Rick Perry's vision of hot tub-sized nuclear power plants isn't so far-fetched

Energy Secretary Rick Perry has a vision for developing fully mobile, hot tub-sized nuclear power plants that could become the latest piece in the Energy Department's innovation and grid resiliency push.

Perry brought up the idea while addressing a National Clean Energy Week conference late last month. He used it as an example of what the Trump administration means when it talks about energy "innovation" as part of its energy dominance agenda.

Perry called them "small modular reactors." But the version of the technology he described would function more like a nuclear battery than a conventional, water-cooled nuclear power plant.

He envisioned them being used for hurricane relief in Puerto Rico. The nuclear batteries would be piled into the cargo hold of a C-130 military transport plane, the kind Perry used to fly in the Air Force, and flown to the disaster zone to re-energize the island's wiped-out grid, he explained.

The situation in Puerto Rico is "maybe one of the most tragic events in history," Perry said. "We are trying to get micro-generators down there," but if small modular reactors were available, they "could serve tens of thousands" and even more "very quickly."

When he delivered the speech, nearly all 1.6 million electricity customers in Puerto Rico were without electricity. Perry's agency is working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency on power restoration.

The idea of portable, small nuclear power plants is not new. It's an idea that came from the lobbying and consulting playbook of William C. Anderson, former President George W. Bush's assistant secretary of the Air Force for installations.

Anderson was a big proponent of making military bases self-sustaining, while looking for advanced power plant technology that would reduce the need for tactically vulnerable diesel supply chains in places such as Iraq.

Replace and Remove every 20 years.

What do you do with the spent material? Can it be recycled? (i.e., replenished through a 'breeder' or something like that) If not, you've still got a serious problem of waste material disposal. We really don't have any 'safe' way to store material that maintains radioactive toxicity for tens of thousands of years.

Personally, I think the only real solution is to launch the stuff into space and park it in a stable orbit around the sun. (not in orbit around the earth) At some point, if mankind survives as a species and the muslims don't drag us back to the seventh century, I'm sure we'd be able to do something with this stuff. If not, fire it into the sun, and let it be our solar garbage disposal.

It takes more energy to put something into the Sun (meaning force it to slow down, so that it falls into the Sun), than it would take to make an object leave the Solar System, as the gravity of gas giants Jupiter and/or Saturn could be used to accelerate it.

Plutonium leftovers can be used for further nuclear fission. That is how France uses their nuclear waste.

"So what does one do with the radioactive trash? Have the taxpayers foot the bill for disposal?"

One disposes of it safely in a place designed for the purpose. The power companies with nuke plants have been paying into a fund to pay for disposal for decades. The safe disposal site has already been built at Yucca Mountain, but is prevented from being put into use by the senior senator from Nevada. He has personally stalled work by blocking legislation.

There are NO "technical issues" involved in safe disposal...just leftist politics.

While I haven't actually seen the orbital mechanics of this, I don't see how it can be true in any meaningful way. The big issue is getting things out of the Earth's gravity well. If you achieve escape velocity and your craft's vector is pointed toward the sun instead of away from it, the work of the sun's own gravity will drag it down absent any additional boost. Depending upon the original vector, the trip will either long (i.e., it might take several orbits to spiral in) or short (if you craft the initial vector appropriately) if the craft does not have enough momentum to escape the sun.

Again, the big problem is getting however many tons of material you're talking about out of our gravity well. Then you also have the enviroweenies who will protest any launch that has nuclear material on board, as they did with the Casinni mission, and that craft had a payload that had been designed to successfully survive a failed launch.

Plutonium leftovers can be used for further nuclear fission. That is how France uses their nuclear waste.

Ya. Useful for plutonium reactor components, but that's a small portion of what is left from a standard fission reactor. I'm not even sure what kind of radioactives are planned for these small units, but I seriously doubt it is something as potentially useful as plutonium.

Personally, I'd love to see something like these small neighborhood reactors, as it would make our power grid a lot more robust, and resilient, but until we figure out how to actually deal with stuff that will remain dangerous for longer than we've even had an existing civilization on this planet, I think we need to be cautious about it and think the entire life-cycle through, rather than just the short-term benefit to be gained.

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