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Comment by phendrenad2 | Hacker News Reader

Maybe we can buy some of these South Korean nuclear submarines, park them off the coast of the US, and use them for energy. If we do it quick, we might be able to get nuclear power going before the environmentalists notice.

Edit: Your downvotes only make me more powerful.

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Your post raises an interesting question. Will the US let South Korea use its naval reactors? The US naval reactors use highly enriched uranium, which can be easily converted into bombs. France used to use highly enriched uranium, but their latest nuclear subs use low enriched uranium (LEU). Now, part of what made the US naval reactors so reliable is that they kept the same design over so many decades. If they change to LEU, that probably requires quite a major design change. If they do that, they might as well allow the civilian industry to use that design for non-military purposes.

Your post is flippant, or you forgot the /s (Poe's law strikes again), but in case anyone took this seriously: using the subs to provide energy would be grossly uneconomical even by current nuclear power standards. Naval reactors are comparatively puny and optimized for compactness and long periods between refueling, which means using highly enriched fuels: very expensive and a proliferation concern.

Why would we buy south korean subs for this, especially ones south korea is building with us navy help? we have nuclear subs and the us is actually pretty good at building more of them. It's the cheapest kind of reactor we have and doesn't get protested by environmentalists.

The transmission from sub / ship to shore is not great I think, though. They're used for power during disaster recovery?

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