Hyperion’s Nuclear-In-A-Box Ready By 2013 | Hacker News Reader

Hyperion’s Nuclear-In-A-Box Ready By 2013

earth2tech.com

18 pointsrobg21 comments

  each being able to generate 70 megawatts of 
  heat energy, or 27 megawatts of electricity 
  from a steam turbine

So we will have 43 Megawatts of excess heat dissipated by a device size of a hot tub. That'll work. Not.

Note that the use of small mobile nuclear reactors is 40 years old now (submarines) - that's a lot of time to refine a technology.

The reactor is the size of a bathtub. The steam generator would be outside, and likely be a whole building.

I've heard of Toshiba on and off for more then 10 years. I'd bet that if there is be someone willing to pay they already have such things ready. No idea what this Hyperion is bringing to the mix...

That just reflects a 40% efficiency converting the heat to electricity that is typical of a steam turbine system. The heat wouldn't be dissipated by the unit itself but by the generator system.

Not impossible. The limit is cooling air flow. If you blew air through a 4m x 4m radiator at 30 m/s, 43 megawatts would generate a 68 C temperature rise.

Those sort of energy densities aren't strange. A hair dryer dissipates 1000 watts in, say, 10 x 8 x 6 cm. So a cube of hair dryers 2.7 meters on a side generates about 43 megawatts.

I would think that datacenters would love to have such a power unit. Two of them could easily back up each other, allowing for 100% power uptime without the use of lead-acid batteries which are expensive, heavy, require replacement every 3 years, etc.

Hrm...santa fe, NM....I hope this company invests pretty heavily in security for their facilities before ELF or ALF decide to pay them a visit...

This has to be a hoax, right? Let's bury an unattended box of hyper-toxic radioactive material in a box "transportable by truck" in every neighborhood where you can get to it just by digging. Yeah, that's a good idea..

...

Never mind. It's a hoax. Dig out your old Battletech stuff and check the about page.

Better yet, let's sell anyone in the general populace a two-ton box of metal they can propel in any given direction at speeds up to 120 mph.

Wait, nevermind. That'll never take off.

Can you poison a thousand people with a minivan?

Sure. Too much iron is bad for your system. I learned that from Grand Theft Auto.

A thousand? Why think small? Take a septic tank and dive in a lake that's used as a watersource.

Sorry for the metaphor, but nuclear _is_ much cleaner then most things we use. and even if it spills, yes, there will be more cancers in the area but it's on the order of magnitude of any other industrial installations. You can't make anything without polluting some. Nuclear does it less then most.

No, that's simply not correct. Reactor innards aren't just fuel: it's the fission products that are dangerous. These things are incredibly toxic. It's true that "nuclear is clean" when you view the picture from outside the reactor. But that all assumes no idiot is going to dig one up and open it. That's easy enough to ensure when the reactor is a giant guarded facility or a military vessel. The suggestion here is to bury it under urban areas.

I doubt it's going to be either in urban areas or without any supervision. In urban areas you already have access to the grid.

Also there will be lots of metal and concrete, and I imagine some big locks. And it will be close/under either a power plant or a heat exchanger, so it'll be anything but abandoned.

If it's a hoax, it's an elaborate, insider one - the people listed on the site appear to be "real" (e.g. Pete shows up on LANL's official website).

FTA:

Hyperion Power Generation, Inc. (HPG) was formed to bring to market the unique Hyperion (formerly Comstar)

Maybe they're just 80's battletech geeks like me. But in FASA's game, Comstar was the cult-like organization that held a monopoly on the use of Hyper Pulse Generator communication technology.

Yeah, I thought something was familiar but couldn't quite place it :-) Read the books but never played the game.

See here: http://pearl1.lanl.gov/external/Research/peterson_FLC.html

Surely people can get at the electricity powerlines "just by digging" too?

...OK.

I'm not sure you understood the point. In what way is a 220V electric cable (those are the only ones they bury, but hell: I'll spot you the high tension lines if you like) or a truck (as jobeirne mentioned above) anywhere near as dangerous, as a box of post-fissile nuclear material?

Even discounting the possibility of terrorism, think of the possibility of poisoning the groundwater after an earthquake.

Fair enough. I probably did misunderstand your point - I thought it was that people might endanger themselves, I didn't consider the terrorism angle.

But it's probably a bad idea to have a nuclear reactor in an earthquake zone anyway, regardless of whether it's underground or not.

"Phenomenal Cosmic Power! Itty-bitty Living Space."

"Where is John Galt?", indeed.

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