U.S. Air Force selects fast microreactor for nuclear power pilot | Hacker News Reader

U.S. Air Force selects fast microreactor for nuclear power pilot

powermag.com

The vendor, Oklo, was in the YC S14 batch and plans to go public in the next quarter or two

https://www.reuters.com/article/oklo-m-a-altc-acquisition/nu...

Oklo, what a clever name.

Oklo is a region near the town of Franceville, in the Haut-Ogooué province of the Central African country of Gabon. Several natural nuclear fission reactors were discovered in the uranium mines in the region in 1972.

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

I assumed the natural reactors might still be fissioning, but the Wikipedia page says this occurred about 1.7B years ago. They know they were reactors because the cite has a lower concentration of uranium-235 than expected and also reaction by-products.

*site

ugh

Through a SPAC after their application to license their design was denied by the NRC, and the responses seem very immature. Does not inspire confidence.

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/nrc-denies-oklo-powers-plan...

Looks like the base in right next to Fairbanks, Alaska https://goo.gl/maps/3HBnJAtu5HnqXyyy9

That must be a busy place for intercepting Russian aircraft. They've got 54 F-35's flying out of there and a bunch of surveillance crafts (+ apparently plenty of US army doing winter training, with some frequent Canadian visitors):

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

Apparently the base almost closed down following the cold war but then the northern pacific became a hot zone again with Russia and China.

The base supports JPARC which is the primary cold weather training area for the entire DoD. They also house a massive refueling operation since tons of military APAC to CONUS flights pass right by Alaska.

Although I am an advocate for nuclear power, I am a little worried about small reactors, which will inevitably warrant less attention and care.

The smaller they are, there more there are, the more there is a risk of mistakes and dissemination to bad actors I think.

>which will inevitably warrant less attention and care.

Can you explain why this would be the case? I suppose you might need less manpower to run the reactor, which might mean fewer total man hours. But does that necessarily mean it gets less attention and care?

Presumably part of the appeal of a small reactor is it's cost. If you're trying to do things on a budget, then there's smaller budget for safety.

A large amount of small reactors would most likely need to be remotely managed. Think of it as a very large IoT toaster just begging to be played with.

Considering the state of IoT (eg IoT botnets), I am not sure this will be reassuring to most. Unless it was sarcasm?

I believe the comment was intended to emphasize the issues created by mass scale remote mgmt

I know your comment was sarcastic, but today I was wondering if you could do remote control via SIPRNet or JWICS (military computer networks) and avoid the issues associated with conventional controls.

What's so unreasonable about this comment? Could someone explain?

I think, in other words, the cost to guard and physically secure a reactor doesn't depend on the size of the reactor, just the existence of the reactor [1]. A large reactor would require the same defense as a small one.

Note that the majority of the cost of nuclear is the people [2].

[1] https://www.nrc.gov/security/faq-force-on-force.html

[2] https://energy.mit.edu/news/building-nuclear-power-plants/

The US military has been safely running small mobile nuclear reactors for many human generations at this point.

Until n=0 goes to 1. As the Concorde.

Like, this sudden optimism concerning nuclear power is a bit worrying. Lowest bidder building small plants everywhere. What a nightmare ...

I really don't get where all this trust for the competence of others comes from.

But it’s not sudden optimism at all, it’s a multi-generational proven record.

They work until they don't and threaten to spread invisible poison that can make a x miles radius inhabitable. A "sorry but not sorry you choose to live next to it" event.

And now we are supposed to put small ones kinda everywhere where incompetent morons or terrorist can blow them up?

To be fair, current power generation also spreads bad things, that will slowly make large areas of the planet uninhabitable.

I don't think it's fair to think so little of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. They have standards. I don't think it's reasonable to assume they will give up their standards of safety.

>And now we are supposed to put small ones kinda everywhere where incompetent morons or terrorist can blow them up?

No one's said "we" are "supposed to put small ones kinda everywhere." This one's being installed at a military base. It should have adequate security.

> They work until they don't and threaten to spread invisible poison that can make a x miles radius inhabitable.

The U.S. nuclear power industry has been producing energy for 66 years without a single fatality to a member of the general public.

