I was a nuclear power plant operator on a submarine during this period. Wanting another challenge (young & crazy ...), I applied for duty at McMurdo Station in 1971. My request was not approved and I was told that the Navy had a shortage of qualified submarine nuc's. Sounds like the Navy had already decided to decommission it.
I've always regretted not going to Antarctica, but this article makes me think that I dodged a bullet. This plant was a maintenance nightmare. Plus, operating a reactor with a mix of personnel sounds bad. We certainly had our personnel issues on subs, but at least all of us in Engineering had the shared experiences of nuclear power school, prototype training, and sub qualification.
Interesting people come to hacker news. (I'd give another upvote for your username if I could.) What is the essential set of skills/foundation knowledge for a nuclear power plant operator of the sort that you get on a submarine?
What do you think of the submarine systems that were designed for you to interact with? Context - I have been thinking recently about submarines and wondering how crew size could be reduced through automation. (I am aware that a lot of work went into this on the Independence class ships, but my working assumption is that this was let down by poor structuring of the design team, rather than that automation is a fundamentally bad idea)
Did you have to manage boredom when you were on-shift but did not have much to do? Or is there plenty to do? Or are you allowed to study when there is not much in the way of active responsibilities?
My experience is from the Vietnam era and doesn't apply today. I was drafted mid-way through an EE program when I got behind in units. Virtually all of us had similar backgrounds. The Navy had a knack for teaching nuclear physics & math to bright people with a high school education.
The S5W plant that I operated had virtually no automation. Just safety interlocks and a few automatic shutdowns. Everything was analog. The electrical controls used mag-amps: dumb and inefficient, but reliable as hell. Safety was achieved by detailed operating procedures and highly trained crews. We studied and drilled constantly. Most over-qualified group of people I've known.
There's no way that I could describe what it was like at sea in a few lines here. It might make for an interesting HN thread as there are other nuc's here. :-)
> The Navy had a knack for teaching nuclear physics & math to bright people with a high school education.
I would very much like to know your take on why the Navy has this knack. I'd like to research what it takes to reproduce that knack by other organizations, in other fields of endeavor.
When you say "bright people", how does an ASVAB VE+AR+MK+MC=252 broadly approximate to percentile?
I'm also curious how the Navy selects for people who can apply that brightness over sustained periods of time.
> I would very much like to know your take on why the Navy has this knack.
I think the obvious answer is that they have to. The Navy has a lot of technology that needs maintenance at sea. Problem diagnosis requires understanding. We didn't rely on black box replacement.
I had nearly two years of engineering math when I was drafted and joined the Navy. The Navy skipped all of the derivations and went straight to the concepts of limits, derivatives, and integrals. Even some differential equations that describe reactor dynamics. Calculations were limited to algebra. Testing focused on calculus concepts rather than numerical answers.
This produced technicians with the ability to understand how the power plant worked but without the formal math and physics need for power plant design.
The only thing I can offer about how the Navy selects people is that it presents the various training programs early, starting with the recruiters. Certain programs are presented as being most difficult and are described in glowing terms. The challenge was definitely an attraction for me.
> I would very much like to know your take on why the Navy has this knack. I'd like to research what it takes to reproduce that knack by other organizations, in other fields of endeavor.
Maybe most interesting for us in this forum many military schools still includes lots and lots of physical training. I guess that is a huge advantage they have.
Some other points:
- Military organizations do have some options that are out of reach for civilian schools today. Knowing you can risk
- humiliation in front of peers (20 something years ago I once forgot to close the window on our room before service and had to run in to fix it while 36 other guys "enjoyed some extra time for pushups". I still remember it.),
- a permanent record for sleeping or otherwise not paying attention,
- a fine and a night behind bars for not being sober or for not behaving
- or being thrown out
sets a standard.
- Also I guess it also becomes obvious during training that failure to learn the required skills might easily cost you and others their lives.
Much more modern plans along similar design thinking is the SHELF reactor. It is designed to operates in an underwater,
sealed capsule that is monitored and controlled remotely. Source: https://aris.iaea.org/Publications/smr-status-sep-2012.pdf
That's amazing and specific experience, very cool!
One thing I noticed at the top of the article was that they used the steam as a source of fresh water as well, did subs do this too, when you worked on them?
They alternate between the two sections, so they do one stack every 2 hours and you can see how much labour, 2 man less than 5 mins. Remember, this isn't how they run it all the time and it is the backup system. With that in mind, most backup plans for anything if not a like for like, are always more intensive. Compare writing a letter by hand too sending an email in effort and this, for me, this looks way easier.
Worth noting that even in the vid, you have crew members of senior rank watching on as they have never seen it done before, which indicates how uncommon it's usage is.
Ah yes, was referring to the excess drinking water aspect knowing electrolysis upon sea water will produce chlorine due to the salt, which really would be an emergency in itself.
Glad to hear you didn't have a situation to use one and does seem a very rare situation, but neat that there is a solid backup.
You might find this series from Smarter Every Day interesting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3Ud6mHdhlQ I didn't find a bit about how they make drinking water, but here's an episode about how they regenerate their oxygen on a nuclear sub.
Just once, briefly when he did an inspection of our boat in Guam. My last memory of him was standing next to the ladder as he left. His pants raised as his ankle reached my eye level exposing a leg that was smaller than my wrist. To me, this was a perfect example of Rickover: a giant in many respects, but small and petty in others.
