Power
This? This is a 24MW containerised, pebble bed reactor. This variant came out of Chinese Mongolia, by way of Shanghai, but we had it made up in Montana. Cheaper, frankly. It’s a beautiful design, the pile and turbines fit in this standard 40ft shipping container. A second container has a couple of ancillary systems and the control room and that’s the lot. Rugged, damn near self-contained and there’s no way any failure can result in meltdown. Good for three years output before you need a fill up, predicted twenty years before replacement. Cost to you, around thirty million.
Installation’s a breeze – couple of days unit set-up, mostly removing the transport interlocks and then setting the reactor to warming up. You can do a crash start in a couple of hours but it shaves about 30% off the lifespan, so we don’t. Hell, you can even transport it hot if you have to. It was developed as part of the PLA fast deployment infrastructure and it really shows, like I say it’s a beauty.
Then it’ll be a few weeks checking the site wiring before final connect. I’ve done eight of these installs before and it’s always the longest part of the on-site, inside the Rim City anyway. It’s a sort of design flaw. No, no not a design flaw of the reactor, *laughs* sorry, I wasn’t very clear there. I mean it’s a design flaw of the city, sort of. You see it was designed be a quick method of constructing permanent housing to replace destroyed buildings, so it was supposed to be hooked up to a grid. Yeah, yeah it’s got limited self sufficiency – generates power with solar cells, wind turbines, bio-reactor produced methane, stuff like that – but it was never meant to function in isolation. Problem is, it was never meant to take over most of the western seaboard either.
All the buildings are interconnected so they can match supply with demand in their local area and most settlements don’t realise there’s any problem outside of the occasional brownout. Until they try to run industry and find that there isn’t any spare power after all. Or until they power up a generator that has a connection to the main grid and find it running at 100% capacity with no local availability increase. So it’ll be a few weeks physically tracing every single cable in the facility before making final hook up. After I leave? Well I’ll have given them the normal warnings and it’s all in the manual. If that doesn’t stop them, well we offer a call out service as an addition to the normal maintenance agreement. Reasonable rates too. Personally I always enjoy seeing how these baby’s are managing out in the world.
- Gerry Stein, AS Power Systems
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