The Speculist

Question: Why doesn't somebody set this up privately? Put the sub engines in international waters so you don't have a lot of regulatory concerns and then start selling the power to whoever wants you to cable it to them.

Maybe the margins are wrong? Or secuirty issues?

Phil:

I think it should be a private company that does this.

But whatever entity that does it will have to have the cooperation of the government. Presumably the plans to this reactor are classified.

...and it should remain classified. The technology could be licensed to qualified companies who have employees that have undergone security clearance.

Its very disappointing to hear this. On the plus side, Bush has come out in favor of nuclear reactors. The risk of land-based meltdown is incredibly low with modern-day technology anyway - seems like offshore reactors would be an unnecessary inconvenience. It's so peculiar that people are talking about extracting oil from our shale when the nuclear option is there and ready.

Seems unlikely that a private company would pursue this, very capital-heavy and probably bad for the image of the company. It would be a radical departure from the current energy regime - all the rich oil companies are good at what they do, and they ain't changin'.

Here is a list of other items in the warehouse:
http://www.warehouse23.com/basement/

J.Random American
ideasinprogress.blogspot.com

Building 1000 PWRs won't make us energy independent, even if it does displace all other existing electric generating capacity. The US economy uses a great deal of energy for things other than generating electricity.

Plug-in hybrids are nice, but they are not economical, even with gas at $3/gallon. The batteries are just too expensive.

A GO-HEV designed around lead-acid batteries would be downright cheap, especially if the hybrid system was designed to limit discharging to extend the battery life.  Here's Commuter Cars' calculations.

Michael:

This is probably another one of those situations (last time it was the Space Elevator) where laymen (which of course includes me) just aren't equiped to argue with each other.

To know which type of reactor would be most cost efficient, we'd need to know the risk of accidents with land-based nuclear power plants, the cost of clean-up after an accodent, the cost of deploying the reactor (including all the environmental impact and NIMBY problems you'd run into) v. the cost of deploying these reactors out to sea, and their comparitive risk (Craven seemed to think the risk was low, but there has to be some risk).

These are things we just don't know. It is good to have another option to study, right?

Paul:

"Building 1000 PWRs won't make us energy independent, even if it does displace all other existing electric generating capacity. The US economy uses a great deal of energy for things other than generating electricity."

1000 of these reactors would give us the equavelent of 2002 electrical output capacity. Of course, the old capacity wouldn't go away. So, you would be doubling output capacity.

We could predict two results from doubled output: we'd use more electricity, and electricity would be cheaper.

Cheaper electricity changes the cost-benefit analysis on plug-in hybrids even if the battery prices remain the same.

But as more people use plug-in hybrids another predictable thing would happen: hybrid technology (including the batteries) would get better and cheaper. Why? Economies of scale and more R&D would be devoted to this new larger market.

And once a substantial portion of the population is in plug-in hybrids, we'd be burning significantly less fossil fuels in the private sector.

All these effects from a single cause. If this didn't make us energy independent, it take us a long way toward that goal.

Meanwhile, research would continue on economic ways to extract the shale oil.

I calculated that the actual power delivered to the wheels of vehicles in the USA averages 183 GW, given some fairly generous assumptions.  Given the efficiencies of hybrids, you might not need much more than that even given battery losses.

The real problems with a thousand submarine PWR's stuck beneath the coastal ocean are:

1. A thousand won't do.  I can't find the ratings of current nuclear-sub powerplants, but a gigawatt output would be 1.34 MILLION horsepower.  The biggest container ships have only a bit more than 100,000 horsepower; it appears likely that a nuclear submarine has on the order of 100 megawatts output, not a gigawatt.  So you'd need ten thousand of them.
2. Making ten thousand fuel loads of medium-enriched uranium for them, and then maintaining them at the bottom of the ocean.
3. Then there's keeping them and their connecting cables intact through undersea mudslides and such.
4. Also, finding the reactor operators who are willing to commute to work in a tiny little can under the water.

EP:

Craven is an old nuclear sub guy. I suppose its possible he could have made an order of magnitude mistake (as a typo).

But I doubt it - this was a prospectus he delivered to Congress - the sort of thing he would have checked and rechecked for errors.

Is it possible that this reactor produces that much power but only needs a tenth of its power for sub propulsion?

Why would the Navy pay for such an overdesigned unit, plus the hull to hold it?

Turns out it's worse than I thought; our most powerful nuclear submarines have around 45,500 horsepower, or less than 35 megawatts.

Peak generating capacity of the US might be 900+ GW, but the average consumption is about 440 GW.  Satisfying even this smaller load would require about 13,000 reactors.

EP:

Not to be contrian (because I just don't know the power of these sub reactors, I was just relying on Craven's number), but the 45,500 hp figure is propulsion only. These reactors are called on to do more. Filter water, O2 system, electricity, etc.

Agreed - a gigawatt reactor would still be much more powerful than needed. Maybe they couldn't make reactors any less powerful at that time? Again, I don't know.

Excuse me?  The first reactors built were a few watts, and there were small reactors designed for things like powering satellites which were in the kilowatts or tens of kilowatts thermal.  The SL-1 boiling-water reactor (designed to power remote military installations) was designed to produce 3 megawatts thermal.

Watermakers (reverse-osmosis systems, IIRC) for ocean-going boats take a few tens of watts, and one thing a nuclear submarine is never short of is heat for distilling water.