To address a few points made here... this isn't about frontline mobile bases or airplanes or ships. This is about "what if... we have a main base located somewhere with poor supply lines?" In other words, something like Afghanistan.<p>In Afghanistan, shipping fuel in was extremely expensive resulting in costs of $400/gallon (~$100/liter) at the destination[1]. At that level of shipping costs, electrical generation is so expensive that it makes sense to investigate small-scale reactors to see if they could make economic sense.<p>[1] <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/63407-400gallon-gas-another-cost-of-war-in-afghanistan-" rel="nofollow">https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/63407-400gallon-...</a>
In an emergency bug out, one needs the ability to destroy or render safe and inoperable anything and everything. How the hell would that work with a reactor? Seems like a bad situation.
There are many reasons to be skeptical of how the military might USE this kind of reactor. Ill-considered foreign deployments conducted by contractors without exit plans could cause many problems.<p>But, there are fewer reasons to to be skeptical about a DOE National Lab's ability safely to develop some prototypes and learn a lot. Three Mile Island's near-meltdown was 42 years ago now. Even though there hasn't been much new construction of civilian nuclear power plants since then, it's absolutely worth investigating whether new reactors designs can be safer than 20th-century ones. Not investigating is a form of security through obscurity: always a bad idea.<p>OTOH: A former president put a former Texas governor (Perry) in charge of the DOE, and Perry, when he took the job, was surprised to learn their major mission is dealing with all things nuclear. It's conceivable the DOE could fall under incompetent political leadership again.
I must be misreading something here: are these news about <i>portable nuclear power plants</i>, born out of military research but independent from military use?<p>If this is a valid interpretation, it seems to me a competitor for "the news of the century". What is the catch? The cost? Maintenance? Vulnerability? If unfit for common civil use, it is still an impressive piece of progress in the direction of solving energy requirements problems, today one of the priorities.
While I'm not in favor of new mainstream nuclear (because wind and solar combined with HVDC will suffice so why take the risk and expense) but small nuclear like this will continue to have a niche market that is awkward to service with other technologies.
Something similar to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_power_station" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_power...</a> ?
I love how atomic energy gets to be described as “resilient, carbon-free energy” but only when it’s going to power things that surveil, kill, or surveil and then kill.<p>Luckily the same group of people who saved California from the scourge of atomic energy are still out there vigilantly protecting me from having to form my own opinions because I might form the wrong ones, aka the ones that don’t line their pockets and give cost-of-living another sorely-needed boost to help get all those troublesome poors (but I repeat myself) to move away while also thinking it was their own idea: <a href="https://science.time.com/2012/02/02/exclusive-how-the-sierra-club-took-millions-from-the-natural-gas-industry-and-why-they-stopped/" rel="nofollow">https://science.time.com/2012/02/02/exclusive-how-the-sierra...</a>