The US nuclear power industry, failing to produce a growing business from new civilian plants, large and small, is turning to small, mobile nukes to use on military bases in war zones and in space.
It’s a concept a Republican Congress and the Trump administration have embraced, but is getting scathing reviews from nuclear non-proliferation advocates and conventional nuclear skeptics.
SpaceNews reports that on Jan. 12, only a week and three days away from the swearing in of Joe Biden as president, the White House released a Jan. 5 Trump executive order, Promoting Small Modular Reactors for National Defense and Space Exploration, following a December White House space policy directive.
While use of nuclear reactors to generate power has long been a staple of space exploration, the most unusual part of the outgoing Trump administration’s nuclear wishes has been the use of reactors in ‘forward operating bases,” or, in common language, on the battlefront. Smaller nukes have long powered US submarines and aircraft carriers, but have never been scaled down to a tactical, war-front technology. The executive order says, “Using small modular reactors for national defense and space exploration will allow the United States to maintain and advance our leadership and dominance across space and terrestrial domains.”
The White House elaborates, “At President Trump’s direction, the Department of Defense will establish and implement a plan to demonstrate the energy flexibility and cost-effectiveness of a small modular reactor at a domestic military installation, and will pilot a transportable small modular reactor for a mission other than naval propulsion for the first time in half a century.”
The Drive website comments that in 2016, the Defense Science Board created a task force to look at mobile reactors in “Forward/Remote Operating Bases, concluding that the Army “could become the beneficiaries of reliable, abundant, and continuous energy through the deployment of nuclear energy power systems,” and that, despite some obstacles, the goal was feasible.
What has the military salivating is a reactor that could fit into cargo aircraft to be deployed to the battleground, increasing how long brigades could fight without the need for diesel supplies. In March, the Army awarded $40 million to three contractors – for prototypes of the tiny, fighting nukes.
The move to develop mobile modular reactors has created a significant backlash. The University of Texas at Austin’s Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Project on April 22 published a paper, “Proposed U.S. Army Mobile Nuclear Reactors: Cost and Risks Outweigh Benefits,” which savages the arguments for mobile nukes in fire zones.
Written by political scientist Alan J. Kuperman, director of the Texas project, the report found, “Significant doubt remains about the need, advisability, and plausibility of this initiative. The original rationale – to reduce U.S. casualties from attacks on shipments of diesel fuel for electricity generation on foreign military bases – is a vestige because such casualties have dwindled virtually to zero. A second military rationale – to provide large amounts of power to future, high-energy weapons – is dubious because such weapons use energy intermittently and thus would not require the large steady-state power output of a nuclear reactor but instead could be powered much less expensively by diesel generators coupled with energy storage. A third rationale is to subsidize civilian microreactor development, but the Army reactor’s rugged specifications make it too costly to compete with commercial versions that the U.S. government already is helping to develop.
“The Army proposal also raises other concerns that could derail it. Reactor accidents that could radioactively contaminate thousands of nearby U.S. troops are a serious risk because an adversary attack – and efforts to defend against such attack by burying and covering the reactor – could disrupt air flow and thereby spur overheating of the fuel.5 The vulnerability of FOBs to attack was illustrated in January 2020, when 11 Iranian ballistic missiles struck an Iraqi base housing U.S. forces, causing extensive damage and casualties.6 Cost also could prove prohibitive, because the expense of mobile nuclear electricity would be many times higher than providing the same amount of power using traditional diesel generators, based on estimates from the nuclear industry itself.”
At a briefing this week led by Kuperman, Edwin Lyman, who heads the nuclear power program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, noted that the nuclear industry also wants to bring these tiny nukes into civilian life. “These types of reactors not only being considered for deployment overseas. They could be coming to site near you.” He noted that the industry is pushing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for rules “to let these reactors be deployed without containment or emergency evacuation zones.
”Some proposals would allow reactors like this to have no armed security at all. There are proposals to reduce number of operators at these reactors or have no operators at all.”
Said Lyman, “All of this is based on a lie. Lie is that these are safe.”
–Kennedy Maize
(kmaize@gmail.com)