> And now we are supposed to put small ones kinda everywhere where incompetent morons or terrorist can blow them up?

I'm pretty sure that a major military base in the middle of the Alaskan Interior has reasonably good security.

Hundreds of millions of panels rolled off the line during my 8 year tenure at a solar panel manufacturer. Those panels were spread across globe. We took blood tests to monitor CdTe levels. So I’m assuming the risk of spreading invisible poison by that approach is not zero.

IIRC, a typical coal plant working normally emits as much radioactives in 30 years as one Chernobyl event.

I'd rather have a plant that might spew poison than one that will definitely spew poison.

The Navy spends uses lots of people to run reactors on ships and spends tons of money training them.

Small reactors won't be economical if they take that many people to run.

Also, naval reactors aren't small. Aircraft carriers have two 250 MW (700 MW thermal) reactors. That is a respectable power plant and much larger than proposed modular reactors.

> Small reactors won't be economical if they take that many people to run.

What are the numbers? What’s the TCO difference to similar systems without atmospheric carbon emissions?

The US Navy doesn't use nuclear reactors because of economics (they're quite expensive) or environmental concern. They use nukes because of the operational advantages of having a ship that only needs refueling once per decade. Any comparison to the naval use case is mostly useless when it comes to commercial power production.

*Once per ~30 years[1], to be pedantic.

The reasons are not simply refueling concerns, although that is a factor. The boats still need to refuel the humans onboard, ie. food supplies and occasionally munitions.

The reactor powers the boat using less mass than a typical diesel-electric, is more quiet, and can remain underwater for an entire deployment if necessary - something that's simply not possible with other power generation methods.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia-class_submarine#:~:te....

> and can remain underwater for an entire deployment if necessary

To be absolutely pedantic not all US navy reactors are on submarines. They also power surface ships with them.

The claim is “Small reactors won't be economical if they take that many people [as the US Navy] to run.”

The question is “What are the numbers?”

Clearly the navy uses nukes due to advantageous performance characteristics. What are the numbers that a civilian small nuke must make to be viable?

Quantity. One of the big issues with nuclear power is that we aren’t building frequently enough, and therefore lose expertise and capability, which drives up costs, both from screw-ups and from not being able to amortize over a large production run. To give an analogy, imagine if Boeing only made one 737 every five years. That aircraft would be insanely expensive.

Personally, I’m bullish on the companies in the micro reactor space that have minimal site construction. I’m less bullish on Oklo, given that their application had some glaring omissions and got denied an NRC license.

> Also, naval reactors aren't small. Aircraft carriers have two 250 MW (700 MW thermal) reactors.

Everything is relative - but there's vastly more nuclear powered submarines than aircraft carriers. The Virginia Class, for example, is powered by a single 30MW reactor[1].

The article states these "microreactors" will range from 15MW to 100MW.

The "Nukes" in the Navy are highly trained, yes, but a military environment is going to be far rougher than anything privately managed for land-side power generation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia-class_submarine#:~:te....

Don't forget about nuclear submarines, those are quite a bit smaller e.g. the S6G model at around 165MW thermal with two 26MW steam turbines

> Small reactors won't be economical if they take that many people to run.

The military has demonstrated you can easily maintain and operate them with a handful of 18 to 22 year olds.

> The military has demonstrated you can easily maintain and operate them with a handful of 18 to 22 year olds.

No, they haven’t. Military reactors aren’t run by relatively junior enlisted personnel alone.

Indeed, the navy sent my dad to go get his PhD before they had him as an engineering officer on a nuclear submarine. Sure some young enlisted might do some of the physical labor, but they're being supervised by someone who knows what they're doing.

This reactor is being run by a private company who will sell the power to the Air Force.

The _Navy_ has been safely running reactors. Neither the Air Force, nor Marines have any real experience, and the Army experience was decidedly mixed.

I have similar reservations for proliferation of the nuclear energy as a whole. Currently, these devices need careful handling and we appear to have enough smart and serious people to do just that however I don't trust having enough of those people if we had a reactor in every city.

But on the other hand we have managed to have air travel(which also relies on meticulous maintenance and operations) very safe despite sharp increase of flight over the years, so it must be possible to find a way to make it work.

