Nuclear Power at McMurdo Station, Antarctica
large.stanford.edu
large.stanford.edu
I've always regretted not going to Antarctica, but this article makes me think that I dodged a bullet. This plant was a maintenance nightmare. Plus, operating a reactor with a mix of personnel sounds bad. We certainly had our personnel issues on subs, but at least all of us in Engineering had the shared experiences of nuclear power school, prototype training, and sub qualification.
One thing I noticed at the top of the article was that they used the steam as a source of fresh water as well, did subs do this too, when you worked on them?
Thankfully, we never had to use oxygen candles. Candles are effective only in a small closed space. That would have been a serious emergency.
Glad to hear you didn't have a situation to use one and does seem a very rare situation, but neat that there is a solid backup.
Worth noting that even in the vid, you have crew members of senior rank watching on as they have never seen it done before, which indicates how uncommon it's usage is.
What do you think of the submarine systems that were designed for you to interact with? Context - I have been thinking recently about submarines and wondering how crew size could be reduced through automation. (I am aware that a lot of work went into this on the Independence class ships, but my working assumption is that this was let down by poor structuring of the design team, rather than that automation is a fundamentally bad idea)
Did you have to manage boredom when you were on-shift but did not have much to do? Or is there plenty to do? Or are you allowed to study when there is not much in the way of active responsibilities?
I believe the Alfa class submarines went this exact route. According to Sutton it had a crew complement of 32: http://www.hisutton.com/Alfa_Class_Submarine.html
Much more modern plans along similar design thinking is the SHELF reactor. It is designed to operates in an underwater, sealed capsule that is monitored and controlled remotely. Source: https://aris.iaea.org/Publications/smr-status-sep-2012.pdf
My experience is from the Vietnam era and doesn't apply today. I was drafted mid-way through an EE program when I got behind in units. Virtually all of us had similar backgrounds. The Navy had a knack for teaching nuclear physics & math to bright people with a high school education.
The S5W plant that I operated had virtually no automation. Just safety interlocks and a few automatic shutdowns. Everything was analog. The electrical controls used mag-amps: dumb and inefficient, but reliable as hell. Safety was achieved by detailed operating procedures and highly trained crews. We studied and drilled constantly. Most over-qualified group of people I've known.
There's no way that I could describe what it was like at sea in a few lines here. It might make for an interesting HN thread as there are other nuc's here. :-)
You might enjoy Destin Sandlin's recent series of videos made on board a nuclear submarine: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjHf9jaFs8XWoGULb2HQR...
From what I’ve seen, this is still true.
I would very much like to know your take on why the Navy has this knack. I'd like to research what it takes to reproduce that knack by other organizations, in other fields of endeavor.
When you say "bright people", how does an ASVAB VE+AR+MK+MC=252 broadly approximate to percentile?
I'm also curious how the Navy selects for people who can apply that brightness over sustained periods of time.
Maybe most interesting for us in this forum many military schools still includes lots and lots of physical training. I guess that is a huge advantage they have.
Some other points:
- Military organizations do have some options that are out of reach for civilian schools today. Knowing you can risk
- humiliation in front of peers (20 something years ago I once forgot to close the window on our room before service and had to run in to fix it while 36 other guys "enjoyed some extra time for pushups". I still remember it.),
- a permanent record for sleeping or otherwise not paying attention,
- a fine and a night behind bars for not being sober or for not behaving
- or being thrown out
sets a standard.
- Also I guess it also becomes obvious during training that failure to learn the required skills might easily cost you and others their lives.
I think the obvious answer is that they have to. The Navy has a lot of technology that needs maintenance at sea. Problem diagnosis requires understanding. We didn't rely on black box replacement.
I had nearly two years of engineering math when I was drafted and joined the Navy. The Navy skipped all of the derivations and went straight to the concepts of limits, derivatives, and integrals. Even some differential equations that describe reactor dynamics. Calculations were limited to algebra. Testing focused on calculus concepts rather than numerical answers.
This produced technicians with the ability to understand how the power plant worked but without the formal math and physics need for power plant design.
The only thing I can offer about how the Navy selects people is that it presents the various training programs early, starting with the recruiters. Certain programs are presented as being most difficult and are described in glowing terms. The challenge was definitely an attraction for me.
We really need a small reactor witha well tested design, where all the bugs and terthing problems have beeen worked out. It would be so usefull for situatioms like this.