>"it was plagued with problems which ultimately forced its early retirement in 1972"
We really need a small reactor witha well tested design, where all the bugs and terthing problems have beeen worked out. It would be so usefull for situatioms like this.
"223 reports of abnormal levels of radiation were recorded"
Yeah, I would not want to stay at that base.
I would say it must be a cost issue. The US Navy now has 65 years of experience running portable, robust, self-contained nuclear reactors, yet because of cost (and presumably safety) they only put them in submarines and aircraft carriers, where there are compelling use cases that can't be satisfied by fossil fuel power plants.
For the USN (and other military's) ones at least there are many other differing issues and design goals that are divergent enough from civilian usage that it's definitely more then just cost. For example on the most basic issue of fuel, the A4W reactors (found on current USN super carriers) run on highly enriched U235, designed around 93% and as high as 97%. In other words, the fuel is flat out weapons grade by itself. A typical civilian plant is more like 3-5%. Very high enrichment allows more density and very long times between refueling, they can go something like 10 years vs 1-2 years for civilian. But obviously that would be a big proliferation concern even ignoring cost, nor are there many places to get that kind of fuel. For the military that is irrelevant, it's not a limiting problem since the vessels these reactors live on tend to also carry literal nuclear weapons. But it means it won't just transfer to other usage. There are plenty of other differences in naval reactors, like they also formulate with high burn up fuels (metal ceramics, u-al/u-zr) rather then uranium dioxide.
Military vessels also have ample trained personnel to throw at maintenance and operations, they can make tradeoffs for things that are more finicky but provide higher performance. They're anything but "self-contained" really, and even the Navy wanted to simplify that. A major goal for the new A1B reactor in the Gerald R. Ford-class supercarriers, as well as normal stuff like "more power, weighs less" was to cut the number of people needed to run the reactors and propulsion.
I mean, yeah, all this certainly does add to the cost too. But it's not just about the cost, or rather the design goals and missions are divergent enough that they necessitate costs for military reactors that would be a waste, dangerous, or both elsewhere. Where the Naval reactors might well carry over to I think would be future space usage, a lot of what the navy is worried about with sending a reactor out on a carrier or sub for years seems to overlap with challenges and goals faced by a reactor on a spaceship sent to the outer solar system.
Except for the USN and RN (which uses US-derived designs), other navies using nuclear propulsion don't use such highly enriched fuel. Russia AFAIK uses somewhere around 30-40%, which is still classified as HEU, so problematic for civilian use, but most likely not directly usable in a bomb.
France runs on 7% enriched UO2 (although using plate-based 'caramel' fuel rather than cylindrical pellets in rods like typical civilian nuclear fuel). This requires them to refuel every 10 years rather than having life-of-ship reactors like the latest generation US submarine reactors, but OTOH French law requires reactors to be defueled and inspected every 10 years anyway.
As for space usage, launch weight restrictions make LWR style reactors impractical. Look at something like the NASA Kilopower as an example of what a (very small) space-based power reactor might look like. For nuclear propulsion like a nuclear thermal rocket, that's again a different kind of reactor pretty different from both LWR's and Kilopower.
>As for space usage, launch weight restrictions make LWR style reactors impractical.
OK, so this is a reply to both you and @nickelpro (your comment is newer but also higher), who wrote:
>Space-based nuclear energy is all based around RTGs, reactors have no place in space
You both seem to have an image in your heads regarding future long duration deep space vehicles (I explicitly mentioned "outer solar system") here that is a mixture of old space assembly and soft science-fiction, wherein industrial capacity is all terrestrial and any ship is built entirely on Earth, launched and off it goes. All-in-one. Even SpaceX with its use of pure chemical rockets to Mars and terrestrial construction plans to break with that: in-orbit refueling is an absolutely key part. And for going farther then that (and as Starship and successors/competitors kick starts a new era of space economics and industry) the clear and necessary next step will be in-space assembly (be it in LEO or a Lagrange point dock or whatever ends up being most practical at a given time).
In the same way we don't expect our ships to somehow be built hundreds of miles inland and then make their way to the ocean or fit entirely on a single semitruck, stay indefinitely on what can be launched out of Earth's atmosphere makes no sense either. The important aspects are all at cross purposes. Aerodynamic considerations are a waste in vacuum and constrict design in very important ways. Engines to get out of a strong gravity well need high thrust, whereas for long distances in space one really wants very high ISP. A torch drive that can do both necessarily bears a striking resemblance to a high energy weapon system to whatever happens to be facing the business end of it, and all known practical models (nuclear salt water, thermonuclear pulse) are ludicrously polluting. And outer solar system ships will need strong variable electric sources with high power/mass too despite solar being entirely impractical. RTGs won't cut it.
So sure I don't think we'll ever see one launch off Earth's surface (I hope not anyway, if humanity is willing to light one of those off here it means we're facing a threat big enough that trashing our home is considered worth it). But that's a-ok, because what we'll do is built empty reactors, or reactor components, and launch those separately from fuel, and put it all together in space. Or for that matter far enough down the road maybe we build that stuff on the moon or in the asteroids or who knows. It obviously wouldn't be a copy/paste, but to the extent that USN reactor designs will get used outside of the military that's where I see it making sense.
