The U.S. Army tried portable nuclear power at remote bases 60 years ago

Economic issues were caused in part by political opposition. An extreme degree of reviews and legal objections can't help the economics.

And research into new designs that might improve on economics and safety isn't going to be as profitable or as common if there is always going to be a virtually insurmountable hurdle of objections on spurious environmental grounds, so the economic pressure that has caused coal plants to become more efficient can't be applied.

Plus, that coal vs nuclear economic calculation doesn't account for the costs of warming, nor for the intended electrification that abundant nuclear power was supposed to enable.

It all has its roots in disproportionate opposition and silly old movies that portrayed nuclear plants as potentially exploding with ten megaton blasts.

Why the downvote? Here is a citation [1] that molten salt reactor was killed for political reasons.

Or was I jumping to conclusions to suggest that activists knew or cared about such details?

[1] http://moltensalt.org/references/static/downloads/pdf/WhyMSR...

I think that falls under Myth #6 in the list of thorium reactor myths.

https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium-myths.html

The target of the activist is not the government, it is other citizens. The goal is to increase the disapproval and outrage above the activation energy of government agencies or legislatures. Anti-nuke activism hit as the first wave of the environmental movement was peaking (think anti-pollution efforts against some really, really bad industrial practices and the anti-litter movement) and it also pulled in a large swathe of anti-war activists who were looking for their next mission after the Vietnam war wound down. Combine these with some genuine hubris on the part of the nuclear energy industry and a public that has a hard time assessing actual risk and you get a perfect storm of sorts. It was easy to pass regulations and laws that made nuclear more difficult to deploy and casually ignore the consequence that this had on making petroleum products and coal the only viable alternatives.

chernobyl

The US government absolutely listen to people when it comes to things like approvals because politicians need to get re-elected. Harry Reid stopped the yucca mountain complex after the govt had already agreed to it for nuclear storage.

How many reactor-years of accident-plagued operations have they had? USS Thresher and USS Scorpion both sank with all hands lost.

The US Nuclear Navy Force has logged over 5,400 reactor years of accident-free operations, as far as they are willing to tell the public.

What would be an accident in the civilian space would be a state secret in the military.

I mean, you're not wrong (I assume), but you're also just excluding the hours which involved accidents.

The USS Puffer [1], Proteus [1], Dace [1], California (twice) [2], Truxton [2], Gurnard (twice) [3], Hawksbill [3], and Abraham Lincoln [3] have all unintentionally leaked nuclear waste into the various bodies of water [1].

The USS Guardfish managed to irradiate it's own crew enough that 4 of them were sent to the hospital, and later managed to contaminate the submarine again while dumping radioactive resin into the wind. The latter form of incident is described as "quite common" [2].

The USS Aspro [2], Sam Houston [3], etc managed to leak radioactive water internally.

The USS Sam Rayburn "is mildly radioactive when it returns from patrol in February 1984. The Navy says this radiation is so mild it cannot be detected by a Geiger counter. " [3] (whatever that means)

(I make no claim that this is a complete list, or even a particularly reliable list since I didn't check my sources sources or anything like that, the point is there have definitely been accidents).

It's true that "there have been no spectacular meltdowns", but you're also talking about operating in an extremely controlled environments of a ship that you control. I don't think the army is going to have as an easy a time at it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_accid...

[2] http://www.chris-winter.com/Digressions/Nuke-Goofs/Refs-70.h...

[3] http://www.chris-winter.com/Digressions/Nuke-Goofs/Refs-80.h...

I think so. At least here in NL, the journalist class decided somewhere in 70s or early 80s, they had an obligation to do 'good' instead of only doing inpartial reporting.

Of course, their defintion of 'good' might differ from mine or yours.

Until it's time to dispose of the old fridge, and then your idiot neighbor just opens it up and releases it in to the air, because proper disposal requires a fee he doesn't want to pay, and then breaks down the fridge to tiny pieces to throw in the regular trash.

This has happened, a lot.

The gases used as refrigerants are actually not that dangerous at all, which is why they're used in such situations. If the thin pipes of your fridge or AC leak all their refrigerant in your home you'll be fine. Maybe have some difficulty breathing, it's not healthy but nothing serious.

Having a nuclear reactor in every house would be insane. Even if they don't leak radiation during their lifespan in normal operation. You can scare most people out of opening them. But can you scare every single person out of doing so? Considering some will be mentally unstable too, or outright psychopathic.

The most dangerous thing a mad person can do right now is blow up their house with natural gas. Which is pretty bad, it can damage houses in the nearby area. It absolutely pales in comparison to creating a mini meltdown or even nuclear pollution however. One alpha-emitting dust particle inhaled into the lungs is enough to kill over time.

And this is not a fantasy. It's happened in real life. Consider the Goiania incident for example and it's not the only one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident

There a pretty substantial amount of mercury in CFL bulbs.

This was true 90 years ago, which is why Einstein and Szilard invented their refrigerator; it was relatively commonplace at the time for a refrigerator to rupture and fill the house with sulfur dioxide, killing the inhabitants. Ammonia absorption refrigerators were even worse, and the earliest refrigeration equipment from the 01860s used "chimogene", which we now know as propane and butane, which is not toxic but disastrously inflammable. Midgley's invention of chlorofluorocarbons turned out to be the key, and ever since then, fridges and air conditioners have been mostly built without any pretty nasty substances.

Well, except for the ozone. That's getting better, though.

