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Comment by dekhn | Hacker News Reader

I think other folks are saying this but the navy solved this problem decades ago.

That’s just not really true.

If that’d be the case then such small nuclear reactors would be powering US military bases and outposts all over the planet.

This ain’t a thing for a myriad of reasons, starting from cooling (not much ocean in the middle of the east), to profileration risks (navy designs using weapons grade uranium).

I'm sorry, I should have said the Army: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Iceworm shows that we were definitely experimenting with nuclear power for remote military bases. They struggled with air-cooling. I consider reactors with weapons grade uranium to be an acceptable risk, but I don't think it's required for the army reactor style.

Army is defacto banned to work on anything involving nuclear energy or weapons for awhile now. Rumor is the government does not trust. Pretty interesting. USAF is well quite scary with how bad they manage our nukes..

USAF, or specifically SAC, put priority on nuking as many civilian areas in as short amount of time as possible. Safety was a distant concern in that mindset, and led to fun stuff like first generation PADs (which controlled arming process of the warhead) being commonly (iirc, up to 50%?) configured to accept all zeroes as arming code.

USN at the same time considered PADs to be undue slowdown in the same mission and had enough power to just not have them mounted, afaik.

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