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It looks like the Department of Defense is considering such reactors again [1], and the author of this article is very much against it. So much so that he publi

It looks like the Department of Defense is considering such reactors again [1], and the author of this article is very much against it. So much so that he published this exact same article at least 3 times before [2], [3], [4]. [1] https://www.defensenews.com/smr/energy-and-environment/2021/03/23/portable-nuclear-reactor-project-moves-forward-at-pentagon/ https://www.defensenews.com/smr/energy-and-environment/2021/... [2] https://theconversation.com/the-us-army-tried-portable-nuclear-power-at-remote-bases-60-years-ago-it-didnt-go-well-164138 https://theconversation.com/the-us-army-tried-portable-nucle... [3] https://www.civilbeat.org/2021/07/project-pele-the-military-is-exploring-portable-nuclear-reactors/ https://www.civilbeat.org/2021/07/project-pele-the-military-... [4] https://www.businessinsider.com/us-military-is-trying-to-build-portable-nuclear-reactors-again-2021-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/us-military-is-trying-to-bui...

mjevans 5y ago
It really does read like a scare mongering fear article. Including mention of problems but no concrete followup with current details, or at the very least a mention of no resolution to the issue as of a specific time of fact-finding.
- graderjs 5y ago
  Anti-nuclear fear-mongering piece, you say? Why that has the mark of the oilman, has it not?
  - MomoXenosaga 5y ago
    Portable nuclear reactors sounds like a new way for government contractors to make a few billion. I suppose now that the war on terror is winding down they're all scrambling for new revenue.
    - tiahura 5y ago
      Surely the taliban could make use of a few of these.
  - kortilla 5y ago
    Nuclear has two enemies: the fossil fuels crowd, and the solar/wind crowd. The latter doesn’t like nuclear because the plants are still big corporate driven endeavors so they don’t “democratize energy”. The socialist faction of the Democratic Party isn’t particularly interested in solutions to climate change that don’t require massive government expansion into the energy market.
    - adolph 5y ago
      [Baptists] take the moral high ground, while the bootleggers persuade the politicians quietly, behind closed doors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootleggers_and_Baptists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootleggers_and_Baptists
    - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
      I would have thought pro-nuclear and massive government expansion go together, but you seem to be arguing the opposite. I've noticed this discrepancy before with libertarians pointing to the French nuclear program as a big success. What kind of massive expansion of government into energy markets are you thinking of that helps renewables but not nuclear?
      - graderjs 5y ago
        I think their argument is more that the economics are heavily centralized in nuclear so it resists government intervention.
    - long_time_gone 5y ago
      What about taxpayers who are sick of bailing them out? In Illinois, we have multiple nuclear plants that deliver a large % of our energy. Taxpayers have also had to bail out the nuclear companies because they cannot manage their plants. There is currently another bailout bill being discussed. [1] Are “massive corporate bailouts” preferred to “massive government expansion”? Is it possible that, in practice, nuclear isn’t the silver bullet people on HN claim? [1] https://news.wttw.com/2021/08/17/bye-bye-byron-exelon-prepares-shutter-illinois-nuclear-plants https://news.wttw.com/2021/08/17/bye-bye-byron-exelon-prepar...
Retric 5y ago
It’s common for identical articles to be on different websites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_syndication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_syndication Which traces it’s roots back through TV, radio, and newspapers. Historically thousands of newspapers used to publish the same comics.
- kupopuffs 5y ago
  dummies, should've invented the Internet and Search Engines
andyxor 5y ago
The author is a geologist at University of Vermont with no apparent connection to energy space except for his environmental activism. on a separate note, NASA had a recent breakthrough after decades of "paper reactors", building and testing the safest and smallest reactor so far based on a new solid core design https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/kilopower/ https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/kilopower/
- nitrogen 5y ago
  environmental activism. My physics teacher in high school was a retired naval nuclear engineer/tech/something. He blamed Jane Fonda (the actress) for a huge portion of the anti-nuclear activism that basically entrenched the power of oil companies and cartels. It's funny/sad how badly the save-the-forest and anti-nuke activism of the 1970s is coming back to bite us so hard now, with wildfires and global warming. Makes me wonder which activist movements today will turn out to have been net negative in another 40-50 years.
  - Retric 5y ago
