alt Hacker NewsThe engineering side of running reactors safely is a solved problem, the US navy has > 7500 reactor-years with a perfect safety record.
It’s also worth noting that the US Navy is the only organization with a perfect nuclear safety record.
My point being: by god, let the Navy nukes train everyone else!
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Would it be fair to say that because the US Navy is not running it as a for-profit power generation that would help. Like every accident seems to be a list of cost saving shortcuts being responsible
> perfect nuclear safety record.
It’s a very semantic claim.
They have lost nuclear submarines (USS Thresher), lost nuclear missiles, depth charges, torpedos and bombs. They have crashed nuclear ships and submarines.
Yeah, they haven’t had a nuclear reactor leak (that we know of).
> It’s also worth noting that the US Navy is the only organization with a perfect nuclear safety record.
But submarine/ship reactors are tiny compared with commercial reactors and 5+ times more expensive (although its hard to break out the true lifetime cost of the reactor from the submarine/ship).
Even modern commercial SMR designs (a few by companies that make Submarine reactors) are likely to cost a couple of times more per MW than large existing reactors
BTW - The US Navy has lost 2 nuclear submarines, which are still being periodically monitored - page 7 https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2025-09/NT-25-1%2...
Their safety record is good, but can they generate power at a cost that's commercially competitive? If it's too expensive then the plan doesn't work.
There's a video of Alvin Weinberg explainng why. It's the smaller scale that allows those safety guarantees.
They have done. The Three Mile Island accident happened when it was being operated by Navy vets [1]. Simple training isn’t enough.
During the investigation of the accident the Admiral that built and ran the Navy nuclear program was asked how the Navy had managed to operate accident free, and what others could learn. This was his response:
> Over the years, many people have asked me how I run the Naval Reactors Program, so that they might find some benefit for their own work. I am always chagrined at the tendency of people to expect that I have a simple, easy gimmick that makes my program function. Any successful program functions as an integrated whole of many factors. Trying to select one aspect as the key one will not work. Each element depends on all the others.
So recreating that accident free operating environment requires a lot more than just training. It would require wholesale adoption of the Navy’s approach across the entire industry. Which probably doesn’t scale very well. Not to mention the Navy operates much smaller nuclear reactors compared to utility scale reactors, and has extremely easy access to lots of cooling water, which probably gives them a little more wiggle room when dealing unexpected reactor behaviour.
[1] https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/tmi-lessons-what-was-lea...