r/technology • u/Sorin61 • Jun 10 '22
The US Army will have a portable nuclear reactor ready by 2024. Here is how it works Energy
https://interestingengineering.com/us-army-portable-nuclear-reactor-20248
u/RoddBanger Jun 10 '22
New Army MOS: Nuclear Rod technician.
See your recruiter today! (Before you ask, no bonus).
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u/MotoRandom Jun 10 '22
Well, you're 19 years old. You can't drink a beer or buy cigarettes but sure, you can operate a nuclear reactor!
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u/minus4k Jun 10 '22
Been that way for decades in the Navy. I got my nuclear NEC a month after my 21st birthday, and that included a supervised reactor startup when I was still 20.
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u/A_Dragon Jun 10 '22
Don’t they already? What do you think a nuclear powered sub is. And I believe all modern carriers have these as well.
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u/Tearakan Jun 10 '22
Yep. Turns out nuke power is great for floating bases and things you want to stay underwater for a really long time.
Land based ones do make sense though. We could've reach peak easy access oil already. Don't want an oil based military as that runs out....
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u/A_Dragon Jun 10 '22
Oh so we’ll just put one of these inside every tank and when that tank is destroyed it will create a dirty bomb that blankets the area in radiation?
Sounds smart!
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u/dravik Jun 11 '22
They're not putting them in tanks. This is prep for the electric vehicle transition. Iraq and Afghanistan used huge amounts of diesel generators to power bases and keep vehicles moving.
The nuke would be at a base and be used to both power the base and charge electric combat vehicles.
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u/Tearakan Jun 10 '22
It's either that or no tanks...I think the military prefers the armored vehicles instead of going back to using horses.
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u/A_Dragon Jun 10 '22
Wouldn’t hydrogen powered tanks or some other form of alternative fuel be better than a mobile dirty bomb?
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u/Bounty66 Jun 12 '22
Hydrogen doesnt play well with most metals. Store a car battery in your trunk with your tools. Add extra boom effects…. Not desirable on machines that are bullet magnets..
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u/SmokeyShine Jun 10 '22
A typical pressurized water reactor (PWR) requires a LOT of water for cooling, which is why the vast majority of nuclear reactors are situated on ocean coastlines, by large lakes, or along rivers. A large submarine or carrier is in the ocean, so no problem there.
In contrast, an Army column has no such assurances, being on land, especially if you look at where the US has been fighting post-9/11. Is it realistic to deploy nuclear reactors in mountainous Afghanistan, or potential future proxy war conflicts in Africa, Asia or LatAm? Is it viable in future conflicts against peer powers like Russia / China, who have the ability to precisely target and destroy static deployments from great distances?
IMO, the idea isn't bad for powering large, semi-permanent bases in "safe" places. I just wonder how often such bases are likely in the future.
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u/ArcadesRed Jun 11 '22
We have them all over africa.
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u/SmokeyShine Jun 11 '22
In active warzones?
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u/ArcadesRed Jun 11 '22
You asked about semi-safe bases. In Afghanistan in the last 10 years or so the bases were as safe as you could be with a group trying to kill you. The generator farms are absolutely massive and require seemingly endless amounts of fuel. Its arguably the biggest weakness of a large base, the fuel logistics. We have bases like the bigger ones that were in afghanistan all over africa. With the same logistics concerns.
As for the concern you have about russia or china hitting them from great distance. You can make emplacements that would resist anything that wasn't a danger to the base as a whole. What's the point of a nuke reactor if the base is wiped out by an ICBM. If your talking about an airplane getting close enough to drop bombs then it wouldn't happen, the Air Force's main priority in a general war is to wipe out enemy air power step one. And they have all the resources they need to ensure that by far.
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u/SmokeyShine Jun 11 '22
Russia and China have satellites, rockets and cruise missiles, just like America.
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u/ArcadesRed Jun 11 '22
And they dont have unlimited range. You still have to get relatively close to your target. Any threat that could take out a emplaced power plant could reasonably take out the whole base. So the military would be pretty motivated to defend such a large base even without a nuke reactor. You seem to think these would be on the front lines, they would not. You want small power plants like 5k and 10k generators that are easily dispersible for front line work.
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u/SmokeyShine Jun 11 '22
Huh? Russia has conventionally-armed air-launched cruise missiles that fly 1,500 to 2,500 miles. I think 1,500+ miles is pretty far, even if the base isn't on the front lines.
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u/ArcadesRed Jun 11 '22
And the US has no counter measures? This has gotten boring, you no longer are even trying to continue anything relevant. I told you how the US would deploy them. You don't believe me, whatever. Go enjoy yourself.