    It’s cold hard economic issues that held back nuclear power rather than any environmental concerns. The US is actually close to the ideal nuclear mix from a cost basis. At best operating at full capacity with moderate subsides it’s roughly competitive with coal operating 24/7, but the grid has wildly fluctuating demand and nuclear’s price per kWh is roughly 3x as expensive at 30% power output as at 100%. France was able to export a lot of nuclear power while importing significant electricity to meet demand and they still had capacity factors fall below 70%. The most surprising issue with nuclear is actually fuel costs. Yes, it’s cheap to mine and enrichment isn’t that expensive, but refueling ends up being quite expensive in part because it’s slow. 3+ weeks of downtime every 1.5-2 years is effectively a 1.5+% fuel cost even if everything else was free. Dropping that to 1 week on it’s own wouldn’t really change the economics much but there are many such issues.
    - nitrogen 5y ago
      Economic issues were caused in part by political opposition. An extreme degree of reviews and legal objections can't help the economics. And research into new designs that might improve on economics and safety isn't going to be as profitable or as common if there is always going to be a virtually insurmountable hurdle of objections on spurious environmental grounds, so the economic pressure that has caused coal plants to become more efficient can't be applied. Plus, that coal vs nuclear economic calculation doesn't account for the costs of warming, nor for the intended electrification that abundant nuclear power was supposed to enable. It all has its roots in disproportionate opposition and silly old movies that portrayed nuclear plants as potentially exploding with ten megaton blasts.
hanniabu 5y ago
Considering the military is the worst pollution offender, I'm wary of how they'd handle nuclear waste.
- slownews45 5y ago
  Don't they operate some of the largest fleet of nuclear powered vessels currently operating? Maybe share some of the issues they've had with those (obviously using very old tech). Sub / Aircraft carriers etc. The mission endurance on a carrier is amazing on the power plant side. 260,000 shaft horsepower for 20 years between refueling. I'd be curious how much oil would need to be burned instead of this (bunker fuels tend to be HIGHLY polluting).
  - AndrewKemendo 5y ago
    The US Nuclear Navy Force has logged over 5,400 reactor years of accident-free operations since 1955
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - cratermoon 5y ago
      How many reactor-years of accident-plagued operations have they had? USS Thresher and USS Scorpion both sank with all hands lost.
      - Teknoman117 5y ago
        Both instances are still zero accidents from a nuclear perspective. Both sites have been visited every few years since they were located to check on the reactors. The design on both is working as intended, and no radioactive material has been detected to be leaking from either wreck. US naval nuclear reactors are (supposedly) designed such that they shouldn't lose containment if the vessel either sinks from an accident or is destroyed by enemy activity.
cm2187 5y ago
I am not sure we can draw definitive conclusions from a bad experience in the 60s anyway, in the very early days of nuclear energy. Think of what aviation looked like 20 years after the flight of the Wright brothers. You would never board a plane today by that standard.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  If you're not above walking right up to the line that separates misleading from lying the state of bleeding edge tech back in said tech's early days is a perfectly fine source to draw definitive conclusions from. You see this kind of dishonest behavior across a wide array of subjects.
  - whythre 5y ago
    You see plenty of misleading/false claims about bleeding edge tech now, no need to look back to the pioneering days.
crmd 5y ago
Agree this is a persuasion piece not straight journalism, but in the author’s defense, the article was originally published under a CC license, and he could have no idea it was posted on this website.
- uncoder0 5y ago
  There really isn't such a thing as straight journalism anymore. Most articles I've read are 'persuasion' pieces. It is rather sad.
  - gnull 5y ago
    Has it ever been different?
    - the-dude 5y ago
      I think so. At least here in NL, the journalist class decided somewhere in 70s or early 80s, they had an obligation to do 'good' instead of only doing inpartial reporting. Of course, their defintion of 'good' might differ from mine or yours.
      - adolph 5y ago
        The muckrakers were reform-minded journalists in the Progressive Era in the United States (1890s–1920s) who exposed established institutions and leaders as corrupt. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muckraker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muckraker
        the-dude 5y ago
        What is the saying, and from whom? To paraphrase, only things people don't want you to write is journalism, the rest is propaganda.
tmp_anon_22 5y ago
Hey the US Military has a great reputation safely discarding its waste! (talking about the burnpits)