The relative safety of airlines is solely, solely, solely because of stringent safety regulation. If you see anyone arguing that nuclear power could be cheaper if we just waived regulation, you can safely disregard their opinion as hopelessly myopic.

Agree, the regulations would probably be part of the safe nuclear energy proliferation - if it happens.

However, Boeing doesn't have to fight off 50 lawsuits and mobs of chanting protesters every time they want to roll a new plane off the line.

But air travel is usually much safer then other means. Similarly, nuclear power is also safer than many other sources, from what I know (not much).

Isn't it a bit absurd? Why we require this high level of scrutiny for these industries, but not for others, where our effort can get higher results?

As a blank check, sure. But there are specific regulations that could be removed. For example, the U.S. prohibits automatic load following equipment in nuclear plants, while the French allow it. It would allow for a control room operator to not have to constantly micromanage the reactor.

There's a big push for nuclear now, I'm curious, is there a hypothetical series of events that even an reasonable nuclear advocate is concerned about? They are mostly not too worried about Fukushima water for example.

The Fukushima water issue is a good test case.

Anyone informed knows it is harmless.

The water being discharged into the Ocean from Fukushima isn't problematic but the cleanup from the entire debacle there is going to take somewhere around a trillion dollars and last 30+ years. There's still a multi thousand acre exclusion zone... Up until a few years ago, there was a large nuke plant with a history safety incidents, owned and operated by a company implicated in several bribery scandals, directly upwind from NYC.

Nuclear technology, operated by responsible operators in well-designed plants is extremely safe. Unfortunately we live in a world where Nuke plant operators literally bribe legislators for billion dollar bailouts and the companies responsible for operating our fleet are the worst profit-maximizing ghouls you can imagine. It's the essence of John Glenn's quote about the Apollo missions, "My life depended on 150,000 pieces of equipment, each bought from the lowest bidder."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/07/22/ohio-house-...

https://www.politico.com/states/new-jersey/story/2020/06/24/...

That plus sign(+) may be doing some heavy lifting if Chernobyl is any guide -- 20,000 years to go.

I like to think I'm a reasonable advocate.

I think the strongest anti-nuclear case is one of civilization collapse (fast or slowly) and instability - what happens when say, Russia, can no longer afford or has the capability to maintain these plants? Even shutting them down leaves huge massive problems for multiple generations.

Then you have the waste storage issue which is largely a political issue. This needs to be solved before nuclear in the US can really be seen as realistic - imo.

Based on their operating record, I'm far more concerned about the risk of CO2 and other pollutants spewed out by fossil fuel plants. If we could swap all fossil fuels for nukes, I'd happily live next to one, even a 70s Russian one.

Even if it goes horribly wrong, even if there's another Chernobyl event and I end up dying 10 years premature due to cancer, I'll be happy knowing the planet won't be a hot disaster in a 100 years time. And even then, my odds are good, even if it's a 70s Russian plant we're talking about. Chances are I'll live much longer, breathing healthier air.

People say "why not renewables" but so far these only work with storage, which we haven't figured out yet. No major area in the world lives entirely off renewables with no fossil fuel backup or imports. Except maybe some very special cases that have very few people and very good hydro (Norway). But even Switzerland, with a favourable geography, doesn't run entirely on renewables, it is indeed nukes that fill the gap.

Ironically of course, clean energy Norway is a major exporter of gas and oil...

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

It appears to not require active safety systems. And we are talking about Alaska.

I would much rather see a small number of highly secure mega baseload power plants distributed across the country and run like mainframes vs distributed computing.

That's $35 billion plus tip, please.

Very excited to see some modern fast reactors happening!

Nuclear waste leaves me with such reservations, these fuel cycles where we use a % or two of the energy, create a bunch of tranuranic waste, and then deal with stuff for thousands of years.

Fasr reactors seem uneconomic, like something industry & capitalism would never ever do. The negative impact of everything else is so easy to externalize. The risk of doing anything new or well is so low.

It's enormously sad to find that military and military alone has the capacity to try new things, to invest better in the future. But here, I'll take it.

