US military eyes prototype mobile nuclear reactor in Idaho | Hacker News Reader

US military eyes prototype mobile nuclear reactor in Idaho

apnews.com

121 pointsFactorium114 comments

To address a few points made here... this isn't about frontline mobile bases or airplanes or ships. This is about "what if... we have a main base located somewhere with poor supply lines?" In other words, something like Afghanistan.

In Afghanistan, shipping fuel in was extremely expensive resulting in costs of $400/gallon (~$100/liter) at the destination[1]. At that level of shipping costs, electrical generation is so expensive that it makes sense to investigate small-scale reactors to see if they could make economic sense.

[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/63407-400gallon-...

For several years the US Government spent more on fuel to air condition tents in the desert than it did on NASA.

I'm not talking about the tents themselves, or the soldiers living in them, their supplies or assistance after the war. All of that cost more. I'm just talking about fuel for air conditioners.

That's incredible, cost of war aside, you'd think solar and batteries would be used if only for the: 1) ability to redeploy 2) one-time shipping event for setup 3) ability to self sustain on supply issues.

That would be a massive amount of solar, if a tent AC has 7kw and a standard panel has 180w theoretical output.

A standard 2x1m panel now has an output of more like 450-500 watts. Technology has moved on since the days of 9% efficient panels!

So if we assume the sun was shining whenever the AC needs to draw 7kW, that would mean roughly 30m^2 of solar panels per 7kW AC.

So roughly one (american) football field of solar panels for every 180 or so 7kW AC units. (Rounding generously since this is just a thought experiment to look at some lower bounds.You'd probably need a lot more solar panels than that (3x?), plus battery infrastructure, plus some way of cleaning the panels etc. for this to be practical)

If you actually wanted to solar power the military, you'd design stuff the be energy efficient from the start. That would probably consist of all buildings having 3 inches of insulation on all sides so that you need far less cooling. Then you have the solar cells built into the roof, and the batteries built in too, so the whole unit is "dump this anywhere in the world and it makes habitable space".

Grid connection optional - and if provided can be used to automatically balance electrical load between buildings.

This probably weighs less than a tent plus generator plus fuel.

It's not practical to build insulated buildings at forward operating bases. They don't have the time, materials, or equipment. Everything has to be flown in by helicopter, or transported in truck convoys over terrible roads under constant threat of roadside bombs. Tents are light and can be erected in minutes.

"The Army has a $95 million contract to foam up to nine million square feet of building space in Iraq, of which about 60 percent has been completed. The Army also let a $29 million contract to foam structures in Afghanistan. So far, 150,000 square feet have been foamed. It takes a mere 26 days to recoup the costs of the foaming through the fuel savings." https://www.army.mil/article/20777/army_saves_fuel_and_lives...

Have you taken some time to consider why forward operating bases make use of tents rather than what, for all practical purposes, would be houses?

Even just putting two tents on top of each other already improves the insulation a lot, because of the air layer. This was used already during the second world war over here.

In reality in general it's hard to do things that make sense as a whole - large organizations can only optimize invididual parts.

Solar pannels don't work at night and you can't ask the enemy to attack on sunny days.

I think there might be a correlation between sunny days and AC usage.

You also use AC to heat the tens at night in the desert.

There's that crazy idea called batteries. For "bigger" stuff one could produce hydrogen during the day (for fuel-cells or straight up burning in combustion engines).

But yeah i would too, not use solar-panels in a warzone.

Why would you want to introduce complex, hard to move storage technology that produces and consumes enormous amounts of explosive gas, and has much, much higher energy loss than both thermal and electrical storage?

Whenever hydrogen turns up in discussions about energy storage people tend to forget physics and the infrastructure reality of dealing with electrolysis, compression and liquefaction and powercells ... which ultimately charge batteries so you can buffer energy to deal with varying consumption.

>which ultimately charge batteries so you can buffer energy to deal with varying consumption.

It's just one thing, storage huge amounts of energy in liq. hydrogen is easier then in batteries (who are explosive as well) and heavy.

But again...i would not use one of those technologies at all in a War-zone..all of them are way too complex for the field.

No, it isn't easier. Which you would know if you had bothered actually reading up on the matter.

So at tank is more complicated than a battery...tell that ~every single rocket.

Storing energy as hydrogen involves a lot more than just a tank. Again, you obviously didn't bother reading up on this and you are guessing how hydrogen based energy systems work. You clearly don't.

