
Nuclear power plants are coming to the battlefield - prostoalex
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2020/03/12/nuclear-power-plants-are-coming-to-the-battlefield
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acidburnNSA
The key point in here is that fully half of the fatalities on the battlefield
are attacks on oil convoys supplying troops. If you can have a nuclear power
source you don't need to truck oil around and your exposure goes way down.
Good old mass-to-energy conversions being 2,000,000x more energetic per
reaction than combustion.

The army developed lots of small reactors for similar reasons back in the late
1950s/early 1960s but they just were too expensive. 10x too expensive even in
wartime, according to some 1960s congressional testimony I was reading the
other day.

Here's the army's old ML-1 reactor (nitrogen cooled, truck mounted):
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML-1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML-1)

I think this time they want to try to get costs down more.

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jpalomaki
Reason why something is needed : ”In 2016 a report by the Defence Science
Board, a committee of experts, concluded that demand would surge as new power-
hungry weapons, like lasers and rail-guns, come to maturity. Vehicles are also
moving away from fossil fuels: America expects to have all-electric brigades
within the decade”

According to article we would be talking about maybe 40 ton few megawat units,
which could be transported with truck and placed to remote military bases.

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kstenerud
This will be a wonderful source of pre-processed nuclear material. No way any
of that would ever go missing in the field. Or get hit with a shell and spread
all over.

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coribuci
> This will be a wonderful source of pre-processed nuclear material. No way
> any of that would ever go missing in the field. Or get hit with a shell and
> spread all over.

FYI depleted uranium projectiles are already used in the "field". The problem
is that nobody talks about them and the effect on the environment.

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acidburnNSA
Unirradiated and irradiated uranium are many orders of magnitude different in
their radioactive dose rates.

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jessaustin
Unmentioned in TFA: what's to become of the spent fuel. Maybe since we're
fighting in someone else's home, we can just leave it there...

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e12e
Keep in mind that depleted uranium has been used for ammunition (arguably
resulting in war crimes against the civilian population in Iraq).

I think it's safe to say that the armies of the world has not learned much
from wwi:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_Rouge](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_Rouge)

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mdorazio
Spent fuel is a hell of a lot more dangerous than depleted uranium, though. DU
is less radioactive than the unprocessed kind that comes out of the ground.
Spent fuel, on the other hand, is extremely radioactive - enough that just
spreading it with a regular bomb would be really bad.

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coretx
When either is atomized enough for people being able to breath it, the end
results is something you likely don't want to see. Nor does it matter if it
was DU or spent fuel; at that point.

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smacktoward
What could possibly go wrong?

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lispm
This is the last thing humankind needs: nuclear powered battlefields.

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7952
It's curious how the US military can commission projects that would be
difficult to get off the ground if the justification was ethical.

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e12e
I've not read tfa (because of the pay wall) - but don't we have third or
fourth generation micro reactors already in submarines, ice breakers and
hangar ships? Obviously there's going to be a lot of water available for
those... But is much research really needed to repurpose one as a generator?

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andrewl
From the article:

The idea of small reactors is as old as nuclear power itself. In July 1951,
five months before a reactor in Idaho became the first in the world to produce
usable electricity through fission, America began building USS Nautilus, a
nuclear-powered submarine. In the 1960s and 1970s small reactors powered bases
in Alaska and Greenland, a radar facility in Wyoming, a research station in
Antarctica and—from a cargo ship—the Panama Canal Zone. America still uses
nuclear-powered submarines and aircraft-carriers. _But land-based mini-
reactors proved unreliable and expensive and have fallen out of favour._

I was thinking the same thing you suggested, that maybe the basically
unlimited supply of water for cooling made the ocean-going reactors feasible.
Other than that, I'd think a mostly stationary reactor would be simpler to
deal with than a ship-based one.

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coretx
While Russia is putting dangerous fastbreeders on the North Pole using ancient
icebreakers; the USA is already developing fusion reactors for use at navy
carriers.

We all know what it looks like when a fastbreeder goes boom. But can anyone
here tell us what will happen when experimental fusion reactors get blown to
pieces ?

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gdy
That's an ignorant comment.

Russia's using the the same kind of reactors (pressurized water reactors) as
American supercarriers.

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coretx
Thank you for correcting me! Can you also answer my other question? What
should I imagine in case a experimental fusion reactor gets blown up ?

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gdy
I don't know, but I've always assumed that nothing too bad, like radioactive
contamination, would happen.

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coretx
Assumptions are perhaps even more dangerous than the topic at hand.

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isoprophlex
This is the military industrial complex reaching new levels of insanity.

We restrict Iranian students from studying at our universities, but will start
littering the battlefield with nuclear appliances. This seems a proliferation
accident waiting to happen...

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coretx
You just explained the Atlantic hatred for Iran. In case of rational
adversaries, the "littering" would convert presence into "MAD" endgame. That's
a swift resolution of conflict! Unlike adversaries in the past such as for
example the Soviet Union, Iran is not a rational actor thus the MAD scenario
will not lead to resolution/stalemate but to obliteration. Never the less, it
is a humane solution at other theaters of war.

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cultofmetatron
America killed one of their national heroes. This put them in the position if
retaliating and risking a war or appearing weak and open to another incursion.

They proceeded with a symbolic attack that left no one dead and declared that
thats the end of that as long as the US does not escalate.

Sounds pretty damn rational to me...

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topkai22
The were shooting to kill but missed, and then accidentally shot down a 3rd
party’s airliner killing 176 people, including 82 of their own citizens. In my
opinion, that tragedy was what was responsible for the de-escalation.

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Grue3
It's unfortunate that it's easier to deploy the latest nuclear technologies on
battlefield than in civilian use. Maybe this will change once they are
(literally) battle-tested.

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berbec
Anyone thinking, even briefly, about potential spin-off designed from these
small reactors will likely be unable to sleep due to nightmares of a few
backpack nukes hidden in the NYC subway system.

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acidburnNSA
What? Small nuclear explosives like the Davy Crockett shoulder-launched bomb
have been around forever. Those are pretty unrelated to microreactors.

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A4ET8a8uTh0
I am not sure how to read it. So because those are not explicitly weapons,
their proliferation is perfectly ok? How big a blast would a mini reactor
produce if it was mishandled?

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XorNot
None. But if it is blown up by say, artillery or a truck load of semtex, the
fine vapor of radioactive dust sprayed all over the place will make a decent
chunk of land pretty dangerous to hang out on.

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tomatotomato37
To be fair any bigger conflict than a guerilla proxy war will do that too,
whether it be from salting the fields, WWI mustard gas, unexploded ordance
and/or mines, agent orange, or fallout from an actual nuclear bombardment. The
scars of war persist for quite a while.

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yannis
Has the US gone nuts? I know this might not go well in some circles, but is
there another way to put it?

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loopz
Will they withstand sabotage and nuclear bombs, such as normal nuclear plants
are?

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etrabroline
No nuclear power plant can survive being hit by a nuclear weapon.

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loopz
Citation?