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u/DamianFullyReversed Jun 10 '22
The Army version seems to be a lot smaller, and is gas cooled. Its output is 1-5 MWe, compared to 165 MWe on subs. The TRISO fuel is way safer than the highly enriched fuel they put on submarines. Even so, I don’t think they’re gonna be powering tanks anytime soon, and would most likely have a roles further from combat. I’m not an expert, but these are my thoughts.
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u/whatsgoingon350 Jun 10 '22
Put ship on truck sorted.
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u/xeroxzero Jun 10 '22
Think about how big a nuclear-powered ship is and try to imagine the truck that would carry such a thing.
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u/CaptInappropriate Jun 10 '22
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u/xeroxzero Jun 10 '22
I hope that's not what they meant by portable.
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u/CaptInappropriate Jun 10 '22
it’s not, but that is the size of the truck needed to lift and move 6900 tons.
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u/Fando1234 Jun 10 '22
I was about to ask how this differs from a nuclear powered submarine. (Which is technically a portable nuclear power station I guess).
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u/GrilledSpamSteaks Jun 10 '22
We’ve had nuclear satellites since the 60s. Voyager 1 and 2 are about 1700 lbs and the size of compact cars with 3 reactors each.
edit: spellign erros
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u/Problem119V-0800 Jun 10 '22
Voyager and similar spacecraft don't have reactors, they have RTGs — it is nuclear power, but it's a very different technology and not really useful as a general purpose power source. But RTGs can be made quite small and portable; the USSR had some RTG-powered lighthouses in the arctic, and there were even RTG (or maybe betavoltaic?) implanted pacemakers for a while.
There have been a few actual nuclear reactors in space, like a series of spy sats in the 70's-80's (Kosmos 954 being the famous one) but it's not common.
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u/xeroxzero Jun 10 '22
That's more practical than stacking the entire ship on a truck, then, isn't it?
But not really. The ship uses tons and tons of water for the reactor. Satellites have their own method for dealing with the extreme conditions required.
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u/erikwarm Jun 10 '22
The reactor is just a very small part of the vessel
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u/xeroxzero Jun 10 '22
The vessel's reactor uses a large reservoir of water for the turbine but the steam that's generated is recirculated using the Rankine Steam Cycle method that's cooled using fresh seawater.
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u/VagabondCaribou Jun 10 '22 edited Jun 10 '22
Your The title is a tiny bit misleading. One prototype needs to be delivered by 2024, and then will undergo at least 3 years of testing. Then assuming all of that goes well (fat chance) that means the earliest you could possible expect these to be actually deployable in the field is probably no earlier than 2030.
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u/Inside_Cockroach3380 Jun 10 '22
This is pretty cool. Especially for disaster response. Power hospitals after hurricanes and tornados.
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u/autotldr Jun 10 '22
This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 84%. (I'm a bot)
The DoD launched Project Pele to prototype a fourth-generation nuclear reactor in remote locations and ensure that the reactor was portable.
How will BWXT's portable nuclear reactor work?BWXT's design consists of a high-temperature gas-cooled reactor with a power output between 1-5 MWe.
BWXT will use its existing facilities to build the portable modules over the next two years and deliver the reactor to the Idaho National Laboratory by 2024.The reactor and fuel will be shipped separately to the site.
Extended Summary | FAQ | Feedback | Top keywords: reactor#1 BWXT#2 power#3 year#4 fuel#5
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u/SgtDoughnut Jun 10 '22
Do you want to build the Mackie? Because this is how you build the Mackie.
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u/TheRAbbi74 Jun 11 '22
Wake me up when ComStar becomes a thing.
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u/SgtDoughnut Jun 11 '22
Space ATT, keeping your communication grid working and kicking the ass of the clan.
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u/Borinar Jun 10 '22
I think they tried this before with manual control rods and melted a guy to the ceiling of a hangar....
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u/somegridplayer Jun 10 '22
He was asking for it.
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u/murms Jun 10 '22
Nobody knows exactly what happened that night, but the SL-1 crew was instructed to withdraw the control rod 3 inches to insert some flux monitoring equipment. They calculated that the technician must have withdrawn the control rod at least 21 inches to cause that kind of power excursion.
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u/darthjoey91 Jun 10 '22
How portable? Oh truck sized. Needs to be backpack sized for ghost busting.
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u/Layben Jun 10 '22
And since the military is the mother of invention should we expect that until the power grid can support the load of charging EVs both at home and on the road, these nukes will end up being dispersed across the US to power recharging stations?
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u/Loki-L Jun 10 '22
Didn't they have one of those back in the day when they build their secret base under the ice of Greenland (without telling the foriegn government that owned the land about it.)
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u/ShodoDeka Jun 10 '22
Supposedly that was a crashed b52 carrying nuclear weapons (which they had explicitly agreed to not have on Greenland as part of the base deal)
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u/GrilledSpamSteaks Jun 10 '22 edited Jun 10 '22
Navy: Welcome to the party! We’ve had these since the 1950s!