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There are 100+ nuclear submarines. Who know where they are? What safety precautions do they follow? Which country's jurisdiction? The right metric is deaths/TW

There are 100+ nuclear submarines. Who know where they are? What safety precautions do they follow? Which country's jurisdiction? The right metric is deaths/TWH. Nuclear is the safest by a wide margin, 1000x safer than coal. [1] [1] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

MobiusHorizons 4y ago
This is true on average, but of the available nuclear technologies, reactors used on ships and subs have the highest enriched uranium (making them inherently more dangerous just as a target of non nuclear nations). I believe they are also responsible for a large number of accidents, although when those occur, the affected personnel are usually limited to the crew.
klyrs 4y ago
They're run exclusively by militaries, which have notoriously liberal budgets and conservative operational safety. Shipping merchants reverse both tendencies. Nuclear isn't safe by its nature, nuclear is safe in the right hands and horribly catastrophic otherwise.
adrianN 4y ago
It's a big difference whether the boat the reactor is on has guns and is run by a military or whether it's a random private enterprise without guns. You don't want enriched uranium like it's used in nuclear submarines to fall into the wrong hands.
- sneak 4y ago
  The kind of fissile stuff being proposed for most forward-deployed reactor designs is not useful for weapons. The biggest danger is blowing up the reactor itself, causing it to be a type of dirty-but-conventional bomb, a non-nuclear (fission/fusion) blast.
  - hnaccount_rng 4y ago
    Which I guess is completely fine in, let's say, the hands of Somali pirates :shrug:
goodpoint 4y ago
That statistic is extremely misleading because it completely ignore systemic risk. And it does not account for environmental damage. Additionally, it is not based on nuclear reactors on rusty cargo ships run by cash-strapped companies. Those companies are notoriously hiring the cheapest workforce they can find and dodging regulations in any way they can. And you would trust them never to leak some radioactive coolant in the ocean?

MobiusHorizons 4y ago

This is true on average, but of the available nuclear technologies, reactors used on ships and subs have the highest enriched uranium (making them inherently more dangerous just as a target of non nuclear nations). I believe they are also responsible for a large number of accidents, although when those occur, the affected personnel are usually limited to the crew.

klyrs 4y ago

They're run exclusively by militaries, which have notoriously liberal budgets and conservative operational safety. Shipping merchants reverse both tendencies. Nuclear isn't safe by its nature, nuclear is safe in the right hands and horribly catastrophic otherwise.

adrianN 4y ago

It's a big difference whether the boat the reactor is on has guns and is run by a military or whether it's a random private enterprise without guns. You don't want enriched uranium like it's used in nuclear submarines to fall into the wrong hands.

sneak 4y ago
The kind of fissile stuff being proposed for most forward-deployed reactor designs is not useful for weapons. The biggest danger is blowing up the reactor itself, causing it to be a type of dirty-but-conventional bomb, a non-nuclear (fission/fusion) blast.
- hnaccount_rng 4y ago
  Which I guess is completely fine in, let's say, the hands of Somali pirates :shrug:

goodpoint 4y ago

That statistic is extremely misleading because it completely ignore systemic risk. And it does not account for environmental damage. Additionally, it is not based on nuclear reactors on rusty cargo ships run by cash-strapped companies. Those companies are notoriously hiring the cheapest workforce they can find and dodging regulations in any way they can. And you would trust them never to leak some radioactive coolant in the ocean?