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Comment by rich_sasha | Hacker News Reader

I'm mildly pro nuclear, but even then I'm not sure I'd have one of those near people. Minor incidents happen frequently, but they would be so much severe, or at least scary, if there's thousands of people within a mile of the device.

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The U.S. Navy nuclear program has developed 27 different plant designs, installed them in 210 nuclear-powered ships, taken 500 reactor cores into operation, and accumulated over 5,400 reactor years of operation and 128,000,000 miles safely steamed. (source Wikipedia)

Many of these have operated in and around the most densely populated ports and cities in the world.

I helped operate 3 of them. No issues.

The US Navy should build and operate commercial reactors as a revenue generator.

One of the keys to the US Navy's success is standardization of reactor design, components and training. A sailor can go from one sub to the next and find the reactor plant nearly identical in operation and design as the other within the same class of ship.

Nearly every commercial plant is different in design and components. Imagine if every company you worked for designed, built their own operating system and computers.

Yes, exactly. Have the Navy design, deploy, and operate reactors for that very reason. They've already done it, instead of startups attempting to start from zero. Even if you don't generate a profit, or operate at a reasonable loss, you're projecting soft power a la China's Belt and Road while providing humanitarian and environmental benefits.

You might even deploy them as marine vessels in ports [1], so that in the event of a (hopefully rare!) catastrophic failure, flooding the reactor with water is trivial.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_power...

Tell us how much, on a per-KWh, the design, build, and operational costs of a Navy reactor are please.

I don't know about others, but personally I am not very comfortable with the idea of a military branch becoming financially independent.

That said, all of these reactors have been on platforms surrounded by water and are occupied by hundreds if not thousands of trained (some highly trained) crew 24/7. It goes without saying that many of those crew are also armed or directly tasked with ensuring nobody can tamper with the nuclear power source / any part of the platform. I should also add a very good friend of mine is a nuclear engineer who works on submarines.

I'm not sure it's even fair to compare the operational discrepancies of something as simple as a test / training reactor to a nuclear heat source at a concrete plant?

You should know, then, that the cost to design, build, and operate those reactors was orders of magnitude higher than any commercial plant that would be competitive.

The problem with nuclear is primarily cost, cost, cost, and then scale, security, and waste.

I try to think about nuclear energy the same way I think about chemical hazards. Chemical spills are happening all the time and we hardly notice unless we are ordered to evacuate. Nuclear seems a lot more scary, but it's not really much more dangerous than a LOT of industrial chemical plants.

In addition oversight for Nuclear is WAY better. If there is a breach we're way more likely to know, rather than wondering why everyone in a certain Indiana town is getting a rare form of cancer from an unreported chemical spill.

Risk tolerance wise, I would rather have one of these running next door, than having a steel plant 20 miles away...

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/california/articles/...

https://apnews.com/article/27ee93094ce81e2522bd495138db9554

https://apnews.com/article/61b2a91a8e4042f1a8d43e734551f159

Just spitballing, but if we're going to play with things like nuclear reactors, why not keep them and their waste relatively close to human settlements specifically in order to promote a culture of responsible management?

This is founded on the proposition that everyone trying to push ecological costs somewhere else, somewhere "over there", can be way more dangerous to human wellbeing than the occasional natural disaster or accident.

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