Kidding aside, while many service members do uphold their oath honorably, there's plenty of non-compliance and outright malfeasance without accountability.
And to the grandparent, the military does run reactors outside of ships (but typically for research as far as I know)
I see you haven't bothered to actually look at the record. The U.S. Navy has decades of operating many nuclear reactors on ships and submarines with no incidents.
> there's plenty of non-compliance and outright malfeasance without accountability
Not in the U.S. Navy's nuclear program. Even what would be considered minor infractions in other parts of the military are grounds for immediate dismissal. I saw that happen once while I was in the Navy and stationed at a shipyard. A minor administrative irregularity got the reactor officer of a ship fired; he was off the ship the same day and never came back.
No, it isn't, since we also have many, many civilian reactors that have operated for decades safely.
What's more, even if we take into account all of the harm done by all the nuclear accidents that have ever happened, including Chernobyl and Fukushima, the harm done by nuclear energy per unit of energy generated is still orders of magnitude less than the harm done by fossil fuel energy per unit of energy generated. And that is only actual harm that has already occurred--it doesn't take into account potential future harms (such as climate change--I personally don't think that's a very significant component of the harm done by fossil fuels, but I'm not arguing that point here, because what I've said is true even if any such potential harm is ignored--any potential future harm to the climate from fossil fuels just makes them look even worse than they already do).
The price premium paid by the military for nuclear power is for operational flexibility, not safe operation. The Navy's capital ships need to be able to steam anywhere in the world without having to worry about fuel. The Navy's submarines need to be able to operate submerged and undetectable for months at a time. Nuclear power is a necessary enabler for those operational capabilities, so the Navy simply can't tolerate any deviation from proper procedures since it would jeopardize those capabilities. The fact that this approach also leads to much increased reactor safety is a benefit, to be sure (and in the early days of Navy nuclear power, when much less was known about reactor safety than is known now, this benefit was indeed a key selling point for allowing the Navy to operate nuclear ships and subs), but it's not the primary purpose. If the greatly increased operational capability had not been there, the Navy wouldn't have bothered with nuclear power in the first place.
Maybe your criteria is different for what constitutes a mishap, but the Navy has had what I think from a safety engineering standpoint would count as mishaps or at the very least close-calls. From just one decade:
December 12, 1971 – New London, Connecticut, US – Spill of irradiated water During the transfer of radioactive coolant water from the submarine USS Dace to the submarine tender USS Fulton 500 US gallons (1,900 l; 420 imp gal) were spilled into the Thames River (USA).
1975 – location unknown – Contamination Radioactive resin contaminates the American Sturgeon-class submarine USS Guardfish after wind unexpectedly blows the powder back towards the ship. The resin is used to remove dissolved radioactive minerals and particles from the primary coolant loops of submarines.
October 1975 – Apra Harbor, Guam – Spill of irradiated water While disabled, the submarine tender USS Proteus discharged radioactive coolant water. A Geiger counter at two of the harbor's public beaches showed 100 millirems/hour, fifty times the allowable dose.
May 22, 1978 – near Puget Sound, Washington, United States – Spill of irradiated water A valve was mistakenly opened aboard the submarine USS Puffer releasing up to 500 US gallons (1,900 l; 420 imp gal) of radioactive water
Maybe you were only considering nuclear reactor incidents? I can understand that perspective even if it probably doesn't meet safety engineering principles.
The numbers are greater if we use the OP's scope of "US military" and greater still if we count National Laboratories doing military funded work. I don't say this to disparage the military's competence, I actually think they are very good at managing complex systems. My main point is that I'm not convinced it's necessarily a byproduct of organizational structure of "chain of command" as the OP said.
Yes, but it was about the military in the context of handling nuclear reactors and nuclear materials, and the US Navy is the only service that does that. (The Army did during WWII because it ran the Manhattan Project, but that was a one-time event and not representative of long-term practice.) So the Navy is the only relevant service.
> I'm assuming you're speaking from personal experience
Yes, as I've mentioned several times in various posts in this discussion (not all in response to you).
> Maybe your criteria is different for what constitutes a mishap
I was speaking specifically about reactor incidents, which is what Fukushima was. If you include releases of radioactive material that do not involve any issue with a reactor, yes, there have been incidents, some of which you note. A similar statement to the one I made about reactor incidents also holds for those: the total harm done by all such incidents involving radioactive materials is orders of magnitude less than the total harm done by releases of materials connected with fossil fuels (oil spills, coal ash, chemical spills, etc.; coal ash, btw, is more highly radioactive than many types of radioactive waste from nuclear reactors).
