It's not nitroglicerine, it's fucking hard work to get a regulus to go supercritical. No plausible deniability if it does, you'd have to design it totally differently.
It will blow up and spread radio active material everywhere. Same as if it blew up on it's own. It's not going to be a nuclear bomb. I think that goes without saying..
If you’re doing straight up war crime level things it’s much easier to just go the biological or chemical route with the added benefit of not making the land completely unusable for millennia.
That's the Hollywood view, you're getting that from a movie. Get it from the books, I recommend Richard Rhodes's The Making of the Atomic Bomb and The Turing Cathedral.
thanks for telling me that it is not nitroglycerine... as if I didn't know... I could make nitroglycerine to spread radioactive material though (you only need a couple of ingredients (3))... I would go for nitrocellulose though...
A modern military has a lot of scarce / complex / expensive equipment that it could crash / set fire to / try to explode in enemy territory. In movies, that looks really cool. In the real world, that's why armed forces carry all those cheap (at least relatively) bullets / bombs / shells / etc. into enemy territory.
I think that still counts as portable. It seems like you can unpack and spin it up in 3 days, and shut it down and pack it up for moving within 7 days. That actually seems insanely portable for what it is.
But the biggest issue with nuclear reactors is more the necessary safety containment housings and safe fuel storage. What are they doing about this? Also, after you start using the fuel, even when shut down it takes active cooling for months/years.
This article seems to emphasize that this will reduce waste and pollution but it doesn't say anything about safety and issues with the new type of fuel.
Note IANANE (I am not a nuclear engineer) but most probably by using a closed Brayton cycle. The gas is heated which expands and drives the turbine, the hot gas is cooled via a heat exchanger, compressed then fed through the reactor again.
Can someone explain what is going on here versus the nuclear reactors navy submarines have been using for decades? I mean I get that design may be improved. I guess I’m just reacting to the notion that a portable reactor is this new achievement, which is not explicitly stated.
These are gas-cooled reactors, and much lower power output. Existing designs for Navy reactors are all pressurized water reactors that produce hundreds of MW.
There's also a challenge in waste heat. Ships have basically unlimited seawater, but they are probably designing this to use minimal (or no?) water.
Not exactly relevant to the article, I've always had the hope that, one day, every home would a have a "nuke ball": a dodecahedron the size of soccer ball operating as an endlessly powered electric battery.
At least some of them were produced at the Idaho Nuclear Engineering Laboratory, and one of them suffered an accident there due to operator error. That site was later renamed to Idaho National Laboratory when being "nuclear" became bad, and they're making these "new" ones, too.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 59.6 ms ] threadAnything that you hit with a bomb would explode... that's the definition of a bomb... and it would spread radioactive material (in this case).
It should deliver 1 to 5 MW for at least three years of operation at full power.
But the biggest issue with nuclear reactors is more the necessary safety containment housings and safe fuel storage. What are they doing about this? Also, after you start using the fuel, even when shut down it takes active cooling for months/years.
This article seems to emphasize that this will reduce waste and pollution but it doesn't say anything about safety and issues with the new type of fuel.
It's all relative. For example, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_computer
https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/man-portable
I couldn't understand from the article what runs a turbine (hot gas?). Can someone explain how electricity is generated?
https://www.cto.mil/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Final-EIS-Vol...
Sounds like an air compressor+turbine, but heated by a heat exchanger instead of burning fuel.
https://energy.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2-3.-HTGR-... has a diagram on page 2 that explains it better than I can
There's also a challenge in waste heat. Ships have basically unlimited seawater, but they are probably designing this to use minimal (or no?) water.
At least some of them were produced at the Idaho Nuclear Engineering Laboratory, and one of them suffered an accident there due to operator error. That site was later renamed to Idaho National Laboratory when being "nuclear" became bad, and they're making these "new" ones, too.