Once in a while, if you watch carefully, you will notice that someone you know is a future-altering genius. But when that same mild-mannered friend gets quoted in a gushingly positive article in Popular Mechanics, you do a double-take.
I met Jose (that's Dr. Reyes to you) at a smallish church in Corvallis while in school for computer engineering. This friendly, positive, and encouraging guy was a deacon in the church (over what responsibility, I'm not sure I never knew). He led singing at the church once in a while, and was always interested in what was going on in the college ministry, despite the fact that (when I was there), his kids were in elementary school and junior high.
Over the years, his daughter married my best friend. She now leads singing at our church. And the humble, song-leading deacon from the Circle Church of Christ turns out to be not only the head of the nuclear engineering department at Oregon State University but also a co-founder of a startup energy company poised to change the face of American energy.
You can read the details of his remarkable (and portable!) micro-reactor core at the Popular Mechanics site. The guys there seemed very pleased with the implications of his design, and surprisingly, the public comments on the article are also substantially positive. Ain't that a switch?
I guarantee the next few years will see an explosion of electric and electric-assisted cars. You are going to own one. And I have a feeling that the energy which pushes the electrons around in that battery pack under the hood is going to come from Dr. Reyes' brainchild.
(Here is some more information on NuScale and its competitors...)
1 comment:
Too bad I'm still strugling with my preliminary designs for my own invention. The TGR Magnum. That's right, it's a gun that shoots tigers. That is to say it uses a propellant to fire live tigers at the target which then is attacked/mauled/devoured/smashed by the tigers. It's basically pretty awesome. The problem is right now I've only got some pencil sketches of the prototype. To be honest, when I say "pencil sketches" it's really nothing more than doodles of a cannon shooting man-eating tigers, which may or may not be of the saber-toothed variety, on poorly executed drawings of people I don't like. Sort of like a developmentally delayed eighth grader's version of a voodoo doll. I'm not going to deny or confirm rumors that one of the tigers may be pooping in mid-air so the tiger poop lands on the target right before the tiger gets him. So rad. Right now the bugs I'm trying to work out involve mostly the fact that by my calculations, this gun will be serioursly heavy unless I can develop a "custom" strain of tigers that are fairly small yet terribly ferocious. That and the fact that most of the propellants that would develop enough energy to launch a tiger at an acceptable ballistic range would also likely kill the tiger and make him come apart right after exiting the muzzle. I bet if I could get my hands on one of those t-shirt launchers they have at sporting events and a good supply of guinea pigs, I could mock-up a scaled-down version. Once I've jumped through that hoop I can look for financial backers before I take this thing global.
Does the article say wether or not that power source can make the car peel out or do wheelies? Also, does this power source develop enough kinetic energy to propel a large cat, oh say about 600 pounds, out to about 100 yards?
ted
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