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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Because nuclear reactors aren’t as dangerous as you’re told, especially not if they sink in water.
Literally 100-150m of water would be a safe distance for you to swim – people do it all the time in nuclear waste tanks to maintain them. Just 150m from Chernobyl in open air is safe for hours.
If you put a nuclear plant on an oil rig platform, and it started to have a complete core meltdown – like Chernobyl but far worse – you could drop the thing in the ocean, cordon off the area under the oil platform with buoys and then build another safely right next door to it. You could literally swim above it and be perfectly safe.
And ones on ships and submarines are tiny in comparison.
People have this intense fear of nuclear power plants and while they can be absolutely deadly if you do stupid things with them, sinking them in water is one of the best ways to suppress the radioactivity – so good that that’s basically how we cool them every day of their working lives.
(P.S. Fukushima was destroyed by a tsunami, but the water didn’t remain in place, so it was a very different problem).
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