"223 reports of abnormal levels of radiation were recorded" Yeah, I would not want to stay at that base.
“SMR - Small Module Nuclear Reactors — Gas Cooled” => https://youtu.be/TYnqJ4VnRM8
- Fort St. Vrain, US[1]. High temperature gas cooled reactor. Operated for 12 years. Corrosion problems. Converted to natural gas.
- AVR reactor, Germany.[2] Pebble bed reactor. Had a pebble jam. Not repairable. Most fuel removed. Pressure vessel remains on site, with hope of full decommissioning in a century or so.
There's a small reactor of this design working at a university in China, and a medium sized one one (200MW electrical output) is supposed to come on line this year. We'll see how that works out.
Boring old boiling water and pressurized water reactors have simplicity in the radioactive part, and water is easy to handle. Designs that involve moving pellets or chemical processing of radioactive fluids add much complexity to a system that is very hard if not impossible to repair. The track record of such reactors is not good.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_St._Vrain_Generating_Stat...
Of course it's not as exotic as pebble bed reactor, or helium-cooled uranium-thorium reactor.
Military vessels also have ample trained personnel to throw at maintenance and operations, they can make tradeoffs for things that are more finicky but provide higher performance. They're anything but "self-contained" really, and even the Navy wanted to simplify that. A major goal for the new A1B reactor in the Gerald R. Ford-class supercarriers, as well as normal stuff like "more power, weighs less" was to cut the number of people needed to run the reactors and propulsion.
I mean, yeah, all this certainly does add to the cost too. But it's not just about the cost, or rather the design goals and missions are divergent enough that they necessitate costs for military reactors that would be a waste, dangerous, or both elsewhere. Where the Naval reactors might well carry over to I think would be future space usage, a lot of what the navy is worried about with sending a reactor out on a carrier or sub for years seems to overlap with challenges and goals faced by a reactor on a spaceship sent to the outer solar system.
1) If it explodes on takeoff you're fucked
2) Naval reactors (and all reactors) require massive heatsinks to dissipate entropy. There's no ocean in space.
Space-based nuclear energy is all based around RTGs, reactors have no place in space
RTGs, on the other hand, are radioactive from the get-go, but are usually quite small.
The USA did run a reactor in space (SNAP-10A) and the Soviets did a few dozen.
Also the problem isn't running the reactor on the launch pad, the problem is if the launch vessel explodes and the fuel load gets spread out over your launch area. The enriched uranium used in naval-style propulsion is absolutely not "safe to hold in your hand" and the weight requirements for using natural uranium, which is safe, would be prohibitive for use in space.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNAP-10A
Highly enriched uranium is still barely radioactive, very similar to natural uranium. The half-life of U-235 is 703 million years. As half-life approaches infinity, atoms approach stability. The dose rate of holding navy nuclear fuel is modest compared to the hazards of fission products.
The on-contact for a HEU billet is over 10mrem/hour. You and I have very different ideas about nuclear safety apparently and I presume you haven't worked professionally in the field with that attitude.
According to that Wikipedia article, SNAP 10A was centered on a device that created and maintained a controlled, sustained nuclear fission reaction. I would call that a "nuclear reactor" even if no attempt were made to harvest the power. I think that the rest of the world is probably with me on this. The Chicago Pile 1 is widely regarded as the first nuclear reactor, and nobody particularly cares how it generated electricity. What they care about is that it demonstrated a controlled, sustained nuclear fission reaction.
You are getting the absolute basics wrong, so you have no standing to question the OP's atittude.
Nuclear reactor runs a nuclear chain reaction, hence the name, RTG does not. There is no scope for debate here. The difference is night and day and is obvious if you look at fuel, power to weight ratio, or do physics 101.
RTGs run on decay heat and use plutonium 238, they cant be turned off, their power slowly drops off over decades. Reactors use U235, have active control and starting/stop procedure and 10-100x higher power to weight
That said, it seems like, all by itself, conversion efficiency is a tricky measure of the usefulness of a design for spaceflight purposes. Wouldn't it be more useful to consider the total cost to deliver a given energy production capacity to space? In that case, rocket fuel itself, and the tyranny of the rocket equation, becomes a major consideration. If an efficiency gain comes at the cost of increasing the weight of the energy generation system in some way, then perhaps it doesn't end up being a net win over the less efficient design.
By comparison the voyager probe RTG used ~1/10th the fuel for a little over 1/10th the power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MHW-RTG So the only advantage was cheaper fuel.
