5 ms·

A better idea - have the navy build them and then sell the completed, operational plant (say, after a year of successful operation) to the highest bidder in an

• pow_pp_-1_v 5y ago
  Hmm. That's an interesting idea. Seems like they are experts in building relatively small nuclear plants and maintaining them in harsh conditions for years. Wonder if it's feasible though. Maybe they are too slow to build. Maybe they are too expensive.
• evgeniysharapov 5y ago
  Why Navy ? Does it have to be in the sea ? If on land then Westinghouse or Duke could build it just as well if not better.
  • beastman82 5y ago
    Because they're already doing it regularly
    • natch 5y ago
      They don’t contract it out to Westinghouse or other similar companies?
      • protomyth 5y ago
        Its actually really complicated on the supplier end. There is a lot of joint stuff with contractors and the DOE.
        • natch 5y ago
          Yeah I'm not sure why they think the Navy is doing it… I think the Navy is "just" the customer. Of course there's a lot involved in being the customer too.
          • protomyth 5y ago
            I don't think the Navy is "just" the customer in a normal DOD contracting sense. It looks like more joint research and DOE involvement. Plus, mix it multiple contractors and locations and you have a very complicated chain.
            • natch 5y ago
              Yep that's why I put "just" in quotes above.
  • agloeregrets 5y ago
    I think the premise is that the US Navy is quite good at building nuclear power plants as multiple reactors power each and every submarine and Aircraft carrier we have. By the numbers the Navy has more nuclear powered ships than the US has nuclear power plants. There's also precedent for smaller scale plants that are lower maintenance and less dangerous.
    • giantg2 5y ago
      I wouldn't necessarily say they are less dangerous. The designs can be very different and might even require more maintenance and safely procedures than the land based ones. Also, the Navy isn't the the one actually building it. The contracting companies do that. Many of the people who run the systems in the Navy leave and become contractors/consultants for the higher pay.
    • protomyth 5y ago
      the US Navy is quite good at building nuclear power plants They are also really good at the operational aspects.
  • newsclues 5y ago
    Because of this guy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover
• javajosh 5y ago
  It's a neat idea; based on the fact that the Navy has a lot of operational experience with nuclear power (especially small heat sources)? How well does that experience translate to a large-scale reactor? And is the Navy particularly good at building things? I would imagine that the (private) shipbuilder has at least as much knowledge around the tech.
  • lvspiff 5y ago
    I think its more fund the navy under the guise of a defense spending bill that ends up going for an RFP to energy companies to build the reactors "for the navy"
  • loeg 5y ago
    The Navy acquires many reactors annually and operates a ton of small to medium reactors. I think they mostly buy the reactors from contractors, but either way, they have a ton of operational experience. Maybe funding it via the navy is politically palatable.
• natch 5y ago
  “for a decade” There’s the problem, this kind of short term thinking that is just long enough to let someone else deal with it. Also, guarantees on paper don’t mean as much as physical reality. Ask any native American or Fukashima resident about how much guarantees are worth.
  • EricE 5y ago
    Fukasima was a dumb design from the start, and plenty of people pointed it out before it was built. Holding it up as the poster child for why all talk about nuclear power generation should not even be discussed is beyond disingenuous.
    • natch 5y ago
      What you said shows exactly why the point was valid. This is what happens with nuclear power projects: They can take a dumb design, as you said, and people point out the problems beforehand, as you said, then it is built, as you said, regardless. It's important that it was still built even though people said, beforehand, that it was, as you say, dumb. This is a key point really. These things are still built regardless of the quality of the design. And then later, reality and physics have their say. And all the guarantees and promises are broken, and the costs are way higher than were accounted for. Of course some designs are better, and that is fantastic. I'm all for safety and predictability. I have other problems with nuclear, having nothing to do with radiation or safety, but I agree that there are much safer designs. Even though there are better and worse designs, and Fukashima may be a bad design with a bad placement, this lack of full accounting for potential costs is a recurring pattern with these huge boondoggle projects.
      • EricE 5y ago
        So because we did some dumb things in the past we can never do new things in the future? Great argument.
