It’s the size of a hot tub. Bury it in the backyard and it’ll power 25,000 homes for at least five years. Seriously.
Politics in the Zeros
"A republic, if you can keep it." Defeat MAGA
Politics in the Zeros
"A republic, if you can keep it." Defeat MAGA
Actually the article says one per 25,000 people, not homes. That means 12,000 of them buried around the country to power everyone. I wonder what happens after five years? Replace it? Recycle it? Refill it? Leave it be and bury another?
Also from the article:
“Could I dig one up in the middle of the night and use the materials inside to make a bomb? What to we do with the waste at the end of those five years? Where are we going to get all the uranium necessary? These are nuclear questions that nuclear experts tend to not want to answer.”
I have 4 issues with nukes: mining, operation, disposal and dependency.
I think the nuclear people have made progress on operational safety. “Passive stability” designs show that they have done their homework.
Mining remains disruptive; and waste disposal extremely serious. Perhaps reprocessing and breeders can mititgate both problems – to some extent. However I prefer solving problems to managing them; and better yet, not creating the problem in the first place. The nuclear industry has made its case about operational safety, but has yet to convince me they have disposal safety in hand.
Worst of all is that they remain in the ‘energy market’ paradigm. But what those 25000 individuals want to buy isn’t energy, measured in kilowatt-hours; it’s power, measured in kilowatts. However safe the nuclear battery is, it still runs down in 5 years, and then you need to buy another. But sun towers, hydropower dams, wind farms, and geothermal plants just need maintenance. I call renewable energy ‘owned power’, and fuel-based energy ‘rented power’. Owned power implies independence.