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Nuclear power plants are coming to the battlefield
- lispm 7y agoThis is the last thing humankind needs: nuclear powered battlefields.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 7y agoI am not sure how to read it. So because those are not explicitly weapons, their proliferation is perfectly ok? How big a blast would a mini reactor produce if it was mishandled?
- AlgorithmicTime 7y agoProbably none? Nuclear reactors shouldn't be able to go prompt critical by design. The bigger concern is that it spreads radioactive shit all over the place if it gets bombed.
- XorNot 7y agoNone. But if it is blown up by say, artillery or a truck load of semtex, the fine vapor of radioactive dust sprayed all over the place will make a decent chunk of land pretty dangerous to hang out on.
- tomatotomato37 7y agoTo be fair any bigger conflict than a guerilla proxy war will do that too, whether it be from salting the fields, WWI mustard gas, unexploded ordance and/or mines, agent orange, or fallout from an actual nuclear bombardment. The scars of war persist for quite a while.
- kstenerud 7y agoThis will be a wonderful source of pre-processed nuclear material. No way any of that would ever go missing in the field. Or get hit with a shell and spread all over.
- coribuci 7y ago> This will be a wonderful source of pre-processed nuclear material. No way any of that would ever go missing in the field. Or get hit with a shell and spread all over. FYI depleted uranium projectiles are already used in the "field". The problem is that nobody talks about them and the effect on the environment.
- acidburnNSA 7y agoUnirradiated and irradiated uranium are many orders of magnitude different in their radioactive dose rates.
- jessaustin 7y agoUnmentioned in TFA: what's to become of the spent fuel. Maybe since we're fighting in someone else's home, we can just leave it there...
- e12e 7y agoKeep in mind that depleted uranium has been used for ammunition (arguably resulting in war crimes against the civilian population in Iraq). I think it's safe to say that the armies of the world has not learned much from wwi: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_Rouge https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_Rouge
- coretx 7y agoNot just Iraq. Many other theaters as well, the balkans for example. Imho more significant for this debate however, is the fact that personnel from coalition partners also have been harmed by it. Point being, it's a unacceptable hazard for everyone and everything.
- mdorazio 7y agoSpent fuel is a hell of a lot more dangerous than depleted uranium, though. DU is less radioactive than the unprocessed kind that comes out of the ground. Spent fuel, on the other hand, is extremely radioactive - enough that just spreading it with a regular bomb would be really bad.
- coretx 7y agoWhen either is atomized enough for people being able to breath it, the end results is something you likely don't want to see. Nor does it matter if it was DU or spent fuel; at that point.
- e12e 7y agoOh, quite. I just meant that the organizations that see no problem with effectively creating depleted uranium aerosol (pulverized on impact) isn't too likely to be concerned with the environmental aspects. I suppose they might be counted on to consider the weaponization of things left behind... But then again it seems they aren't really able to keep track of who they supply actual weapons to either..
- smacktoward 7y agoWhat could possibly go wrong?
- isoprophlex 7y agoThis is the military industrial complex reaching new levels of insanity. We restrict Iranian students from studying at our universities, but will start littering the battlefield with nuclear appliances. This seems a proliferation accident waiting to happen...
- coretx 7y agoYou just explained the Atlantic hatred for Iran. In case of rational adversaries, the "littering" would convert presence into "MAD" endgame. That's a swift resolution of conflict! Unlike adversaries in the past such as for example the Soviet Union, Iran is not a rational actor thus the MAD scenario will not lead to resolution/stalemate but to obliteration. Never the less, it is a humane solution at other theaters of war.
- cultofmetatron 7y agoAmerica killed one of their national heroes. This put them in the position if retaliating and risking a war or appearing weak and open to another incursion. They proceeded with a symbolic attack that left no one dead and declared that thats the end of that as long as the US does not escalate. Sounds pretty damn rational to me...
- topkai22 7y agoThe were shooting to kill but missed, and then accidentally shot down a 3rd party’s airliner killing 176 people, including 82 of their own citizens. In my opinion, that tragedy was what was responsible for the de-escalation.
- gdy 7y ago"Iran is not a rational actor" [Citation needed]
- coretx 7y agoIran being a theocracy is being disputed by none. In the context above it means they can't be trusted to behave as a rational actor in case of a MAD scenario. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction As they might just say inshallah!
- loopz 7y agoWill they withstand sabotage and nuclear bombs, such as normal nuclear plants are?
