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Could these be viable for shipping containers??

IIUC, 18,000 TEU ships have engines that generate ~60 mW - and use about 66,000 gallons of diesel per day.

That's ~$90M in fuel per year, which could be replaced by ~12 of there reactors.

That's $7.5M per year. If these can be purchased for less than $20M - with an 8-year life-span and $2M for fuel and operation per year - then maybe it could work??

If you do that the ships would go (dangerously ?) fast.

60 MW output from a combustion engine means rougly 3x the mechanical energy output for the same amount of Joules input with an electric engine.

On the plus side, container ship drag races would now be a thing.

Imagine how far they travel when trying to stop. I guess you would have the power to run the engines in reverse at full power too.

Power isn't the problem; vibration, the stress on the ship's hull, and risk of losing a propellor are the real problems with sustained running in reverse at full power.

Stop ? Just drift with all your cargo.

You'd get surprisingly little additional speed. An old rule of thumb is that if you double the power of a large ship, you get 4 additional knots of speed. Current average laden container ship speed is ~15 knots, down from about 20 knots from back before they cared about fuel costs and emissions. So you'd only get speeds up to what they were before.

I think the 60MW output is shaft horsepower so it already takes into account the low efficiency of converting fuel oil to movement (so in reality it's burning about 150MW of fuel oil).

It would require changes in regulations around the world. Many ports do not allow nuclear powered vessels to dock. Those regs were written with traditional nuclear power plants in mind but I think there would still have to be a lot of work to get acceptance.

Would these reactors take up less physical space than the fuel system they would displace?

Almost certainly. See picture [1]. According to Wikipedia, they're ~87 ft x ~87 ft x ~44 ft = 333k cuft [2]

These reactors are supposed to be a max of 4 containers in size.

So ~12 of them would be ~48 containers = 4x6x2 = ~80 ft x ~60 ft x ~30 ft = 144k cuft.

Though, I doubt you'd want to stack them like that, and I imagine you'd need more than just the reactors to replace the engine.

But more importantly - container ships need space and weight for ~66k gallons of diesel per day - about ~3M gallons total. That's an additional ~401k cuft for diesel, and ~13,500 tons... Each TEU is 22 tons - so you could probably carry an additional 600 TEU (or ~3.5% more).

[1] https://www.amusingplanet.com/2013/03/the-largest-and-most-p...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C3%A4rtsil%C3%A4-Sulzer_RTA9...

What you're looking for is just a very small utility company. At 5MW of load you'll be needing distribution, substations, maintenance for all the above, planning, etc. The overhead you'd need at such a small scale of sales would probably surprise you.

And yet most of the world, and even most of the US, does this, including generation, for some $200/MWH less than PG&E. I’m not saying it’s cheap. I’m saying that the amount of money on the table is very large.

(Distribution cost really ought to scale roughly linearly in the length of the system. I don’t know if it does in practice. As a data point, Palo Alto manages to run their entire system for considerably less money than PG&E, and Palo Alto is not an inexpensive place to do anything.)

a. Yes, but you can easily put up solar+batteries such that the cost of retail energy to the consumer is entirely transmission line rental, at which point disruption is worth whatever the cost of line rental is minus the capital cost of grid construction.

> It’s possible to sell power to the utility for a reasonable price per MWh. But one can’t easily sell to the utility’s customers.

You might not be able to sell energy directly to them, but you can sell/lease energy generation to them which is essentially the same thing. You won't be able to charge the line rental that makes up the majority of the retail cost post installation of solar, but you can start with some fraction of the difference between they save with the solar system, which is probably at a better price point than wholesale cost of electricity.

Good thing everybody lives in Arizona and Sahara, and nobody lives in Sweden, Canada, or even in Seattle! /s

Sadly, sun is not universally abundant.

But HVDC lines are. The longest one in operation today is ~2200 km.

