Thursday, February 14, 2019

Naval nuclear power, why not for small ships?

Read an interesting book the other day (series actually) which was a zombie apocalypse story.  Appears to have ripped off various other stories but it was entertaining and well read, and since I hadn't read the other stories, I didn't know so didn't care.  On the other hand, there are probably a limited number of zombie apocalypse scenarios, so maybe a review of the literature would indicate that the genre is pretty tradition bound.

(Reminds me of the joke about the fellow reading Shakespeare for the first time and commenting that he was a horrible author, all he ever did was write in cliches.)

Anyway, none of that is the point.  The point is that in the books there is a new class of Navy destroyer that is nuclear powered and run on molten salt reactors.   As a former "nuke" (please don't ever write it as "nuc" if you are writing a book, no one does that except authors who don't know any better from what I've seen) this interested me.

A few years ago I looked into working for a company that was using transportable salt reactors to power operations in remote oil fields.   Didn't work out (I had a phone interview, they sounded interested in me but weren't ready to start operations, and that was the last I heard.  I suspect that they weren't nearly as together as they implied when they offered to interview me) but I did a little research into the concept to prep for the interview.

When I saw the concept in the books it started me wondering why the Navy wasn't doing this now.  The technology is available, it is proven (near as I can tell) and if anyone has the experience to create this kind of program it would be the Navy.  So the research started again.

Power Mag - Molten Salt Reactors and Military Application

Forbes - Nuscale and reactor development

City Journal Future of Atomic Energy

Well, one thing I learned is that the fellow I interviewed with was definitely full of it.  From the reading above sounds like they are close to being able to maybe build some of these but they were NOT operational a dozen years ago when he claimed that they were getting ready to run some in Alberta.

Interesting stuff though.  I'm a big proponent of continued development and use.  I have an article in my stuff about recycling nuclear "waste" and the various uses for the bits, including medical and power generation uses.  Haven't seen much since then (article dates back about thirty years) but I suspect that the lack of development relates to the hostility towards nuclear power that has been fairly evident in public policy and in the environmental movement.

1 comment:

innominatus said...

I'm in Corvallis, home of NuScale. I guess I'm also in the "believe it when I see it" camp, but there sure seems to be a lot more noise about NuScale over the last few months. Hopefully they're really on to something.