Underground "nuclear batteries" promise zero-carbon power

A company started by nuclear weapons laboratory staff is proposing to power remote communities and military installations using shed-sized nuclear reactors buried underground.

Hyperion Power Generation, which was started by a scientist at nuclear weapons laboratory Los Alamos, says that the "nuclear batteries" will cost between $20m (£12.9m) and $30m each and will run for seven to 10 years before being returned to the company's manufacturing facility for refuelling.

The reactors are based on the Comstar design, which uses a chemical reaction in uranium hydride to create heat. The technology is not water-cooled and cannot melt down, the firm says.

Although the reactors will be buried underground in a concrete casing, the heat can be transferred to the surface using heat exchanges and either used directly or converted to electricity by steam turbines.

According to the company, they will produce 25MW of power when their heat is converted to electricity using a turbine, or 70MW if direct thermal energy is used.

Deborah Deal-Blackwell, vice president of licensing and public policy at Hyperion, said that the direct thermal energy could be of interest to oil companies, which need large amounts of heat to extract oil from tar sands areas such as northern Alberta in Canada, as well as military installations and remote communities away from the grid.

The company already has $2bn in orders for the products, she said, and is now chasing about $20m in Series B funding.

"We will be deploying while patents are still pending, but something new is discovered about the engineering of this old technology all the time," she said, adding that the first would likely be sold overseas. "In the US it will take longer, because the US is much more afraid of nuclear than the rest of the planet, unfortunately."

Challenges to the company will include obtaining site licences from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the US. It is also working with engineers to ensure that the reactors can withstand earthquakes.

The reactors would produce a softball-sized amount of nuclear waste, said Deal-Blackwell, which would have to be retained at the company's manufacturing facility after the refuelling process until the US government was able to provide a permanent repository. It is currently considering manufacturing sites in New Mexico, where Los Alamos is located, and Idaho.

The US Department of Energy has still not finished the Yucca Mountain nuclear repository, which has been earmarked for the storage of high-level nuclear waste from plants around the country. Now 10 years late, it is unlikely to open until at least 2020.