The Fukushima disaster appears to have taken the nuclear role off the table, so far as smart communities are concerned. Hence, after 3-11 nuclear reactors tend to disappear from the smart-community power schemes, and renewables move to the fore. Though the technocrats do not write it out explicitly - and perhaps they never actually debated this - the logic of distributed power and resilient communities also leads away from nuclear. Unless one is prepared to offer the world smart communities with a small-modular nuclear reactor (SMR) underneath, low-carbon (or even no-carbon) smart communities mean green power. This claim is not tree-hugging craziness, but rather what makes economic and environmental sense. The US Navy’s Office of Naval Research is, for example, taking a central role (via a DC smart grid and other gear) in such projects as 100% renewable Chiang Mai World Green City (ASEAN’s first), with explicit aims to broaden that collaboration elsewhere in Thailand as well as Vietnam, and explicitly as part of the pivot to the Asia-Pacific.7 Of course, the enthusiasm for SMRs remains strong within the nuclear industry. Toshiba’s 4S (“Super safe, small and simple”) micro sodium reactor is said to be ready to be buried 30 meters underground and relied on to pump out several dozen megawatts of power.8 For its part, Hitachi has the GE Hitachi Nuclear Energys Power Reactor Innovative Small Module (PRISM) project.9 Yet even Toshiba and Hitachi’s corporate PR for smart communities emphasizes 100% renewable energy. So perhaps somewhere along the recent time-line the smart energy engineers, within those power-unit makers, kept the enthusiasts of underground mini-nuke from slipping an SMR in blue-chip Japan’s smart community design and thus making their offerings an unmarketable NUMBY (“not under my back yard”) waste of investment and opportunity..10................. japanfocus.org/-Andrew-DeWit/4229
Posted on: Mon, 01 Dec 2014 02:06:46 +0000
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