>So sure I don't think we'll ever see one launch off Earth's surface
Are you saying you don't think a nuclear reactor powered spacecraft will ever be launched into space on a chemical rocket in the forseeable future, or that you don't think nuclear powered rockets will ever be used to get from ground to orbit?
You're probably aware, but nuclear power in space has not been limited to plutonium powered RTGs that output a few hundred watts.
My point is that the requirements on a space reactor are sufficiently different than a naval reactor that I'd think you're better off looking for inspiration at things like Kilopower than the PWR's currently used in naval vessels. Yes, if you build the thing in space weight isn't such a critical factor as if you're launching it from Earth's gravity well, but weight still matters as it's mass you have to accelerate and decelerate as you zip around the solar system. A PWR is inevitably extremely heavy due to having to withstand the 15 MPa pressure (assuming naval PWR's have about the same pressure as civilian ones, I suppose they could be somewhat lower). Further, a critical issue for a space reactor is how to cool it. Radiative cooling in space is very bad compared what we can do down here. Thus to minimize the size of your radiators you want a reactor that operates at high temperature. Also in this respect a PWR is a very poor choice.
In some cases you want sorta aerodynamic vehicles even if they are space only, as you then can do aerocapture and aerobreaking, possibly reducing quite a bit the delta-v needed for a flight.
Also high thrust engines if you can get them can make use of the Oberhausen effect & some maneuvers, like specific orbit captures or crewed radiation belt transits need them as well.
Still no problem to build that thing in space if you can pull it off. :)
This is the kind of comment that keeps me coming back to HN. Thoughtful, nuanced, and full of information from a field I know very little about. Thanks!
Almost all space reactor concepts have fresh fuel at takeoff and then start-up once they're launched. You can hold fresh nuclear fuel in your hand with very little hazard. It's only once you start splitting atoms that the radiation levels get high. So you launch the fresh and mostly inert reactor to avoid this risk.
RTGs, on the other hand, are radioactive from the get-go, but are usually quite small.
The USA did run a reactor in space (SNAP-10A) and the Soviets did a few dozen.
SNAP was a scaled up RTG, as are the soviet examples. You can call these reactors if you want but then we're just playing a semantics game. I tried to head this off by saying "traditional naval reactor or anything that resembles one".
Also the problem isn't running the reactor on the launch pad, the problem is if the launch vessel explodes and the fuel load gets spread out over your launch area. The enriched uranium used in naval-style propulsion is absolutely not "safe to hold in your hand" and the weight requirements for using natural uranium, which is safe, would be prohibitive for use in space.
Highly enriched uranium is still barely radioactive, very similar to natural uranium. The half-life of U-235 is 703 million years. As half-life approaches infinity, atoms approach stability. The dose rate of holding navy nuclear fuel is modest compared to the hazards of fission products.
I don’t disagree that in comparison to many other nasty byproducts of the U235 chain, most Uranium isotopes are not that “hot” but the danger of HEU comes partly from the increased presence of the U234 isotope, not just U235. So that isotope solely is not the right half life to do math around. While U235 is about as stable as U238, most purification techniques result in selecting the lower weight isotopes, which selects the hotter U234 as well. And while there is less of it, if I recall correctly eventually U234 dominates in terms of radiation output.
Again this is a semantics game, SNAP 10A was still driving a thermo electric converter, thus "scaled up RTG", nothing resembling a traditional naval reactor.
The on-contact for a HEU billet is over 10mrem/hour. You and I have very different ideas about nuclear safety apparently and I presume you haven't worked professionally in the field with that attitude.
Frankly, it seems to me that you're the one trying to make it a semantics game, by trying to define what is and is not a nuclear reactor based on how you collect power from the device.
According to that Wikipedia article, SNAP 10A was centered on a device that created and maintained a controlled, sustained nuclear fission reaction. I would call that a "nuclear reactor" even if no attempt were made to harvest the power. I think that the rest of the world is probably with me on this. The Chicago Pile 1 is widely regarded as the first nuclear reactor, and nobody particularly cares how it generated electricity. What they care about is that it demonstrated a controlled, sustained nuclear fission reaction.
10 mrem/hour seems to confirm the "barely radioactive" argument; the CDC says (https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/air_travel.html) that a cross-country flight exposes you to 3.5 mrem. No one's saying you should hold said uranium in your hand for weeks at a time; they're saying the risk of chucking some around after a (very rare) spacecraft crash is pretty minor, especially as it'll be launched over water.
>"Again this is a semantics game, SNAP 10A was still driving a thermo electric converter, thus "scaled up RTG""
You are getting the absolute basics wrong, so you have no standing to question the OP's atittude.
Nuclear reactor runs a nuclear chain reaction, hence the name, RTG does not. There is no scope for debate here. The difference is night and day and is obvious if you look at fuel, power to weight ratio, or do physics 101.
RTGs run on decay heat and use plutonium 238, they cant be turned off, their power slowly drops off over decades. Reactors use U235, have active control and starting/stop procedure and 10-100x higher power to weight
The issue is these designs are ~3% efficient like RTGs and have few moving parts unlike ~35% efficient nuclear reactors on earth. While they sidestep most of the complications of traditional nuclear reactors like radiation shielding, they really aren’t useful designs having low energy output, terrible energy density, relatively short lifespans, and extreme cost.