I wonder how their upkeep and bulging expense (especially across difficult terrain) compares to that of the small nuclear power plant described here. We could determine the distance when the HVDC line still makes more sense.

For true "wilderness" your total addressable market is like a million people. Sweden and Norway have abundant hydro power so they actually export power from north to south. So reduce that to tens of thousands.

For southern scandinavia it is already connected through HVDC to Central Europe and more are being built.

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

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

Nobody knows what this reactor is going to cost yet, the first one has not been completed ..

True, but consider that most of southern Asia, Oceania, Africa and central America the sun is abundant. That covers a lot of people.

Now we just need a bunch of these reactors to power the desalination plants to support all the folks living in the desert.

The Netherlands is about as sunny as Seattle, and it's possible to break even after a few years with a decent-sized solar array on your roof.

Jeesh, how expensive is power there? It would take me almost 15 years to get my money back on a solar/battery combo that is big enough to generally supply my electricity needs if I was at 100%.

Currently paying around €90 for ~250KWh per month. That is about 4 times what I used to pay in South Africa 5 years ago.

In Belgium we're at €0,50/kwh We're ordering 36 panels and 10kw battery tomorrow.

The only sad thing is that we can't utlize the battery when we lose netpower. Huawei has an addition, but it only gives an outlet on the battery. I wanted inline, like my ups.

Your payback would be a lot faster without a battery I think. At least that is the case where I live (US/East).

I like the idea but not sure if wealthy homeowners would want to a nuclear reactor in the vicinity of their homes. It would have to be proven out over a couple of decades of incident-free operation before it becomes acceptable.

Los Altos Hills resident here. Sign me up for one in my yard. There's an empty lower acre begging to do something useful.

> There's an empty lower acre begging to do something useful.

How about building housing there? As long as house prices are as high as they are today, that should be the main priority.

Local zoning regulations don't allow it. But backup power systems? No problem.

> In California, regardless of what wholesale electricity costs, the retail cost is something like $200/MWh more than could be considered reasonable.

$200/MWh is $2/kWh. California electricity prices are around $0,27/kWh (https://www.energysage.com/local-data/electricity-cost/ca/). I guess you mean $200/GWh?

Also, why do you find PG&Ek’s pricing unreasonable, given that it required a “phenomenally large capital investment” (and, I expect, quite a bit of ongoing maintenance) to be able to provide customers with electricity?

> $200/MWh is $2/kWh.

$200/MWh is $0.20/kWh.

Oops. Thanks

PG&E pricing is higher than that, ranging from 37 to 49 cents per kWh on their default residential plan. That's more than three times the national average. It's unclear why the state expects folks to electrify when electricity is outrageously expensive.

https://www.pge.com/tariffs/assets/pdf/tariffbook/ELEC_SCHED...

There is the small issue of transmission and maintaining that. But surely it is better to also use the grid for when you peak over 5MW at dinner time when people turn on their ovens, lights and other appliances and also to be able to sell back to the grid at other times. Unless you have batteries.

But your argument is solid for a factory with constant 24/7 load where a single building might consume all that power.

The spreads are egregious, though. You can buy from PG&E for several hundred dollars per MWH. You can likely sell to them for a couple dollars per MWH. No, you do not get NEM for your neighborhood nuclear plant.

Or you can overprovision, discard unused output (or try to do something useful — even just heating up a big heat reservoir is useful for district heating if you feel like building out a system to deliver the heat), and still potentially win on overall price.

Large grids are economical when reasonably run. They are not economical when poorly run.

That is horrendous. Battery it is!

Residential solar plans in Sydney would buy power back for about 5c US / kwh so $50 / mwh

Although I think their hand might be forced to encourage solar. They used to pay crazy high amounts.

I recall some California communities without PG&E have somewhat reasonable electric costs. Santa Clara has silicon valley power with rates of .11-.13/kwh which are significantly lower than PG&E at .28-.51/kwh

PG&E is expensive.

[Cries in European]

expensive houses require a lot more than 5 kw