Nuclear power plants are coming to the battlefield | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear power plants are coming to the battlefield

economist.com

32 pointslxm48 comments

The key point in here is that fully half of the fatalities on the battlefield are attacks on oil convoys supplying troops. If you can have a nuclear power source you don't need to truck oil around and your exposure goes way down. Good old mass-to-energy conversions being 2,000,000x more energetic per reaction than combustion.

The army developed lots of small reactors for similar reasons back in the late 1950s/early 1960s but they just were too expensive. 10x too expensive even in wartime, according to some 1960s congressional testimony I was reading the other day.

Here's the army's old ML-1 reactor (nitrogen cooled, truck mounted): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML-1

I think this time they want to try to get costs down more.

Reason why something is needed : ”In 2016 a report by the Defence Science Board, a committee of experts, concluded that demand would surge as new power-hungry weapons, like lasers and rail-guns, come to maturity. Vehicles are also moving away from fossil fuels: America expects to have all-electric brigades within the decade”

According to article we would be talking about maybe 40 ton few megawat units, which could be transported with truck and placed to remote military bases.

This will be a wonderful source of pre-processed nuclear material. No way any of that would ever go missing in the field. Or get hit with a shell and spread all over.

> This will be a wonderful source of pre-processed nuclear material. No way any of that would ever go missing in the field. Or get hit with a shell and spread all over.

FYI depleted uranium projectiles are already used in the "field". The problem is that nobody talks about them and the effect on the environment.

Unirradiated and irradiated uranium are many orders of magnitude different in their radioactive dose rates.

Unmentioned in TFA: what's to become of the spent fuel. Maybe since we're fighting in someone else's home, we can just leave it there...

Keep in mind that depleted uranium has been used for ammunition (arguably resulting in war crimes against the civilian population in Iraq).

I think it's safe to say that the armies of the world has not learned much from wwi: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_Rouge

Not just Iraq. Many other theaters as well, the balkans for example. Imho more significant for this debate however, is the fact that personnel from coalition partners also have been harmed by it. Point being, it's a unacceptable hazard for everyone and everything.

Spent fuel is a hell of a lot more dangerous than depleted uranium, though. DU is less radioactive than the unprocessed kind that comes out of the ground. Spent fuel, on the other hand, is extremely radioactive - enough that just spreading it with a regular bomb would be really bad.

When either is atomized enough for people being able to breath it, the end results is something you likely don't want to see. Nor does it matter if it was DU or spent fuel; at that point.

Oh, quite. I just meant that the organizations that see no problem with effectively creating depleted uranium aerosol (pulverized on impact) isn't too likely to be concerned with the environmental aspects.

I suppose they might be counted on to consider the weaponization of things left behind... But then again it seems they aren't really able to keep track of who they supply actual weapons to either..

DU is less radioactive but is quite active as a chemical element and causes a lot of problems.

It will stay in the reactor for around 10 years and then be replaced in a facility just like we do with submarines. Don't worry, we won't leave plutonium-laden spent fuel around in warzones.

What could possibly go wrong?

This is the last thing humankind needs: nuclear powered battlefields.

It's curious how the US military can commission projects that would be difficult to get off the ground if the justification was ethical.

I've not read tfa (because of the pay wall) - but don't we have third or fourth generation micro reactors already in submarines, ice breakers and hangar ships? Obviously there's going to be a lot of water available for those... But is much research really needed to repurpose one as a generator?

From the article:

The idea of small reactors is as old as nuclear power itself. In July 1951, five months before a reactor in Idaho became the first in the world to produce usable electricity through fission, America began building USS Nautilus, a nuclear-powered submarine. In the 1960s and 1970s small reactors powered bases in Alaska and Greenland, a radar facility in Wyoming, a research station in Antarctica and—from a cargo ship—the Panama Canal Zone. America still uses nuclear-powered submarines and aircraft-carriers. But land-based mini-reactors proved unreliable and expensive and have fallen out of favour.

I was thinking the same thing you suggested, that maybe the basically unlimited supply of water for cooling made the ocean-going reactors feasible. Other than that, I'd think a mostly stationary reactor would be simpler to deal with than a ship-based one.

While Russia is putting dangerous fastbreeders on the North Pole using ancient icebreakers; the USA is already developing fusion reactors for use at navy carriers.

We all know what it looks like when a fastbreeder goes boom. But can anyone here tell us what will happen when experimental fusion reactors get blown to pieces ?

Fermi-1 in Detroit and EBR-1 in Idaho were the only fast breeder reactors that had meltdowns that come to my mind. They didn't go boom at all. Though we did get a great Gil Scott-Heron song out of the former.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=cpNUqNe0U5g

As a pro-nuclear person, this is my favorite anti-nuclear song. The lyrics are pretty off though.

