I’m just a former Navy Nuke, but I see a major issue with this. Namely, by the time we retire ship-board nuclear reactors, they have been absorbing neutrons and radiation for 30 years, so the steel is weak enough that you could put a ball-peen hammer through it.
This is a big part of why the LHC experiment is so expensive. Turns out that equipment that exists to create high energy collisions (and as a product a lot of spicy radiation) goes brittle or the sensors go dark pretty quickly and need to be replaced a lot. I did sim work on a replacement detector setup for the experiment back in undergrad and the lions share of my simulations were showing how the crystals would perform at various levels of degradation
I’m just a former Navy Nuke, but I see a major issue with this. Namely, by the time we retire ship-board nuclear reactors, they have been absorbing neutrons and radiation for 30 years, so the steel is weak enough that you could put a ball-peen hammer through it.
But then we just dick a hole if there happens anything.
The wiki on radiation embrittlement is pretty good reading for any mechanical engineers out there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_embrittlement
This is a big part of why the LHC experiment is so expensive. Turns out that equipment that exists to create high energy collisions (and as a product a lot of spicy radiation) goes brittle or the sensors go dark pretty quickly and need to be replaced a lot. I did sim work on a replacement detector setup for the experiment back in undergrad and the lions share of my simulations were showing how the crystals would perform at various levels of degradation