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Access anywhere, anytime: Nuclear power, Ice Camp, and Rickover’s enduring standard of excellence
Admiral William Houston
As U.S. Navy submarines surface through Arctic ice during Ice Camp 2026, they demonstrate more than operational proficiency in one of the harshest environments on Earth. They reaffirm a technological truth first proven in August 1958, when the USS Nautilus completed its submerged transit of the North Pole: nuclear power enables access anywhere, anytime.
The Arctic is unforgiving, with vast distances, extreme cold, shifting ice, and no logistical infrastructure. Conventional propulsion is constrained by fuel, air, and endurance. Nuclear propulsion removes those constraints. Only a nuclear-powered submarine can operate anywhere in the world’s oceans, including under the polar ice, undetected and at maximum capability for extended periods. Nuclear power provides sustained high speed and the endurance to reposition across the globe without refueling.
Tetsuo Sawada, Hisashi Ninokata, Hirofumi Tomozoe, Hiroshi Endo
Nuclear Technology | Volume 130 | Number 3 | June 2000 | Pages 242-251
Technical Paper | Fission Reactors | doi.org/10.13182/NT130-242
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An outline is given of simple evaluation models for a recriticality in an attempt to construct a fast reactor core that has high potential to terminate an accident and prevent its progression, under postulated core-damage conditions, into further disruption of the degraded core and into possible recriticality leading to an energetic power excursion. The basic idea to prevent recriticality events is to remove a certain amount of fuel material out of the core in order to keep the core subcritical. Based on the simplified models, general guidelines are given that minimize the amount of fuel removal necessary to avoid recriticality events. Multigroup two-dimensional diffusion calculations are also performed to ascertain the tendency obtained by the simple model for the reactivity insertion due to a core collapse. In the sense of controlled material relocation, the fraction of core materials is identified that should be preferentially removed out of the core to eliminate the recriticality potential.