Re: [PSUBS-MAILIST] nuclear psub?

["Nero Wolfe" <wolfe19@megsinet.net>]

Now I am halfway serious about this.....  I mean.. the technology is in our grap.  Though just to give you some idea (now if I have gotten my ideas right.. )  CP-1 was a big freaking pile.  there were some six tons of uranium and uranium oxide in the pile.  And I think another 315tons of pure graphite.  And some pretty serious cadmium rods.  The whole shebang was 20ft tall and about that wide.  But of course that setup was as blatently overkill as could be.  it "HAD" to work.  They never actually completed the pile.  they stopped several feet short of the "maximum" pile. 

CP-1 was disassembled and reassembled as CP-2 in the argonne national forest where it became a test reactor.  But that's as far as I know about the history of that particular pile.  

Witha little smart engineering.. it would be very possiable to get it down from a twenty some foot sphere down to a more managable size....  Like submarine size.  We wouldn't need a seriously powerfull reactor.. "any" power would be enough to make the boat move and survive.  

Going by what I read.. we could even have several levels of redundancy in the reactor...  mmm cadmium salt solution.  A bath of that will kill any reaction that might be going on.

I have some ideas on core shape that would allow for easy controlability.......  And still a compact size.  As you get to more and more powerfull isotopes you can even use air, or water as a dampening medium instead of graphite...   it turns out that the nitrogen in air is enough to really absoarb those neutrons....  but that's technology for more powerfull reactors.  I'm just thinking on the most basic level here.  Something that could boil water or even just run a sterling cycle engine.

OR maybe we could just go the thermopile route, and find some really freaking radioactive poop and shove it in a can with some thermopiles on the outside of the can ;-)