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Did we not already learn our lesson that nuclear power plants on or near the ocean are bad, very very bad! Stop this nonsense. Build it on tracks or as a vehicle if you realy want to... anything but this!
It depends on who builds them. The US has been operating nuclear-powered sea vessels (lots of them) since 1954 without any nuclear incidents, while USSR/Russia has had many nuclear incidents at sea.
Nuclear-powered marine vessels are in use for a variety of applications. We also use nuclear power for many of our deep space missions. (Actually, there was a plutonium RTG (Radioisotope Theroelectric Generator) on Apollo 13 when it crashed into the ocean and they think it ended up in the Tonga Trench, they're not sure.)
Yes, if they're carrying the really hot stuff it can be a security issue. Russia has a bunch of nuke-powered icebreakers -- not much worry about somebody hijacking one of those in the middle of the arctic.
I think the Danes are competent engineers and they'd have no problems with accidental release. But they may not be calculating in the extra cost of 24x7 high security for those ships.
@Pat A lack of nuclear incident in the past is not a good mark for acceptability. A single incident, any incident, becomes uncontained, that is unacceptable regardless.
It is also incorrect to say there has been no incidents. There have been 2 US incidents where a nuclear vessele has sank and its nuclear material, as such, leaked into the ocean. Thankfully these vessels carry much much less nuclear material than a power plant so the damage was less but still very real.
What does that have to do with anything? You are missing a few key points:
1) Enriched uranium is what we care about when talking nuclear power, not uranium ore in general.
2) The uranium itself isnt even the biggest or only issue when it comes to nuclear incidents. Nuclear plants convert uranium to plutonium internally and 1/3rd of their energy comes from the produced plutonium component. Enriched plutonium, having a much shorter half life, is a much bigger issue in many ways.
Incorrect, it is significant enough to be measurable by over the counter Geiger counters. The fukishima incident made it very noticeable on Geiger counters when measuring west coast fish radiation levels, for example.
To give you both an idea of actual numbers, fukishima is estimated to have caused about 2000 additional cases of cancer from 2011 to 2015, and those cases continue to add up as time goes on. So over the course of decades we are talking tens of thousands of cancer incidents in humans.
This also doesnt account for the death in wildlife population that occurs from cancer which would be much much higher of course.
Its also important to note the half life on these things are long enough that the effects that the deaths we see per year from this will go on for tens of thousands of years. So it is cumulative in the extreme. If each incident adds 5000 cases of cancer per decade for at least 20,000 years into the future thats a case to find not even one such incident to be acceptable.
@freemo @Pat
aside from some extremely localized issues, the change in radioactivity of the oceans is subminiscule.