I'm not talking about wrecking a car and causing a meltdown or anything. Did you dispose of the plutonium waste once it was depleted? Nope - that's done by the nuclear engineers in a lengthy ROH process. All of that waste is super radioactive. But that's fine - we only have around 100 nuclear ships that need ROH every 20ish years, so we don't have facilities all over, and the waste and protocols can be as tightly controlled as they ought to be. Not only for the environmental factors and safety of the personnel involved, but to control (ideally prevent) the flow of fissile/radioactive materials into the black market.
Now, if there were, say 100 million very small ships that had to do ROH every 2-3 years (because they're much smaller, so the cores exhaust on shorter time scales), you have two choices: Trust the DIY mechanics to swap out their own nuclear cores safely, or build facilities everywhere and train an entire economic sector to follow the correct protocols. Of course that also increases the likelihood of materials going to the black market by orders of magnitude in either case. And I mean... carriers and subs don't typically get stolen, while cars get stolen by the millions each year. Fissile material control would be completely lost.
Sure - we can harvest power from fissile materials pretty safely, and we can set up foolproof systems that even the drunkest sailor can operate safely, but you can't compare the ~100 enormous military vehicles with the might of the US military budget behind them with entrusting fissile materials to every layperson in the US. Even just accounting for ignorance (let alone maliciousness) you'd quickly have both environmental and weapons disasters on your hands.
InYourFaceNancyGrace 0 points 8 months ago
I'm not talking about wrecking a car and causing a meltdown or anything. Did you dispose of the plutonium waste once it was depleted? Nope - that's done by the nuclear engineers in a lengthy ROH process. All of that waste is super radioactive. But that's fine - we only have around 100 nuclear ships that need ROH every 20ish years, so we don't have facilities all over, and the waste and protocols can be as tightly controlled as they ought to be. Not only for the environmental factors and safety of the personnel involved, but to control (ideally prevent) the flow of fissile/radioactive materials into the black market.
Now, if there were, say 100 million very small ships that had to do ROH every 2-3 years (because they're much smaller, so the cores exhaust on shorter time scales), you have two choices: Trust the DIY mechanics to swap out their own nuclear cores safely, or build facilities everywhere and train an entire economic sector to follow the correct protocols. Of course that also increases the likelihood of materials going to the black market by orders of magnitude in either case. And I mean... carriers and subs don't typically get stolen, while cars get stolen by the millions each year. Fissile material control would be completely lost.
Sure - we can harvest power from fissile materials pretty safely, and we can set up foolproof systems that even the drunkest sailor can operate safely, but you can't compare the ~100 enormous military vehicles with the might of the US military budget behind them with entrusting fissile materials to every layperson in the US. Even just accounting for ignorance (let alone maliciousness) you'd quickly have both environmental and weapons disasters on your hands.