BS, for liq. hydrogen you need to perfectly isolate it and that's it, the Adrianne rocket could achieve that with a 1.3mm think tank.

And storing compressed hydrogen needs nothing more then a Gas tank like the one under your Grill.

You even use compressed hydrogen for welding.

Again, you know nothing and try to blind everyone with your highly secret knowledge.

https://energies.airliquide.com/resources-planet-hydrogen/ho...

>>For example, the tanks on the Ariane launcher, designed and manufactured by Air Liquide, contain the 28 tons of liquid hydrogen that will provide fuel to the central engine. These tanks are a genuine example of technological prowess: they weigh only 5.5 tons empty and their casing is not more than 1.3 mm thick.

There is nothing "secret" about the challenges of turning energy into hydrogen and then back into heat or electricity. The challenges of each step along the energy chain are pretty well understood.

You make the naive assumption that you temporarily storing hydrogen in a tank with 1.3mm thick walls that needs to last for, at most, a couple of days, has any relevance for permanent energy installations.

If you are going to argue for an energy storage technology you have to consider what it would actually look like in practice. And since you only want to consider one part of the chain: I suggest you look into what it takes to safely store hydrogen in a vehicle and how this compares to your naive belief that hydrogen behaves like liquids that you have an intuitive understanding of. (Spoiler: you'd have a hard time convincing authorities to let you drive around traffic with a 1.3mm thick tank in the back of your car).

Then again, I don't think you want to actually know anything about this. I think you only want to argue and you are annoyed that someone called you out.

>Storing energy as hydrogen involves a lot more than just a tank.

The 1.3mm example was to prove that it's technological possible to isolate liquid hydrogen with such a tank. In a car you don't use liq nitrogen[1]. You just shift the usage-surrounding to make your point, it's like saying "but using kerosene in a rocket needs some additional measures too", true. Exactly like using a toilet in space needs some additional measures too.

[1] https://www.ieafuelcell.com/fileadmin/_processed_/e/e/csm_fc...

You suggested that a tank used for ultra short-term storage of hydrogen was relevant in this context. I didn't. When you realized that your assumptions about hydrogen didn't hold you became unpleasant and childish.

You can’t cover solar arrays and they have large area, so hitting them from distance is fairly easy.

How easy is it to design a solar array that stays operating (with reduced capacity) after a few mortar hits?

I would guess solar arrays in space that beam energy down are a better solution for military bases in times of war. The USA is actively working on that (https://www.livescience.com/microwave-beam-military-space-pl...)

FYI, this is the "space laser" part of the "jewish space lasers" of Marjorie Taylor Greene that left everyone laughing about how (wrongly) absurd space lasers are and forgot about the anti-semitism.

She basically said that a system like you've mentioned was tested, misfired and started wildfires. It was then covered up by some Jewish guy on the board.

Not in 2003.

If an advanced invading army requires solar power, as an freedom fighter u I’m going to lob mortars and snipe those panels.

Also exactly what was happening to the fuel convoys heading across Afghanistan.

I think better having people target your equipment in a base where its easier to have defence and a perimeter, than over a regular and long supply line.

Better to have attacks on a base where you can mount an effective defence rather than letting your supply line get ambushed?

I don’t know if it’s better or worse but different with different risks.

Per retired brigadier general Steven Anderson, who did logistics for Petraeus in Iraq:

* https://www.npr.org/2011/06/25/137414737/among-the-costs-of-...

The DoD position:

> Defense Department spokesman Dave Lapan says that in fiscal year 2010, the Pentagon spent approximately $15 billion on energy for all military operations around the world. The Pentagon says when it comes to Afghanistan, it spent $1.5 billion from October 2010 to May 2011 on fuel. That fuel was used for heating and air conditioning systems, but also for aircraft, unmanned aerial systems, combat vehicles, computers and electricity inside military structures.

On Anderson (at the time):

> Anderson advocates for increased energy efficiency for military structures in order to cut down on the need for long, dangerous fuel-transport missions. […] Anderson says experiments with polyurethane foam insulation for tents in Iraq cut energy use by 92 percent and took 11,000 fuel trucks off the road. […]

> In February 2011 Gen. Anderson has joined the Relyant corporation as Senior Vice President, in charge for the company’s presence in Washington, D.C., managing the organization’s strategic planning and military business development. Relyant is a global provider of construction and insulation projects, life support, demining, logistics/procurement, security, and IT communications. It should be noted though that these additional costs are spent regardless of the volume of supplies sent over supply lines, as the convoys do not carry only fuel, but also food, ammunition, batteries, spare parts, building supplies etc. nevertheless, a green approach could significantly reduce volume, and costs and risk of such operations.

