Hope it is true though.
That is real.
https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/radiant-completes-study-f...
Diesel generators are "great" because diesel doesn't evaporate. You can have it there for years, and with good design, it just springs up the next day.
This nuclear reactor has to be connected for fleet monitoring if you want to operate it. Which excludes it from many real life scenarios where diesel generators are used.
Maybe for remote locations where constant power is needed (Antarctica and such), but I see their uses being very limited.
Do you know the shelf life of TRISO fuel? I imagine it doesn't matter because it would be very expensive to build a reactor and not switch it on.
I still run my tractor and Land Cruiser off the stuff; the tractor had an outing today. Granted, neither of those engines are very particular about the fuel they are given, but still...
(Water drained off every few months, also a biocide is added to keep the diesel gunk at bay.)
They give similar specs ideals about gasoline fuel going bad in 3-6 months, and yet 95% of gasoline engines will still run 2 year old fuel fine because they aren't pushing compression ratios to the absolute possible limit, and half of the performance engines that do push limits these days have adaptable computer controlled compression and sensors which will figure out how much it can push the fuel.
If I put 5 year old diesel fuel into any regular diesel motor or generator or vehicle and it didn't start up, I would be extremely surprised, and be most worried that the fuel either wasn't diesel fuel to start with or had a wide open hole in the container that a bunch of rain water drained down into.
That said, if I had some kind of tuned up diesel motor that I was trying to push 800+ HP out of, I probably wouldn't use year old diesel fuel just in case. High performance motors like that are already straddling the line between working great and catastrophic failure and using old potentially bad fuel only adds to it.
LOL, no. I see, you have never worked with large diesels meant for backup.
If you just leave diesel fuel alone, then over time (6-9 months) the residual water separates at the bottom of the tank. And then various microbial life springs into action, happily living off all of that free energy. While there's some dissolved oxygen, it will happily use it to oxidize the fuel. But even without oxygen, the bugs will try to live off energy produced by polymerization of unsaturated hydrocarbons.
Polymerization == gunk that clogs up your fuel filters.
So you have to periodically clean up diesel fuel by removing water and filtering the gunk out. It's called "fuel polishing". Large diesels will have fixed systems, for smaller diesels, sometimes mobile systems are used like these: https://fueltecsystems.com/equipment/pneumatic-systems-2/
I don't understand this sentence, why does connection to fleet monitoring preclude using this microreactor as opposed to a diesel generator? Can't you just hook a starlink up to it, and program it to shut down in the event of prolonged comms loss?
Unfortunately much of it can't be sold or shipped off site and if it isn't used, will be fugitive gas emissions or flared.
Replacing the diesel and other fuels used on-site is good. But it's only part of the story. Running the train would certainly burn a lot of gas, so replacing that would be good.
(-not a fan of SMR for a variety of reasons, mostly political)
But it being a 1.9mw(thermal) makes sense.
I wonder what the support requirements are, like how do you yeet the heat to make it efficient?
Also containing super heated helium seems hard for any length of time. I wonder what the operating lifespan is.
Where does all that heat go?! They must have some very impressive fans.
https://www.generatorsindustrial.com/products/1mw-diesel-gen... has a simple radiator.
but then the heat profile is different I suppose, and the efficiency doesn't depend on being able to shed heat.
What does it cost?
How much power can it deliver?
So what's the equivalent $/KWh?No, that used to be believed to be true. We're just seeing the curtain come down.
The food pyramid, the CIA's "war on drugs" in South America, the wars with Iraq, Libya.. Just to name a few. Why do we pretend like bribery and corruption is this new thing?
yikes from their FAQ:
"The plan is for the small amount of spent fuel (the volume of the spent fuel in one reactor is equivalent in size to just two Walmart gas grill propane tanks) that comes out of our reactors at the end of their duty cycle to only be temporarily stored on-site until a federal repository or interim storage solution becomes available. "
They don't even have plan while the exist now.
So everyone just leaves it in the reactor's parking lot for now, in big concrete and steel dry casks.
Is this a real measurement in tank sizes? Why not just say two 20lb tanks? What if I bought my tank from Home Depot? Are they a different size? Do they think using Walmart makes it more relatable?
That's only 0.393% the size of a football field!
Seriously though, isn't a lump of radioactive material that size actually huge?
[1] "Plutonium powered pacemakers (1974) https://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/collection/miscel...
