394
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2024
394 points (97.6% liked)
Technology
60123 readers
3948 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Does anyone know about the technology that nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers use? Why are they able to operate but we can't use the same technology on land?
I was a nuclear operator in the Navy. Here are the actual reasons:
There’s more but that’s just off the top of my head
Because if the military wants something, budgets are big. And they do not need to make money.
Military expenses, the only socialism acceptable to Americans.
Gotta love how the post office is legally required to show they can turn a profit, but the military has a history of building literal burn pits that essentially burn US tax dollars by lighting equipment on fire and giving soldiers cancer.
The fact that this was your take away is concerning.
No government service should have to show a profit. If it’s an essential service, then it needs to be done. The only time money should come into it is in regular audits to ensure the budget is being used efficiently.
Yup, the military's purpose is to not be needed. It should be strong enough to deter attack and assist diplomacy (carrot and stick), and no larger. Our (US) military is bigger than that, so it gets used in place of diplomacy.
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/most-ridiculous-things-united-states-military-spent-money-on
Boner pills, anti-rape lip balm (which they destroyed) and other such brilliant things.
And the margins for DoD contracts can be through the roof.
Because military engineers overengineer these things from the most expensive materials available, and they also perform frequent maintenance on them, which is also expensive.
To add to this: A certain type of Soviet submarine used a lead-bismuth alloy as coolant for their reactor. The coolant solidifies at ambient temperature so it had to be heated indefinitely by some way or another or else it solidified and trashed the reactor. I don't think any of them exist anymore since Russia wasn't able to afford sustaining the giant navy after the Soviet collapse.
Just goes to show how insane nuclear submarine engineering is, or was at some point.
Military budgets. You can use the tech, but no civilian can afford it.
They used pressurised water reactors with enriched uranium. Dunno how the costs run but there is no strategic alternative anyway. They also wouldn't want such highly enriched uranium to be commonplace.
And cost isn't really an issue for militaries, while it absolutely is for civilians.
I'm pretty sure they essentially are "one time use" only.
Extremely simplified:
They run for 20-30 years without refueling, which means the reactors/system could be built more compact, a higher level of safety and require less maintenance / monitoring / fine-tuning.
All those parameters are connected in an equation which means if you want higher safety you have to make another parameter "worse". By making the system "one time use" you set the "refuelability" and "repairability" parameters to the lowest and can therefore up the other parameters.
Also, military requirements are very different from civilian.
It's expensive in subs too
I’m pretty sure most military reactors use weapons grade uranium that’s enriched to mid 90%. Countries get sensitive when you start enriching uranium to the mid 90s.
Because if the electricity produced on these vessels was ten times the normal price, it would still be peanuts in the grand scheme of things.