| > Does 30% come from something? No, I just added a bit on top to get an estimate for the entire power conversion system, assuming your estimate of 20% for the nuclear parts were in the right ballpark. > Not sure how shaft power is what we are considering here as this would be converted to purely electricity generation The power to turn the prop shaft would roughly be what's available for turning the generator if the thing is used to produce electricity rather than propulsion. Sure, there's the "hotel load" to run the rest of the sub, but then again a generator isn't 100% efficient either so I think roughly 30 MW electrical output is about right. Details are classified, but from publicly available sources my understanding is that naval reactors tend to work at lower pressure and temperature than civilian land based PWR's, so efficiency takes a (substantial) hit. So I do think my estimate of 30 MWe is closer to the mark than your 70. > doesn’t need refueling for 20 years So it's a life of ship core which is supposedly 33 years. But, that's 33 years of average use. AFAIU subs spend most of their time creeping along pretty slowly in order to stay silent, so on average they'll be using a small fraction of max power. Civilian power reactors otoh want to run at full power as much as possible to amortize capital costs. Not to mention that HEU just won't fly for civilian use, as I tried to explain my previous message. As for economics, yes I think that decarbonizing the electric grid with series produced reactors would, in the end, be pretty cheap. France did that some decades ago, for about $1500/kW in today's money. AFAICT that would require the government to handle it (like in France), both to decide on one reactor model (to get on the learning curve by series producing it) and to have access to cheap capital. If one wanted to do it with SMR's rather than large reactors like France, I suggest e.g. Nuscale would be a better starting point than submarine reactors. |