>first nuclear battery can deliver 100 microwatts of power and a voltage of 3V
>plans to produce a battery with 1 watt of power by 2025
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/nuclear-battery-betavolt-...
Looks like a giant part of the value is that it can be shipped in, dropped on the ground on site, turned on overnight, and it only takes up the footprint of a shipping container.
If you have 24 hrs to find an empty football field within a powercable's distance of what you're trying to power, and then fill it with solar panels and batteries, you're gonna have a bad day.
Using a bomb to flatten the nearby trees/debris/buildings/people to make way for solar panels strikes me as not preferable to a clean standalone box providing a MW of power for 5 years at a time.
Also the environment would thank you for choosing nuclear over this.
I get that you don't like the idea in general, no matter who it is dropped on, but take a step back and examine your reaction.
Dude, take a step back and examine your entire system of ethics.
There are plenty of examples of things that are not equal like skin color or gender and yet we - I assume you are not racist or sexist - try to treat equal. Drawing a hard line in the sand at human and everything else seems well ... really an Orangutan and a Human are so different that they deserve completely different rights, what about whales that have languages likely as complex or more complex than humans? Don't get me wrong I don't believe a cricket has the same emotional reasoning capabilities as a human. But it strikes me as very human to define in-groups people like you and people or beings other than you and using that as justification to do horrible things to them.
[1] https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2024/08/mm-12-human-supremacy/
> But it strikes me as very human to define in-groups people like you and people or beings other than you and using that as justification to do horrible things to them.
This is a behavior nonspecific to humans...not sure if you've heard of it, but there's this fascinating emergent behavior among wild animals that naturalists have occasionally observed - in colloquial terms, they've labeled it "predator and prey".
Many predatory species engage in behavior that limits their hunting to avoid making their prey extinct. Right now extinction rates are >1000x above the baseline a couple hundred years ago. What we are doing to the biosphere we are currently part of is short sighted self sabotage - which is in large parts fueled by a wide spread human supremacist mindset.
Let's do the math: To match even a 1MW reactor, you'd need 2,000+ panels, inverters, batteries, mounting, and approx. 120-150 man-days of labor...and that's with pre-cabled gear. You're still looking at 8+ containers, a full crew, and a full 10-14 days to deploy, not "a few hours."
A nuclear microreactor doesn't need 54,000sqft of land or weather-dependent storage. Nice idea for a solar camp but not a replacement for a compact nuclear source.
Nobody’s dropping off a nuclear fucking reactor in the middle of a disaster area on six hours’ notice in any universe other than the bizarro one invented by their PR firm.
You’re maybe running water desalination for an island that has known for years they want an alternative to shipping in diesel, or you’re shipping diesel generators to a disaster area because the Red Cross has a stack of them in a warehouse ready to go.
Or you’re some hyperscaler data center hoping to not have to maintain fifteen generators onsite for you eight server rooms (8 + 4 + 2 + 1 = 15), and those could potentially be replaced with battery systems or gas turbines. And again, on six months or more of notice.
If someone had an easy non-snake-oil nuclear solution we would be using it already. A realistic person would assume incremental improvements in portable nuclear over the next twenty years, not an overnight success.
Nuclear has been pretty much regulated to death. This is definitely not true.
> Nobody’s dropping off a nuclear fucking reactor in the middle of a disaster area on six hours’ notice in any universe other than the bizarro one invented by their PR firm.
Why not? It absolutely has the potential to be cheap, reliable and safe. That sounds like a fantastic use case. The biggest reason we don't do that is environmental lobbying regulating the technology into oblivion.
The blaming everything on regulations is a nice scapegoat when the technology doesn’t deliver.
We left the piston steam engine to the past, now it’s nuclear powers time to fade into museum pieces.
I’m not saying it’ll never happen. I’m saying the work hasn’t been done and this is more snake oil.
And then there’s the physics and logistics the other responder mentioned. For conventional reactors, that much concrete of a very specific and difficult quality to achieve in that many layers is expensive. The last one I heard about being built they had to jackhammer off many feet of the base because they missed spec, and lay it all over again. And the carbon footprint of that much concrete is not tiny. The embodied cost of a built plant is huge, and repairs are constant. They aren’t free, even if you ignore heat pollution, and we are running out of runway for that conceit.
