An ultimately useless (but sort of interesting) statistic was uncovered by intrepid boffins at Scientific American, once they put down their damn game controllers: in total, U.S. videogame consoles consume as much electricity annually as the entire city of San Diego in the same period. Cra-zee.

Furthermore, we’d save half of all that energy if we got off our asses and turned our consoles off, and didn’t leave them switched on to download the latest 4TB demo from Xbox Live Arcade (guilty).

EPRI [Electric Power Research Institute] said if the heaviest gamer plays about six hours a day over a year — a figure found by Nielsen Co. in 2006 — then his Wii would consume 29 kilowatt-hours, his Playstation 178 kWh, and his Xbox 360 184 kWh. A plasma TV, by comparison, averages 242 kWh a year.

That makes gaming a formidable energy user. U.S. homes have about 63 million video game consoles, and together they use about as much energy as San Diego does in a year, according to a 2008 study by the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Much of the energy use isn’t even from playing video games, according to NRDC — it’s from the idling that goes on after the gamer has left the room. The group said idling uses about as much energy as playing.

If gamers turned off their systems when they finished playing, and if manufacturers made systems that turned themselves off when inactive, consumers would save $1 billion a year in utility bills, NRDC said.

Crazier still: all these numbers are excluding the juice slurped up by the required television.

[Scientific American, via Geekologie]

U.S. gamers consume as much electricity yearly as San Diego is a post from: The Inquisitr

These miniature reactors will not contain any weapons grade material and additionally they will be nearly impossible to steal because they will be encased in concrete and buried underground. Hyperion is confident that they will be able to start mass producing these mini-reactors within fives years and have already taken firm orders for some.

John Deal, chief executive of Hyperion, believes they will be able to generate electricity for 10 cents a watt anywhere in the world. Mind you these babies won;t be cheap as each one is estimated to cost around the $25 million mark. the sales pitch is though that for a community of 10,000 homes the end price would work out to $250 per household.

Business looks good if what Deal said to the Guardian is correct

Deal claims to have more than 100 firm orders, largely from the oil and electricity industries, but says the company is also targeting developing countries and isolated communities. ‘It’s leapfrog technology,’ he said.

The company plans to set up three factories to produce 4,000 plants between 2013 and 2023. ‘We already have a pipeline for 100 reactors, and we are taking our time to tool up to mass-produce this reactor.’

Hyperion isn’t alone in the mini-reactor business either as Toshiba has been testing 200KW reactors that are designed to fuel smaller numbers of homes for a longer period of time; even powering a single building for some 40 years.

Neighbourhood size reactors within 5 years is a post from: The Inquisitr