>The trick is, as always, to make a sealed system and scare people into not messing with it.

No, it is about knowing where the cutoff point of risk vs reward is. It is about understanding when diminishing returns makes something impractical. Trying to design a nuclear reactor small enough for a house or car, that is also so safe, tamper proof, and unweaponizable that it is ok to just have 10s of millions of them floating around is pointlessly difficult. Building a reactor to go into personal vehicles that crash all the time is ridiculous. It’s the different version of the flying car, when we realized that maybe having everyone moving themselves around in personal vehicles that would plummet out of the sky in the event of mechanical failure instead of just pulling over in the breakdown lane. It is a “that would be cool” idea.

Replacing coal plants with nuclear plants is a far better idea. Building self-contained smaller reactors to provide power on the neighborhood, sub division, or factory complex level is a far better idea. Why would I even want a reactor taking of space in my house when I could just get the same electricity from a more efficient reactor installed in a large concrete shed for my whole block? Why would I want to buy an insanely over engineered nuclear car, when I could just charge up my Battery Electric using my neighborhood reactor off peak electricity? Or I could fill up my hydrogen electric car produced by my neighborhood reactor through electrolysis during times of excess power generation.

I think you are being downvoted because of the word « communist » which is exaggerating.

But anyway there is some truth in what you say but I’ll would rephrase « centralized power » as « political will + state controlled company ».

You probably need this to be operated by a state controlled company because as much as I trust nuclear power, I’d never trust plants managed with a profit driven company. There must be unlimited warranties in case things goes wrong. But that is far from communism. You just can’t allow scenarios such as the power plant going bankrupt while being operated or maintenance costs being reduced to pay bonuses.

A lot of liberal countries have state controlled electricity providers. In France we even have multiple energy companies but just one is state controlled.

There was a movie about Russian arctic base, where the hero for some reason had to spend the night outside and warm himself with discarded portable nuclear plant. When he manages to get back inside first thing he was looking was iodine tablets.

Looked very handy thing that nuclear hand warmer. Like big cabin stove, which runs for ever and needs no fuel.

With EVs, nuclear could solve a lot more of our energy mix. Maybe EV tech would have been more developed earlier if we had cheaper electricity.

But that still ignores the huge capital costs of building a nuclear power plant, not to mention the liability insurance that has to be provided by the government.

In a world of cheap nuclear electricity, more possibilities would open up in these other areas like smelting etc. It would be possible to have a higher carbon tax, use more electricity-derived heat for industrial processes (even just electrolyze and burn hydrogen if needed).

Farming is a tricky one but again, with cheap electricity things like hydroponics become more feasible. A lot of things are physically possible but simply ruled out by the economics of energy cost.

40 years of unnecessary coal and gas emissions adds up.

Yes, the processes would be different. A misfunctioning gas furnace will kill everyone from CO poisoning, and wood fireplaces are even more dangerous.

Surely an in-home reactor would require safeties of an appropriate degree. Perhaps those would make in-home nuclear infeasible, I wouldn't know. With a bit of careful planning, any given house could easily take out half a city block or more given someone with intent to cause harm, though, and without knowing the actual amount of radioactive material in any given in-hime reactor, I couldn't begin to compare.

Edit: this is why I am a whimsical commenter on the internet and not the person in charge of whether or not we give redneck engineers nuclear reactors.

Where did I say, or even hint, that the entire aerospace industry is unsafe?

What I did say, is that this approach seems remarkably similar to the process that is both partially credited with the 737 Max issues, and one of the reasons some other countries' regulators refused to trust the FAA's later decisions regarding that plane.

> You're talking about a lapse in safety relative to an industry that is 2nd only to Nuclear power in doing no harm.

Yes, and that’s why when evaluating the use of a safety process in one, it is both relevant and interesting to look at the impact some conceptually similar process had on the other's safety record.

Regarding the cars analogy… really?

Oh, certainly, it is much safer than most things.

But there still are huge conflicts of interest in self-certifying equipment, wether it’s an airplane or a nuclear power plant.

In this case, following the crashes, the FAA's safety model is one of the reasons the EASA refused to delegate safety approval to the FAA on that specific plane.

Clearly signalling they consider Boeing, the FAA and the FAA's safety model to be untrustworthy.

I really don’t see why a process that is considered untrustworthy in the aerospace industry should be applied to nuclear power plants.

Now, to be clear, if some US airline's plane full of US citizens suffers some malfunction due to some design defects and crashes in the middle of the US because some government agency in the US decided to trust some US plane manufacturer to certify itself, it’s sad, but it’s a US problem for the US people. I really couldn’t care less.

Same with US power plants. Should a US nuclear power plant suffer catastrophic failure because some US regulator couldn’t learn from the FAA's mistake and decided to trust some US power plant operators with their own inspection, it would be a problem for the people living in and around the US.

Regarding the totally unrelated coal plants tangent and the blatant attempt to change the topic, I don’t care either. Over here, considering the dangers they pose, it’s been decided they should be entirely phased out over the next year.

You seem to be operating under the assumption that I am somehow against nuclear power, or consider it inherently too dangerous.

I am not, and I do not. I’d even go as far as to say I consider it to be one of our best bets in facing climate change, air pollution, and our need to quickly and drastically lower global greenhouse gases emissions.

[1]: https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...

I think the demon core was the "chunk of uranium" they were stacking bricks around. It's been several years since I read the book so my memory is fuzzy. I think the later experiments used the metal hemispheres instead of bricks.