Nukes in the backyard
Ever seen a nuclear reactor this small?
I borrowed Fortune magazine from a friend while I was in India, and while I found The Economist more interesting compared to Fortune, this article on mini nuclear power plants in its 22 March issue caught my interest. It applies to the American context but it would be quite applicable for Singapore as well.
The writer Brian Dumaine highlights new technology that allows the construction of mini nuclear reactors underground instead of one huge reactor as is the case for most nuclear power plants in service / under construction today. Also known as "backyard nukes", they are supposedly cheaper to construct and safer. It can provide power for small / mid-sized towns (20000 homes) in America, which means that one such unit could probably also power a HDB estate in Singapore.
There is nothing much very convincing about the cheaper price tag in the article, but in terms of scale if the whole reactor unit and protection around it would just be the size of a hot tub, it would certainly be quite small scale. And supposedly it is easy to replace the whole unit when refuelling of the core needs to be done. It will be useful in Singapore given that we dont have the land (both for the plant and for buffer) available to host one single nuclear power plant, so these backyard nukes that work within our space constraints are worth considering. But no one has dared to order from the manufacturer yet... the issue of safety is quite a big question mark. It is not exactly tested yet, and chances are that smaller but more of such nuclear power units would be harder to protect than one large single reactor that can be cordoned off. And the question of nuclear waste disposal is not resolved here.
For more detailed reading, these backyard nukes have also been featured in The Christian Science Monitor and Discover magazine.