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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   2762 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 4, 2022

Be advised; this thread is not for serious in depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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They're seriously glossing over the difficulty and expense of making compact steam turbines for use at sea. For one thing turbine halls are, what, twice the size of the reactor building itself? They've squeezed them into a much smaller space in the diagrams. I'll post it on Navalgazing to see what they think.

It's pretty common for nuclear concepts from the Good Idea Fairy to ignore the non-nuclear stuff.

Luckily there are still naval steam turbines made, but buying gear designed for the US navy isn't going to be easy or cheap (forget buying them on Alibaba lol), and I'm not sure what modifications would be needed for running them off commercial boilers using low-enrichment fuel rather than the 94% bomb-grade stuff military reactors use. The pressures are going to be different, I imagine.

And rather than transmission, I'd be worried about the costs of designing and maintaining very compact transformer equipment rated for use at sea. Nobody makes that afaik. (Edit: I was wrong about this, as there are power barges in use, but I don't know how wrong. Looking up what they cost would tell you a lot about how practical a nuclear one is.)

At least there's precedent: back in the 30s the US moored some of its turbo-electric carriers off California to provide power. This is literally just changing the heat source.

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