Expanding on Dean’s terse post, small nuclear power plants have been in the testing phase for years.  I strongly suspect that the greatest problems in deploying that technology will not be technical but political and bureaucratic. Here’s an example.
Back in 2003 the small Alaskan village of Galena entered into talks with Toshiba to install a test miniature nuclear plant there, the first in the world:
A Japanese corporation wants to thrust the Interior community of Galena into international limelight by donating a new, unconventional electricity-generating plant that would light and heat the Yukon River village pollution-free for 30 years.
There’s a catch, of course. It’s a nuclear reactor.
Not a huge, Three Mile Island-type power plant but a new generation of small nuclear reactor about the size of a big spruce tree. Designers say the technology is safe, simple and cheap enough to replace diesel-fired generators as the primary energy source for villages across rural Alaska.
Such a plant would also have enough excess power to create hydrogen gas, proponents say. They envision Galena as a demonstration center for the highly vaunted hydrogen economy, in which cars and trucks could run on the clean-burning gas.
Department of Energy officials say the new technology is promising but enormous hurdles remain. A reactor of this type and size has never been built anywhere in the world, much less tested and licensed for use in the United States. The cost of building a prototype that meets stringent U.S. safety standards could kill it, said a nuclear engineer at the Energy Department’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
Now it’s 2008, more than five years later. What’s the status of the plan now?. The plan hasn’t received approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. But they’re studying it. Boy, are they studying it.
The NRC hasn’t approved a new nuclear power plant in the U. S. since 1985. Nonetheless every month they produce reams of new studies, position papers, and regulations if they ever should approve a new plant.
Even if the NRC should happen to approve construction of a new plant, I doubt the wrangling will end there. Every jurisdiction in which people want to build such a plant will want to get into the act on its own. Between the hearings, studies, and lawsuits it will take decades to get approval to construct any plant however small and by then any sensible company planning to do such a thing will have lost interest long ago.
Remember that when you hear about grand new plans for energy independence (an idea that I think is fatuous on the face of it but that’s a subject for another day). There is a hierarchy of goods involved here and many of those who argue for energy independence don’t mean producing as much energy as we need for today and tomorrow but rather reducing our energy consumption to what we already produce.
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Irrational fears of nuclear power and nuclear waste have done more to damage the environment and put our nation at jeopardy than anything else in my lifetime.
It would not surprise me if these plants never get approved. It’s demonic nuclear power after all, and we wouldn’t want the little "nuke" devils getting out and wreaking havoc on the countryside. Their demonic power is just too great to mess with.
It reads to me like the NRC is looking for opposition, rather than trying to "grease the skids".
Ugh.
If there are no new nuclear reactors the NRC has maximized its impact and minimized its accountability. From a bureaucratic standpoint that’s perfect.
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