You're describing the engineering problems of rarely-produced machinery, and seem to imagine that we can't figure out how to do that better, and cheaply, at scale? The potential market for a shipping-container-sized MW-scale power supply is likely huge.
In places solar panels make sense they would certainly be used, but that's not everywhere.
Now try foisting a nuclear reactor on them.
https://www.spitsbergen-svalbard.com/2024/04/09/longyearbyen...
People just want a compact solution to generate power, not a whole separate project.
Nor is that generating electricity at night.
Plus battery storage.
And it's closer to 4-6x football fields if you did it in say, San Francisco. 4-5x football fields in Kansas City. 6-8x football fields in Chicago. Again, plus battery storage.
It’s cargo container size and that’s apparently a few MWH of battery these days.
It is unlikely that those 1) cost as much as a nuclear reactor or 2) are exactly the amount of available space you have. So 2 or 3 aren’t going to solve your water desalination problems but might solve your intermittent power ones.
Just FYI, every building that is required by law to have emergency backup power has an engine-generator set. There are zero exceptions to this rule. If batteries were able to serve critical loads like hospitals and emergency dispatch centers, they would be allowed to be installed for that purpose, but they aren’t. This should end the argument about battery backup, at least until battery storage density reaches a point where it can serve those loads.
FWIW I sell and run electrical work
For a permanent installation I would agree that solar would usually make more sense, but the mini reactor might be better in scenarios where it's replacing a diesel generator - emergencies, temporary events, confined spaces, etc.
I think there's a huge opportunity for nuclear power in the world today.
But: all these micro-reactor strike me as disastrously bad idea, that's all too likely to offload incredibly complex nasty gross problem to the future. Costs that alas will likely be handled as network externalities, as drains and damage against humanity and people and government, that the creators and purchasers of these device will skate through with comparatively little injury.
Short of discovering portals or wormholes (natural or artificial), we should only assume demonstrated space propulsion technology to make the trip. With current technology its a long trip, and its cold and dark inbetween 2 stars. We should definitely conserve fissile materials until we demonstrate fusible materials for reliable power generation.
The scale of the problem l, technologically simply renders earthbound resource constraints irrelevant.
Like you're into "synthesize antimatter with solar power" at that point.
I'm not going to argue circular conditions, this is precisely why we should preserve dense energy sources, first an alternative abundant energy source must be demonstrated, before squandering it locally.
> The scale of the problem l, technologically simply renders earthbound resource constraints irrelevant.
Hidden in such statements is the implicit assumption that mining the solar system for fissile materials is less energy intensive than mining them locally.
We should make sure interstellar travel remains affordable by the time we decide to afford seeding other star systems.
Nothing prevents interstellar travel with current technology, it would just take a long time. We should keep this mode of travel, where survival on the ship is powered with known feasible technology (nuclear fission) on the table and conserve fissile materials until we succeed in compact fusion plants, in that case this constraint no longer is an argument to preserve fissile materials.
Speculating other energy storage technology like "antimatter storage as a battery to store solar power" before launching to another star is just that: speculation. We shouldn't squander fissile materials on the basis of feel-good speculation.
And then of course, if you can't afford the energy to sustain a human population on Earth in decent conditions, you also definitely can't afford interstellar travel. Because implicit in your assumption is that somehow the extremely limited number of people who could be put on a slow ship (and by slow we're talking thousands of actual years minimum at "current technology" levels) will somehow be able to command and control all of Earth's fissile resources.
And it is a money pit.
And then you have things like this: https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2019/01/10/two-sail...
It's proof that you can build a robust and safe reactor, but like all things under triple constraints it will not be cheap.
We just awarded $0.5B to decommission the USS Enterprise (CVN 65), the first nuclear aircraft carrier. More will follow! https://theaviationist.com/2025/06/03/uss-enterprise-dismant...
The DoE has been helping to decomission Los Angeles class attack subs for a while now. Here's a piece on that: https://www.defense.gov/News/Feature-Stories/Story/Article/4...
It require enormous care & effort. It's fantastically costly. Do I think it was worth it? For a mission like this: I think yes. For the good of a nation. And a Nation that hopes to still be around to take care of the problem, the complex decomissioning decades latter. But I have so little faith that private interests will endure and bear their own responsibility for this awesome but deeply corrupting irradiating force.