That said, it seems like, all by itself, conversion efficiency is a tricky measure of the usefulness of a design for spaceflight purposes. Wouldn't it be more useful to consider the total cost to deliver a given energy production capacity to space? In that case, rocket fuel itself, and the tyranny of the rocket equation, becomes a major consideration. If an efficiency gain comes at the cost of increasing the weight of the energy generation system in some way, then perhaps it doesn't end up being a net win over the less efficient design.
Efficiency is a big deal in part because you need to radiate out all that thermal energy. A radiator that’s dumping 100kw of thermal energy for 1.3kw of electricity is much heavier than a 1.3kw solar panel anywhere near earth. Add 50kg for fuel and and things look even worse.
By comparison the voyager probe RTG used ~1/10th the fuel for a little over 1/10th the power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MHW-RTG So the only advantage was cheaper fuel.
They have same radiation shielding and powet output as any other reactor, electricity generation is a separate concern that should not be confused with the reactor itself.
The same reactor couod be hooked up to a 20% efficient stirling engine to keep it low maintenance, to a >50% efficient convined cycle or have 0% electricity output and be used for heat or water desalination.
> Space-based nuclear energy is all based around RTGs, reactors have no place in space
It is true that RTGs are the only type of nuclear power used in space now, but that is more to do with type of craft we send to space rather than practical limitation of nuclear power in space.
A large spacecraft will have enough surface area mount enough radiative heatsinks to dissipate the heat from a nuclear reactor. Designs exist that have the math worked out for this since the 50s.
The problem is that it is insanely costly and cumbersome to get regularly approval to build an experimental reactor in the US (and elsewhere I presume) so nuclear tech is stuck in the 1970's, just 20 years after the first commercial reactor was built. Imagine still using cars, or trains, or computers after only 20 years of development.
One has to design the whole reactor on paper before building it and get it approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). If, when you build it, you find you need to make changes to the design that are above a certain threshold, you have to recertify (not sure of the details. Can't find a good link about this). Imagine trying to build something as complicated as a nuclear reactor and you can't make iterative improvements. NuScales design approval process, the approval to be able to build the first reactor, cost $500 million dollars, took 2 million man hours, included over 2 million pages of documents, and after submitting in Jan of 2017 did not get approval until around 4 years later in August of 2020[1]. This is just to be able to build the first design. No wonder nuclear power has seen no progress in the last 50 years.
Fortunately this company did persevere and now is planning to build the first power plant in Utah, hoping to be operational in 2030. The people/governments stating that climate change is a crisis, and I do believe there is way too much CO2 in the atmosphere, should be fast tracking this approved tech with as much money as usable to build thousands of these reactors as quickly as possible.
There should be pretty strict regulation for fission reactor development, simply because radioactive materials in runaway reactions can have totally uncontrollable, millennia-spanning consequences. Very few other technologies have this potential - even a regular chemical explosion poses little risk to future generations in a large radius. Certain materials (plutonium, for instance) can reach criticality very quickly and in tiny quantities, and plutonium is a byproduct of fission. (I’m not a nuclear physicist, so my understanding of the real potential here might be wrong, because I have no sense of the quantities that might be experienced).
This isn’t a defense of the current regulatory process. The time frames, in particular, sound pretty egregious (4 years to approve a prototype, and 2m pages of documentation feels like a lot, too, but again I don’t know how these things are designed). But I would be extremely uncomfortable with lax regulatory oversight, given that nuclear accidents have permanent, irreversible impacts on society and geography.
Now, small-scale reactors may be a different beast entirely. If the quantity of materials is pretty much guaranteed not to have potential to cause problems for anyone but the operators for a short period of time…. Then there certainly seems to be a case for a shorter regulatory cycle. But I would be shocked if scale isn’t already taken into account for the current regulatory burden.
The US should set up a special zone for companies that wish to work with nuclear material and provide well designed containment labs to work in. I would nominate the nuclear test site in Nevada. That area was already used to test devices that purposely went super-critical and spread their nuclear material into the environment with the most powerful explosions man has ever created.
Those numbers are completely meaningless without comparison to how long it takes to get approval for other power plants. I could not find definite answers but this report [1] for Australia says it can take up to 15 years between original prospecting and operation of a windfarm. I found another source that said it takes on average 3.1 years for approval in Sweden (it was not clear if that applied to windfarm only). Several other sources talk about multi year time frames as well. Considering the comparable impact of nuclear vs e.g. wind 4 years is quite short. Also this also disproves that nuclear is 3xpensive because of regulation, other energy sources face similar regulation delays.
What I am talking about is the approval to build the first version of the reactor. The demo reactor. Imagine if one had to wait four years and spend half a billion dollars to get approval of your design of a windmill (not windmill farm) before you could even build the first one to see how well it would work. Progress on windmill design would be slow.
Actually building the power plant with the reactor at a specific location is a different problem.
Why can't these designers set up their experiments in a country that has lax or no regulation? I can understand security concerns but surely there is some part of the world amenable to these kinds of experiments
A lot of the cost is regulatory. Starting a project where 3/4ths of your time will be your construction crews idling while waiting on your army of lawyers to get injunctions lifted, makes the idea incredibly unattractive to investors. Which is the whole point of people who use the court system as a strategic barrier to new construction, even when they realize they'll likely ultimately lose.