Nuclear is uneconomical because politics wants it to be.

Leading up to the 1980s, nuclear was poised to replace basically the whole power grid. "Too cheap to meter" they said. Fossil fuel energy companies and the petroleum exporting countries who had only recently gotten their cartel going were, shall we say, not happy with this. (Also Russians. Literally they got caught funding anti-nuclear "environmental groups"; someone published the documents after they went into Ukraine. Russia is another major petroleum exporter.)

So they ran a propaganda campaign centered around Chernobyl to paint the safest known method of power generation as one too dangerous to use, so it would be buried in safety rules the incumbents weren't subject to themselves. (If a nuclear power plant released as much radiation as every coal-fired one does, it would be shut down.)

And now they say "well, it would be nice, but we can't use it because it costs too much."

I'm frustrated by this argument. Yes, nuclear power gets unfairly maligned across several axes. Yes, fossil fuel is even more of a disaster. But what we have now is a situation where nuclear power has all of its negative externalities properly priced in, whereas fossil fuel doesn't, and yet we have people arguing to remove the forces that properly price in the externalities of nuclear rather than doing the right thing, which is properly pricing in the externalities of fossil fuels. This is counterproductive. Look around at our modern world and see everything enshittifying around us in the relentless pursuit of profit; now imagine that applied to nuclear power. What a nightmare.

Thanks for putting your frustration into words so succinctly. I feel exactly the same!

We have a slew of safety regulations that apply to, for example, chemical plants that handle substances every bit as dangerous as anything in a nuclear reactor. They basically work. They increase the operating cost a little bit. But they're not purposely designed to make the operation prohibitively expensive, so they don't.

Pricing externalities is a cost/benefit calculation, because overhead and inefficiency are externalized harms too. If you can prevent a 1 in 100 chance of a million dollar loss for $100 then you do it. If you have the "opportunity" to prevent a 1 in 10,000 chance of a million dollar loss for $10,000, you don't, because the expected cost of preventing the loss is more than it is to incur it. Unless you're trying to destroy something, and then you insist on it.

Do we price in the externalities?

My impression is that nuclear waste isnt dealt with hardly at all, especially in the US. https://www.energy.gov/em/cleanup-sites shows what seem like a dozen sites where negative externalities aren't at all priced in, where the government has had to cope. The US hasn't a single viable plan for nuclear waste, as far as I can tell.

And what of other nations? Setting this image out there that nuclear power is great & easy, even though so few have actually figured it out; that seems like a danger.

> https://www.energy.gov/em/cleanup-sites shows what seem like a dozen sites

Virtually all of these are nuclear weapons sites, not civilian power sites. A quick skim shows that the contamination in many of them has to do with producing plutonium, which current power reactors do not even use.

> And what of other nations?

Like France?

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

France has been producing the majority of its electricity from nuclear power for going on 40 years.

"Nuclear waste" is only a problem because we don't build new reactor designs that use the "waste" of existing reactors as fuel. One of the best arguments for building new reactors is to get rid of it so nobody has to try to store it for thousands of years like a chump.

Lazard's LCOE on nuclear is 6x as expensive as solar and wind.

I would like to think that regulatory issues are responsible for most of that. I would. I simply don't think it is all pencil pushers.

The real challenge is that any broad nuclear power push would result in reactors coming online in 8-10 years. That's 8-10 years of solar/wind benefiting from economies of scale, cheaper grid storage, perovskites, better wind designs, better engineering of offshore wind, etc. It's my very rough guess that solar/wind will drop by 50% in "real dollar" cost in the next 10 years, with only marginal increased cost for grid storage using sodium-ion or sodium-sulfur or pumped hydro or any manner of storage.

I think there is enormous potential still in nuclear, and I'm glad applications like this nuclear contract are keeping it afloat. I'm glad the Chinese are pursuing an MSR, and active "next-gen" nuclear startups are in action. I believe there is a design and regulatory framework and proven safety system that can result in competitive nuclear power against solar and wind prices when they stabilize.

It would be great if the air force reactor here and the various "next gen" reactors had examples in operation/production with numbers that substantially undercut the old solid-fuel PWRs monstrosities. But they aren't, and nuclear missed the train of having working substantive designs of these to compete head to head with low cost solar/wind or low-cost gas turbine for leveling. But ... the nuclear industry did not have these ready.

