Russian ALFA Class interceptor submarine

Ah ok. They were showing people putting on what looked like moon suits and going into a chamber. I imagine that's for smaller scale welds. But I imagine pumping argon under pressure to displace oxygen in some areas would work as well. Then ventilate properly as it would settle and well ... suffocate people.

Is that so? I recall the reading a piece on the SR-71 and it mentioned that the titanium was, ironically, sourced from the Soviet Union who supposedly were behind in titanium tech. Further, I remember a following tidbit about one of their jets still being made of steel because of their supposed lagging metallurgical skills. Have they since leapfrogged the US?

They're more innovative. Move fast and break things, right?

Science fiction for working submarines.

I meant to refer to the commercial fleet of commercial nuclear power plants making electricity on land, almost all of which have designs directly descended from naval designs. I guess "fleet" isn't a great word to use in the context of naval vessels. Whoops!

Not in the US Navy. Part of the reason the US Navy standardized on PWR is that while it's not the most efficient it is something you can restart at depth if necessary. The lesson of how much that matters was driven home by the loss of the USS Thresher.

MSRs use either Th/U-FLiBe or U/Pu-NaCl and both of those would easily dissolve in water. But honestly radioactive inventory of these cores is small enough that one or two breached systems, while catastrophic, wouldn't have significant biological consequences as it disperses in the vast oceans. Certainly this wouldn't be acceptable for civilian operations but I wouldn't put it past an ambitious military. Problem with Molten Salt in a submarine is size. The fuel salt is very low density compared to metallic nuclear fuels, by about an order of magnitude. That would require more volume to be critical. Small thermal/epithermal solid fueled reactor cooled with water, liquid metal, or even solid fuel/salt cooled reactors (like the FHR) are appropriate for submarines but probably not full-on liquid-fueled MSRs.

The Uranium tetrafluoride itself is basically insoluble in water. But the fuel isn't really the issue, Uranium is a toxic heavy metal but in terms of irradiating the environment outside of a reactor it's not very radioactive at all. People always clamour over Uranium having a half life of billions of years but what that means is that Uranium basically doesn't decay on its own. It's fissile, so hit it with a neutron and you'll induce it to split, but once it leaves a reactor and is subcritical you don't have to worry about the radiation from Uranium.

What you do need to worry about is the radiation from the products of fission as those are the nasty components of nuclear waste. Not only do you have the direct products which have a tiny half life compared to Uranium, those direct products have a decay chain of their own and in most reactor designs out there those products stay in the reactor so not only do you have the decay to contend with, you also have additional fission since it's still being bombarded by neutrons. This is what leads to the toxic soup of radioactive waste, you get tons of isotopes of elements so while the fuel itself wouldn't be too terribly awful for the environment the partially burned fuel is dramatically more radioactive.

The fuel salt itself though if it's anything similar to what was used in the MSRE or FLiBe's new Thorium breeder reactor would actually be insoluble in water and would freeze, hopefully trapping the waste in the frozen salt just like vitrification of nuclear waste. I am not a chemist, and any knowledge I have on the subject is just the result of a hobbyist interest in the subject, but I would think that in the event of a MSR being sunk and breached that the frozen fuel salt would keep most all of the radioactive products dissolved in it safely contained.

To what end?

The USN has, to a material degree, perfected the compact PWR.

Their experience in fuel design, materials, cooling, support systems, control systems, and processes pose an enormous barrier to new systems other than those that could truly radically simplify the reactor system and yield a huge gain in reduced manpower and increased reliability.

I think the best marginal gains are coming and will come from developments in tactical and ISR systems.

'Zolotaya' -> made of gold or golden, 'Rybka' -> fish.

The Polish currency is named 'złoty', which also has its roots in gold.

On the flip side between where you can get out in a survival suit, where rescue submarines can get to, and places where the people tank will go crunch before you hit the bottom, pretty much everything is covered for USN submarines; it's a very safety conscious community.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_Escape_Immersion_Equ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_Submarine_Rescue_System

I happen to know how it's set up :)

It's a pelican static site but in git; then there is a tiny Python webserver that 'publishes' the bare git repo, not unlike a custom github pages.

And it's running on an absolute-cheapest VPS with no RAM or CPU to speak of.

The good thing about the host though is they limit bandwidth rather than total bytes, so sure it slows down - it's really being hammered right now! - but it won't die with a nasty message when it hits some total-bytes-per-month limit.

I think the opponent Russian sub was an Alfa, though. That's the one that's sunk at the end of the movie.

"Max depth" is kind of a nebulous concept though. There's the "test depth" which is as deep as they're willing to test the submarine. There's the maximum operational depth, which is some lesser depth that keeps a safety margin over the test depth. Then there's the "crush depth", which is the depth at which the submarine will actually fail, and is hopefully substantially deeper than the test depth.