Posted on 03/10/2020 7:41:44 AM PDT by DUMBGRUNT
The Pentagon on Monday issued three contracts to start design work on mobile, small nuclear reactors, as part of a two-step plan towards achieving nuclear power for American forces at home and abroad.
The combined $39.7 million in contracts are from “Project Pele,” a project run through the Strategic Capabilities Office (SCO), located within the department’s research and engineering side. The prototype is looking at a 1-5 megawatt (MWe) power range. The Department of Energy has been supporting the project at its Idaho National Laboratory.
A second effort is being run through the office of the undersecretary of acquisition and sustainment. That effort, ordered in the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act, involves a pilot program aiming to demonstrate the efficacy of a small nuclear reactor, in the 2-10 MWe range, with initial testing at a Department of Energy site in roughly the 2023 timeframe.
According to an Oct. 2018 technical report by the Nuclear Energy Institute, 90 percent of military installations have “an average annual energy use that can be met by an installed capacity of nuclear power of 40 MWe or less.”
“The concern here is that, obviously, installations need energy, they need power,” Ellen Lord, the department’s acquisition head, explained last week at the annual McAleese conference. “Typically they are tied to the grid; what if the grid goes down, what if your generators don’t have fuel to work on for awhile? So, what we’re doing is looking at small nuclear modular reactors.”
(Excerpt) Read more at cnet.com ...
Maybe they are still pissed about the sale of the super hi-tech milling machine to the Ruskies? I am.
More details from no link sources.
They’re called aircraft carriers.
Perhaps one day every home will have its own mini nuclear plant . . . assuming we’re not rendered extinct by this latest pandemic.
They tried this sixty years ago, with the SL-1 reactor and other efforts. Long before small computers became available.
SL-1 underwent a runaway criticality incident that killed three people. One got pinned to the ceiling with a control rod through his groin. That kind of took the wind out of the small military reactor research effort.
SL-1 used fuel that was weapons-grade, or close to it; so do submarine reactors.
Sure, but an aircraft carrier does not help Whiteman AFB, Missouri.
Mr. Fusion.
So could mobile reactors / generators be emergency back up if a power plant in the USA were taken out ?
Seems like something worth having for Homeland defense
Yeah. Those are really useful in Kansas and North Dakota.
In every home ...
Or cluster of homes.
This 30 KW product has been around a while. larger ones available or connect in sequence. I have wanted one for years. Great units
https://www.capstoneturbine.com/products/c30
Good unit, especially with the price of natural gas to run it.
Pretty sure that a good percentage of our sub fleet already has mobile nuclear reactors.
Ship to shore power you dummys, it aint new
Everyone mistakes a reactor with a battery. These need a lot of management. It’s not a box you can just plug into the grid and power something. It isn’t really “portable” and it really isn’t easy. This looks like a R&D and exploration of the technology prospects for today. This is something we should have already been working on for decades, but of course we’ve had terrible management of our national defense for quite a long while.
They’re called aircraft carriers.
The reactors on an aircraft carrier are considerably larger and not exactly portable.
...Nimitz-class supercarriers, which have two reactors rated at 550 MWth each. These generate enough steam to produce approximately 100 MW of electricity, plus 140,000 shaft horsepower (104 MW) for each of the ship’s four shafts – two per propulsion plant.[2]
“Perhaps one day every home will have its own mini nuclear plant”
One megawatt represents the amount needed to power 100 homes!
District heat and power for clusters could work well.
A friend who lives near an underground water treatment facility that looks like any other house in the area. The pumps and some equipment are concealed in the house.
“They tried this sixty years ago, with the SL-1 reactor and other efforts.”
Yes, they used a simple rope for control of Chicago Pile 1.
But that was 1941!!! On the south side of Chicago surrounded by a university and many houses/apartments.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1
On January 3, 1961, the reactor was being prepared for restart after a shutdown of eleven days over the holidays. Maintenance procedures required that the main central control rod be manually withdrawn a few inches to reconnect it to its drive mechanism. At 9:01 p.m., this rod was suddenly withdrawn too far, causing SL-1 to go prompt critical instantly. In four milliseconds, the heat generated by the resulting enormous power excursion caused fuel inside the core to melt and to explosively vaporize
emergency back up if a power plant in the USA were taken out ?
My career Navy father used to tell of an event on the west coast where the town lost the power plant, after WWII.
They used what he called ‘shore cables’ to connect the ship’s generators to supply temporary power.
Today it would be, my toaster needs pure sine wave 60 hertz I,m calling my lawyer, we don’t want any creepy Sailors in our town...
Ship to shore power you dummys, it aint new
See #16, I think you know way more than I do.
Can you tell us about it?
IIRC the Oldman has a couple of old photos of HUGE cables strung out?
CVN’s and boomers literally have an ocean of coolant available. Land locked sites, not so much.
I already have one in my DeLorean. It can hit 88 mph in no time.
This project will die before it is ever finished.
Somebody had a brain fart thinking it was original. It is back to the future. Bases once had their own power plants as did most towns. In the 50s to early 60s there were small nuclear power plants for Greenland and Antarctica. Both worked but both had their problems. We have them now of course in places called submarines and air craft carriers.
Nice idea but nothing new at all.
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