It really doesn't help when nuclear proponents brush safety under the rug, even if Chernobyl was symptomatic of Russian disregard for individual human life, and Fukushima didn't actually kill that many people.

Really, that doesn't send the message you think it does. It sends the message that all the pro-nuclear forces just roll their eyes at compliance and safety as this annoyance. That is a terrible terrible message, because that paints the pro-nuclear people as sloppy and careless. It doesn't matter than coal releases more radiation, or the technical death rate.

The message should be instead "we have learned from X and Y, let me explain to you why reactor design Z makes this and a vast array of other scenarios much safer". Of course for MSRs/LFTR, that's the inherent self-regulation of the fluid, "the plug"/cooling pool", it "burns" 99% of fuel practically eliminating waste transport risk. I know other newer designs are inherently more safe as well.

You should thank China for bringing new nuclear designs online, now the US's labs are starting projects in nuclear power generation again. It may take a decade, but I think a nuclear design will come out that governments can get behind.

But really I also see the modern day pro-nuclear crowd as "polluted" by the old guard that just wants the same old crappy solid fuel rod huge dome PWRs limped along (which I actually support) and to keep all the old guard manufacturers and fuel rod reprocessors as the main providers of nuclear reactors. This IMO is very bad, because those industries, which will not survive without subsidies, will hinder and undermine any newer reactors politically.

Nuclear needs a reboot. I like that this project seems like a step towards a reboot.

> The real challenge is that any broad nuclear power push would result in reactors coming online in 8-10 years. That's 8-10 years of solar/wind benefiting from economies of scale, cheaper grid storage, perovskites, better wind designs, better engineering of offshore wind, etc. It's my very rough guess that solar/wind will drop by 50% in "real dollar" cost in the next 10 years, with only marginal increased cost for grid storage using sodium-ion or sodium-sulfur or pumped hydro or any manner of storage.

This is not really a problem because there is little chance of replacing 100% of fossil fuel generating capacity on that timeframe. If some alternatives become cheaper and then it turns out to be 35% nuclear, 55% renewable and 15% fossil fuels instead of 35% nuclear, 35% renewable and 30% fossil fuels, either one of those is better than having less nuclear and more fossil fuels.

> It sends the message that all the pro-nuclear forces just roll their eyes at compliance and safety as this annoyance.

But this is why the propaganda has been effective. Because the assumption is that the compliance and safety rules are in good faith, when they're not.

It's not that safety doesn't matter, it's that nuclear reactors are safe and still would be if the safety regulations were reasonable instead of intentionally burdensome, which is what needs to happen.

> The message should be instead "we have learned from X and Y, let me explain to you why reactor design Z makes this and a vast array of other scenarios much safer".

Focusing on safer designs is like investing in platform shoes because someone you are three feet taller than keeps accusing you of being too short. They are not accusing you because you are actually too short.

And when they've had a rule instituted saying that anyone from your school has to fly to Alaska to have their height measured before each game or you can't play basketball, finding a way to make yourself taller doesn't get you back to the mainland before you miss the game.

> But really I also see the modern day pro-nuclear crowd as "polluted" by the old guard that just wants the same old crappy solid fuel rod huge dome PWRs limped along (which I actually support) and to keep all the old guard manufacturers and fuel rod reprocessors as the main providers of nuclear reactors. This IMO is very bad, because those industries, which will not survive without subsidies, will hinder and undermine any newer reactors politically.

They should only do so if the new nuclear reactors came at the expense of the existing ones, but why would they do that? The whole idea is for them to come at the expense of fossil fuels.

> 35% nuclear, 55% renewable and 15% fossil fuels

Clearly these numbers add up to 105% because if renewables become cheaper it will cause the total installed generating capacity to increase relative to the alternative and definitely not because I can't count to 100.

> The real challenge is that any broad nuclear power push would result in reactors coming online in 8-10 years.

I see this argument a lot. It seems to be based on the assumption that grid-scale solar and wind plants can be built overnight which is... not the case.