mjevans 5y ago

It really does read like a scare mongering fear article. Including mention of problems but no concrete followup with current details, or at the very least a mention of no resolution to the issue as of a specific time of fact-finding.

graderjs 5y ago
Anti-nuclear fear-mongering piece, you say? Why that has the mark of the oilman, has it not?
- MomoXenosaga 5y ago
  Portable nuclear reactors sounds like a new way for government contractors to make a few billion. I suppose now that the war on terror is winding down they're all scrambling for new revenue.
  - tiahura 5y ago
    Surely the taliban could make use of a few of these.
- kortilla 5y ago
  Nuclear has two enemies: the fossil fuels crowd, and the solar/wind crowd. The latter doesn’t like nuclear because the plants are still big corporate driven endeavors so they don’t “democratize energy”. The socialist faction of the Democratic Party isn’t particularly interested in solutions to climate change that don’t require massive government expansion into the energy market.
  - adolph 5y ago
    [Baptists] take the moral high ground, while the bootleggers persuade the politicians quietly, behind closed doors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootleggers_and_Baptists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootleggers_and_Baptists
  - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
    I would have thought pro-nuclear and massive government expansion go together, but you seem to be arguing the opposite. I've noticed this discrepancy before with libertarians pointing to the French nuclear program as a big success. What kind of massive expansion of government into energy markets are you thinking of that helps renewables but not nuclear?
    - graderjs 5y ago
      I think their argument is more that the economics are heavily centralized in nuclear so it resists government intervention.
  - long_time_gone 5y ago
    What about taxpayers who are sick of bailing them out? In Illinois, we have multiple nuclear plants that deliver a large % of our energy. Taxpayers have also had to bail out the nuclear companies because they cannot manage their plants. There is currently another bailout bill being discussed. [1] Are “massive corporate bailouts” preferred to “massive government expansion”? Is it possible that, in practice, nuclear isn’t the silver bullet people on HN claim? [1] https://news.wttw.com/2021/08/17/bye-bye-byron-exelon-prepares-shutter-illinois-nuclear-plants https://news.wttw.com/2021/08/17/bye-bye-byron-exelon-prepar...

Retric 5y ago

It’s common for identical articles to be on different websites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_syndication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_syndication Which traces it’s roots back through TV, radio, and newspapers. Historically thousands of newspapers used to publish the same comics.

kupopuffs 5y ago
dummies, should've invented the Internet and Search Engines

andyxor 5y ago

The author is a geologist at University of Vermont with no apparent connection to energy space except for his environmental activism. on a separate note, NASA had a recent breakthrough after decades of "paper reactors", building and testing the safest and smallest reactor so far based on a new solid core design https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/kilopower/ https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/kilopower/

