Are you're seriously comparing a few containers of fold-out solar panels and batteries to a portable nuclear reactor?

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.

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hinkley 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Let’s not pretend to be offended that someone else is making up an unfair scenario, as if you guys didn’t already make one up.

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.

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generalizations 2 days ago | parent [-]

> If someone had an easy non-snake-oil nuclear solution we would be using it already.

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.

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hinkley 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I grew up an hour from a lake you couldn’t swim in because the cooling equipment for the plant caused microbes to grow that cause encephalitis. Those regulations are written in blood and you’re fantasizing about an unattended reactor as the next generation? No. Dream on.

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.

	▲	generalizations 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		FAA regulations are written in blood, too - and yet our private aircraft technology is ancient (and likely less safe than modern tech could facilitate) because those same regulations make the cost to innovate astronomical. I would not make the mistake of believing that regulations do more than freeze our tech in a relatively safe local minima. 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.

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ViewTrick1002 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Nuclear power was dying due to cost overruns already before TMI.

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.

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supportengineer 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What if robots/drones/automation was doing the deployment?

	▲	generalizations 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		You’ll need some peacekeeper drones, too - gotta keep the people from coming back after you evict them to make space for the solar panel fields!

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nehal3m 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm not comparing anything, I'm just saying a solar solution doesn't have to be discounted because of my OP's incredulity about deployment characteristics. No need for hostility.