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These nuclear reactors fit on a flatbed truck. How safe are they?
The nuclear industry aims to miniaturize, looking to place hundreds of small power plants across the nation.
Now the government is pushing ahead with tests — at a fortified lab in Idaho — of multiple competing microreactor designs.
The Golden Chest Mine in the far northern reaches of Idaho seems an unlikely staging ground for clean power innovation. It is a throwback to an earlier era, the last hard rock gold mine in Idaho, where heavy machinery bores deep into the earth.
The company wants to power its mining machines with a nuclear reactor small enough to be packed in a shipping container and loaded on a truck. The project would put the company in the vanguard of microreactor development, which backers say could spur wider use of nuclear energy.
The flatbed-size reactors are designed to generate as little as a single megawatt of power — roughly one-thousandth the amount of a large legacy unit. It’s enough to power 1,000 homes, a single manufacturing plant or even a remote island owned by a billionaire (one company claims it has received such an inquiry).
