We do *not* want naval reactors!

Normal civilian reactors work on low enrichment uranium or even natural uranium--stuff that has no potential to go boom.

Even reprocessing isn't the danger it's made out to be. First, the plutonium from spent reactor fuel has a lot of Pu-240 in it. Bombs need Pu-239, too much Pu-240 will make them malfunction. (If you are trying to make Pu-239 you switch out the fuel rods much more frequently.) Second, the reprocessing plant has access to a lot of very hot stuff. All you actually need to do in reprocessing is strip out the waste products that poison the reaction, a fuel rod heavily "contaminated" with something like Cobalt-60 won't interfere with reactor operation, but it will ensure no thief will make off with it.

Naval reactors, however, are built to be as small as possible. That means very highly enriched uranium. Building a gun-type uranium bomb is easily within the range of what Al Qaeda can do, the limiting factor is obtaining the materials. Thus naval reactor fuel needs to be treated with extreme security.

Apologies if my thesis wasn't clear. I'm advocating for Navy administration of the commercial nuclear fleet being subsidized by the federal gov, not Naval reactors of the same design you'd put at sea. The value is in accountability and chain of command ("safety culture"), not the marine vessel reactor design.

Or have the government own the plants and lease out operation to a qualified commercial operator with rigorous certification requirements and regular recertification requirements.

I have more faith in the military chain of command versus a contractor who isn’t going to give AF if they lose a contract and the US gov has to pay out to rehabilitate a facility that wasn’t properly maintained.

Contractors have less fear than someone who can be jailed (and let’s be honest, contractors and other commercial entities are never held accountable when they cut corners for profit and pollute with wild abandon leaving us with Superfund sites).

> when they cut corners for profit and pollute with wild abandon leaving us with Superfund sites

The military doesn't have a great track record on Superfund sites i.e:

https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/cursites/csitinfo.cfm?id=0...

However, I agree that at least the military has the culture that will follow orders if asked, and more importantly, it's the only government program that the US population is willing to put unchecked amounts of money towards.

As Reagan said: "trust, but verify".

Why does it need to be run by a commercial operator at all? What advantage does that confer?

The US Navy is not exactly known for great cost efficiency or safety.

[Citation needed]

Google USS Fitzgerald as well as Fat Leonard, that will put you on the path to understanding the pervasive problems in 7th fleet. They've chopped off heads in leadership, so maybe things are moving towards better, but it's undeniable there's been a huge problem festering for ages.

Familiarize yourself with the Zumwalt and LCS procurement programs. Both are nearly total failures, with the Navy grasping at straws to find ways to make the ships that have been constructed useful. Congress bears some of the blame here, particularly in relation to Zumwalt, but it's also clear Navy leadership has been often incompetent in planning future acquisitions. Those two programs cost US tax payers about $50 billion.

You're blaming F35 cost overruns on trans people and minority hires? Wierd, my first guess would have been something about the complex and ultimately corrupt interplay between military contractors, congressional pork-barrelling, and government bureaucracy.

These things usually boil down to money and power, not {{cultural_issue_of_the_day}}.

The F35 was doomed from the start. It was asked to do too many roles, inherently making it the jack of all trades, king of none. The military would have been much better served by making a few related airframes with as much commonality of parts as practical.

The military no longer discharges people? It promotes everyone?

If the promotion figures don’t include enough minorities, certain members of Congress get very mad and threaten all sorts of things. This is also why academic and honor standards at the military academies have collapsed.

You are spouting pure bigoted nonsense.

The military has been shifting to demographic and gender blinded promotion systems, like this for example: https://hbr.org/2020/11/reinventing-the-leader-selection-pro...

It is in no way the case that affirmative action is being used as an excuse to promote incompetent officers, let alone that this is somehow destroying the military. In fact the military historically has had the opposite problem. "Legacy" counts for far to much, particularly with the families at military academies, leading to a senior leadership structure that is very out of step with ordinary Americans, and fails to grapple the cross cultural international issues inherent to the US projecting military power globally.

Stop disparaging our military with your alt right fantasy nonsense. The rank and file certainly don't deserve it.

