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Journal North: Home | Sports | Opinion | Obits | Entertainment
Monday, March 15, 2010
More Power To the People
By Phil Parker
Journal Staff Writer
Santa Fe-based Hyperion Power has taken more than 120 orders for its hot-tub-sized nuclear power reactors. When buyers ask CEO John "Grizz" Deal when the reactors will be ready, he said, his answer is, "When they're done."
The company — a Los Alamos National Laboratory spinoff — is about four years into a 10-year plan, Deal said, which will culminate with mass-production of the Hyperion Power Module, a nuclear reactor that can be buried in the ground and provide enough energy to power 20,000 homes for eight to 10 years.
Deal is aiming to submit engineering and manufacturing designs to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission by the end of this year.
Priced between $35 million and $50 million apiece, HPMs sound like marvels. They're billed by the company as "a safe, self-contained, simple-to-operate nuclear power reactor." Because they're relatively tiny, HPMs can easily be shipped around the world.
"Big nuclear reactors are like mainframe computers," Deal said. "We're building laptops."
Deal said he had given a talk on Hyperion recently when a Kenyan man approached him and said, "You can save Africa; don't screw up."
Deal said the HPM's potential to help poor people is "why I go to work every morning."
First, though, they have to get the thing built.
Portable supply
Otis "Pete" Peterson invented the reactor during his more than 25-year career at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He's retired from the lab now, he said, and working part-time for Hyperion. He acknowledged the HPM's potential to "change the world" and said the first customers will probably be industrial or military installations in need of an independent power supply.
"That's very important to military bases," he said, "that they have their own dedicated power source so they're not dependent on some commercial grid that might be compromised."
This is what Hyperion has the potential to offer: a power source that gets delivered like a package from Amazon and generates freakish amounts of energy for up to a decade. (Then you have to buy another one, but Deal said the cost is minimal compared with what companies pay for that kind of energy over the same stretch of time.)
It gets better. Deal and Peterson insist that HPMs are 100 percent safe, because they're sealed at the factory. Also, Deal said, nuclear energy is "the safest way to generate electricity ever."
Said Peterson: "There have been far less accidents and far less fatalities in the nuclear field than in any other energy fields."
If even the tiniest safety concerns aren't entirely satisfied, HPMs will never hit the market, Peterson said — a grueling regulatory process is the biggest reason there haven't been mass-produced reactors before. Probably the most essential step in Hyperion's development plan is getting certification from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
"Someone said the NRC knows what they like and they like what they know," Peterson said, meaning Hyperion has to be careful introducing a new idea like for-market nuclear power reactors.
Peterson said Hyperion has kept in constant contact with the NRC "to make sure they wouldn't just dismiss us out of hand." Certification might take as many as two or three years after the designs are submitted.
The company's goal is to start shipping reactors by about 2016, Deal said.
Deal and Peterson both said there's no pie-in-the-sky aspect to their product. HPMs aren't like cold fusion, for which a breakthrough always seems to be five or 10 years away.
"We've been using small reactors for over 50 years in the Unites States Navy," Deal said. "There are 60-something similar reactors around the U.S. The innovation is our company. It turns out it's really hard, not to build (the reactors), but all the politics involved and the capital requirements."
There may be no ceiling for Hyperion's money-making potential once HPMs hit the market, but Deal insists it was humanitarian aims that lead him to Peterson and the creation of Hyperion.
Which brings us back to Africa.
"We started this company to clean water in Africa," Deal said. "We looked at energy sources like solar and wind. We looked at small gas plants and oil. And then we met Pete Peterson."
According to statistics from UNICEF, one in five children in the undeveloped world have no access to clean water, and almost half of all people in developing countries suffer at any given time from a health problem caused by water and sanitation deficits.
"Our emphasis is helping people not die from not having clean water," Deal said. "About 20,000 people die each day in Africa and Asia alone from dirty water. If 20,000 Americans died every day, we'd have a solution."
Deal said the filtering technology exists to clean dirty water. What undeveloped areas lack is the ability to power that technology cheaply. He said Hyperion solves that problem.
"If you've got energy, you can have all the clean water you want," he said.
UNICEF says millions of women spend several hours each day collecting water. Deal believes that less time hauling water means more time for things like education.
"Their status is raised in society," he said. "It's weird that water is the thing."
Obviously, a poor village in Ethiopia can't pool its money and buy a $50 million nuclear reactor. But Deal said Hyperion may work out an arrangement by which it gives away an HPM for every one it sells. He said his investors, including the venture capitalist group Altira, are committed to putting HPMs where they can improve poor people's quality of life.
"There's got to be more than just the profit motive that's challenging us and inspiring us to work this hard," Deal said.
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