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When was the last time there was a safety incident on a nuclear Navy vessel? Or a loss of radiological material? I am aware of the culture causing loss of life due to overwork and hubris on their non nuclear vessels, but nuke specialists run a tight ship, and reactors on land are stationary and need nuke folks (not sailors).


I'll have to dig up a citation. But the [] Three Mile Island accident was in part caused by (former) naval nuclear specialists making poor choices based on optimizing for the wrong things.

My memory is fuzzy, but this 37 minute video [2] has a breakdown.

If memory serves, the root causes were faults in the pumps and delays in the 28 baud diagnostic printouts running minutes or hours behind which left everyone operating on bad data.

Part of that was exacerbated by the operators applying techniques used on subs (something about preferring to keep low pressure in some vessel, because high pressure there could sink the boat if containment was lost), the TMI design didn't need this as it could vent/blow-off, and the operators became somewhat fixated on "trying to save the boat" and missed a bunch of procedures.

Of course this doesn't invalidate your point, but even if the reactor designs are really similar, it may be a mistake to cross train anyone.

(disclosure: haven't seen this video in a year or so, and am generally a fan of nuclear power considering the alternatives, but it needs to be done with different, safer reactor designs and probably with new branding because no matter what it's going to take _forever_ to convince anyone to trust nuclear, when they associate that term with the dangerous, BWR designs that were never intended for land)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xQeXOz0Ncs


At a guess I'd say that a number of them are regarded as Top Secret, a big issue would be hard to cover up.

Although I'd imagine if there were many issues they be known about. I'd love to learn morea about nuclear reactors on carriers and submarines, but I imagine most of the engineering knowledge is secret.


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So did Trump make any improvements on this score? Not from what I’ve seen. It may be more no shooting wars lead to degradation.


Trump was basically unable to do anything about any part of the federal bureaucracy, including the military, which is entrenched through a combination of civil service laws and Supreme Court decisions that make it impossible for the President to effectively control the bureaucracy if they don't see eye to eye.




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