3 ms·

There's also the incredible cheap and easy to mass produce submarine and shipboard reactor designs. Going smaller and build lots more brings costs down tremend

There's also the incredible cheap and easy to mass produce submarine and shipboard reactor designs. Going smaller and build lots more brings costs down tremendously. Combined with breeder reactors plus reprocessing to deal with waste. You'd have to miltarize all staff to deal with profilieration risks and then license out delivery to private corps (utility companies).

PaulHoule 1y ago
It's kinda the opposite. Submarine reactors burn like a cigarette which is great from the viewpoint of rapidly changing power output and dealing with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine_pit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine_pit but terribly uneconomical. Optimizing economics is about optimizing power output from a given volume of pressure vessel. The power of a nuclear reactor is limited by the ability to get heat out of the fuel rods and into the coolant so good economics requires producing energy evenly throughout the whole core, which commercial reactors do and submarine reactors do not. Submarine reactors are worth it, however, because being able to go around the world over and over again without surfacing is of great military value. It's insane how fast a nuclear aircraft carrier can travel, there's enough uncertainty over where it will be in 15 minutes that an attack with a reasonably sized nuclear warhead could fail to kill it so, so china developed maneuverable hypersonic weapons that could punch a hole in the deck with a conventional weapon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DF-21#DF-21D_(CSS-5_Mod-4)_Anti-ship_ballistic_missile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DF-21#DF-21D_(CSS-5_Mod-4)_Ant...
- FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
  If nuclear is going to work, it cannot be commercial. The economics won't work out. It has to be federally owned and operated (preferably by military staff so they are under UCMJ) and run as a public good and not for profit.

PaulHoule 1y ago

It's kinda the opposite. Submarine reactors burn like a cigarette which is great from the viewpoint of rapidly changing power output and dealing with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine_pit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine_pit but terribly uneconomical. Optimizing economics is about optimizing power output from a given volume of pressure vessel. The power of a nuclear reactor is limited by the ability to get heat out of the fuel rods and into the coolant so good economics requires producing energy evenly throughout the whole core, which commercial reactors do and submarine reactors do not. Submarine reactors are worth it, however, because being able to go around the world over and over again without surfacing is of great military value. It's insane how fast a nuclear aircraft carrier can travel, there's enough uncertainty over where it will be in 15 minutes that an attack with a reasonably sized nuclear warhead could fail to kill it so, so china developed maneuverable hypersonic weapons that could punch a hole in the deck with a conventional weapon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DF-21#DF-21D_(CSS-5_Mod-4)_Anti-ship_ballistic_missile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DF-21#DF-21D_(CSS-5_Mod-4)_Ant...

FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
If nuclear is going to work, it cannot be commercial. The economics won't work out. It has to be federally owned and operated (preferably by military staff so they are under UCMJ) and run as a public good and not for profit.