I think it's a bit melodramatic to say microreactors offload nasty environmental problem to the future. Also, their environmental problem is literally at the scale of "Drop them in an abandoned mine somewhere, where they cause zero harm to the world, and we will have a few centuries to figure it out."
But it's not THAT much worse. Nuclear waste is already ridiculously small in volume per kWh vs. any other fuel-burning energy technology. Right now all of the waste we've accumulated from making 20% of the country's electricity for decades fits on a football field 3 meters high (that's pellets only, if you include individual dry casks it's 135 meters). So if we make lots of small reactors that are a bit less fuel efficient we might need 2 big football fields deep underground rather than 1. Compared to all the particulate and CO₂ emissions other sources make I'm just not that worried about it. Recall that fossil kills ~6 million per year from particulate emissions alone. Commercial nuclear waste has never hurt anyone, and is unlikely to do so in the future.
If you're a billionaire building your bunker this would be the ultimate off-grid power source :-).
We did run a nuclear reactor in space once that did use TRIGA fuel. It was called SNAP-10A. More recently, the Kilopower test ran a reactor on land but intended for space with a U-Mo metallic fuel.
Trying to make microreactors cheap is super hard. We've obviously tried it many times, the most relevant being the truck-mounted military microreactor ML-1 (the only closed-cycle direct gas turbine reactor ever operated) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML-1.
Shielding is hard. Even a small reactor this size needs like 8 ft. of high density concrete on all sides, or equivalent, plus 4-6" of a heavy metal like tungsten to take down the gammas. You can't just put it underground because the neutrons activate the dirt. Driving it off afterwards is borderline impossible because you generally have to put the spent fuel in robust canisters that can handle collisions, rollovers, and RPG attacks.
But the hardest part is fuel cost. This reactor uses medium-enriched ('HALEU') fuel, which is super expensive, and then it packages it into TRISO form, which is about 100x more expensive to fabricate than regular UO₂ fuel. On the plus side, it's super robust and can minimize the need for other safety systems. Those prices could both go down, conceivably, but the fab process is pretty intricate, and it's hard to bring down enrichment costs. In my analysis, the fuel cost alone nearly makes this kind of reactor uncompetitive with a diesel generator in almost all applications. So even if the reactor is free (because you build it on an assembly line?), you're still out of luck.
Then there's thermal strain. When you're a small reactor you have big gradients. This bends things. Neutrons make it worse. Then you have a tiny box with electronics in it getting absolutely hammered by neutron dose. That does bad things too.
I hope they can find a way to bring fuel costs way down. I really like the people at this company, and I really like nuclear power and want to see it used in many new applications. I just don't quite see the path yet.
I've spoke with some researchers and investors working on seawater uranium extraction and left quite optimistic.
Can it survive 20 kilos of TNT planted by a terrorist?
Plus the fuel form holds in a lot of the fission products even when scattered around. It may overheat and release volatile fission products but I don't think it would be a widespread disaster no matter what.
You can also use water on neutrons or lead on gammas. There are many combos and composites.
Oh and neutrons cause more gammas when they get absorbed. Sometimes there are repeated layers, 3 or 4 times. If you have even tiny impurities in your shield you can get huge unexpected capture gammas
It's a rich tradition for reactors to start out with too little shielding though. Like the Japanese nuclear powered cargo ship Mutsu fired up for the first time, realized they didn't shield well enough, and spent 4 years fixing/retrofitting more shielding.
Gamma rays are stopped by electron density. Electron density requires high mass density heavy (high Z) nuclides.
Neutrons are stopped by light nuclei via conservation of momentum, and by neutron absorbing nuclei like boron.
If metamaterials can be made with higher density electrons in a way that's cheaper than lead and high hydrogen density that's cheaper than concrete, paraffin wax, or water, then I guess it could be interesting.
And you can just remove the control rods and wait for it to melt on its own (meltdown-proof fuel isn't actually, well, proof). You'll get a nice contamination with volatiles (cesium and iodine), for the bonus points you can wait until the end of the fuel campaign to maximize the amount of transuranics.
I just don't think this is a viable option, except for very niche scenarios.
https://www.spitsbergen-svalbard.com/2024/04/09/longyearbyen...
I'm sure there's a few catches or weed already have them back ordered globally but frankly anything that normalises using these self heating rocks to boil water gets my vote :)
“I just approved a program to deploy small modular nuclear reactors built in the United States to an allied country to help with their sort of energy infrastructure.”
