Military facilities accidents and disasters

GarryB wrote:

Nothing about a nuclear aircraft engine is revolutioniary. Thats old stuff from the late 50th.

The engine they are talking about is operating in a vacuum... so really we are talking about 3 month trips to Mars instead of a year and a half to get there... and of course a vehicle with efficient enough propulsion to fly around in earth orbit and collect up some of the major objects that are no longer needed to have a bit of a cleanup... both very valuable things...

GarryB wrote:With such an engine you are more likely to have have flight control...

There are a lot of nuclear reactors in space... many are shut down and launched in to a much higher orbit to delay the time they become a problem... being able to deal with them sooner rather than later is a good thing... not to mention a chance to clean up some of the other crap floating up there...

Arrow wrote:What will this revolution consist in that can change the balance of power in the world? New hypersonic weapons, nuclear hypersonic engine?

Aristide wrote:We have countless nuclear power plants, nuclear powered submarines ect. But never an accident on that scale.

What do we right that Russia does wrong?

Mindstorm wrote:

Arrow wrote:What will this revolution consist in that can change the balance of power in the world? New hypersonic weapons, nuclear hypersonic engine?

Military component (a small part of results of which has been rendered open in 2018 and 2019 President's speechs) is only a minor part of this basis Science and applicative program on innovative technologies; some of the most interesting are aimed, particularly, at render suddenly obsolete the entire line of production, with the related technological basis, upon which is founded a competitive advantage of western products, while furtherly strengthening advange in the areas of our lead.

All this attention about nuclear propulsion units (the development of which, until now, luckily proceed regularly and without any destructive accident) truly fail to center the picture......

Aristide wrote:We have countless nuclear power plants, nuclear powered submarines ect. But never an accident on that scale.

What do we right that Russia does wrong?

Nothing right and nothing wrong, more simply : in France authorities accept the realization of civil and military products (above all those with potential high class of mishaps in the experimental phase) only after the relative technology basis, and proved production protocols has been established.

This obviously reduce of orders of magnitude chances of accidents ,the large majority of which hystorically happen in the program's experimental or production start-up, but contemporaneously condemn you to at best to second line role in contribution to technological cycles and, in military field, to the continous catch-up in the creation of the most revolutionary samples.

Just to provide an example of what just said, limited to the point in question, we can notice that France while being the nation at world with the majority amount of electricity coming from nuclear reactors, operate still today exclusively PWR reactors of the so called "second generation", vast majority of which built in the '80 years.

Now the main characteristic of those reactors ,on which the entire nuclear energy production is based upon, is that all them was constructed employing the well established technical design and construction protocols developed by the American Westinghouse INC (US), of which the designer Framatome was effectively a mere license-maker.

Is clear that for the development of the prototypes and start-up construction of those PWR was obviously the US at "pay" with major accidents (1977 at Army Nuclear  and even more 1979 at Three Mile Island Unit 2 meltdown) not France .

On the other side France pay very heavily for its national nuclear energy production based entirely of a foreign by now truly primitive design (and its infinitely lower risks associated with construction and start-up operations) : the export potential, economic profitability and technological appeal of France's nuclear plant construction abroad is practically zero while Росатом,, that has been always at the leading position of experimentation on new nuclear-related technologies and have already constructed and operated the unique "third +" generation ВВЭР-1200 and Fast Neutron Reactors, boast a value of the foreign order book for nuclear power plant construction abroad -33 - ,excluded maintenance works, superior to 6,8 trillions rubles !!! -more than 100 billions of US $-

If we return to military sector you can observe a similar situation: let examine selection of USA for new military programs.
You will notice a progressively higher reliance and emphasis put on the increased performances of the electronic content while contemporaneously a very conservative.....almost backward-oriented......attitude toward experimentation and integration of innovative or even revolutionary solutions in terms of platform layout, material content and propulsion.

So you see that new anti-ship missiles of US Navy, the LRASM aimed at confront the superiority of OPFOR products ,at the beginning a very ambitious (for US standard) program with an high supersonic ram-jet powerd missile with independent targeting capabilities and data exchange in the salvo similar to Soviet products, ended to be merely an AGM-158 with software and homing adapted to Navy employment, the artillery program - ERCA - tasked to confront the heavy problem of range and fire power superiority of our systems is nothing more than modified outdated M777 and M109A7 with merely a new ammunition and software upgrades and so on with the "new" ABM program, new ground forces vehicles, new naval propuslion etc....
Those choices reduce enormously technical risks and accident risks for those programs, but bring also an iherent involutive effects on military science.  

Federation approach is at the opposite side of the spectrum, when it was necessary to change the shift in ground based gun artillery the solution was to develop a complete new system -  2С35 Коалиция-СВ - including an entire line of related ammunitions and logistical vehicles, not to adapt a 30 years old gun to shot a new ammunition, when was necessary to create a new generation of long range anti-ship/anti-ground missiles the solution was to develop hypersonic missiles Кинжал and Циркон not to change the software of an irrelevant missile in a modern conflict, when was decided to create a new approach to aerospace defense was created "Нудоль" ABM, С-500 anti-missile/Aircraft system, "Пересвет "laser (and some others still not disclosed) with all the related revolutionary technolgies involved ,not changed the software and the booster stages of old interceptors, when a new level of ground based highly protected vehicle was considered necessary Federation's holdings have created "Армата" and "Курган" family with new lines of ammunitions and unparalleled passive, dynamic protection and APS "Афганит" not refurbished old M1A2 with new vectronics and mounting on it an Isreali built APS , and so on and on.

