Do you love your garden shed? Well, here’s news for you. You may soon be able to get your electricity from a mini nuclear power plant no larger than…you guessed it…your own garden shed! Those wise scientists at Los Alamos have been playing their “ little Strangelove games” again. Having had the enormous pleasure of creating Little Boy, the first atom bomb, which killed approximately 200,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they are now rubbing their hands in glee, shouting in unison: “ It’s small ! It’s safe! It’s cheap! And will soon be rolled out on the world’s “catwalks.”
Welcome to the real world.
These mini beauties will be able to power 20,000 homes and will be on sale within the next five years.
They will be factory- sealed in concrete, contain no weapons grade material, have no moving parts, and will be buried underground. Absolutely no need to worry.
New Mexico based company Hyperion are the lucky ones to have taken their first order with plans to start mass production within five years. Generating electricity at 10 cents a watt anywhere in the world at a snip at £ 13 million each, who could possibly complain? The cost to a community of 10,000 souls would be approximately £ 2.500 per household.
Eastern Europe is getting quite excited. The first order came from the Czech’s and Romania will be the proud “ owner” of it’s very own first one. Property owners in the Caymans, Bahamas and Panama need not be left out either as developers there are showing great interest. “ Locals” like Richard Branson may be curious? And… one wonders, what James Bond alias Sean Connery would make of this?
Reactors only a few metres in diameter will be delivered on the back of a lorry and would be buried underground. So simple! No worries about waste! No moving parts! And as they are too hot to handle there’s no risk of a Chernobyl type accident either, we are reassuringly told.
The Japanese firm Toshiba has also joined the micro-reactor party, testing a 200KW reactor measuring two metres by six.
My contention would be, that what the world needs now, more than ever, is a massive injection of funding for renewable energy and energy efficiency. Then all of us can party to our hearts content, wherever we are. Neither macro or micro nukes are invited.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!