[HN Gopher] Navy nuclear engineer and wife arrested for trying t...
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Navy nuclear engineer and wife arrested for trying to sell
submarine secrets
Author : BitAstronaut
Score : 16 points
Date : 2021-10-10 20:05 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cbsnews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cbsnews.com)
| callesgg wrote:
| Sad stuff.
|
| Personally I can't imagine that anyone would want information on
| nuclear reactors. What would one use that stuff for. It's not the
| 50's, how nuclear reactors work is well known. The limiting
| factors for building them are probably more about economics and
| finding manpower and ore not informational.
| laverya wrote:
| Building a basic (large, loud, inefficient, expensive, unsafe)
| reactor is "easy", by the standards of nuclear shit. Building
| one that's suitable for use in a submarine is decidedly less
| so.
|
| How often do you need to refuel the reactor? That's
| inconvenient on land, but in a submarine you need to cut
| through the pressure hull to access anything and "inconvenient"
| doesn't even begin to describe it. Modern American reactors are
| designed to run for 20+ years without refueling for exactly
| that reason.
|
| How much do you need to run the coolant pumps and how loud are
| they? A loud sub is a dead sub. If your reactor can run on
| convection at low power, that's wonderful.
|
| How power dense is the reactor? You need to fit this in a
| relatively narrow tube, after all! And higher density means
| higher speed.
|
| How safe is it? How easy is it to cause a meltdown? That
| directs staffing requirements, and subs don't have staff to
| spare. A reactor shutting down at the wrong moment can very
| easily cause the sub to be lost, even out of combat. See the
| USS Thresher for a demonstration.
|
| And finally, how much maintenance does it need? What portion of
| this tractor's life needs to be spent tied up alongside a pier
| having work done, or even worse spent in drydock? The higher
| the proportion, the more subs you need in order to maintain a
| given number on station.
|
| So yes, there's PLENTY of things that aren't in a textbook
| reactor design. And the largest current buyer of nuclear
| reactors is the US Navy. Number two is the People's Liberation
| Army Navy.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Not a nuke tech but knowing output/efficiency of the powerplant
| could tell you max speed of these subs which is probably highly
| classified
| noughtme wrote:
| https://www.cbsnews.com/news/navy-engineer-and-wife-charged-...
| retox wrote:
| Any thoughts on why the court paperwork only refer to the
| supposed foreign government as being 'COUNTRY1'?
|
| https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1440946/downl...
| Stevvo wrote:
| I get a 404 when clicking the link, to get to the article I have
| to truncate 'via@Cbs Politics' from the URL.
| movomito wrote:
| $10,000? Really? It always shocks me how cheap people are. You
| would think that if any actual adversary wanted information they
| believed would be helpful in replicating or attacking a nuclear
| submarine, the price tag they would be willing to pay would be
| much higher. The guy and his wife are both idiots and they are
| undoubtedly facing severe consequences. Let's all hope they never
| had the opportunity to have children.
| spzb wrote:
| BBC version of the story says $100,000. Not sure which is right
| but $100k sounds more plausible.
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-58863678
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(page generated 2021-10-10 23:01 UTC)