U-Battery – Micronuclear power with intriguing business model

U-Battery was one of the more intriguing presenters at the Advanced Reactor Technical Summit (ARTSIII) held at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory last week. Even though this was a technical summit, the segments of the presentation that captured my attention were the business model and the funding source. However, certain technical choices are vital to…

What do you do with the waste? – Kirk Sorensen’s answers

Gordon McDowell, the film maker who produced Thorium Remix, has released some additional mixes of material gathered for that production effort. One in particular is aimed at those people whose main concern about using nuclear energy is the often repeated question “What do you do with the waste.” Many people who ask that question think…

Update from Hyperion Power Generation Chief Operating Officer

Yesterday morning I wrote a post titled Where is Hyperion Power Generation headed now? By the time I was ready for a lunch break, I had received an email from the Chief Operating Officer of Hyperion Power Generation offering to fill me in on some of the details that he was able to make public….

Letter from the Editor: RTGs, Batteries That Last and Last

This issue was inspired by a request from one of our Internet readers for more information about nuclear batteries. It seems that a short article in the April, 1995 issue of AEI was one of the few hits returned on a key word search for the phrase radioisotope thermal generator. He was interested in learning…

Nuclear Batteries: Tools for Space Science

The Apollo missions to the moon are famous for heroic astronauts, exciting first steps and incredible pictures that fired the imaginations of a whole generation of scientists, engineers and school children. Mixed in along with the hoopla about sending men into space on huge, fire spewing rockets, however, was some serious science. Each time the…

Earth Bound RTG Systems: Uses Closer to Home

Not all of the RTGs that have been produced have been designed for use in space. Here on earth, there are some applications where even extremely expensive RTGs have been able to successfully compete with other power supply alternatives. Here are the criteria that seem to be necessary to make RTGs a potential choice under…

RTG Heat Sources: Two Proven Materials

Essentially all RTGs that have been produced have been designed for long term unattended operation. An isotope needs several rather specialized attributes to be useful in such an RTG: Half life of several decades High energy alpha or beta decay Low associated gamma radiation The two isotopes that have been most frequently used are Pu-238…

Cassini: Near Term Use of RTGs

The only planned use of RTGs in the US space program in the near term is the unmanned, 1997 Cassini mission to explore Saturn. The Cassini spacecraft will be powered by three General Purpose Heat Source Radioisotope Thermal Generators (GPHS RTGs) each designed to provide 276 W of electrical power at the beginning of the…

Really Cool Stuff: Batteries That Last for Decades

Atomic energy provides an amazing source of concentrated power. The potential applications that have been proposed are widely varied. There is room for unlimited innovation and creativity. Imagine what it would be like to have a battery that could provide power for several decades without recharging. Sounds almost like science fiction. Fact, in this case,…