The same reactor couod be hooked up to a 20% efficient stirling engine to keep it low maintenance, to a >50% efficient convined cycle or have 0% electricity output and be used for heat or water desalination.
By comparison SL-1 a 400kw thermal design so 4x power used a 12,000 kg pressure vessel including shielding. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1
It is true that RTGs are the only type of nuclear power used in space now, but that is more to do with type of craft we send to space rather than practical limitation of nuclear power in space.
A large spacecraft will have enough surface area mount enough radiative heatsinks to dissipate the heat from a nuclear reactor. Designs exist that have the math worked out for this since the 50s.
France runs on 7% enriched UO2 (although using plate-based 'caramel' fuel rather than cylindrical pellets in rods like typical civilian nuclear fuel). This requires them to refuel every 10 years rather than having life-of-ship reactors like the latest generation US submarine reactors, but OTOH French law requires reactors to be defueled and inspected every 10 years anyway.
As for space usage, launch weight restrictions make LWR style reactors impractical. Look at something like the NASA Kilopower as an example of what a (very small) space-based power reactor might look like. For nuclear propulsion like a nuclear thermal rocket, that's again a different kind of reactor pretty different from both LWR's and Kilopower.
OK, so this is a reply to both you and @nickelpro (your comment is newer but also higher), who wrote:
>Space-based nuclear energy is all based around RTGs, reactors have no place in space
You both seem to have an image in your heads regarding future long duration deep space vehicles (I explicitly mentioned "outer solar system") here that is a mixture of old space assembly and soft science-fiction, wherein industrial capacity is all terrestrial and any ship is built entirely on Earth, launched and off it goes. All-in-one. Even SpaceX with its use of pure chemical rockets to Mars and terrestrial construction plans to break with that: in-orbit refueling is an absolutely key part. And for going farther then that (and as Starship and successors/competitors kick starts a new era of space economics and industry) the clear and necessary next step will be in-space assembly (be it in LEO or a Lagrange point dock or whatever ends up being most practical at a given time).
In the same way we don't expect our ships to somehow be built hundreds of miles inland and then make their way to the ocean or fit entirely on a single semitruck, stay indefinitely on what can be launched out of Earth's atmosphere makes no sense either. The important aspects are all at cross purposes. Aerodynamic considerations are a waste in vacuum and constrict design in very important ways. Engines to get out of a strong gravity well need high thrust, whereas for long distances in space one really wants very high ISP. A torch drive that can do both necessarily bears a striking resemblance to a high energy weapon system to whatever happens to be facing the business end of it, and all known practical models (nuclear salt water, thermonuclear pulse) are ludicrously polluting. And outer solar system ships will need strong variable electric sources with high power/mass too despite solar being entirely impractical. RTGs won't cut it.
So sure I don't think we'll ever see one launch off Earth's surface (I hope not anyway, if humanity is willing to light one of those off here it means we're facing a threat big enough that trashing our home is considered worth it). But that's a-ok, because what we'll do is built empty reactors, or reactor components, and launch those separately from fuel, and put it all together in space. Or for that matter far enough down the road maybe we build that stuff on the moon or in the asteroids or who knows. It obviously wouldn't be a copy/paste, but to the extent that USN reactor designs will get used outside of the military that's where I see it making sense.
Also high thrust engines if you can get them can make use of the Oberhausen effect & some maneuvers, like specific orbit captures or crewed radiation belt transits need them as well.
Still no problem to build that thing in space if you can pull it off. :)
Are you saying you don't think a nuclear reactor powered spacecraft will ever be launched into space on a chemical rocket in the forseeable future, or that you don't think nuclear powered rockets will ever be used to get from ground to orbit?
You're probably aware, but nuclear power in space has not been limited to plutonium powered RTGs that output a few hundred watts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US-A
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BES-5
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOPAZ_nuclear_reactor
Rigorous, yes, but not "very, very difficult to pass". The Navy needs a consistent stream of replacement operators, and their preferred way of getting them is to take reasonably capable volunteers and tutor/coach/remediate as many people as needed once they're in that group.
My experience too. Do you remember the "skyhook"? We'd return to the barracks after class and find that the guy next to you had vanished without a trace.
