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Comment by WaitWaitWha | Hacker News Reader

For those who are interested in the size (will it fit in my garage/car port?)

The picture in the article is a NuScale Power Small Modular Power plant[0].

> Each NuScale reactor vessel is expected to be 9 feet (2.7 m) in diameter and 65 feet (20 m) tall, weighing 650 short tons (590 metric tons).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NuScale_Power

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Note that the reactor vessel doesn't generate electricity, but steam. You need a turbine to make it useful. Once you include that, it doesn't look quite as miniature[0]. As far as I can tell, these aren't targeted at anything other than utility-scale power.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU-IlqiP4sU&t=63s

I wonder if TPV could be used instead of a turbine?

https://news.mit.edu/2022/thermal-heat-engine-0413

> Engineers at MIT and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have designed a heat engine with no moving parts. Their new demonstrations show that it converts heat to electricity with over 40 percent efficiency — a performance better than that of traditional steam turbines.

Unfortunately, it can't. Nuclear reactor cores can obviously get very hot, but for safety reasons they are not allowed to. They work at about 300 degrees Celsius. The linked heat engine has the high efficiency quoted only when the hot element is extremely hot, a few thousand degrees Celsius.

I think you could use these to "upgrade" coal power plants to nuclear power plants, no? Those already have turbines, cooling towers, transformers, grid connection, etc.

It also need to sit in a giant pool of water, not sure if you can share the pool if you install more than one to save volume and concrete.

This may be for the best. The size alone would make it a no-go for average homeowner. I am saying this, because while I am sure there are plenty that know what they are doing on their property, there is a substantial non-zero amount of those that do not. And, separately, can you even begin to imagine that non-zero amount demanding that they have remote access to it via their favorite app?

All I can think of is Snowcrash and multiple sovereigns.

This thing could power a small town, it doesn’t need to fit in your lawn.

Micro grids with multiple redundancies make the size perfect for a community project.

The tallness is pretty important to the design and is pretty much antithetical to everything about home design.

The 60MW seems a bit more antithetical to home design than the height! That's a not-small amount of power.

Those dogecoins aren't going to mine themselves.

No but it sounds about right to supply a large parking garage (or three!) of charging EVs.

Average American drives 14,263 miles per year. Tesla Model 3 consumes 0.27 kWh/mi. Average American driving a Tesla uses 3851.01 kWh / year.

60MW reactor produces 525,600,000 kWh / year.

So a single NuScale reactor could power a garage with 136,483 electric cars.

Sure, but there are a couple of things to consider like peak consumption (everyone gets home from work and plugs in) or potentially much better utilization of electric vehicles from av adoption which might happen in the timeframes needed to get this tech out.

Nuclear is pretty terrible for peak consumption though! It's perfect for base load.

Or people will just have a nuclear tower on their lawn. If it can be buried (or partially buried), the tower need not be taller than the house. With some decorations similar to the ones on cell phone towers, it could even look reasonably attractive.

Back of the envelope, 60MW is 30,000 homes. So a small city or very large town could install just a couple of these and be completely set.

Perhaps for individual detached houses; 20m can easily fit inside apartment buildings...

The Nuscale design requires that the reactors are submerged in a below ground pool.

Except for Lord Farquaad's castle.

Who are these people who want a nuclear reactor in their garage? Folks, you may be getting a bit carried away!

Could it be moved via a standard tractor trailer?

This suggests it can be shipped by truck (though probably not a standard trailer, as it's not light): https://www.nuscalepower.com/technology/technology-overview

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