That's just absolutely not true. They are promoting incompetent people because of demands for diversity, and everyone in the military knows it. There are ways of achieving that while still being able to claim you are "blind" to this or that factor in the process. And no system can be blind because it eventually has to incorporate feedback from your commanding officer and others who deal with you. Do you think those people don't face political pressure to make sure the right outcome happens? Do you want to be accused of racial discrimination?

Read. The. Article.

Source?

It's unclear to me that the military is currently any less effective and efficient than it was in the 90s. In Hollywood films in those days, it was typically portrayed as being incredibly efficient, but that has nothing to do with reality.

My own anecdote says that "The wastefulness of the military budget" has been an issue for many decades -- go look up Eisenhower's warnings of the military/industrial complex, and consider that the problem had been building for quite a while at that point.

Back then, of course, "cultural rot" would've meant "Treating black soldiers as equals"; in the 90s, IIRC, it would've meant "Treating female soldiers as equals". Just wondering, are you in favor of racism and sexism as well, or are you just anti-trans? Please note that anti-trans attitudes are likely to age about as well as racism and sexism have.

IMHO, every social change feels a little weird at the time; you're used to thinking a certain way, and now you're told that it's wrong; people take that sort of things personally. Other self-righteous people sometimes realize they can use the new woke attitude to swan around and club people who're moving more slowly -- bullying, really, and this bullying is the serious problem on the left, not the wokeness itself. We'd all be better off if we were better at granting grace to people making good-faith efforts to change their habits and attitudes.

So social change is hard. But that doesn't make it wrong, or rot, or virtue-signaling; it really does make life better for unfairly marginalized people, and as it spreads, the power of the leftist bullies will dissipate, and we'll be left with a better world overall.

And: if you want to disempower those leftist bullies faster, support racial justice, support women's rights, support trans rights. You don't have to club people over the head with it; just offer quiet support, because it's the right thing to do, and it'll make the bullies all the madder if there's nothing they can use to feel superior to you. :-)

Affirmative action hires? are you saying minorities are destroying the Navy? Please explain.

When was the last time there was a safety incident on a nuclear Navy vessel? Or a loss of radiological material? I am aware of the culture causing loss of life due to overwork and hubris on their non nuclear vessels, but nuke specialists run a tight ship, and reactors on land are stationary and need nuke folks (not sailors).

I'll have to dig up a citation. But the [] Three Mile Island accident was in part caused by (former) naval nuclear specialists making poor choices based on optimizing for the wrong things.

My memory is fuzzy, but this 37 minute video [2] has a breakdown.

If memory serves, the root causes were faults in the pumps and delays in the 28 baud diagnostic printouts running minutes or hours behind which left everyone operating on bad data.

Part of that was exacerbated by the operators applying techniques used on subs (something about preferring to keep low pressure in some vessel, because high pressure there could sink the boat if containment was lost), the TMI design didn't need this as it could vent/blow-off, and the operators became somewhat fixated on "trying to save the boat" and missed a bunch of procedures.

Of course this doesn't invalidate your point, but even if the reactor designs are really similar, it may be a mistake to cross train anyone.

(disclosure: haven't seen this video in a year or so, and am generally a fan of nuclear power considering the alternatives, but it needs to be done with different, safer reactor designs and probably with new branding because no matter what it's going to take _forever_ to convince anyone to trust nuclear, when they associate that term with the dangerous, BWR designs that were never intended for land)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xQeXOz0Ncs

At a guess I'd say that a number of them are regarded as Top Secret, a big issue would be hard to cover up.

Although I'd imagine if there were many issues they be known about. I'd love to learn morea about nuclear reactors on carriers and submarines, but I imagine most of the engineering knowledge is secret.

So did Trump make any improvements on this score? Not from what I’ve seen. It may be more no shooting wars lead to degradation.

Trump was basically unable to do anything about any part of the federal bureaucracy, including the military, which is entrenched through a combination of civil service laws and Supreme Court decisions that make it impossible for the President to effectively control the bureaucracy if they don't see eye to eye.