* https://defense-update.com/20110627_costly_aircondition.html

> $400/gallon (~$100/liter)

That wasn't because fuel (or shipping) is inherently expensive. Some contractors just made a ton of money. Fuel in Iraq close by is like 50 cents a five gallon bucket.

Wait till you see how much it costs to deliver a reactor there, and especially remove it from there (not something you can leave to the Taliban, like helicopters and Humvees).

Yeah, overly expensive contractors must have been part of the story for a price like that. That said, I'd much rather military money be spent on new/interesting technologies like mobile nuclear reactors than on old stuff that isn't going anywhere.

These costs were due to air refueling. And then delivering fuel by helicopter. Applied to really far away mountain areas with no road access at all.

Why, though? Concerns about the quality of the locally available fuel? Concerns about the supply of the locally available fuel? Or just some monetarily aligned motivations?

I have to assume security issues with shipping large quantities of fuel to bases by ground had something to do with it, though presumably the adopted solution was an extravagantly wasteful one driven by a culture of budgetary excess.

I imagine both quantity and quality (including the risk of wilful adulteration) were issues.

The first one would be compounded by fuel economy rarely being high on the list of concerns for military procurement.

Probably the quantity of the locally available fuel. Not to mention that many of the locals were buying their fuel from Iran. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/8/24/iran-resumes-a-cruc...

But the corruption involved was just staggering, in all directions. Here's a Kyrgyz guy misappropriating Russian jet fuel and selling it to the US in 2010: https://foreignpolicy.com/2010/12/21/did-an-american-contrac... / https://www.justsecurity.org/2726/the-juice-worth-squeeze-ky...

But of course even the locals couldn't buy fuel without protection money being paid to the Taliban, so that's what the US ended up doing: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/10/9/11-millionaires-and-corrup...

> According to a Pentagon analysis, 40% of the $108 billion that the Defense Department paid to contractors in Afghanistan between 2010 and 2012 ended up in the hands of either the Taliban, the violent Islamist Haqqani terror network, organized crime rings, transnational drug traffickers or corrupt Afghan officials.

Besides costs, having forward operating bases with nuclear power plants also makes battery-powered fighting vehicles (or plug-in hybrids) feasible. I can see a whole lot of advatages for those.

While the article says that these are enriched uranium models; leaving a molten salt (thorium) reactor is much more practical.

Add in the concept that micro power plants would really boost local infrastructure and you spread freedom through capitalism.

So if they have worked it out earlier, Taliban would've ended up with a reactor, too?

The US did quite well at keeping the sensitive stuff out of Taliban hands. What the Taliban got was:

1. Enormous quantities of gear that belonged to the Afghan government

2. US military equipment that the US consciously decided not to pack out or destroy.

Quite a bit of that had to be destroyed on site - glass powder in helicopter fuel tanks etc.

Harder to do safely with a reactor.

The US military did not leave any helicopters when it pulled out.

The Afghan Army and US State department left helicopters.

That's semantic quibbling that's entirely missing the point.

No, it isn't. Equipment that the US military was managing was evacuated securely and on schedule. Equipment that it had handed off to other parties (mostly the ANA) was not. Nuclear reactors are not likely to fall into the second category.

The Taliban got equipment that the US gave to the Afghan government military. The US didn’t leave them with sensitive or specialized equipment. Anything left behind that was sensitive was permanently disabled.

It’s so handy how there’s always a national-level partisan angle to prevent us from ever having to discuss certain global issues. I get so many upboats in my favorite racially-segregated-Tweet-screenshots subreddit when I incredulously wonder how Those People can even exist with such broken brains. We should really Do Something about them or they might become violent next time I remind them that their perception of reality is wrong.

Cynicism is destroying discourse. Everyone thinks that everyone else is dumb and no one respects the shoes that other people walk in.

Would the reactor core be light enough to fly out in a C-17 when the main base is abandoned?

Who can say about aircraft-transportable, but it says "mobile" right there in the title of the article.

There’s a broad range of mobility though, Akademik Lomonosov is mobile but it’s a 21500 tonnes non-self-propelled barge.

Didnt they try this early on and it went poorly... IIRC the only event that had immediate casualties in the US

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1

It seems likely this was a suicide by someone with a good idea of what happens when you very rapidly yank the single control rod from a reactor.

