Nuclear power may be about wake up from its decades' long snooze here in the United States.
And like Rip Van Winkle, many of us may be rubbing our eyes in wonder when we see what is coming down the pike.
The large monolithic plants we now have may little ressemble that is coming.
True, the mega-projects are getting off the ground now that the Obama administration has announced $8 billion in loan guarantees to get things rolling on some long-proposed projects. And he is talking about tripling the federal loan pool tp $54 billion.
But an interesting indication of the real future of nuclear was provided by an intriguing front page article in yesterday's Wall Street Journal entitled, "Small Reactors Generate Big Hopes."
In case you missed it, here is the lead: "A new type of nuclear reactor - smaller than a railcar and one tenth thecost of a big plant - is emerging as a contender to reshape the nation's resurgent nuclear power industry."
Not that we are clairvoyant, but we saw it coming.
Microsoft R&D guru Nathan Myhrvold wrote about the prospects of revolutionary small nuclear units in the November/December 2008 issue of EnergyBiz - our readers with good memories will recall.
Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures operation has created a TerraPower division for its energy projects. And TerraPower's CEO, John Gilleland, will be speaking about their nuclear work at the rapidly approaching EnergyBiz Leadership Forum in Washington March 1.2. Small indeed may be most beautiful.
Here is what TerraPower has to say about small nuclear on its website:
"Extensive computer simulations and engineering studies underway at Intellectual Ventures have produced encouraging evidence that a wave of fission moving slowly through a fuel core could generate a billion watts of electricity continuously for well over 50 to 100 years without refueling.'
Join us at Washington's Mandarin Oriental Hotel in 10 days to learn more about these and other wondrous developments in the world of energy.
[1] Major utilities will not want to participate (small generation, small profit).
[2] Securing the fuel against terroists wanting to make a dirty bomb.
On the upside, "mini-nukes" are the solution to our lack of investment in the transmission infrastructure; if you make the power where it is needed, wheeling power over long distances becomes obsolete.
If TWR's and/or Thorium Pebble Bed reactors work half as well as planned, we will not need Yucca Mt., or any other repository for that matter; what is now considered waste will become fuel for our long-term energy future.