How is it safe to have a nuclear reactor on aircraft carriers and submarines when they are a potential military targets?
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There are a LOT of things that make naval nuclear reactors safe from the way their shielding is set up to the environment (water, which blocks a lot of radiation) to their design (they fail in a way that shuts them down rather than catastrophically). I wasn’t a nuclear guy but I was a submarine guy so I was taught a lot of rudimentary stuff about how the reactor works and everyone in board is taught a whole lot of safety stuff.
In a condensed version, glossing over a whole lot of technical stuff, a naval nuclear reactor is much smaller than one for providing power for a region. The reactors in TX provide around 1200MW to make electricity for the region each while a submarine reactor according to Wikipedia produces a couple hundred MW of power. This much smaller reactor is surrounded by a lot of shielding and is sitting in a ship which is almost always going to be in the ocean, where the surrounding water would do a pretty good job of preventing radiation from spreading very far if the worst were to happen.
Some other factors to make it safe to have these reactors in things that are considered military targets is that they’re pretty difficult to attack. An aircraft carrier doesn’t just go somewhere, it goes as part of a group. There are other classes of ship that escort the carrier that are much better at their roles in surface and antisubmarine warfare than aircraft carriers are and there are ships that have incredibly powerful and accurate detection suites to provide a warning for incoming aircraft to give the carrier time to get is own aircraft into the air.
Nuclear submarines have a really good track record regarding safety. As best I can remember, the US has never lost a nuclear submarine in battle and the losses that have happened have been prevented in the future with design changes and training. There are very stringent requirements for being able to operate a naval reactor and anyone who has been in a submarine for more than a year or two can tell you that the examinations for maintaining a certification are very thorough. As far as being attacked, a submarine in the ocean is a difficult thing to find. They can dive deep enough to be undetectable visually, radio waves don’t penetrate water well for the same reasons that radiation is blocked by water, and they’re very quiet compared to the rest of the stuff in the ocean. The ocean is also very large so it would be difficult to even begin looking for one.
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