Grid scale solar plants barely even exist, and I believe all of them are heavily subsidized.

1) Come on, you can build windmill farms and solar farms in stages and start getting generation far faster than the time to get a nuke plant up. They can be easily upgraded/replaced without worrying about nuclear fuel. Nuclear reactors are 8-10 year projects with no payoff until the switch is turned, until the holy grail of the cheap shipping container sized reactor is realized. A windmill farm can start with one or two windmills and grow from there.

2) Lazards has specific categories for unsubsidized and subsidized, and NO WAY subsidies are responsible for nuclear being SIX TIMES more expensive. The nuclear industry shouldn't complain about subsidies, it's the only way they stay relevant. And the subsidies that really matter are the subsidies for fossil fuels.

"One or two windmills" aren't going to replace an 8 GW nuclear power plant, and by the time you could "grow from there" you'd have had enough time to build a nuclear plant. Which, you know, still works even when the wind isn't blowing.

Are you familiar with the expression "hope is not a plan"?

What the person was referring to is the fact that you will have an incremental increase in production with wind. With nuclear you will have to wait until the reactor is done.

Looking at my country there will most certainly be no nuclear reactors in place before 2035, whereas there is almost 70TWh/yr of sea based wind power waiting for permission to start building (expected to be operational in 5 years), and another 300TWh/yr on track to submit proposals for consideration.

It is hard to feel positive about nuclear power when everybody talks a lot, but nothing seems to happen. SMRs are mentioned everywhere but the economics make them seem like a crazy bet currently.

The fact that it takes 10 years is the thing we need to address.

For example, one of the problems has been that the government will change the construction requirements during construction. If the reactor was completed it would be allowed to continue using what it was licensed to use initially, but if it's half completed they will change the requirements and require them to start over. This could be solved by using the requirements in place on the day construction begins rather than the day construction ends, which is what would have been permitted if construction had taken less time, which in turn allows construction to take less time.

You might also consider the nature of an issue to determine whether it should prevent the plant from being commissioned. If two pipes are too close together and it would cause the material to fatigue in 15 years instead of the expected 30, this is a problem that needs to be fixed, but it is one that could reasonably be fixed two years after operations begin instead of holding up the start of operations for two years.

Ah yes, politics wants it to be uneconomical that is why NuScale's nuclear power plant has doubled its costs. It is certainly not the cost of input materials or changes in the interest rate, which makes long financing durations significantly more expensive. No way, it must be a political conspiracy against nuclear power (but somehow the nuclear hating politicians don't seem to mind paying the inflated bills).

https://ieefa.org/resources/eye-popping-new-cost-estimates-r...

"Remarkably, the new $89/MWh price of power would be much higher if it were not for more than $4 billion in subsidies NuScale and UAMPS expect to get from U.S. taxpayers through a $1.4 billion contribution from the Department of Energy and the estimated $30/MWh subsidy in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). "

> Ah yes, politics wants it to be uneconomical that is why NuScale's nuclear power plant has doubled its costs. It is certainly not the cost of input materials or changes in the interest rate, which makes long financing durations significantly more expensive.

You're talking about recent events that apply to any kind of large scale construction project. If that was the reason then why didn't anyone build a hundred nuclear plants during the decade+ of low interest rates when building materials were cheaper?

> but somehow the nuclear hating politicians don't seem to mind paying the inflated bills

They're not the same politicians. And subsidies aren't as effective as actual regulatory reform because they don't scale, which the opponents know so they don't fight them as hard. They can stand adding 3 GW of nuclear plants to the US grid; adding 300 GW would shut down a large fraction of existing fossil fuel generating plants. But the only way that happens is if you address regulatory inefficiency because large subsidies only fit in the budget when you're not building many new plants.

If nuclear waste is radioactive, it means that it can be refined into usable products for power production.

The dangerous stuff that's left over is dangerous because it was formally cheaper to bury it and mine more than to refine it .

Not to mention the majority of nuclear reactors were designed to create weapons grade materials which was an equally wasteful activity creative even more waste that needed refinement back to usable fuel.

Now that's coming to an end since power production is far more important. There may be a point Where we will see ourselves digging up nuclear waste sites to recover the left over refuel.