This much higher aptitude to radical innovation of domestic institutions is obviously accompained, in some fields, by a proportional higher exposure to destructive accidents above all in the latest development and validation phases , but on the other hand allowed them to become the "trend setter at world level.

See Aristide if, instead of highly conservative "old" Rolls-Royce MT30 engines and capacitors the new class Zumwalt destroyer would have integrated a truly innovative propulsion and batteries, the break-up with water intrusion in the Panama canal and the two other ones during the latest tests phases would have been true disasters with immense material losses and potentially several dozen of deaths; this class of ship instead, with the actually integrated technical solution, will remain totally safe......as much as irrelevant.....both for US Navy operators than for theirs enemies.

As you can easily understand nothing inherently right or wrong here; it is only a question of relative return on the short, middle and long term.

GarryB wrote:

I don't think planes fly with nuclear engines. So where is this quiet revolution?

They don't currently do that because nuclear engines are not practical.... just like in the age of steam there were no steam powered aircraft either...

A nuclear battery, say 1 metre by 1 metre, and perhaps 2.5 metres long and generating a megawatt of continuous power for 20 or 30 years is plenty of power to run a small aircraft as long as it is not too heavy or too radioactive. You could fly as far as you wanted without needing to refuel... it could run 2 or three electric motors continuously... it could be propeller or electric turbine...

Flight control like the one that exploded recently?

When Concorde crashed it killed way more people... should people stop flying in airplanes too?

Or the countless russian rockets that went boom? Or our first Ariane V that went out of control?

Cars crash, buses crash, trucks crash, ships sink, planes crash, rockets blow up... if you give up on a technology because there is a chance of failure go back to living in a cave as a hunter gatherer...

You can build a nuclear battery relative fail safe i such an event. You cant build a nuclear engine in a way to be secure in such an event.

A nuclear battery only has become safe after years of development and testing and likely some failures. A nuclear engine offers performance in places where normal engines are useless... like in space or even underwater...

Are you going to turn your back on progress?

We have countless nuclear power plants, nuclear powered submarines ect. But never an accident on that scale.

What do we right that Russia does wrong?

Russia leads the way and has no path to follow to make progress easy and less painful.

I see it as risk management. We dont have the land mass in our home nation to evacuate after a nuclear accident of Chernobyl scale. Where should we send all people? New Caledonia or Tahiti?

Well those island states need power generation too... if you had any brains you would get together with the world leaders and invest in some ship based new generation nuclear power plants with Russia that can be sent to tropical islands to sit on extended piers to provide stable electricity without having to ship in enormous amounts of diesel every week, plus the electrical power and heat generation could create potential for efficient desalination plants for plentiful amounts of fresh water for the islands too... after a few years of operation when the reliability is proven you can adapt them to land based systems and replace your oldest reactors first with these new ones.

Why?

Well these reactors don't produce the enormous amount of irradiated waste material that the old reactors do... in fact they are called breeder reactors because the way they operate you can put spent fuel rods around the atomic pile during normal operations of the reactor and reenrich the spent fuel for use as fuel again or enriched further as weapon grade material.

No, perhaps it is not a good idea for France to do this because it will make living on islands cheaper and much easier and will help deal with your nuclear waste problems and of course enable you to build up weapons grade material quickly or produce fuel grade material to sell to the US or other countries using old or new reactors...

Bad idea... forget I mentioned it.

Regular wrote:So basically secrecy and face saving doomed whole plane?

GarryB wrote:

The last thing those islands need is water. New Caledonia, and all our pacific islands are filled with an ambundance of water. Watersfalls evrywhere, rivers and rainforests.

A small island has little surface area to catch rain water. The sea around most islands in the pacific is salt water, not fresh water. If they have plenty of fresh water then that is fine, besides... don't bother... France should keep its old nuclear reactors and not develop new technology... it is not safe...

As for Concorde, do you actually know what went wrong? Concorde was absolute safe. Our Concordes flew decades without incident.

But that is the point... nothing is absolutely safe and when you think it is accidents happen.

The US space shuttles were safe until they had accidents.

This was a fuck up of Air France, not the aircraft. Its amazing actually she managed to get off the ground under those circumstances.

If bits of metal are left on runways, it would be more than just concords crashing...

The thing is that a small piece of metal from a United Airlines plane that had just taken off ruined the safety record of the concorde... and that safety record and its speed was why people flew concord... an entire type of aircraft taken out of service because one crashed... that is expensive...

you could argue it was an over reaction, but it was making money but not excessively, so after the crash they would not be flying full of people which means they would not be paying their way so they got cut.

Exclusive: Russian doctors say they weren’t warned patients were nuclear accident victims

owais.usmani wrote:https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/security/2019/08/exclusive-russian-doctors-say-they-werent-warned-patients-were-nuclear-accident

Exclusive: Russian doctors say they weren’t warned patients were nuclear accident victims