Peacedog wrote:Honestly it's not that big a deal. Practically speaking most large ships should be nuclear powered. They aren't for strictly political reasons.
Here is a good wrap up of what is going on with nuclear fleets worldwide:
https://www.world-nuclear.org/informati ... ships.aspx
Accidents have happened in the past, the reactors themselves are designed with this in mind
On 12 August 2000, K-141 Kursk was lost when it sank in the Barents Sea, killing all 118 personnel on board.
Scorpion was lost on 22 May 1968, with 99 crewmen dying in the incident.
The US has used a floating nuclear power source in the past in the 60s...
MH-1A was the first floating nuclear power station. Named Sturgis after General Samuel D. Sturgis, Jr., this pressurized water reactor built in a converted Liberty ship was part of a series of reactors in the US Army Nuclear Power Program, which aimed to develop small nuclear reactors to generate electrical and space-heating energy primarily at remote, relatively inaccessible sites.[1] Its designation stood for mobile, high power. After its first criticality** in 1967, MH-1A was towed to the Panama Canal Zone that it supplied with 10 MW of electricity from October 1968 to 1975. Its dismantling began in 2014 and was completed in March 2019.
** Criticality, is the state of a nuclear chain reacting medium when the chain reaction is just self-sustaining (or critical), that is, when the reactivity is zero. More loosely, the term is used for states in which the reactivity is greater than zero.[1]
What the Russians are doing makes sense, using tech that has been tested
and used real time updated with latest modern technology
Each Lomonosov-class vessel will have two KLT-40S pressurized water reactors, a derivative of the standard KLT-40 and improved KLT-40M, the latter of which powers Russia’s Taymyr-class icebreakers. Each S variant can produce up to 35 megawatts of electricity or 150 megawatts of thermal energy.