> I'm not convinced it's necessarily a byproduct of organizational structure of "chain of command"
I think the primary factor is simple unwillingness to tolerate any deviation from proper procedures. The existence of a military chain of command might not be essential for that, but it certainly makes it a lot easier. It would be very difficult for a civilian organization to justify summarily firing a high-level official over a single administrative error, as I saw done with a Navy officer (I mentioned this in another post elsewhere in this discussion).
> handling nuclear reactors and nuclear materials, and the US Navy is the only service that does that
That's not entirely true. I'd be willing to bet the Navy has the most experience in this regard, the Army still runs reactors and the Air Force handles nuclear material. Both investigating implementing reactors in future plans:
"Fast Burst Reactor (FBR) — The FBR is an unmoderated and unreflected cylindrical assembly of uranium and molybdenum alloy. The FBR produces high-yield pulses of microsecond width, as well as long-term, steady state radiation, to closely simulate the neutron radiation environment produced by a fission weapon"[1]
"The Defense Department is looking to develop miniature nuclear reactors to supply power to domestic military bases in an emergency, and later to power expeditionary forces"[2]
The other services are also heavily involved in National Laboratories that do a lot of the nuclear research for the federal government.
>the total harm done by all such incidents involving radioactive materials is orders of magnitude less than the total harm done by releases of materials connected with fossil fuels
Point noted and I don't know enough to disagree. But the issue wasn't which form of energy was the most safe, it was whether the military is inherently better at managing such systems because of their organizational structure. The military may foster accountability but I don't personally think this is attributable to a chain of command, but rather due to the emphasis on leadership principles and mature processes. There's plenty of civilian organizations that have a well-structured chain of command.
>I think the primary factor is simple unwillingness to tolerate any deviation from proper procedures. The existence of a military chain of command might not be essential for that, but it certainly makes it a lot easier.
Agree 100%. Out of curiosity was that officer actually fired (discharged/loss of commission) or reassigned? Reassignment is pretty common on the civilian side when people show themselves incapable of executing duties appropriately.
[1] https://www.wsmr.army.mil/testcenter/dir/Pages/Survivability...
[2] https://www.airforcemag.com/pentagon-working-on-mini-nuclear...
I wasn't aware that they were currently running any. You are right that I left out that the Army did used to have a small program, though--none of their reactors were more than about 10 MW, IIRC--but I thought it was shut down in the 1970s and they never had many reactor-years of operation.
> the Air Force handles nuclear material
Yes, fair point, the Air Force does handle nuclear weapons and associated materials.
> Both investigating implementing reactors in future plans
Yes, true. I've thought for a while that the obvious way for the US government to encourage nuclear power as well as generate some revenue independently of taxes would be to build a reactor for every US military base and sell the excess power generated back to the grid.
> the issue wasn't which form of energy was the most safe, it was whether the military is inherently better at managing such systems because of their organizational structure
If you left out "because of their organizational structure", I would agree with your description of the issue. I don't think organizational structure is the only relevant factor.
> Out of curiosity was that officer actually fired (discharged/loss of commission) or reassigned?
Reassigned, to a different command (not a ship), to duties not involving nuclear in any way. (I may have said "fired" in one of my posts describing this, but in military lingo that means "reassigned". Actually discharging someone requires a court martial, and the rules for when that can be done are much stricter.)
> Reassignment is pretty common on the civilian side when people show themselves incapable of executing duties appropriately.
But the definition of "incapable of executing duties appropriately" is very different in the civilian world. A minor administrative error wouldn't qualify. (By "minor administrative error" I mean an error of the order of "a single document was not filled out correctly", not an error of the order of "many things over an extended period of time were not done correctly". The latter might get you reassigned in the civilian world; the former won't.)
Those were what the Navy calls subsafe incidents, not nuclear incidents. There was no problem with the reactor. The problem was what one of my Navy instructors called "water in the people tank"--a flaw in the welds that seal the interior of the ship or structure against water pressure from the outside. The Navy took major steps to improve the QA on those welds as a result of these incidents; when I was in the Navy we did three different types of nondestructive tests and a single flaw, no matter how minor, meant you had to redo the entire weld.
Scramming and then having no procedure for a rapid restart, yes. But that's not a reactor safety incident.
If you look at one of my earlier replies, I acknowledged the relatively good (but not pristine) record of Navy warships but also linked to a list of a surprising number of military mishaps (both facility and weapons related).
To be fair, the list dwindled as the timeline became more recent.