Wednesday, September 19, 2012

A Disruptive Technology Sets Its Sights on Nuclear Power

Is nuclear power ready for a truly disruptive technology? One company, with a track record of technology revolution, thinks so.

The company has convincing cred: It has revolutionized warfare with its Predator drones and aircraft launching from carriers with electromagnetic catapults.

Now it wants to soar away from today's reactor designs, rooted in the 1950s and the beliefs of Adm. Hyman G. Rickover, father of the nuclear Navy and by extension the nuclear power industry.

Rickover's legacy is the light water reactor, the technology in more than 400 reactors making electricity around the world. But to the scientists at General Atomics (GA) in San Diego, Calif., the light water reactor is yesterday's machine, like the land-line telephone, the radial aircraft engine, mechanical calculators and the silent movie.

GA, where the Predator was born along with a number of other "disruptive" technologies, believes it is time to shed the past and build new reactors that answer the concerns that have swirled around light water for decades. Call it the new, improved, front-wheel-drive reactor.

GA's entry into the nuclear stakes -- which are hot again because of Department of Energy interest in small modular reactors (SMRs) -- is the Energy Multiplier Module (EM2) as in "e-m-squared."

It is derived from more than 50 years of the company's R&D on modular high-temperature reactors. If EM2 works as its enthusiastic designers believe it will, then nuclear power generation will be changed in the way that the Predator has changed warfare.

To the EM2 team, the old days of boiling water at relatively low temperatures to create steam to turn a turbine is first-generation technology: It is the technology of the 19th century with nuclear replacing coal in steam generation starting in the 1950s.

Read more: http://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/A-Disruptive-Technology-Sets-Its-Sights-on-Nuclear-Power.html

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