- Fort St. Vrain, US[1]. High temperature gas cooled reactor. Operated for 12 years. Corrosion problems. Converted to natural gas.
- AVR reactor, Germany.[2] Pebble bed reactor. Had a pebble jam. Not repairable. Most fuel removed. Pressure vessel remains on site, with hope of full decommissioning in a century or so.
There's a small reactor of this design working at a university in China, and a medium sized one one (200MW electrical output) is supposed to come on line this year. We'll see how that works out.
Boring old boiling water and pressurized water reactors have simplicity in the radioactive part, and water is easy to handle. Designs that involve moving pellets or chemical processing of radioactive fluids add much complexity to a system that is very hard if not impossible to repair. The track record of such reactors is not good.
Boring old water cooled reactors (both boiling and pressured) are comparatively dangerous compared to quite well tested lead-bismuth cooled small modular reactors, which not only loadable on train car as self-contained part that needs no internal access, but are self-sealing in case of failure.
Of course it's not as exotic as pebble bed reactor, or helium-cooled uranium-thorium reactor.
>nuclear technician training in the Navy is very, very difficult to pass.
Rigorous, yes, but not "very, very difficult to pass". The Navy needs a consistent stream of replacement operators, and their preferred way of getting them is to take reasonably capable volunteers and tutor/coach/remediate as many people as needed once they're in that group.
As someone who was a reactor opreator in the US Navy I'm laughing my ass off at this: "very, very difficult to pass". 90% of the people I started training with were gone in the first two years!
> 90% of the people I started training with were gone in the first two years!
My experience too. Do you remember the "skyhook"? We'd return to the barracks after class and find that the guy next to you had vanished without a trace.
Shipyard constructed floating nuclear power stations are a truly excellent idea. You get economies of mass production and scale in the factory to reduce costs and speed up timelines, and you get extra safety from being in coolant, decoupled from earthquakes, and in deep enough water to not have tsunamis. You have more weather to worry about, and piracy, but in the balance shipyard nuclear is one of the most intriguing ways to really decarbonize the planet at scale quickly.
In the US, Offshore Power Systems tried this in the 1970s. They hired 1000 people, formed a joint venture with Newport News, bought and installed the world's largest gantry crane at their construction yard in Jacksonville, FL, and got a license to construct 8 gigawatt scale floating reactors from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Wild story [1].
Oh I dunno about that. IIRC it had been there for far far longer than the first human settlements on Antarctica.
Who's the invasive species? The creature minding its own business for 100k years or the humans who start stirring Things up as soon as they get there? ;)
Whats more: "In addition to problems with the drinking water and environmental contamination, there were several recorded instances of crew radiation exposure, some resulting in injury. [7] During the plant operation, 223 reports of abnormal levels of radiation were recorded. [7] Of these cases, 14 resulted in injury and 123 resulted in exposure in the amount of 0.350 rem over a period of 7 days."
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.
I deployed to South Pole ten times from 1997 to 2011, each time passing through McMurdo both southbound and northbound. Of course I knew about the reactor, and walked around that area several times, but it is fascinating now to read a more detailed history. Especially fascinating is the notion that the reactor had to fit in an LC-130, in order to be used at the Pole. I definitely would have been less than excited to be at the Pole if that reactor had been the main power source. (Not sure how jazzed I would have been to be a passenger on said LC-130, either.)
That being said, I wonder if some of the compact reactor designs being generated today[1] would actually wind up being a good fit for remote sites like the Pole. The current power plant runs on AN8 jet fuel and spews smoke/steam into the air 24/7. Clean power generation there is difficult because of lack of consistent wind and sun energy (pilot programs were in place at various times when I was there).
Parenthetically, the Pole's Clean Air facility there has some of the cleanest air in the world (upwind of the power plant). Their continuous CO2 measurements, graphed prominently on one wall when I visited, were sobering indeed to contemplate.
The US did a similar thing at Camp Century [1] on Greenland. They installed a PM-2A nuclear reactor there, as far as I know they relayed very sparse information to the Danish goverment during the time, especially about the secret Project Iceworm [2].
There was a danish article about it with some good pictures of the camp including one which looks like a part of the reactor [3]
The was also the B-52 crash out side of the Thule air force base in Greenland, which was carrying a nuclear warhead[0]. This, in an area designated as a nuclear-free zone by the Danish government.
The cleanup project was unofficially referred to as "Dr Freezelove" by the Americans involved, which is a bit disturbing when you think about how Dr. Strangelove ends.
I have no doubt the Danish government knew exactly what was going on just not in an official capacity that would allow them to answer any questions in parliament.
The Japanse use the same sophistry when asked about nuclear weapons on US bases (in violation of the Japanse constitution).
There's been talk of shipping a nuclear reactor to power a base on Mars. The Antarctic experience indicates pretty clearly that from a reliability point of view, we're almost certainly better off with solar panels, wind turbines and batteries.
I feel like nuclear power is the only tech that people perceive to be static in development. Isn’t it like saying we should have stopped using computers in the 40s because they were big, expensive, slow, and we’re only frequently used to kill people?
Nuclear power was great until 1986. Then it was bad. Then it was getting a bit better until 2011. Then it was bad again. Now it's a getting bit better again.
Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011 was among the worst nuclear disasters in history; not only because its human toll was so high, but also because it was the "final straw" -- so to say -- in public opinion in Western countries that made people scared of nuclear energy. Nuclear energy remains the safest, cleanest way to produce energy but Chernobyl and Fukushima significantly reduced the funding going into this kind of research, because public opinion was very much against nuclear power. It is getting better recently, but if history shows anything in the next 20 to 30 years we will have another disaster that will change public opinion again.
I see. Thanks for the explanation. I had been thinking in terms of the technology rather than in its public perception (although sure… that perception influences funding for the technology).
Now I see that I would have been well served by looking up 'nuclear 2011' and 'nuclear 1986' since those disasters are very famous.
One would hope that after such a disaster, and given the pros of the underlying technology, more funding and research would be focused on safety, rather than abandoning it.
I wonder to which degree has nuclear power's association with nuclear weapons affected its public perception.
Wind turbines? We're going to ship 30 meter blades to Mars so we can barely power a microwave and a few lightbulbs? A 1MW installation in a good location on Earth will average ~300kW. On Mars that will likely be 1% because of the air density difference, or 3kW.
Solar power on Mars would also give you around half the energy you get on Earth, per unit area. It’s basically like running solar panels on earth well beyond Arctic circle.
> On Mars that will likely be 1% because of the air density difference,
Power goes as v^3, so a few x wind speed compensates for density. There are design sketches for a couple of kW at 10 m/s, ~10 kW at 25 m/s. Getting those speeds does require prioritizing it in site selection. IIRC, turbine mass is competitive with solar under dust storms.
I'd link to recent work, but sci-hub doesn't have it. :/
30m sounds small. Also, not only is the atmosphere thinner, but sand particles are 4x smaller. Have fun repairing those moving parts with that erosion.
There simply isn't much energy in that wind, no matter how you plan to harvest it. It's like trying to get water from a stone (possible, but you won't get much.)
No, it indicates exactly nothing. You’re talking about 1970e technology (ie when the computing power on Apollo was roughly a pocket calculator) vs how we will actually get there, a period during which nuclear reactor designs have also evolved, and the navy in particular has learned a huge amount.
How does one article on the third portable reactor built tell us clearly anything at all about how we should power a hypothetical Mars base more than 60 years later
We've made great leaps in safety measures since then. I'm not convinced we've made much in the way of progress in terms of miniaturization, simplicity or cost of operation though, as you can see from the ludicrous cost overruns seen for basically all recent reactors.
Miniaturization is not desirable for nuclear power because of regulation. Each nuclear power plant is required to pay 375 million dollars in insurance, regardless of size. So this incentivizes building plants as large as possible.
Even without regulation, things like surface area to volume ratio still make larger reactors more efficient.
A is the area, e.g. π/2 * r² for horizontal axis designs,
ρ is the air density and η is the total system efficiency (limited to <59% and safe to assume to be >0.4 for modern systems) and v is the wind speed.
Mars' atmosphere is about 1% of Earth's atmosphere in density. Given a wind speed of 7 m/s² (the optimal wind speed for most modern wind turbines), on Mars we'd get only 1% of the power we'd get on Earth.
A 100m installation (~2.6MW on Earth) would deliver only 21kW on Mars. The average wind speed during a year is slightly higher on Mars, though, at 10 m/s² [0]. The average power output thus would be about 61kW.
The most important time, however, would be dust storms, which render solar useless. Wind speeds have been recorded to exceed 30 m/s² during dust storms. Assuming we can efficiently shield the generator from the dust, the power output would peak at 1.7MW.
A more conservative 17 m/s² for dust storms still yields about 308kW.
100m class wind turbines, while rare on Earth (e.g. GE Haliade-X [1]) would be easier to build on Mars given the significantly lower gravity.
Wind turbines would work on Mars and have great synergy with solar - when solar doesn't work (e.g. during dust storms), wind turbines would be most efficient.
Wind power wouldn't be the first choice for powering a Mars station, though. As can be seen above, installations would have to be pretty significant in size to deliver noteworthy amounts of power.
I don't think 100m wind turbines on Mars are feasible anytime soon. Even Starship has only a 18m high cargo area, so even if we assume that blades are assembled out of two parts in-place, you get only a 40m radius. That reduces the average power to just 10 kW.
Furthermore, I think your average 10 m/s is an overestimation -- the source gives it as the high limit outside of dust storms.
> I think your average 10 m/s is an overestimation -- the source gives it as the high limit outside of dust storms.
You misread the source then - peaks during sandstorms are 17 - 30 m/s² with 10 m/s² being the annual average.
> I don't think 100m wind turbines on Mars are feasible anytime soon.
Manufacturing of the wind turbine is assumed to entirely take place on-site. Wind power is not something for a "starter station/settlement". The question was about general viability and given local manufacturing capabilities, wind power isn't completely useless on Mars.
> would be easier to build on Mars given the significantly lower gravity.
In one sense yes, but in another sense no. Consider erosion. It is the bane of existence for any system near the ocean. Mars has a similar problem with dust, which is smaller than what we see on Earth. This shreds electronics and other instruments on Mars. Sealing becomes far more important, but also more difficult. The other thing we need to recognize is that on Mars there's no electric ground.
