Personal Nuclear Plant
Dude, these are totally awesome! Enough power for about 10,000 US homes for 7-10 years. And you just bury it, and it requires minimal monitoring and no maintenance. I wonder if it is an RTG? They don’t go too much into the details, but I bet that’s what it is. Those are totally safe and well understood. NASA has been using them for years. They cost $25M so assuming a 5 year maximally operative lifespan that’s only $500 per year which is less than I pay for electricity right now. Nice.
I’m going to comment on this now, since I missed it the first time around.
These are incredibly cool – but note that the $25M probably doesn’t take into account the costs of “Buried deep underground”, “guarded by a security detail” or the things that aren’t mentioned on their page – transmission losses, transmission line maintenance and administration costs, all of which wind up being substantial chunks of the price you pay for electricity. It wouldn’t surprise me at all of these things wind up being cost-effective, but conventional nuclear power would be cost-effective if we actually got around to building it.
Yeah, I’m a big fan of nuclear power. I used to love getting the quarterly reports from ComEd stating that 90% of our power was coming from nuclear. Modulo stations going temporarily offline. But then they changed how they bought and generated power and now it is 40% from “unknown sources”. Meaning that they bought it. Meaning that it is coal. Ugh. Ideally we would not burn things we dig out of the ground for power, but if we are going to do it anyway, the least we could do is burn the things that burn most efficiently.