The Russian nuclear ice breakers like the one that took the Olympic torch to the north pole on the relay a few years ago use light-water reactors, not fast breeders.

A water-cooled reactor in the water isn't all that dangerous.

That's an ignorant comment.

Russia's using the the same kind of reactors (pressurized water reactors) as American supercarriers.

Thank you for correcting me! Can you also answer my other question? What should I imagine in case a experimental fusion reactor gets blown up ?

I don't know, but I've always assumed that nothing too bad, like radioactive contamination, would happen.

Assumptions are perhaps even more dangerous than the topic at hand.

> We all know what it looks like when a fastbreeder goes boom.

In April 1986, Argonne National Lab tried to make their fast breeder "EBR-II" go boom twice by shutting off all cooling during full power operation. Nothing happened.

This is the military industrial complex reaching new levels of insanity.

We restrict Iranian students from studying at our universities, but will start littering the battlefield with nuclear appliances. This seems a proliferation accident waiting to happen...

You just explained the Atlantic hatred for Iran. In case of rational adversaries, the "littering" would convert presence into "MAD" endgame. That's a swift resolution of conflict! Unlike adversaries in the past such as for example the Soviet Union, Iran is not a rational actor thus the MAD scenario will not lead to resolution/stalemate but to obliteration. Never the less, it is a humane solution at other theaters of war.

"Iran is not a rational actor"

[Citation needed]

Iran being a theocracy is being disputed by none. In the context above it means they can't be trusted to behave as a rational actor in case of a MAD scenario. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction As they might just say inshallah!

I have serious doubts that religious leaders actually believe in their god or gods.

And the US presidents, to that matter, are all claim to be religious.

Not to mention Nixon's 'madman theory'.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman_theory

From my experience working with persian dissidents I can tell you that this is true for some but certainly not for all. This volatility is unworkable geopolitically as the stakes are too high. Furthermore, although being a pacifist i'd rather see Iran eradicated instead of having to take a gamble with their fait. So much for the madman theory. Let's hope diplomacy one day prevails.

"although being a pacifist i'd rather see Iran eradicated"

This makes you a monster.

To choose survival instead of death merely makes me human. And yes, humans are monsters. It's also why I concluded with hope for diplomacy to prevail instead. You are also right about the lies. All actors lie, a lot.

Nobody threatens you and yet you are advocating genocide.

"working with persian dissidents"

'Dissidents' lie. See Curveball dossier.

In a February 2011 interview with The Guardian he "admitted for the first time that he lied about his story, then watched in shock as it was used to justify the war."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curveball_(informant)

And I highly doubt that any of the Iranian 'dissidents' you've worked with have any idea of what happens in the minds of Iranian leadership.

America killed one of their national heroes. This put them in the position if retaliating and risking a war or appearing weak and open to another incursion.

They proceeded with a symbolic attack that left no one dead and declared that thats the end of that as long as the US does not escalate.

Sounds pretty damn rational to me...

The were shooting to kill but missed, and then accidentally shot down a 3rd party’s airliner killing 176 people, including 82 of their own citizens. In my opinion, that tragedy was what was responsible for the de-escalation.

It's unfortunate that it's easier to deploy the latest nuclear technologies on battlefield than in civilian use. Maybe this will change once they are (literally) battle-tested.

Anyone thinking, even briefly, about potential spin-off designed from these small reactors will likely be unable to sleep due to nightmares of a few backpack nukes hidden in the NYC subway system.

What? Small nuclear explosives like the Davy Crockett shoulder-launched bomb have been around forever. Those are pretty unrelated to microreactors.

I am not sure how to read it. So because those are not explicitly weapons, their proliferation is perfectly ok? How big a blast would a mini reactor produce if it was mishandled?

None. But if it is blown up by say, artillery or a truck load of semtex, the fine vapor of radioactive dust sprayed all over the place will make a decent chunk of land pretty dangerous to hang out on.

To be fair any bigger conflict than a guerilla proxy war will do that too, whether it be from salting the fields, WWI mustard gas, unexploded ordance and/or mines, agent orange, or fallout from an actual nuclear bombardment. The scars of war persist for quite a while.

Has the US gone nuts? I know this might not go well in some circles, but is there another way to put it?

Will they withstand sabotage and nuclear bombs, such as normal nuclear plants are?

Sabotage, yes. These will be heavily armed and guarded.

If a small nuclear reactor gets hit by a large nuclear weapon, we don't need to worry about the reactor.

No nuclear power plant can survive being hit by a nuclear weapon.

Citation?

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