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Comment by andbberger | Hacker News Reader

extremely safe. the US navy has operated old reactor designs with less inherent safety features than modern designs for over 5000 reactor-years with no major incidents. [0]

[0] https://www.mofa.go.jp/region/n-america/us/security/fact0604...

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The US Navy utilizes highly enriched uranium reactors that don't have to be refueled every few years, I think it's more like a 20 year lifetime between refueling. Unfortunately this is not an acceptable civilian model as HEU is bomb-grade, i.e. it's very easy to take the fuel rods and turn them into simple Hiroshima-style nuclear weapons.

Also, the US Navy lost two submarines, and the Scorpion case in particular might have been related to a nuclear power plant failure, although there's been no comprehensive report as of yet:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Scorpion_(SSN-589)

> the US Navy lost two submarines

The Thresher was a subsafe accident (a problem with one of the weld joints that keep the hull from being breached at depth); it had nothing to do with the reactor.

The Scorpion's root cause wasn't a reactor problem; note that "reactor problem" is not one of the hypotheses listed in "theories about the loss" in the Wikipedia article you reference.

Ok. No major incidents except those that we don't want to talk about, like: "dude, where is my nuclear reactor?".

> "dude, where is my nuclear reactor?"

What are you talking about?

If you lose a nuclear submarine it does not matter how it sank, Some nuclear stuff is lost and lying somewhere in a place when can't be safely maintained. It was not designed to end its life like that so, of course that this was a major incident, a significant deviation from the master plan!.

Only a fool would think that just because you don't see it, the problem is gone.

But the nuclear evangelists did never learn that lesson. They keep denying, closing their eyes, talking like is still 1950; saying that we can hide under a picnic tablecloth in case of nuclear accident.

> Some nuclear stuff is lost and lying somewhere

And as the Wikipedia article referenced in the post I originally responded to makes clear, the Navy doesn't just leave the stuff there; it keeps track of it and monitors the state of the nuclear materials in it. So there are contingency plans in place for incidents like this, even though they are extremely rare (2 of them in all of the decades that the US Navy has been operating nuclear submarines). And no harm has come to any member of the public as a result of either of these incidents. So talking as though this represents a serious danger to the public is not warranted.

Also, these are military reactors, not commercial reactors. Commercial reactors can't get lost this way. So using the Navy examples as though they reflected the risks of commercial reactors is ridiculous.

5000 reactor-years is very little in comparison to the amount which would count up if similar units were somehow economically rolled out for industry. To play any significant part in global energy supply hundreds or moreso thousands of these would need to be operated, each for decades. And by civilians - some liable to fail to match military standards of operation. 5000 reactor-years is really a tiny fraction of what many people are interested in.

the anti-nuclear folks throw around "long tail" and "black swan" a lot, but if you're turning your nose up when met with the hard data of "operated for 5000 years with no incidents" then we're truly doomed.

> civilians couldn't possibly operate reactors safely inane, but ok simply make the navy operate the power grid

That is 1 reactor for 5000 years, or 5000 reactors for 1 year. It really is not much hard data in the context of regulating hundreds or thousands of reactors for decades. 5000 hard drive years, wouldn't even inform a hard drive failure rate.

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