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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.
Yoshinori Nakahara, Kenya Suyama, Jun Inagawa, Ryuji Nagaishi, Setsumi Kurosawa, Nobuaki Kohno, Mamoru Onuki, Hiroki Mochizuki
Nuclear Technology | Volume 137 | Number 2 | February 2002 | Pages 111-126
Technical Paper | Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT02-2
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
To establish a nuclide composition benchmark data set for the verification of burnup codes, destructive analyses of light water reactor spent-fuel samples, which were cut out from several heights of spent-fuel rods, were carried out at the analytical laboratory at the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute. The 16 samples from three kinds of pressurized water reactor (PWR) fuel rods and the 18 samples from two boiling water reactor (BWR) fuel rods were examined. Their initial 235U enrichments and burnups were from 2.6 to 4.1% and from 4 to 50 GWd/t, respectively. One PWR fuel rod and one BWR fuel rod contained gadolinia as a burnable poison. The measurements for more than 40 nuclides of uranium, transuranium, and fission product elements were performed by destructive analysis using mass spectrometry, and alpha-ray and gamma-ray spectrometry. Burnup for each sample was determined by the 148Nd method. The analytical methods and the results as well as the related irradiation condition data are compiled as a complete benchmark data set.
