Perry pushing small nuclear plants that could be delivered by truck where needed

Washington Examiner:
Energy Secretary Rick Perry has a vision for developing fully mobile, hot tub-sized nuclear power plants that could become the latest piece in the Energy Department's innovation and grid resiliency push.

Perry brought up the idea while addressing a National Clean Energy Week conference late last month. He used it as an example of what the Trump administration means when it talks about energy "innovation" as part of its energy dominance agenda.


Perry called them "small modular reactors." But the version of the technology he described would function more like a nuclear battery than a conventional, water-cooled nuclear power plant.
He envisioned them being used for hurricane relief in Puerto Rico. The nuclear batteries would be piled into the cargo hold of a C-130 military transport plane, the kind Perry used to fly in the Air Force, and flown to the disaster zone to re-energize the island's wiped-out grid, he explained.

The situation in Puerto Rico is "maybe one of the most tragic events in history," Perry said. "We are trying to get micro-generators down there," but if small modular reactors were available, they "could serve tens of thousands" and even more "very quickly."
...
I like the idea.  I think they could also be used to power key installations in the event of an EMP attack.  They would address only one of the problems in Puerto Rico whose power plant went down.  They also lost a lot of key infrastructure.  AS they rebuild they should consider less vulnerable underground utilities.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Bin Laden's concern about Zarqawi's remains