‘Spitballing’ is a time-honored method for generating ideas
and spurring innovation. If you’re not
familiar with the practice, it’s basically a mental free-for-all where
participants toss out ideas, no matter how wild or unconventional and nothing
is ruled out. There are no bad ideas at
this stage. The concept is that the flow
of ideas either produces a good one or, more likely, triggers a new, good idea
from the germ of one of the oddball ideas.
The second stage of the process is to filter the assembly of ideas and
begin weeding out the ridiculous ones and focus in on the better ones.
Well,
it appears that the military has been engaging in spitballing but without the
second step wherein the ridiculous ideas are weeded out. A case in point is the concept of mobile nuclear
reactors, as reported by an Army Times website article.(1) According to the article,
The
Army is seeking to develop and field a mobile nuclear reactor to power forward
operating bases. (1)
The
program, known as “Project Pele,” is prototyping the mobile advanced
microreactor concept under the Pentagon’s Strategic Capabilities Office.
The
purpose is “to provide deployable, reliable, resilient and safe operational
power for a variety of DoD missions,” said Navy Cmdr. Josh Frey, a Defense
Department spokesman.
“Project
Pele offers a transformative capability to deliver resilient electrical power
for years without refueling and in a size small enough to be transported by
existing defense infrastructure,” Frey said. (1)
In a
148-page 2018 report commissioned by the Army Deputy Chief of Staff G-4, the
authors claimed the benefits of such reactors would help reduce fuel logistics
and storage problems, reduce infrastructure challenges for large-scale power,
aid in power generation for areas lacking electrical grids and provide power to
energy-intensive systems.
Congress
approved funding for prototype reactors and the Army awarded $40 million in
contracts to three nuclear reactor companies in March 2020 for Project Pele,
according to the NPPP report. (1)
Here’s
an accompanying illustration.
What
would the specific requirements be?
The
original proposal, approved by the Pentagon’s Strategic Capabilities Office
asked for industry solutions in January 2019 on providing a less than 40-ton
small, mobile nuclear reactor design that could operate for three years or more
and provide 1 to 10 megawatts of power.
Planners
want the reactor to fit inside a C-17 cargo plane for air transport to theater.
More recent moves have reduced the power output to 5 megawatts.
Other
requirements include: the reactor must shut down safely without intervention in
the event of an attack, rely on passive cooling and avoid significant release
of radioactivity or health consequences to people nearby. (1)
Where
would these reactors be used? Among
other places,
The
2018 G-4 report recommended the following locations where it saw potential use
for the mobile reactors:
Just
out of curiosity, don’t all of those places already have power?
Not
everyone agrees with the concept.
Alan J.
Kuperman wrote the 21-page report titled, “Proposed
U.S. Army Mobile Nuclear Reactors: Costs and Risks Outweigh Benefits,” in his
role as coordinator of the University of Texas at Austin’s Nuclear
Proliferation Prevention Project. (1)
Kuperman
makes some excellent and common sense points:
High
cost – Kuperman said the Army’s claims that nuclear power can provide cheaper
electricity for powering future forward bases is “based on unrealistic
assumptions.” Those include that such a reactor would have low construction
costs and operate for 18 hours a day over 40 years. The more likely scenario is
a mobile reactor would run for half that time over about 10 years, meaning
nuclear electricity could cost 16 times more than estimates and still seven
times more than diesel-generated power.
Vulnerability
to missile attacks – The report points to the 2020 missile attack on forces at
al-Asad air base in Iraq. Even with warnings hours ahead of time, more than 100
U.S. personnel suffered traumatic brain injury from the 11 strikes that hit the
facility. And the missiles were 10 times more accurate than the Army has
predicted in its report on the vulnerability of reactors to precision strikes.
The service admits that a direct hit on a reactor would destroy the device.
Kuperman notes that even the Army’s plans to protect the reactors, by burying
them underground, could inadvertently cause meltdowns by impeding air cooling
and causing overheating. A similar strike on an similar such future base with a
reactor could cause far more devastating consequences.
Captured
reactors – Should a U.S. base housing a mobile reactor be overrun or abandoned,
the radioactive waste from the reactor could be used in “dirty bomb” terror
attacks.
No
mission for reactors – One of the chief purposes of pursing such reactor
programs was to reduce casualties from diesel transport to remote bases. But
Defense Department data shows a dramatic drop in casualties of five per 1
million gallons of fuel delivered in 2005 to nearly zero by 2013.
High-energy
weapons don’t need reactors – Kuperman states that the justification that
future high-energy or laser weapons that the Army hopes to have protecting
bases don’t require a reactor to power. “A high energy weapon would have to be
fired millions of times to justify a reactor,” Kuperman said. “In reality such
a weapon would be fired perhaps hundreds of times in its lifetime.”
Transport
problems – The Army wants to air deliver these reactors to combat posts.
Kuperman questions the “regulatory nightmare” that would create. The program
calls for initial tests flying the reactors domestically to run then returning
them, and their radioactive waste, to another domestic location. Foreign
transport would require approval of countries airspace traversed and the
approval of a host nation where the reactor would be placed, he said. Other
Army recommendations include truck or rail transport domestically and either
ship or over-the-ocean flights to friendly ports to then move the reactors
again via truck or rail.
Is
there any relevant experience with small reactors that we can look at?
The
military did have a small reactor program during the Cold War. The Army Nuclear
Power Program, which ran from 1954 to 1977, developed eight small nuclear
reactors. Those reactors ranged in power production from 1 to 10 megawatts.
How
five of the eight reactors were used:
The
PM-1 reactor was used in Sundance, Wyoming, from 1962 to 1968.
The
PM-2A was used at Camp Century, Greenland, from 1961 to 1964.
The
PM-3A was used at McMurdo Base, Antarctica, from 1962 to 1972.
The
ML-1 was used in developmental testing from 1962 to 1966.
The
MH-1A was used in the Panama Canal Zone from 1965 to 1977.
Lyman [Union
of Concerned Scientists and its then-director of the Nuclear Safety Project,
Edwin Lyman] notes a major failure with one of the original eight designs in
1961 when a core meltdown and explosion of the SL-1 reactor in Idaho killed
three operators.
The
three deployed to Antarctica, Greenland and Alaska proved “unreliable and
expensive to operate,” Lyman wrote in his response to the Army’s 2018 report on
the mobile reactor program.
Lyman
told Army Times on Thursday that a number of those old reactors required
decades of decommissioning and one used at Fort Belvoir, Va., near Washington
D.C. is finally scheduled for decommissioning in late 2021. (1)
Let me
summarize this as briefly as I can: this
is one of those ideas that doesn’t even require ten seconds thought to see that
the idiotic aspects outweigh the benefits by a wide margin. Does the military have no one with the
courage to stand up and say, this is stupid?
There are so many things we desperately need to be doing and yet we
continue to waste time on things like this.
So sad.
___________________________________
(1)Army
Times, “Mobile nuclear reactors? Scathing report slams ‘disturbing’ military
program”, Todd South, 1-May-2021,
https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2021/04/30/mobile-nuclear-reactors-scathing-report-slams-disturbing-military-program/
