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Hyperion’s Nuclear-In-A-Box Ready By 2013
- t0pj 18y ago"Phenomenal Cosmic Power! Itty-bitty Living Space." "Where is John Galt?", indeed.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- ajross 18y agoThis 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.
- jobeirne 18y agoBetter 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.
- ajross 18y agoCan you poison a thousand people with a minivan?
- Herring 18y agoSure. Too much iron is bad for your system. I learned that from Grand Theft Auto.
- radu_floricica 18y agoA 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.
- ajross 18y agoNo, 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.
- radu_floricica 18y agoI 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.
- gaius 18y agoIf 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).
- ajross 18y agoFTA: 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.
- gaius 18y agoYeah, 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 http://pearl1.lanl.gov/external/Research/peterson_FLC.html
- qwph 18y agoSurely people can get at the electricity powerlines "just by digging" too?
- ajross 18y ago...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.
- qwph 18y agoFair 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.
- DenisM 18y agoeach 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.
- radu_floricica 18y agoThe 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...
- gaius 18y agoNote that the use of small mobile nuclear reactors is 40 years old now (submarines) - that's a lot of time to refine a technology.
- te_platt 18y agoThat 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.
- tlb 18y agoNot 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.
- patrickg-zill 18y agoI 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.
- sown 18y agoHrm...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...