[makeitdouble]

Nuclear energy stays a bad fit when you factor in that it needs to combine:

- sustained political will and capital

- high morale (contractors and controllers need to not collude to hide flaws/cut corners/inflate prices)

- excelent design and on par execution

- excelent risk assesment and long term vision

- stable geopolitical situation

No country currently has a combination of all the above, all the nuclear plants we build are basically a failure waiting to happen. e.g. France has a set of plants that should have been decommissioned and replaced long ago, yet it didn’t due to the first point. Japan hit the second and fourth point. We’re seeing Ukraine hit by the last. The US could be the only country that fails at less than half the point.

[bobthepanda]

It fails at less than half the points? I’ll give you geopolitcal stability, but all the other things suck too.

[pyuser583]

The US has all of those things for nuclear submarines.

[makeitdouble]

That model works because there is no question of scale or mass production, no external client, not enough civilians involved to put a strong political aspect on it, so virtually no external pressure to do anything about it.

Basically we’d need volunteer based self-sustained communities living in the middle of nowhere to replicate that in a non military setting.

[pyuser583]

The US nuclear naval fleet isn’t a set of islands. The fuel must be mined and delivered.

The nuclear reactor have to be maintained and kept in dry dock, sometimes for years on end.

Nobody is afraid of aircraft carriers, even though they are powered by nuclear reactors.

[bobthepanda]

There aren’t that many naval submarine bases, and they’re not particularly close to most of the population.

Unfortunately, nuclear reactors need transmission lines to population centers, and we can’t just concentrate reactors into less than a dozen massive stations for the entire country.

[pyuser583]

Aircraft carriers also have nuclear reactors - and they are much less discreet than submarines.