One has to design the whole reactor on paper before building it and get it approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). If, when you build it, you find you need to make changes to the design that are above a certain threshold, you have to recertify (not sure of the details. Can't find a good link about this). Imagine trying to build something as complicated as a nuclear reactor and you can't make iterative improvements. NuScales design approval process, the approval to be able to build the first reactor, cost $500 million dollars, took 2 million man hours, included over 2 million pages of documents, and after submitting in Jan of 2017 did not get approval until around 4 years later in August of 2020[1]. This is just to be able to build the first design. No wonder nuclear power has seen no progress in the last 50 years.
Fortunately this company did persevere and now is planning to build the first power plant in Utah, hoping to be operational in 2030. The people/governments stating that climate change is a crisis, and I do believe there is way too much CO2 in the atmosphere, should be fast tracking this approved tech with as much money as usable to build thousands of these reactors as quickly as possible.
This isn’t a defense of the current regulatory process. The time frames, in particular, sound pretty egregious (4 years to approve a prototype, and 2m pages of documentation feels like a lot, too, but again I don’t know how these things are designed). But I would be extremely uncomfortable with lax regulatory oversight, given that nuclear accidents have permanent, irreversible impacts on society and geography.
Now, small-scale reactors may be a different beast entirely. If the quantity of materials is pretty much guaranteed not to have potential to cause problems for anyone but the operators for a short period of time…. Then there certainly seems to be a case for a shorter regulatory cycle. But I would be shocked if scale isn’t already taken into account for the current regulatory burden.
[1] https://www.nwfc.gov.au/observations-and-recommendations/cha...
Actually building the power plant with the reactor at a specific location is a different problem.
And the reactor brings itself home for service if needed.
That seems way different than what you'd want in Antarctica.
That's nothing, you should've seen what the local wildlife did to the Norwegian and US bases down there.
Who's the invasive species? The creature minding its own business for 100k years or the humans who start stirring Things up as soon as they get there? ;)
NASA's Kilopower is sort-of aiming to be this, though it has a long way to go to get there.
If that’d be the case then such small nuclear reactors would be powering US military bases and outposts all over the planet.
This ain’t a thing for a myriad of reasons, starting from cooling (not much ocean in the middle of the east), to profileration risks (navy designs using weapons grade uranium).
USN at the same time considered PADs to be undue slowdown in the same mission and had enough power to just not have them mounted, afaik.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_pow...
In the US, Offshore Power Systems tried this in the 1970s. They hired 1000 people, formed a joint venture with Newport News, bought and installed the world's largest gantry crane at their construction yard in Jacksonville, FL, and got a license to construct 8 gigawatt scale floating reactors from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Wild story [1].
[1] https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-01-26-offshore-power-sys...
What was the nature of these injuries?
That being said, I wonder if some of the compact reactor designs being generated today[1] would actually wind up being a good fit for remote sites like the Pole. The current power plant runs on AN8 jet fuel and spews smoke/steam into the air 24/7. Clean power generation there is difficult because of lack of consistent wind and sun energy (pilot programs were in place at various times when I was there).
Parenthetically, the Pole's Clean Air facility there has some of the cleanest air in the world (upwind of the power plant). Their continuous CO2 measurements, graphed prominently on one wall when I visited, were sobering indeed to contemplate.
[1] e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27133196 [2] https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/co2/graphics/South_Pol...
(Google Australia-ASEAN power link)
There was a danish article about it with some good pictures of the camp including one which looks like a part of the reactor [3]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Century
The cleanup project was unofficially referred to as "Dr Freezelove" by the Americans involved, which is a bit disturbing when you think about how Dr. Strangelove ends.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Thule_Air_Base_B-52_crash
https://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/news/releases/2001/01_72AR...
> "Only during dust storms on Mars is there enough wind energy to operate a wind turbine," said Michael Flynn, another NASA Ames scientist. On Earth about 10 meters (33 feet) per second wind speed is needed to make electricity with wind turbines; on Mars about 30 meters (98 feet) is needed because of the extremely thin air, according to Bubenheim.
As the article points out, the device required significant manpower, had reliability issues and wasn't cost effective.
While it'd be relatively simple to build wind power locally once infrastructure is in place, the same cannot be said for nuclear power on Mars.
Autonomy and self-reliance are critical factors for outposts on Mars - a point that cannot be overstated.
I can't imagine a viable self-sufficient Mars colony that doesn't involve a lot of manpower anyway (I'm talking thousands of people).
I wasn't necessarily thinking about complete self-sufficiency, just the fact that it might take up to 2½ years to get replacement parts.
