Floating Nuclear Plant Would Ride Out Tsunamis

The widows & children of USAF Texas Tower #4 (TT-4), off Long Island, wouldn't say such platforms are ALL that safe.

Lots of "unsinkable" vessels are lying at the bottom of oceans.

The idea in the article is proposing an anchored floating platform, which differs from the Texas Towers.

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Unsinkable might not even be the best option. The US Navy has a good record with sinkable (and resurface-able) reactors.

Seems like a rational proposal.

Until someone allows the active ballast system to go off line during a hurricane evacuation while leaving the hydraulic accumulators pressurized with nothing but a leaky block valve between the accumulator and the hydraulically opened/spring closed ballast intake valves..... then you end up with what happened with the BP/Exxon operated Thunderhorse rig....

This is dumber than dumb.

We can't even get a land based plant approved, and the genuii at MIT want to build one in a boat?????????????????

Really????????????????????

This is like storing your data in the cloud. Trust us, it's safe.

The might actually be onto something. We've had far better success here in the US getting approval for, completing construction, and successfully beginning operation of nuclear reactors in boats than we have had on land in the most recent decades.

Nope!

Those reactors can only kill a few military grunts. Only the military can play with that kind of fire.

Don't look for any nuclear powered commercial freighters or passenger boats.

What do you mean 'nope'? How is what I said inaccurate? Is it the ownership structure of the assets?

Yes, sort of. The US, and other governments, do not restrict themselves to the same requirements as normal folk.

Reactors that power ships are small, relatively, and have none of the regulatory constraints of commercial reactors used to provide as much as the 3,875 MW generated by Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station, 50 miles from my house.

Incidentally, Palo Verde is the only nuclear generating plant in the world NOT located by a large source of surface water. (Ocean, lake, river, etc)

Different rules, for sure. Different scale, too.

I don't think we are disagreeing on facts here, just coming from different perspectives.

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The US Navy's nuclear power does fall under different oversight for reactor operation (though the same oversight for other aspects such as transport of radioactive material). While the restrictions may not be identical, there are a lot of similarities, and in many ways Naval Nuclear Power is more restricted or more conservative.

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Having a huge power plant with no large body of water or river nearby has got to make things tough.... are they just using massive amounts of piped in or well water to keep mega-swamp coolers moist?

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Aside from the cushion from seismic waves and the minimal effect of tsunami waves, no shortage of heat sink is one of the advantages of siting a reactor in the ocean.

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However you want to look at it, the US Navy has been able to plan build and begin operation of far more nuclear power either on a MW basis or on a number of reactors basis for a couple of decades. The oversight/regulation may be different, but the track record suggests that level of oversight/regulation has worked pretty well.