“Which allied country would that be?”
“I can't tell you. It's not public yet.”
From Interesting Times with Ross Douthat: The DOGE Alum Asking if Foreign Aid Is America’s Problem, Jul 31, 2025
This is admittedly napkin math, but it should be good enough to set expectations.
The naive notion of we'll just ship these all over the place by the thousands and it's going to be fine is not going to withstand a lot of critical thinking very long.
With nuclear it's all rosy and optimistic. But also almost 100% hypothetical. And the industry has a piss poor record delivering on its promises. 200-300% cost overruns are routine.
We won't see more than a handful small small nuclear reactors for years to come. We might get to hundreds by the 2040s or so. Maybe growing to thousands or even tens of thousands by the 2050s under the optimistic scenario.
Most of these things have the power output of a handful of wind turbines, of which we have close to half a million right now around the world with more coming online all the time. The challenge here is that wind turbines are just stupidly cheap and scalable at this point and still getting better.
SMRs will remain very niche for a long time even if they do get their cost levels under control. Which is a big if. Thousands of these things would barely move the needle in terms of power output. Essentially all of the expected growth in electricity demand for the next few decades is going to be met by wind and solar supported by batteries.
2. Why only refuelable 4 times?
3. Is it really safe to fly around with in an airplane? Can major airlines help distribute these via standard flight routes to reduce cost?
4. What happens when home base monitoring detects a problem with the reactor? (And why isn't this covered in the slides to put the audience at ease?)
These are too big for your standard air freight network or aircraft (that is, it's significantly larger then any typical ULD [Unit Load Device, shipping containers for airplanes]).
So it'll definitely be a charter to get one delivered. Weights going to be the big determinant in cost, dimensionally it looks like you could get it into anything bigger then a C-130. I doubt you'll be within the C-130s weight limits though.
We are actually pretty good at making alloys and materials today that can resist radiation problems better and more predictably these days, but there is still a bit of randomness from manufacturing variables that means you need a pretty large safety margin to prevent problems. They probably would work for a dozen refuelings, but the consequences of a reactor breech are too high to not have a massive safety margin. And maybe after they ran these for a few refuelings and inspected enough of them they could bump up the refueling limit before inspection or replacement a little.
It was even deployed to provide power to a remote Arctic outpost. It had to use an exotic coolant (basically, a rocket oxidizer) to make it work, and it had to be placed far away from anything else. The shielding was not enough to bring down the gamma radiation to a safe level when the reactor was active.
I forgot about it, because it was delivered by a plane, not a truck.
https://www.ixbt.com/live/offtopic/pervaya-v-mire-peredvizhn... (German Wiki also has an article with an image: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/TES-3 ).
I remember reading about it in an encyclopedia as a child.
Well that's a relief.
Jokes aside, very cool tech.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uR7VDqUbaCg
[2] https://nuclear-news.net/2025/04/04/update-on-the-bankruptcy...
[1] https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/advanced/who-were-...
* no prices
* no dates, just "2026" (elsewhere 2028).
* no pictures even of prototypes just computer graphics.
* helium is notoriously hard to keep from leaking
* it's all just way too promising and convenient and appealing. Who doesn't want a reactor that fits in a shipping container? Who doesn't want reliable, clean energy? Who doesn't like hospitals and the military? Does it also release puppies and cure cancer?
> The plan is for the small amount of spent fuel [..] that comes out of our reactors at the end of their duty cycle to only be temporarily stored on-site until a federal repository or interim storage solution becomes available.
>The NRC is legally required to ensure that, in the event of bankruptcy that the site is secure and the spent fuel remains safely managed before ultimately transferring over to the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) possession
So basically like with all other nuclear, the tricky parts with unknown costs are handed over to future taxpayers. These costs are thereby removed from the estimates in Kaleidos business plan making it seem like it's a viable business, which is isn't otherwise.
Meanwhile the founders get rich today, since immense amounts of money has to be presented upfront, before any energy is produced at all.
The obvious replacement for diesel generators today is solar+batteries, which is evident in many countries that used to rely on small scale diesel generators already.
idontwantthis•22h ago
cactacea•22h ago
> Additional Requirements
> Must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as necessary to accomplish our mission.
So... not yet.
kwhitefoot•21h ago
acidburnNSA•21h ago
wmf•20h ago