Get out your geiger counters

I filed this story away when it first came out but never got around to blogging 'bout it. Then the whiskey power plant news drifted across my monitor and reminded of this gem: Mini nuclear reactors!

Yes, a company is going to market a "garden shed"-sized reactor. The technology was developed by the Los Alamos National Laboratory (think Manhattan Project) and the federal government has given their okay. The CEO of the firm leading this radioactive charge explains:

"Our goal is to generate electricity for 10 cents a watt anywhere in the world. They will cost approximately $25m each. For a community with 10,000 households, that is a very affordable $250 per home."

So far it seems that the only orders are coming from utility providers and infrastructure builders. Call it the ultimate back-up (or primary) generator. But don't expect them to show up in Home Depot any time soon. I know, I was bummed out too. From a practical standpoint, however, this could be a boon to the developing world, where electricity can be scarce. And security is virtually a none-issue because the reactor design is ancient at 50+ years old (physics grad students use way more advanced stuff all the time), the reactors are buried in concrete underground, and there are no moving parts.

All you aspiring Dr. Evils our there, start saving your pennies because this baby would be the perfect complement to a villain lair.

On a somewhat related note, I picked up a new book entitled A Nuclear Family Vacation: Travels in the World of Atomic Weaponry by Nathan Hodge and Sharon Weinberger. Haven't started reading yet, but I'm giddy with anticipation.



Update: Great book. Highly recommended for anyone, particularly those interested in nuclear science, the military, history, or foreign affairs. Among the more memorable parts, and something that underscores a theme of the book, was when the current military officer in charge of our nuclear missiles couldn't remember the term M.A.D. How the world has changed in just a decade or so!

Scotland Runnin' on Whiskey. Literally.

Those inventive Scots have done it again. Not content to power themselves with whiskey, the plaid-clad tinkerers are going to power their electrical grid with the water of life. Approval has been granted for a group of distillers to build a biomass-fueled power plant Speyside. The biomass of course being the whiskey mash and related by products of the distilling process. When operational, the plant should generate about 7.2 megawatts.

Never mind the arguments over green power and climate change, I say this is the future. The more we imbibe, the more we can consume, so to speak. Seriously, though, this is innovation - doing more with what we have at hand, and what was before basically waste. I think I'll go open another bottle of Black Label to help make sure the project gets off to a good start.

Full article

You're a MOTOR company, right?

This is something of follow-up to my recent posts on gasoline prices and automobile manufacturing. Several major car companies, including Nissan, Toyota, and GM, have announced plans for new all-electric or hybrid products to be introduced over the next 4-odd years. After some additional pondering on the matter, I have an important questions:

You guys are MOTOR companies, right? The word MOTOR is there in your name - General MOTORS, Toyota MOTORS, etc...

So why can't you just build me an electric motor to replace the internal combustion one in my current car? I really like my current car. It's extremely reliable and gets almost 30 mpg on the highway (and it was built in the early '90s). I'm confident there are engineers out there who would love the challenge of retrofitting a shiny new electric motor into my car and replace the gas tank with some sort of battery/power cell. Maybe I need to go into the retrofit motor business and become the next Henry Ford.

Three for Thinking

InnoCentive. "Win cash awards of up to $1,000,000 for your creative solutions to Challenges"

Flypaper. "The easiest way to create, edit and share interactive content that can be used for live presentations or over the Web"

Technology Review. "The authority on the future of technology." Published by MIT.

I Love Technology

This is simply amazing. I have a special affinity for technology that fuses dispersed visual content with an interactive experience. To echo some of the comments on the TED.com web page, this guy needs to get together with this guy. I seriously wish I had even the slightest clue how to design and build software like this - I'm lucky if I can get macros to function in Excel - because these applications are just so cool.

Let's hope that Microsoft doesn't muddle Photosynth all up.

Worth a Read

Being a Yankee means appreciating creative (and usually astoundingly simple) solutions to problems, be they unique or ubiquitous. Thus, I'm pirating borrowing a format from the intelligent authors of Marginal Revolution.com and presenting my own "Markets in Everything" post.

The Economist reports from Africa on the proliferation of personal banking services:

They have taken branches to the unbanked, either in prefabricated form, or in vans that make regular visits to under-served areas. Other countries are doing the same. In remote areas where delivering cash is hard, mini-machines have been installed in corner shops where customers print out a slip confirming they are in the black and present it to the shopkeeper, who provides the cash. Some rural branches and ATMs rely on solar energy and satellite phone connections.

How cool is that?! Wait, it gets even more amazing.

Standard Bank supplies an isolated branch on an island in Uganda's Lake Victoria by having planes drop bags of cash from the air.

Who says money doesn't fall from the sky - I'd love to know how much security that requires. Anyway, this is the type of innovation (and risk taking) that powers economic growth and freedom. Sadly, it is not all whiz-bang progress.

According to the World Bank, in 40 out of 48 countries in the region, it still takes over a year—and a long list of procedures—to enforce a contract.

A year! 12 months! 365 days! I don't have any data, but I'm guessing most contract disputes in the US and other industrialized countries are resolved in a matter of weeks or months. Actually, I'd bet that most are resolved before they ever get to adjudication. This is important because contract disputes, and enforcement of contracts, can be a tremendous dead weight loss for the parties involved and for the economy and society as a whole. See this post (fourth paragraph, but read the whole thing) for a brief glimpse of what I think about the state of litigation in America .

Bottom line, conditions are improving in Africa because of creative people and a little bit of risk taking. Although compared to the alternative of continued poverty, maybe the risk isn't that big.


Don't you love the irony of me blogging about innovation in a format that I effectively stole from another blogger. Ah, the glory of the Internet!

Innovations for Life

It has been a slow day for me, so for inspiration I went to my personal web archives and found this from about a month ago, which I now offer up to you...

2007 Breakthrough Awards from Popular Mechanics

Classic examples of Yankee ingenuity and creativity. And wherewithal to nurture an idea to life. We need to make better examples of these types of people in our schools and communities. They are the ones who make the leaps that make all our lives safer, more comfortable, and more efficient.

My personal favorite: The hands-on computer (seen above) wins for most cool, while I highly admire the spunk of the young chemist to find an economical fix to a world-wide problem.