It was recently reported that an American private company by the name of Gen4 Energy is currently in the development stage of designing a new breed of small nuclear reactors that will primarily be operated underground and will only need refuelling once every decade. One of the design plans the company is mainly focussing on consists of a 25-megawatt reactor that could effectively provide power for approximately 170 of the world’s small islands and over 100 remote U.S. government facilities. Additionally, as stated by the company, the electricity would be much cheaper than that produced by diesel generators and not to mention more environmentally friendly as well.

Traditional nuclear power plants are large, above ground, “thermal power stations in which the heat source is a nuclear reactor. The nuclear reactor is the heart of the plant whereby the heat is generated by controlled nuclear fission”1. With this heat, a coolant is heated as it is pumped through the reactor, which removes the energy from the reactor. Heat from nuclear fission is used to raise steam, which runs through turbines, supplying power to electrical generators. The new trend in smaller nuclear reactors stems from the increasing safety and building costs concerns’ caused by that of the larger above ground nuclear power plants. For instance, the Fukushima accident which took place in Japan during 2011 when a “tsunami hit the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant releasing substantial amounts of radioactive materials into the environment”2. Furthermore, with the designs of the smaller reactors, located underground instead of above, they would be less vulnerable to terrorist attacks and have cooling systems that could keep them safe for seven days without a single human intervention. Aside from the safety benefits that the Gen4 Energy smaller reactors would provide, they are also to be factory-built