And of course Mars is not a totally barren world – another big part of the solution is to build things with materials that can be gathered on Mars.
Cost is dominated by weight in space, and a large wind turbine needs hundreds to thousands of tons of concrete for foundations - are those going to be brought from Earth? Can you make concrete on Mars?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosmos_954
Concrete would need cement made with limestone and massive amounts of heat and water which is scrace on Mars.
In this case the reactor would only be started once it arrives on mars.
Wind power is calculated by A * v³ * ρ * η
A is the area, e.g. π/2 * r² for horizontal axis designs, ρ is the air density and η is the total system efficiency (limited to <59% and safe to assume to be >0.4 for modern systems) and v is the wind speed.
Mars' atmosphere is about 1% of Earth's atmosphere in density. Given a wind speed of 7 m/s² (the optimal wind speed for most modern wind turbines), on Mars we'd get only 1% of the power we'd get on Earth.
A 100m installation (~2.6MW on Earth) would deliver only 21kW on Mars. The average wind speed during a year is slightly higher on Mars, though, at 10 m/s² [0]. The average power output thus would be about 61kW.
The most important time, however, would be dust storms, which render solar useless. Wind speeds have been recorded to exceed 30 m/s² during dust storms. Assuming we can efficiently shield the generator from the dust, the power output would peak at 1.7MW.
A more conservative 17 m/s² for dust storms still yields about 308kW.
100m class wind turbines, while rare on Earth (e.g. GE Haliade-X [1]) would be easier to build on Mars given the significantly lower gravity.
Wind turbines would work on Mars and have great synergy with solar - when solar doesn't work (e.g. during dust storms), wind turbines would be most efficient.
Wind power wouldn't be the first choice for powering a Mars station, though. As can be seen above, installations would have to be pretty significant in size to deliver noteworthy amounts of power.
[0] https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/marsfact.htm...
[1] https://www.ge.com/renewableenergy/wind-energy/offshore-wind...
Furthermore, I think your average 10 m/s is an overestimation -- the source gives it as the high limit outside of dust storms.
You misread the source then - peaks during sandstorms are 17 - 30 m/s² with 10 m/s² being the annual average.
> I don't think 100m wind turbines on Mars are feasible anytime soon.
Manufacturing of the wind turbine is assumed to entirely take place on-site. Wind power is not something for a "starter station/settlement". The question was about general viability and given local manufacturing capabilities, wind power isn't completely useless on Mars.
Where on the page? The only wind speed related data I can see is this:
> Wind speeds: 2-7 m/s (summer), 5-10 m/s (fall), 17-30 m/s (dust storm) (Viking Lander sites)
Also m/s² isn't the correct unit for wind speed, since it's a unit of acceleration, not speed.
Isn't speed m/s and acceleration m/s/s?
In one sense yes, but in another sense no. Consider erosion. It is the bane of existence for any system near the ocean. Mars has a similar problem with dust, which is smaller than what we see on Earth. This shreds electronics and other instruments on Mars. Sealing becomes far more important, but also more difficult. The other thing we need to recognize is that on Mars there's no electric ground.
So yeah, on surface things look easier but there's a reason why including domain experts in the conversation is necessary. This is a classic example of napkin modeling being representative of how things will work in reality.
So look to the domain experts. They've used solar and nuclear for a reason. Maybe dig into why those were the choices made.
Safe on Mars
Precursor Measurements Necessary to Support Human
Operations on the Martian Surface (2002)
Ch.3 Physical Environmental Hazards, Pg. 21
The small radiation sources refer to weak sources of alpha radiation (think smoke detectors), whose low-energy alpha particles collide with the atmosphere, ionizing it in the process. The now conductive atmosphere in the vicinity of the rod-device would then be able to neutralize excess charge.
[0] https://www.nap.edu/catalog/10360/safe-on-mars-precursor-mea...
The PDF version is available free of charge. The book can also be read online for free.
What has a planetary magnetosphere got to do with electrical ground? The planet itself is a spherical conductor. There probably is an ionosphere, although I would not be surprised to find that it is much nearer ground level than ours.
Also ground is about a differential. What you don't want is floating potentials. You want a constant refernce value. Floating potentials are dangerous because you don't have a constant reference value and thus the chance of unwanted discharge.
I'm intrigued. Is it due to much drier conditions? Grain size? Mineral composition? Combinations? Anywhere I could read a bit more?
