In the Palm of Your Hand

In the wave of support for “Green Energy,” we’ve seen support for about every form. But the future of energy isn’t in clean coal, it’s not in windmills, nor water mills, nor distilled cereal grains. We’ve been doing all of those for centuries, anyway.

Two companies – Hyperion Power Generation and Toshiba – are developing for market mini-nuclear reactors. They’re the size of a tool shed, made of no moving parts, and can be buried for security and safety. Hyperion’s provides 25 megawatts of power, and lasts for up to 10 years. And it’s all in a generator that needs no infrastructure but the road to drive the truck on, and the cable coming up from the ground.

But it’s nuclear – and nuclear’s scary, right? Not really. They’ve been safely using this source of power – thermocouples turning radioactive heat into electrical energy – on deep-space probes for decades. It’s material that’s refined only enough to stay hot, but not so much to be hot enough to melt down. And they say it would take roughly the same level of technology to “weaponize” it as pure ore.

That means countries like Iran that feel the need to have nuclear programs “for the energy” can do just that without needing an the infrastructure that’s strikingly similar to nuclear weapons programs. Don’t you just hate it when plausible deniability disappears like that?

That’s not to say it’s without fault. I don’t know how “dirty” a dirty bomb using the material would be – but it’s probably worse than using regular dirt. Also, in 10 years, you’d have a bunch of radioactive material come due for reprocessing or disposal. And that disposal problem has proven tricky in the past.

But, in the end, it’s the technology to dig a hole and plug in the world – whether it’s remote drilling sites in the Canadian far north, or cell towers linking rural Africa to the global market. And that’s pretty darned cool.

Welcome to the Nuclear Age. Even if it is some 60 years late.