That said, no more single control rods...

In an emergency bug out, one needs the ability to destroy or render safe and inoperable anything and everything. How the hell would that work with a reactor? Seems like a bad situation.

A 1to 5 MW reactor isn't going to have a lot of actual fuel... you could probably pull the actual weaponizable fuel pellets and shielding into something the size of a briefcase and leave the generation infrastructure behind.

(I dunno if they are built this way, it just doesn't seem particularly impossible).

So you are going to put the fissile material which operates at muti megawatts in a briefcase and carry it away?

Disregarding the health and safety issues of the briefcase carrier the briefcase is sure to turn into a pile of molten radioactive sludge very quickly.

Yes, of course. Below critical mass for chain reaction, fissile material deteriorates fairly quickly into stable isotopes.

the multi-megawatts comes from the nuclear chain reaction. presumably any package used to transport fuel would prevent criticality.

I believe the 1% of nominal output is a reasonable ballpark for cooling requirements after a reactor is shut down. 1% of 1MW is still 10kW. You probably don't want to transport that in a briefcase.

> the briefcase is sure to turn into a pile of molten radioactive sludge

Nah those have already existed for a long time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...

They could probably render the reactor inoperable by destroying the supporting equipment around the nuclear core, but couldn't they just plan on flying it out? I don't know how heavy the military's reactor is, but this 1MW reactor claims to fit in a shipping container and able to be flown or trucked out:

The microreactor is designed to fit in a shipping container and can be easily transported by air, ship, and road

https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-science-technology-busi...

A plan C still sounds like a good idea.

Blow it up and let the local population deal with the fallout? Backlash would be huge, yet I think it could happen, in a "Oops we fucked up, see ya!" situation.

No need to blow it out, I would hope an SMR (or MMR) would be designed with full containment in case of meltdown, so you can trigger a meltdown on your way out, and whoever arrives gets a bunch of corium encased in heavy shielding.

I do like the idea of leaving behind an object that's not dangerous, it's just so incredibly heavy that it greatly inconveniences the enemy.

Corium is absolutely dangerous - it take heavy equipment and time to break it apart and use it, and the stuff tends to be so massively radioactive it'll kill most gear and people who try to do the job.

The shielding, in this case, serves to protect innocent bystanders who aren't trying to pull the thing apart. Though I would still not want to live close by - intentional "safe" meltdowns are not a well-explored technology.

Would there be corium though? Isn't that caused by destruction of the container? Seems like there would just be melted Uranium very slowly cooling off.

Corium is "everything in the reactor melted together". It doesn't have to include the containment vessel. For example, in Chernobyl, the corium didn't include any of the containment vessel, because RBMKs funny have containment vessels.

For something this small the proportion of uranium would probably be higher, but it'd still be a radioactive slurry of fuel, decay products, control systems, cooling loop, and internal structural materials.

*because RBMKs don't have containment vessels

zero consequences, just follow the Bikini Island pattern nobody bats an eyelid.

A plan C (or maybe A) would be to use the TRISO fuel [1],[2],[3], and it's almost certain that this project will use it (at this point nothing is final, this paper is just a call for comments). This fuel is small grains the size of a poppy seed. If you need to leave in a hurry, you just put the fuel in some boxes, maybe mixed with some sand, and load the boxes in an airplane and fly away.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fuel#TRISO_fuel

[2] https://www.energy.gov/ne/downloads/x-energy-tier-i-awardee

[3] https://www.energy.gov/ne/advanced-reactor-technologies

You could transfer the clean fuel as a powder and pelletize and assemble fuel bundles on-site. Just mix the powder with a bunch of frangible containers of depleted uranium powder like glass cylinders and if the need arises or in an emergency situation (crash in transport), you've mixed the mildly enriched reactor grade fuel with enough depleted uranium to make it largely worthless.

For an operating reactor it would definitely need to be passively safe. If you went with a molten salt breeder reactor or even just a non-breeder like the MSRE you could dump the fuel salt into your drain tanks mixed with a bunch of some boron compound. You could set off small charges to spray a bunch of dimethylmercury all over the outside of the reactor to kill anyone foolish enough to enter the building. I think that would be banned by the Geneva convention but the point is that there are ways of "salting the earth" within a short amount of time.

I would expect µMR to be no different than SMR or subs: not refuelable on-site, they’d be delivered fuelled up would run for 10-30 years, and would be shipped back to factory for either disposal or rebuild at EOL.