So yeah, on surface things look easier but there's a reason why including domain experts in the conversation is necessary. This is a classic example of napkin modeling being representative of how things will work in reality.
So look to the domain experts. They've used solar and nuclear for a reason. Maybe dig into why those were the choices made.
It's because Mars's magnetic core isn't spinning, which is also why there's no magnetosphere.
As a quick intro that isn't doesn't have much detail but has links I'd go with[0]. But if you pick up any book on Martian engineering or read any report (NASA reports are public) you'll find mentions of this. This is also discussed deeply in most astrophysics textbooks.
What does it mean to say "there is no electric ground" on Mars? You would not be willing to drive a spike deep into the ground, as is done on Earth? Or are you saying that without ground moisture, the ground would not be conductive enough?
It has to actually do with the magnetosphere. It's not about will to put a spike of metal into the ground but that doing so doesn't create an electric ground like it does on Earth because there is not this electromagnetic differential.
What has a planetary magnetosphere got to do with electrical ground? The planet itself is a spherical conductor. There probably is an ionosphere, although I would not be surprised to find that it is much nearer ground level than ours.
Because without a magnetosphere there is 1) no potential difference between the ionosphere and the surface 2) charge particles from solar wind (and cosmic radiation but mostly solar wind) accumulate on the surface. There's technically an ionosphere but it is extremely weak because Mars's dynamo isn't moving.
Also ground is about a differential. What you don't want is floating potentials. You want a constant refernce value. Floating potentials are dangerous because you don't have a constant reference value and thus the chance of unwanted discharge.
Safe on Mars
Precursor Measurements Necessary to Support Human
Operations on the Martian Surface (2002)
Ch.3 Physical Environmental Hazards, Pg. 21
> A combination of technologies might also be considered, such as point-discharge, needlelike devices or even small radiation sources to prevent charge buildup. [0]
The small radiation sources refer to weak sources of alpha radiation (think smoke detectors), whose low-energy alpha particles collide with the atmosphere, ionizing it in the process. The now conductive atmosphere in the vicinity of the rod-device would then be able to neutralize excess charge.
A 100m wind turbine would require a lot of material and/or energy to construct, though - some of the materials would have to be processed locally, I wonder what the embodied energy of such a structure would be, and how long it would take to be net energy positive.
> "Only during dust storms on Mars is there enough wind energy to operate a wind turbine," said Michael Flynn, another NASA Ames scientist. On Earth about 10 meters (33 feet) per second wind speed is needed to make electricity with wind turbines; on Mars about 30 meters (98 feet) is needed because of the extremely thin air, according to Bubenheim.
We've made a lot of improvements to nuclear reactor design since the 60s, and potentially we'll have working fusion by the time we have a colony on Mars, which would probably be the best solution (can easily get H from water and then would have He which is useful).
I can't imagine a viable self-sufficient Mars colony that doesn't involve a lot of manpower anyway (I'm talking thousands of people).
Right but without complete self-sufficiency that applies to any power generation method. The only viable solution is to have enough raw material and redundancy on Mars that you can recycle things if something fails. e.g. have multiple redundant reactors, if one breaks you fix it, if it can't be fixed you dismantle it and start using the parts to build a new one, taking parts from other things when necessary and using parts you can't use for other things. Basically there needs to be enough "stuff" on Mars that you can use stuff to make other stuff in perpetuity. To my mind that would require enough diversity of equipment that you'd want on the order of 1000 / 10k people.
And of course Mars is not a totally barren world – another big part of the solution is to build things with materials that can be gathered on Mars.
We have since deployed many nuclear reactors in space, with totally different reliability, so those should be used as reference. They can be packed on a rocket, launched, turned on and work for years unattended ( they powered societ radar satellites)
Cost is dominated by weight in space, and a large wind turbine needs hundreds to thousands of tons of concrete for foundations - are those going to be brought from Earth? Can you make concrete on Mars?
Nuclear fuel that has never been "fired up" in a reactor is almost hamless - its just uranium. You could have it under your bed and you'd be fine, just don't eat it.
In this case the reactor would only be started once it arrives on mars.
it’s completely different design from conventional “pressurized water” reactors with drastically reduced complexity, using heat pipes and solid core, it’s more like a battery really, and we’ve been sending nuclear batteries to space for many decades
Is an experience with a reactor designed and built in the very early 1960's really relevant? Would you also use experiences with early solar cells to vet out their viability today?
Nuclear power requires serious amounts of cooling...
Without easy-access to water and evaporative cooling on Mars, I can imagine you'd be needing super big radiators pointing at the sky to make even modest amounts of electrical power. Solar might work out better...
From a reliability point of view, you're better off with constant power to keep humans alive, instead of fluctuating power that can cause humans to die.
This reminds me of a lot of technology work. "It seemed like a really promising idea, but when we got into it the practical details made it not very practical." I'll leave it to others to name examples, but there are reasons I'm a member: http://boringtechnology.club/
This project was a disaster, no matter how you slice it. It is very lucky that it failed only as much as it did. That it was down so much of the time made it worse than useless: expensive to build, expensive to operate, expensive to maintain, ruinously expensive to clean up after, and didn't even provide reliable baseload power.
The experience does not suggest that small-format nukes are simpler to operate and maintain than big ones.
