in one reactor is equivalent in size to just two Walmart gas grill propane tanks) that comes out of our reactors at the end of their duty cycle to only be temporarily stored on-site until a federal repository or interim storage solution becomes available. "
They don't even have plan while the exist now.
Is this a real measurement in tank sizes? Why not just say two 20lb tanks? What if I bought my tank from Home Depot? Are they a different size? Do they think using Walmart makes it more relatable?
So everyone just leaves it in the reactor's parking lot for now, in big concrete and steel dry casks.
Hope it is true though.
That is real.
https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/radiant-completes-study-f...
[1] "Plutonium powered pacemakers (1974) https://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/collection/miscel...
>first nuclear battery can deliver 100 microwatts of power and a voltage of 3V
>plans to produce a battery with 1 watt of power by 2025
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/nuclear-battery-betavolt-...
Unfortunately much of it can't be sold or shipped off site and if it isn't used, will be fugitive gas emissions or flared.
Replacing the diesel and other fuels used on-site is good. But it's only part of the story. Running the train would certainly burn a lot of gas, so replacing that would be good.
(-not a fan of SMR for a variety of reasons, mostly political)
> Additional Requirements
> Must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as necessary to accomplish our mission.
So... not yet.
I'm sure there's a few catches or weed already have them back ordered globally but frankly anything that normalises using these self heating rocks to boil water gets my vote :)