- acidburnNSA 7y agoSabotage, yes. These will be heavily armed and guarded. If a small nuclear reactor gets hit by a large nuclear weapon, we don't need to worry about the reactor.
- etrabroline 7y agoNo nuclear power plant can survive being hit by a nuclear weapon.
- loopz 7y agoCitation?
- e12e 7y agoI've not read tfa (because of the pay wall) - but don't we have third or fourth generation micro reactors already in submarines, ice breakers and hangar ships? Obviously there's going to be a lot of water available for those... But is much research really needed to repurpose one as a generator?
- andrewl 7y agoFrom the article: The idea of small reactors is as old as nuclear power itself. In July 1951, five months before a reactor in Idaho became the first in the world to produce usable electricity through fission, America began building USS Nautilus, a nuclear-powered submarine. In the 1960s and 1970s small reactors powered bases in Alaska and Greenland, a radar facility in Wyoming, a research station in Antarctica and—from a cargo ship—the Panama Canal Zone. America still uses nuclear-powered submarines and aircraft-carriers. But land-based mini-reactors proved unreliable and expensive and have fallen out of favour. I was thinking the same thing you suggested, that maybe the basically unlimited supply of water for cooling made the ocean-going reactors feasible. Other than that, I'd think a mostly stationary reactor would be simpler to deal with than a ship-based one.
- yannis 7y agoHas the US gone nuts? I know this might not go well in some circles, but is there another way to put it?
- 7952 7y agoIt's curious how the US military can commission projects that would be difficult to get off the ground if the justification was ethical.
- coretx 7y agoWhile Russia is putting dangerous fastbreeders on the North Pole using ancient icebreakers; the USA is already developing fusion reactors for use at navy carriers. We all know what it looks like when a fastbreeder goes boom. But can anyone here tell us what will happen when experimental fusion reactors get blown to pieces ?
- 08-15 7y ago> We all know what it looks like when a fastbreeder goes boom. In April 1986, Argonne National Lab tried to make their fast breeder "EBR-II" go boom twice by shutting off all cooling during full power operation. Nothing happened.
- acidburnNSA 7y agoFermi-1 in Detroit and EBR-1 in Idaho were the only fast breeder reactors that had meltdowns that come to my mind. They didn't go boom at all. Though we did get a great Gil Scott-Heron song out of the former. https://youtube.com/watch?v=cpNUqNe0U5g https://youtube.com/watch?v=cpNUqNe0U5g As a pro-nuclear person, this is my favorite anti-nuclear song. The lyrics are pretty off though. The Russian nuclear ice breakers like the one that took the Olympic torch to the north pole on the relay a few years ago use light-water reactors, not fast breeders. A water-cooled reactor in the water isn't all that dangerous.
- gdy 7y agoThat's an ignorant comment. Russia's using the the same kind of reactors (pressurized water reactors) as American supercarriers.
- jpalomaki 7y agoReason why something is needed : ”In 2016 a report by the Defence Science Board, a committee of experts, concluded that demand would surge as new power-hungry weapons, like lasers and rail-guns, come to maturity. Vehicles are also moving away from fossil fuels: America expects to have all-electric brigades within the decade” According to article we would be talking about maybe 40 ton few megawat units, which could be transported with truck and placed to remote military bases.
- berbec 7y agoAnyone thinking, even briefly, about potential spin-off designed from these small reactors will likely be unable to sleep due to nightmares of a few backpack nukes hidden in the NYC subway system.
- acidburnNSA 7y agoWhat? Small nuclear explosives like the Davy Crockett shoulder-launched bomb have been around forever. Those are pretty unrelated to microreactors.
- acidburnNSA 7y agoThe key point in here is that fully half of the fatalities on the battlefield are attacks on oil convoys supplying troops. If you can have a nuclear power source you don't need to truck oil around and your exposure goes way down. Good old mass-to-energy conversions being 2,000,000x more energetic per reaction than combustion. The army developed lots of small reactors for similar reasons back in the late 1950s/early 1960s but they just were too expensive. 10x too expensive even in wartime, according to some 1960s congressional testimony I was reading the other day. Here's the army's old ML-1 reactor (nitrogen cooled, truck mounted): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML-1 I think this time they want to try to get costs down more.
- Grue3 7y agoIt's unfortunate that it's easier to deploy the latest nuclear technologies on battlefield than in civilian use. Maybe this will change once they are (literally) battle-tested.