There is no plausible scenario where small-format nukes are a better investment than a solar + wind + storage system, terrestrially. On Mars or the moon, leaks might not matter so much, although the catastrophic failure likely to follow would leave users without power.
Even with insolation on Mars much reduced, solar remains the overwhelmingly better choice by any measure.
On the moon, dark for two weeks at a stretch calls for more clever engineering. An 11,000 km equatorial superconducting transmission line with distributed solar panels could power quite a lot of activity. Even a 5500 km system would be immediately useful, given a vertically-oriented array at each end. But solar and storage would probably be cheaper. A flywheel constructed above-ground, hundreds of meters across (dumbell style, at first) would store quite a lot of energy. Structure could be just a cable on top of a tower; when stopped, the counterweights hang vertically, and swing out as it spins up.
I believe the USSR installed nuclear reactors in unmanned lighthouses along its remote northern coast. I don’t know if that’s as far north as McMurdo station is south. I also suppose, with them being unmanned, they may have had less strict safety requirements.
Those are RTGs that harvest a couple hundred watts of decay heat for really remote applications. Often used in space probes, etc... Bit of a different safety profile since they're low power and generally don't have any moving parts.
We have only non-classified information to suggest their safety record is spotless. Considering the experiences on Antarctica and Greenland with naval-inspired designs, an entire lack of reported failures really indicates lack of reports, not lack of failures.
When it comes to reactor accidents, there is a limit to what can be covered up. And nuclear accidents from other branches of the military are publicly known; particularly, the US Army blew up a test reactor (SL-1), the USAF has lost some nuclear bombs. Either the USN is uniquely effective at covering up their fuckups, or they really do have an exemplary safety record. My money is on the later.
"While reactor accidents have not sunk any U.S. Navy ships or submarines, two nuclear-powered submarines, USS Thresher and USS Scorpion were lost at sea. The condition of these reactors has not been publicly released"
Yes, but they're far less cost efficient than diesel. That's why the nuclear cruisers were retired. For the carriers and especially the subs the nuclear plants provide operational capacity that diesel can't match. For a research station that's not a concern.
Of course, but those externalities are for more expensive/less cost efficient when discussing uranium and nuclear power than anything involving diesel. Personnel training, fuel production, equipment maintenance, pick an angle to inspect and you'll find the nuclear solution is far more expensive than traditional power plants.
Cost of operation isn't an externality. Externalities are costs we don't directly pay for, like carbon emissions causing global warming. Fossil fuels have incalculably higher externalities in this regard.
You are talking about direct costs that are priced in, and I actually disagree about including personnel and training costs in this specific instance because they are all - to an extent - fungible in the military or navy, as there is no shortage of souls and people will be trained for something for some duration of time.
When one considers the whole loop from incredibly polluting mining to disposing and keeping everything decontaminated in the process, fission nuclear should only be seen as a last resort option, as much as I see the great progress that has been made of course. I would have gone geothermal in Antarctica... with modern super depth drilling tech, and hot water as side effect, looks like a promising choice.
We have enough "waste" nuclear material that could be burned again in advanced reactors that mining doesn't have to be a thing if we really got our act together.
Also, the question really is about carbon emissions vs other types of environmental impact. Batteries and solar panels require great gobs of mining infrastructure too.
Update your knowledge of nuclear power. Mining can be done cleanly or not at all, and nuclear power plants generate very little waste - most of the waste that exists is from bomb making.
Newer fission tech has a lot of promise... if people who are convinced they already know all about nuclear energy can be troubled to learn about it.
What we know about it is that it is the most expensive alternative. Building, operating, and maintaining a new solar installation is cheaper than just operating and maintaining a nuke steam generator, ignoring the huge construction and decommissioning costs.
We finally got the ramshackle Indian Point and Diablo Canyon contraptions shut down, after decades of constant effort, and now it will cost a billion dollars and a decade or two to take them apart.
It was public knowledge. Further, there is no such thing as New Zealand territory (or anyone's territory for that matter) in Antarctica. There are existing territorial claims, but they are overlapping and basically nullified by the Antarctic Treaty.
This predates the New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone created in 1984 and in any case this is not New Zealand territory. But land-based nuclear power is perfectly legal in New Zealand, just unpopular & undeveloped, in favour of oil, gas, hydroelectric, and more recently wind. One unusual barrier to NZ nuclear power is that the common designs would be too big to maintain a balanced grid; a single 1GW commercial reactor could supply 1/7 of NZ's electricity.
While legally allowed it would be politically and culturally impossible at this point to build a nuclear power plant in NZ. The population has a strong Nuclear Free identity. For example, when you fly into Wellington, the sign on the way out of the airport says "Welcome to Wellington, Capital of Nuclear Free New Zealand".
I didn't downvote you but it takes about 30 seconds to discover that the New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament, and Arms Control Act was passed in 1987, well after the reactor discussed in the article was decommissioned.
My Dad was telling me some story how there's a secret military base in volcano in Antartica built by by Nazis. I'm convinced he was retelling a movie plot line. Anyone see a movie like this?
I've always regretted not going to Antarctica, but this article makes me think that I dodged a bullet. This plant was a maintenance nightmare. Plus, operating a reactor with a mix of personnel sounds bad. We certainly had our personnel issues on subs, but at least all of us in Engineering had the shared experiences of nuclear power school, prototype training, and sub qualification.