I am curious as to a statement found with regards to the modular reactor design: “The system uses a technology that was originally developed at Los Alamos National Laboratories and licensed by the company for commercial development.” I am not aware of any reactor prototype that has been built and operated to support this statement. Coming from a reactor background in the Navy (Submarines/Prototype instructor) and as a research reactor operator/supervisor, I am interested in whether or not such a prototype will be built and tested. Given the kind of money that has been set aside for research, $25 million does not seem unreasonable in order to demonstrate the viability of the design.

Your design and the Toshiba 4s design certainly have potential. I am in agreement that smaller reactors have their place. From a political perspective it is unfortunate that McCain had such a pronuclear stance, yet his running mate was one of the obstacles for the Galena, Alaska Toshiba 4S reactor project.

David J. Whitfill PE CHP

Yes, the amount of fuel required to generate large amounts of energy is astoundingly small, but the incredible elevation in the risk of permanent damage to the human genetic fabric of this planet due to human error…which statistically raises considerably the more an activity is conducted and branches out…is very real in my mind.

Nuclear waste doesn't just kill people, it permanently damages the genes of living things, this equates into malformations that carry on well into the future life / generations of offspring of the living organism.

This aspect of nuclear power, can NOT be ignore, and I feel that unless more money is spent on developing research that accelerates the half-life of this spent nuclear fuel, that nuclear power should not be proliferated or advocated.

E.g. We see great opposition to drilling off the US coast, but apparent total disregard to the totally unregulated consequences of drilling elsewhere in the world. "Just don't let the oil I buy pollute MY back yard!" seems to be the cry.

The 3rd World will go wild using the oil dollars they get from us to buy these micro nuclear power plants for the same reason they went wild buying wireless phone systems: a) minimal infrastructure investment, b) rapid deployment.

And as a consequence, they get extra heat energy to desalinate water and crack water into hydrogen for there new automobile industries.

Watch out America… while we're wiring up our windmills, the 3rd world may be taking a bold step into a NEW New World.

Good to hear from someone that knows whats whats I to a'm a navy vet that worked on a atomic sub tender but only as a lowly engineman, in any case the problems that I see are atom coal and all the other sources for electricity are fine with me except for gas,,,

gas is critical for heating in the northern part of the country,,fuel oil is soon going to be very exspensive,,, and for anyone liveing in the south, electric home heating is much to expensive anywhere north of nyc,

this is a solveable problem by using atom power to replace the gas fired power plants,and will ease the transition away from ff that must be made, coal is ok for electricity but very dirty as a home heating fuel,,as a child my dad used coal to heat our farmhouse in central maine it was a very black smoke.

I really don't have any good answers I'm just trying to gain some time for us to address these problems. and find a way to act on them also.

I think there are plenty of fossil fuel marketers that like that result. That could be one reason that the wind and solar marketers get such strong political and financial support.

Of course, making that connection means that people have to acknowledge that some marketing efforts can be a bit devious.

In terms of the old wind verses nuclear debate you must always consider capacity factor. A wind farm is at best 20% of its nameplate capacity, sometimes much less, but a nuclear plant could be 90% over its entire life. While the capital cost of a generation III 1 GW nuke might be the same as a 1 GW wind farm, the wind farm will only give you 200MW of power, on average, whenever the wind wants to blow. So you need to build a 5GW nameplate farm, PLUS extremely large scale energy storage just to get 1GW of reliable base load wind-power, which is far more expensive and far less "green" than just building a nuclear plant when you do a total life cycle analysis.

Wind and solar = square miles of land use, while Nuclear power is just acres, W&S = far outside point of use, while nuclear is anywhere you want it (less transmission line losses), W&S = mountains of steel, concrete, aluminum, and silicon, and nuclear is just a small hill. Nuclear has usable waste heat while W&S doesn’t. W&S = thousands of tons of waste from construction and mining, while nuclear is a handful of recyclable “waste”. The list goes on. Focusing on W&S means utilities just sigh at the costs of “green” power, and go for coal or gas, all the while nuclear is cheaper, safer, cleaner, and more practical. And it will get more so, once we start building new plants and putting more research dollars into next gen nuclear tech, but the same can’t be said for W&S, which will only increase use of commodities that are getting tighter and more expensive already.