• Invictus0 5y ago
  Is it legal for the military to manufacture and sell products to the public?
  • giantg2 5y ago
    I think the manufacturing is required to be contracted out. The military can and does sell many things if they no longer have need for them. You can find some of that stuff in surplus shops, but they even sell old aircraft and other vehicles.
• mywittyname 5y ago
  At that point, they should create a government-owed corporation to hand off operation to. End-of-life for plants is a huge issue. The owners of plants are obligated to collect fees for cleanup, decommissioning, and remediation of power plant sites. But what has happened (unsurprisingly) is that operators will sell these plants to someone else, who signs a contract, accepting all future legal liability for any issues resulting from operations or cleanup, then those cleanup fees (which total in the hundreds of millions) get put into an escrow account. Of course, these new owners are limited liability corporations who find that it's cheaper to provide campaign donations to high-level state officials who then pressure state agencies to allow half-assed measures to be used for containment of toxic chemicals. This is an ongoing issue in right now because so many coal plants have been driven out of business. If these people won't spend an extra million bucks to line coal ash containment ponds appropriately, I have no faith they will do so with significantly more expensive nuclear waste.
  • danans 5y ago
    > At that point, they should create a government-owed corporation to hand off operation to. The difference is that rightly or wrongly, the public doesn't see the military spending as wasteful government spending in the way they see spending on the Postal Service or for some, health programs like Medicaid. There's an argument that a way to sell renewables to the climate change denying sections of the population is to have the military involved in its implementation. If you think about it, the military has functions of 1) protecting the US against existential threats and 2) providing a path toward a dignified livelihood for a lot of the population. Climate change also poses existential threats, and there is an opportunity to create a path to a dignified livelihood for many people by tackling it with renewables.
    • Synaesthesia 5y ago
      The military isn't going to want anything to do with renewables. They run on oil, almost exclusively. The military's exalted position in society is also largely artificial. Yes it serves to defend the country but it could be far smaller and still achieve that. No this should be a civilian effort, although it could be a state one.
• jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
  US Naval reactors are not a substitute for commercial power plants. They use highly enriched fuel, and are optimized for small volume and low maintenance costs, not net generation efficiency. They're at least one if not two orders of magnitude smaller than what's economic in power plants, and they are not in any way built with an efficient "model T" style production line. US Naval reactors are not some silver bullet no one has thought of. They're a different tool, and it's not clear the Navy would be particularly more effective in creating a future of factory built small modular reactors vs any other company that's attempted it so far.
  • Klinky 5y ago
    Exactly, people who bring this up don't understand the different one-off reactor designs used in maybe a handful of vessels, or that the Navy reactors are meant to go without refueling for up to 25 years. They are also made by third-party contractors, not hand-built by the Navy itself. The complexity, capital costs and liability risks make commercial "small nuclear" unfeasible. It's "go big or go home".
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
      Yeah, I learned this harsh lesson doing deeper research in recent years. I was really hopeful for NuScale and similar SMR style approaches, but now I understand more clearly why that's so unlikely to work out. I'd love it if someone shows up tomorrow with some clever idea that changes the capital costs and long timelines, but I don't think we should be allocating significant capital towards that as hope alone.
  • asdff 5y ago
    Do they ever use a parked carrier to power something? It seems like it would be useful to run at least a portion of a base using a carrier anchored in the harbor, or as response to downed power infrastructure after a natural disaster. Quick googling indicates an aircraft carrier allegedly could be able to power 12,000 homes.
• opwieurposiu 5y ago
  I was talking to an ex-navy reactor man at a bar once. He said one of the most important things for naval reactors is to make sure you were making the "right kind of bubbles." I never found out if this was some kind of navy joke or if he was talking about Nucleate boiling.
• thinkcontext 5y ago
  Naval reactors are currently built by GE and Bechtel. They are designed at Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory, a national lab of DOE, operated by Fluor. Fluor is a parent company of NuScale which just got a license from the NRC to be able to build a civilian small modular reactor (SMR). Their first project is scheduled to come online at the end of the decade.