This is a much cheaper and faster way to get nuclear power.

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[–] 28 points 7 months ago (2 children)

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.

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  • [–] 15 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    The wiki on radiation embrittlement is pretty good reading for any mechanical engineers out there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_embrittlement

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago

    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

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