We have Hyman G. Rickover, Admiral in the US Navy to thank for steering nuclear energy research away from thorium to uranium.
He very much wanted the Navy to be in command of nuclear wessels carrying nuclear missiles.
If I can remember correctly from research in US energy policy history in college, the US had sunk about 10 years into thorium reactor research when Hyman came along.
Seems rather important to not ignore the violence monopoly. Quit paying it too much serious attention for too long and it gets chippy.
Let’s hope this is PTSD from a generation that was forced to go through hell, often for no reason, and it can normalize out. So long as we live long enough to test that hypothesis.
On the upside, the Navy has never had a nuclear accident. We’ve proven it’s doable.
That's why risk analysis looks at defense in depth. It's for people who believe there's no such thing as luck and every close call is a near disaster that needs to be accounted for in the plan.
The Navy has never admitted to a nuclear accident (other than radioactive coolant spills and the like, which it has admitted and which are nuclear accidents), but the US government has in other contexts kept nuclear accidents secret for decades after they happened, notionally for security reasons, so why wouldn't they do that with one occurring in the fleet?
> the Navy has never had a nuclear accident. We've proven it's doable
Ehem... Where the USS Thresher and the USS Scorpion sailing under Mauritanian flag?
Nope. The US navy has never had a nuclear accident, they just lost two whole nuclear submarines that sank near Azores and Massachussets (but only 220 people were killed so it seems that the army forgot all about it yet).
> On the upside, the Navy has never had a nuclear accident. We’ve proven it’s doable.
Well that's not true:
"An American nuclear-powered submarine leaked radiation for more than two years, releasing the bulk of the material in its home port of Guam and at Pearl Harbor, Japanese and U.S. officials said Thursday."[1]
There was also the A4 that fell off an aircraft carrier with 3 nuclear bombs on board, which were never recovered[2].
Both the USS Thresher and USS Scorpion sunk and haven't had their nuclear reactors or weapons recovered. They do appear to remain intact though.
He very much wanted the Navy to be in command of nuclear wessels carrying nuclear missiles.
If I can remember correctly from research in US energy policy history in college, the US had sunk about 10 years into thorium reactor research when Hyman came along.
Seems rather important to not ignore the violence monopoly. Quit paying it too much serious attention for too long and it gets chippy.
Let’s hope this is PTSD from a generation that was forced to go through hell, often for no reason, and it can normalize out. So long as we live long enough to test that hypothesis.
On the upside, the Navy has never had a nuclear accident. We’ve proven it’s doable.