How heavy is this waste, and can it be put into rockets and sent somewhere off-planet?

Strapping waste to enormous canisters of fuel and shooting it up through the atmosphere. What could go wrong?

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

The US alone has performed 520+ atmospheric nuclear weapons tests. I'm not suggesting adding to that number, but perhaps there is a method to get nuclear waste off-planet.

The difference is large. If you blow up a nuke without contact to soil and stuff there is very little left for dangerous long term contamination. Hiroshima isn't dangerous to live in. Chernobyl is.

If a rocket blows up and spreads whatever is left when we removed it from a nuclear power plant that would be bad.

All these little reactors need HALEU fuel… which of course is only made in quantity in Russia.

DOE is going to have to spend billions to build infrastructure to support these efforts. Regulating Centrus and figure out how to transport UF6 around.

> Initiated in response to a Fiscal Year 2019 National Defense Authorization Act requirement, DAF’s Micro-Reactor Pilot Program seeks to build and operate at least one licensed microreactor by Dec. 31, 2027, that will deliver power and steam to a defense base under a long-term power purchase agreement (PPA).

For those of you like me who got excited about the prospect of nuclear powered aircraft, the reactor is to power a base.

For 24/7/365/30 constant airborne capabilities? Seems overkill to say the least. Also, not sure too many people would be happy with a nuclear reactor flying overhead.

Funnily enough, molten salt reactor were developed for this specific purpose: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_Reactor_Experiment

With some very scary designs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto

> deliver them with greater accuracy than was possible with intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBMs) at the time and, unlike them, could be recalled.

hold up, what

Launch the nukes, abort the launch, and then have the nukes... fly back to base, and land safely without exploding.

Right I get that there's fail-safes for the warheads, but that seems definitely scary, I agree

No, I'm afraid you are mistaken what is scary about these.

People have "launch the nuke, abort the nuke, fly back to base and land safely without exploding" already. That is called a nuclear armed bomber.

The scary thing about these is that their propulsion is a nuclear reactor. You know how in a jet engine the air is heated up by burning fuel? Here the air is heated up by comming into contact with the reactor. They exhaust fission products while they fly. To quote from the page: "The other major problem with the SLAM concept was the environmental damage caused by radioactive emissions during flight, and the disposal of the reactor at the end of the mission. Merkle estimated that about 100 grams of fission products would be produced, which would be dispersed over a wide area."

This thing is by design, when nothing goes wrong leaves a contrail of radioactive contamination behind it. And when things go wrong it leaves even more contamination.

And the funny thing is, the Russians are still experimenting with this tech: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9M730_Burevestnik

And predictably as they were trying to scope their test wreckage from the sea floor they managed to have a radiation incident with it in 2019: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyonoksa_radiation_accident

(As you can read the exact circumstances are disputed, but I believe this is the most likely explanation of what we have seen.)

The SLAM missile it was designed for was scarier than just that. It was to be able to fly supersonic close to the ground for months at end and could be modified to bleed radioactivity into the exhaust. So not only would it nuke several cities, it would then deafen, kill and/or radiation poison with its flyovers.

When you absolutely must demonstrate how much 'the good guys' side you are.

when freedom is rained down, there are multiple forms of precipitation it can arrive

That sort of power density is just absolutely mind boggling.

Also, potentially bad outcomes if a nuclear aircraft is shot down.

> For 24/7/365/30 constant airborne capabilities?

I'm not saying it's necessary (or even a good idea, see the "accidents" section in the linked to article), but it also wouldn't be the first time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Chrome_Dome

> For 24/7/365/30 constant airborne capabilities?

Probably for the ability to replace fossil fuels in an application where batteries don't have enough energy density.

> Also, not sure too many people would be happy with a nuclear reactor flying overhead.

Better not tell them the kinds of things in the cargo holds of existing planes.

You may find this interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kR5gefU87TY (t 6:12). Sadly it didn't pan out.

They used the word 'pilot' in an ambiguous way, in the context of the Airforce, and then the first photo on the page is of an aircraft in flight. I think the editors _wanted_ you to momentarily think this was going to be an airborne reactor.