nitrogen 5y ago
environmental activism. My physics teacher in high school was a retired naval nuclear engineer/tech/something. He blamed Jane Fonda (the actress) for a huge portion of the anti-nuclear activism that basically entrenched the power of oil companies and cartels. It's funny/sad how badly the save-the-forest and anti-nuke activism of the 1970s is coming back to bite us so hard now, with wildfires and global warming. Makes me wonder which activist movements today will turn out to have been net negative in another 40-50 years.
- Retric 5y ago
  It’s cold hard economic issues that held back nuclear power rather than any environmental concerns. The US is actually close to the ideal nuclear mix from a cost basis. At best operating at full capacity with moderate subsides it’s roughly competitive with coal operating 24/7, but the grid has wildly fluctuating demand and nuclear’s price per kWh is roughly 3x as expensive at 30% power output as at 100%. France was able to export a lot of nuclear power while importing significant electricity to meet demand and they still had capacity factors fall below 70%. The most surprising issue with nuclear is actually fuel costs. Yes, it’s cheap to mine and enrichment isn’t that expensive, but refueling ends up being quite expensive in part because it’s slow. 3+ weeks of downtime every 1.5-2 years is effectively a 1.5+% fuel cost even if everything else was free. Dropping that to 1 week on it’s own wouldn’t really change the economics much but there are many such issues.
  - nitrogen 5y ago
    Economic issues were caused in part by political opposition. An extreme degree of reviews and legal objections can't help the economics. And research into new designs that might improve on economics and safety isn't going to be as profitable or as common if there is always going to be a virtually insurmountable hurdle of objections on spurious environmental grounds, so the economic pressure that has caused coal plants to become more efficient can't be applied. Plus, that coal vs nuclear economic calculation doesn't account for the costs of warming, nor for the intended electrification that abundant nuclear power was supposed to enable. It all has its roots in disproportionate opposition and silly old movies that portrayed nuclear plants as potentially exploding with ten megaton blasts.

hanniabu 5y ago

Considering the military is the worst pollution offender, I'm wary of how they'd handle nuclear waste.

slownews45 5y ago
Don't they operate some of the largest fleet of nuclear powered vessels currently operating? Maybe share some of the issues they've had with those (obviously using very old tech). Sub / Aircraft carriers etc. The mission endurance on a carrier is amazing on the power plant side. 260,000 shaft horsepower for 20 years between refueling. I'd be curious how much oil would need to be burned instead of this (bunker fuels tend to be HIGHLY polluting).
- AndrewKemendo 5y ago
  The US Nuclear Navy Force has logged over 5,400 reactor years of accident-free operations since 1955
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - cratermoon 5y ago
    How many reactor-years of accident-plagued operations have they had? USS Thresher and USS Scorpion both sank with all hands lost.
    - Teknoman117 5y ago
      Both instances are still zero accidents from a nuclear perspective. Both sites have been visited every few years since they were located to check on the reactors. The design on both is working as intended, and no radioactive material has been detected to be leaking from either wreck. US naval nuclear reactors are (supposedly) designed such that they shouldn't lose containment if the vessel either sinks from an accident or is destroyed by enemy activity.

cm2187 5y ago

I am not sure we can draw definitive conclusions from a bad experience in the 60s anyway, in the very early days of nuclear energy. Think of what aviation looked like 20 years after the flight of the Wright brothers. You would never board a plane today by that standard.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
If you're not above walking right up to the line that separates misleading from lying the state of bleeding edge tech back in said tech's early days is a perfectly fine source to draw definitive conclusions from. You see this kind of dishonest behavior across a wide array of subjects.
- whythre 5y ago
  You see plenty of misleading/false claims about bleeding edge tech now, no need to look back to the pioneering days.

crmd 5y ago

Agree this is a persuasion piece not straight journalism, but in the author’s defense, the article was originally published under a CC license, and he could have no idea it was posted on this website.

uncoder0 5y ago
There really isn't such a thing as straight journalism anymore. Most articles I've read are 'persuasion' pieces. It is rather sad.
- gnull 5y ago
  Has it ever been different?
  - the-dude 5y ago
    I think so. At least here in NL, the journalist class decided somewhere in 70s or early 80s, they had an obligation to do 'good' instead of only doing inpartial reporting. Of course, their defintion of 'good' might differ from mine or yours.
    - adolph 5y ago
      The muckrakers were reform-minded journalists in the Progressive Era in the United States (1890s–1920s) who exposed established institutions and leaders as corrupt. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muckraker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muckraker
      - the-dude 5y ago
        What is the saying, and from whom? To paraphrase, only things people don't want you to write is journalism, the rest is propaganda.

tmp_anon_22 5y ago

Hey the US Military has a great reputation safely discarding its waste! (talking about the burnpits)