This thing isn't for a forward operating base. This would be at locations so large that any "bug out" would occur over a matter of weeks.

Have you been watching the news lately …

The American evacuation was going on for weeks or months; e.g. by the time of the Afghan government's collapse, Bagram (giant Air Force base) had been quite cleanly evacuated.

The logistical problem of exit is something the US has always been very good at. It's the political aspects it has problems with.

Snopes[0] estimates that we left about $10 billion worth of equipment in Afghanistan. For reference that's about half of Afghanistan's 2020 GDP[1].

[0] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/us-taliban-arsenal-militar...

[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/afghanistan/gdp

Which was all Afghan National Army gear. I would damned well hope that the US would not give portable nuclear reactors to a shaky ally.

Have you? The military had a fairly orderly evacuation according to schedule over several months. What was unexpected was how quickly and completely the Taliban would take over the country, which made civilians, which were not planning on leaving, attempt to flee.

Yes.

If it was a molten salt thorium chloride reactor, they could just dump the core into a series of horizontal pipes to cool, making it subcritical. Then they could load those pipes into a few vehicles for egress.

The reactor itself could then be disabled with shaped charges, etc.

TBF they don’t seem to have much bothered with that when leaving afghanistan, and if the µMR is fully sealed, all the other guy would get is a 1MW electric generator, or nothing and a hefty dose of dying if they breach containment.

Design it with a fail safe shutdown?

If they made the core material removable then the bulk of the machinery would be worthless. 98% of the effort in reactor power is sourcing/producing the nuclear material.

There are also ways to poison the core so that it is inoperable unless you got a large nuclear processing facility to remove the contaminates from the core material. But I find that an inferior solution since it leaves behind dirty bomb materials.

Probably make the interior (inside the shielding) so massively radioactive that no human or machine can survive long enough to extract anything.

There are many reasons to be skeptical of how the military might USE this kind of reactor. Ill-considered foreign deployments conducted by contractors without exit plans could cause many problems.

But, there are fewer reasons to to be skeptical about a DOE National Lab's ability safely to develop some prototypes and learn a lot. Three Mile Island's near-meltdown was 42 years ago now. Even though there hasn't been much new construction of civilian nuclear power plants since then, it's absolutely worth investigating whether new reactors designs can be safer than 20th-century ones. Not investigating is a form of security through obscurity: always a bad idea.

OTOH: A former president put a former Texas governor (Perry) in charge of the DOE, and Perry, when he took the job, was surprised to learn their major mission is dealing with all things nuclear. It's conceivable the DOE could fall under incompetent political leadership again.

The military generally doesn't hand off this kind of gear to contractors or to any but the most reliable allies. If they can get all of their own troops out - which the US did in Afghanistan - they can get out a high-value piece of equipment like this.

(Militaries also have a long history of training troops on how to quickly disable gear in danger of capture.)

Good points. I wish they’d just stick with safe, limitless Bunker C diesel which hasn’t contributed to environmental damage at all over the previous 42 years. I didn’t look that up but I know it’s correct because there’s no way the global merchant marine fleet’s 17-thousand cargo vessels would be allowed to burn it in every corner of the world if it could leak out or if obtaining it was environmentally-destructive or if only one nation’s currency was allowed to purchase it: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2003/feb/16/iraq.theeur...

Gotta watch out when searching for this stuff though, because Our Enemies’ propaganda distribution networks will use it as an excuse to blame America for having to protect the world from evil people like Saddam and Gaddafi https://www.rt.com/news/libya-all-about-oil-818/

You can tell RT are lying because Vladimir Putin owns only a paltry 50.002% stake in the world’s largest coal gas company and they probably welcome a little camaraderie from rival producer-nations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gazprom

I must be misreading something here: are these news about portable nuclear power plants, born out of military research but independent from military use?

If this is a valid interpretation, it seems to me a competitor for "the news of the century". What is the catch? The cost? Maintenance? Vulnerability? If unfit for common civil use, it is still an impressive piece of progress in the direction of solving energy requirements problems, today one of the priorities.

We’ve had portable nuclear plants on ships and submarines for decades. That part isn’t new.

I did not know, thank you. And what are the issues that make such technology not apt to see our landscape constellated with mini nuclear power plants?

> And what are the issues that make such technology not apt to see our landscape constellated with mini nuclear power plants?

Political ones, mostly. Though there certainly seem to be valid security/engineering concerns.

