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).
The whole idea that any nuclear material will just create a nuclear explosion if you blow it up is just a meme. It requires very specific conditions and materials to work at all, and those do not exist in generators.
Generators on land have the risk of cooling towers having the steam they release get contaminated so it releases harmful particles into the air. That isn’t the case with subs and boats since they have ample water around them and don’t need to rely on air to cool.
Nuclear particles contaminating water for hundreds of miles is also a meme. It gets diluted pretty fast and it’s only a problem when water is going directly through the damaged reactor and onto land where people farm and drink the ground water (this was the case with Fukushima). The particles are mainly just a problem when inhaled or ingested
I was a nuclear trained electrician on a sub for 4 years. There is definitely inherent danger with having nuclear reactors on the boats. A few random thoughts in no particular order:
1) The Navy has operated without any major nuclear accidents since the inception of it’s nuclear program. This has a lot to do with smart design, but the training program is also very intense.
2) A nuclear explosion cannot happen from a nuclear reactor. Consider how hard it was for the Manhattan project to be successful (academically speaking). If a submarine’s reactor gets hit by a tornado the worst it can do is meltdown, at which point the submarine is guaranteed to go the bottom of the ocean. If a submarine was in port in shallow waters, that would be a problem that needed to be dealt with and cleaned up. If they sink in hundreds of feet of water, well, that’s no problem for humans anymore.
3) Some countries won’t let nuclear powered vessels moor at their piers. The list of ports I could visit on a nuclear powered submarine was less than those ships that were diesel powered (cruisers, destroyers, etc.).
4) A submarine that sinks to the bottom of the ocean is absolutely leaking radiation like crazy down there. Water quickly absorbs all of it before it reaches humans, but at the end of the day it’s probably speeding up evolution in the surrounding ecosystem.
So having a nuclear reactor doesn’t necessarily make it a bigger target, but there are more risks with having one on board. If you’re curious as to why you would want a reactor over a diesel engine:
1) Diesel engines require a lot of air. If the diesel eats up all the air in the sub then there is none for me (it actually draws a vacuum on the sub and kills you that way). So our options are to stick a mast out of the water and suck air, or operate off the battery (which doesn’t last that long!)
2) With enriched uranium, the ships with reactors only need to refuel once every few decades. Imagine stocking enough diesel fuel to last 20+ years, what kind of explosion could you make if you hit that with a torpedo?! (a dumb question but still fun to think about)
So it’s a no-brainer to put reactors on a submarine, and the power requirements of an aircraft carrier make it seem just as necessary.
If an aircraft carrier of submarine is attacked by a force capable of sinking it then we have bigger problems to worry about.
The same reason it’s safe to have electricity in your house but not a lightning bolt.
The reactors that power ships are absolutely tiny compared to like Chernobyl or Fukashima or whatever. Even an absolute worst case scenario isn’t going to be an issue for anyone downwind in the next town or anything. There’s just not enough stuff in there.
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.
I have no idea how nuclear-powered vessels are constructed, but couldn’t an explosive weapon penetrating to the reactor or a magazine detonation end up blowing a radioactive cloud of what used to be the reactor into the air?
Generally aircraft carriers and fleet submarines are strategic assets carrying atomic weapons. If an enemy power is attacking your strategic assets, you are likely in a nuclear war already.
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