Compact Nuclear Reactor

Loading a Valar Atomics Compact Nuclear Reactor onto a C-17 Aircraft

Defence Blog reports:

The United States Department of War and the Department of Energy transported a next-generation nuclear reactor aboard a C-17 military aircraft on Feb. 15, 2026, from March Air Reserve Base in California to Hill Air Force Base in Utah for testing under a federal nuclear modernization initiative.

'Compact' is a relative term. 

Russian Nuclear Powered Weapons

A computer model of the Burevestnik missile. © RT

Russia claims that this nuclear powered missle made a 9,000 mile test flight. That's a very good trick. I don't know how it works, but the only way I can think of is that it operates like a ramjet. In that case they would use a conventional rocket to boost it up to cruising velocity where there is enough air coming in. The air is heated in the reactor and then it escapes out the back. If they can do that without spreading radiation far and wide, that would be a VERY good trick.

NATO's designation is Skyfall, which you may remember was the name of a James Bond movie from 2012.

The development of the Poseidon underwater drone. ©  Russian Defense Ministry

In season 3 of the Netflix show The Diplomat, our players got themselves twisted in knots over a Russian submarine that was carrying a Poseidon drone that sank off the coast of England.

While these weapons are fearsome, I don't think it is worth worrying about them. I mean, we already have enough nuclear armed conventional missiles to destroy the world should someone get a burr up their ass.

On the plus side, they might prompt our nuclear engineers to develop our own miniature nuclear reactor, assuming they haven't already done so and are just keeping it under wraps. Miniature nuclear reactors could be very handy for just about anything people want to do. Assuming they can figure out how to deal with the radioactive byproducts.

Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant, Turkey

Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant, Turkey

Russia has 22 nuclear power plants under construction around the world. This is just one of them. How many nuclear power plants are we building?

Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant, Turkey

It is not near any major population centers, which is good from a safety stand point, but it means they are going to building some very long high tension lines to deliver the power this plant will produce.

Hinkley Point C nuclear power station

Hinkley Point C nuclear reactor, UK, still under construction - AP

Looking at the thumbnail for this puzzle, I thought it might be a stadium, but it's not. I didn't know anyone (except maybe the French) were building nuclear reactors these days, but here we are.

Hinkley Point C nuclear power station is under construction in Somerset, England. The project is financed by EDF Energy and China General Nuclear Power Group. EDF is a French company. China General Nuclear Power Group is a Chinese state-owned energy corporation. Is the UK becoming a colony?

EDF has several pictures of this project. This one caught my eye:

The cranes are placing a 5,000-tonne water intake head onto the seabed

There are tunnels leading from the power plant out into the bay and the intake (and outlet) heads are placed on the seafloor to preserve the integrity of the opening into the tunnel. The concrete block suspended between the two cranes is the intake head. To give you a sense of scale of this scene, the intake head is 150 long and 25 feet tall.

Torpedos

Mark 48 heavyweight torpedo

Defence Blog tells us that Lockheed-Martin, the Pentagon's number one weapons supplier,

. . . was awarded $16,8 million cost-plus-incentive-fee contract in support of the Mark 48 heavyweight torpedo efforts.

I like the "cost-plus-incentive-fee" bit. How fast can we pour money down the drain?

But it does get me thinking about torpedos. The Wikipedia article about the Mark 48 tells us:

The swashplate piston engine is fueled by Otto fuel II, a monopropellant which combusts to drive the engine.

Swashplate engines are kind of cool, they are compact, roughly the shape of a Wankel rotary engine like you can find in the Mazda sports car, but Otto fuel II, that's something else. Being a monopropellant means you don't need an oxidizer. Near as I can tell it's based on nitrogylcerine but they have done things to it to make it stable. It gets sprayed into the combustion chamber and ignited with a spark where the resulting explosion drives the piston. It's nasty stuff, you don't want to get any on you and the exhaust fumes are deadly poison. In a torpedo the exhaust gets pumped into the ocean where it is seriously diluted, so it probably doesn't kill too many fish. Probably.

Now I am reminded of the Russian nuclear powered torpedo. Putin announced it a couple of years ago but I haven't heard much about it since then.

Can Russia's Doomsday Weapon Be Stopped? Status-6/Poseidon
Covert Cabal[The video has an advertisement that runs for one minute starting from the one minute mark.]

Poseidon is big - over five feet in diameter and 80 feet long - which makes it like 35 times the volume of the Mark 48 and likely 35 times the mass.

Now I am reminded of the search for the missing flight 370 airliner in the Indian Ocean.

INDIAN OCEAN (April 14, 2014) Operators aboard the Australian navy vessel ADF Ocean Shield move U.S. Navy's Bluefin-21 into position for deployment. Using side scan sonar, Bluefin will descend to a depth of between 4,000 and 4,500 meters, approximately 35 meters above the ocean floor to spend up to 16 hours at this depth collecting data. Joint Task Force 658 is supporting Operation Southern Indian Ocean, searching for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Peter D. Blair/Released)

They were using a torpedo to look for the wreck. They didn't find it, but then the torpedo they were using wasn't nuclear powered, so it had limited range and endurance. But if we had a nuclear powered torpedo, we could set it to searching and it could search the entire ocean. It might take a while, but then we would know what is down there.

There have been nuclear powered submarines cruising the oceans for decades and they probably have been accumulating a great deal of data about the ocean floor, but maybe not. Submarines only go down to about a thousand feet and most of the world's oceans are much deeper than that, so deep that the submarines can't 'see' the bottom.