While I'm not in favor of new mainstream nuclear (because wind and solar combined with HVDC will suffice so why take the risk and expense) but small nuclear like this will continue to have a niche market that is awkward to service with other technologies.

Nuclear submarine deal with Australia, now portable nuclear reactors. I really hope the world is not heading for nuclear arms race.

Well given that both are about nuclear power not nuclear weapons this comment makes no sense really.

It's kind of sad that everyone seams to think that nuclear power is the same as nuclear weapons, and the used stuff could be interchanged without any problems, and that a commercial nuclear power-station can produce weapon grade stuff without any problems.

Is it just disinterest? Or the thinking that Nuclear is bad overall?

The anti-nuclear crowd willfully conflates the two.

Except neither of these things are nuclear arms. They are nuclear fueled systems.

How can the be a nuclear arms race if everyone already finished the race decades ago and there's enough nuclear bombs to turn the whole world into a wasteland?

It's easy, if you invest in weapons who could potentially stop the other side from delivering the "atomic-payload" you force them to make them "better/different", this is how you start a race without even touching your actual arsenal.

And that's why the US should not place anti icbm stuff near the russian border (turky, poland enc).

Actually that's why the US shouldn't have unilaterally left the ABM treaty in 2002, but by now the Russians are a fair bit along in developing nuclear powered cruise missiles. Who knows, they might be working on (fractional) orbiting nuclear weapons too, they've deployed such systems before.

>Actually that's why the US shouldn't have unilaterally left the ABM treaty in 2002

Absolutely on your side with that.

> Nuclear submarine deal with Australia

Thanks. WTF, I'd not heard of this, not that I read much news these days. (Sydney here.) Apparently both the main parties support it. But the public weren't consulted about this major policy shift. Australia doesn't have nuclear power, let alone nuclear weapons, and doesn't like nuclear-powered ships visiting... now suddenly we're gonna have our own, maybe. I think this will be unpopular. I've always admired NZ's anti-nuclear stance, and have never spoken to a Australian who doesn't also. Gee, I haven't felt so motivated to protest for a long time.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-09-16/australia-nuclear-sub...

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/sep/16/austr...

https://www.afr.com/companies/energy/anti-nuke-campaigners-p...

https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/no-nuclear-submarines-s...

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/australia-s-fading-a...

> But the public weren't consulted

What does this mean - a public referendum on the deal? As someone who hasn't been following Australian politics, do you guys hold referenda for big purchase agreements?

> do you guys hold referenda for big purchase agreements

I assume that's a joke? Not just a "big purchase agreement", but as that ABC article begins, "Australia is embarking on its most significant change of defence and strategic direction in decades", because the US and UK want it, not because Australians want it, I guess. It's a total reversal of a policy that's lasted, well, must be 50 years. We've had a succession of remarkably cretinous Liberal[0] governments since 2013, from whom nothing is that surprising—I keep reading about their dreadful decisions on HN lately. But this is pretty surprising.

[0] i.e. the Liberal Party, in Australia the main party of the right.

It means it was top secret until the day it was announced, so the big opposition party were briefed the day before it was announced and there's been absolutely no public discussion at all.

The cabinet just made a huge strategic choice on their own and gamble on being able to sway the rest of society.

Maybe we should hope for a nuclear energy race!

It's pretty close already, what with China building out it's bunker ICBM stock, Russia developing it's crazy nuclear torpedo and cruise missile and the USA gearing up to spend a few trillions on new ICBMs (because apparently making sure that Wyoming, Montana, and North Dakota get nuked in a war is of national security importance).

The nuclear deal has already spooked Indonesia and Malaysia might need to build counter attacks against Australia, now India and Japan most likely also want nuclear subs. Well done white Anglo nations, really well done still acting like its 19th century and can dictate what happens in Asia.

Diz iz just a cover-up for building Wayward Pines!

Again? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_Nuclear_Propulsion

I love how atomic energy gets to be described as “resilient, carbon-free energy” but only when it’s going to power things that surveil, kill, or surveil and then kill.

Luckily the same group of people who saved California from the scourge of atomic energy are still out there vigilantly protecting me from having to form my own opinions because I might form the wrong ones, aka the ones that don’t line their pockets and give cost-of-living another sorely-needed boost to help get all those troublesome poors (but I repeat myself) to move away while also thinking it was their own idea: https://science.time.com/2012/02/02/exclusive-how-the-sierra...

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