As a quick intro that isn't doesn't have much detail but has links I'd go with[0]. But if you pick up any book on Martian engineering or read any report (NASA reports are public) you'll find mentions of this. This is also discussed deeply in most astrophysics textbooks.
[0] https://hackaday.com/2017/08/17/living-on-mars-the-stuff-you...
Nobody is building new reactors with 70 year old designs though.
I wonder to which degree has nuclear power's association with nuclear weapons affected its public perception.
1 radiation death and 18 injuries? (Only 2 of which involved possible radiation exposure.)
The "overly-conservative" decision to evacuate such a large area killed more people than if they hadn't evacuated at all.
Even Chernobyl only killed ~30 people, with maybe another 30 cases of cancer that workers had since then.
Now I see that I would have been well served by looking up 'nuclear 2011' and 'nuclear 1986' since those disasters are very famous.
But thanks to all for telling me. :)
How does one article on the third portable reactor built tell us clearly anything at all about how we should power a hypothetical Mars base more than 60 years later
Even without regulation, things like surface area to volume ratio still make larger reactors more efficient.
Power goes as v^3, so a few x wind speed compensates for density. There are design sketches for a couple of kW at 10 m/s, ~10 kW at 25 m/s. Getting those speeds does require prioritizing it in site selection. IIRC, turbine mass is competitive with solar under dust storms.
I'd link to recent work, but sci-hub doesn't have it. :/
it’s completely different design from conventional “pressurized water” reactors with drastically reduced complexity, using heat pipes and solid core, it’s more like a battery really, and we’ve been sending nuclear batteries to space for many decades
Without easy-access to water and evaporative cooling on Mars, I can imagine you'd be needing super big radiators pointing at the sky to make even modest amounts of electrical power. Solar might work out better...
Introduction to Nuclear Energy
PH241 - Stanford University - Winter 2014
The experience does not suggest that small-format nukes are simpler to operate and maintain than big ones.
There is no plausible scenario where small-format nukes are a better investment than a solar + wind + storage system, terrestrially. On Mars or the moon, leaks might not matter so much, although the catastrophic failure likely to follow would leave users without power.
Even with insolation on Mars much reduced, solar remains the overwhelmingly better choice by any measure.
On the moon, dark for two weeks at a stretch calls for more clever engineering. An 11,000 km equatorial superconducting transmission line with distributed solar panels could power quite a lot of activity. Even a 5500 km system would be immediately useful, given a vertically-oriented array at each end. But solar and storage would probably be cheaper. A flywheel constructed above-ground, hundreds of meters across (dumbell style, at first) would store quite a lot of energy. Structure could be just a cable on top of a tower; when stopped, the counterweights hang vertically, and swing out as it spins up.
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/04/25/powering-the-l...
Rather since they don't have a critical mass/configuration which makes them impossible to explode.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/non-power-nucl...
We have only non-classified information to suggest their safety record is spotless. Considering the experiences on Antarctica and Greenland with naval-inspired designs, an entire lack of reported failures really indicates lack of reports, not lack of failures.
An exemplary safety record accommodates quite a large number of adequately-contained failures.
And
https://apnews.com/article/559da885ca7c3f6252d67e400e92a846
So not exactly an "incredible" safety record, more like an incredibly secret record.
Newer fission tech has a lot of promise... if people who are convinced they already know all about nuclear energy can be troubled to learn about it.
We finally got the ramshackle Indian Point and Diablo Canyon contraptions shut down, after decades of constant effort, and now it will cost a billion dollars and a decade or two to take them apart.
The economics don't pan out. The opportunity costs alone are staggering.
https://www.leonardodicaprio.org/the-7-reasons-why-nuclear-e...
https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/Nucl...
Also, the question really is about carbon emissions vs other types of environmental impact. Batteries and solar panels require great gobs of mining infrastructure too.
You could make the same comment about modern battery tech and solar though.
There's no err uranium involved in that one.
Also, the costs of uranium mining are insane.
And with lithium-free batteries around the corner, that comparison gets even more ridiculous.
https://www.faradion.co.uk/faradion-comment-on-catl-announce...
https://www.antarctica.gov.au/about-antarctica/law-and-treat...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_nuclear-free_zone
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLPedQdHAKc
There are a few movie plots featuring Antarctic Nazis. You might find the bits about Admiral Byrd's "Operation High Jump" interesting.