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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.
Cheol Shin Lee, Chan Eok Park, Chul Jin Choi, Jong Tae Seo
Nuclear Technology | Volume 139 | Number 1 | July 2002 | Pages 42-49
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/NT02-A3302
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The Korean Standard Nuclear Power Plant (KSNP) has adopted the digital plant protection system (PPS) to enhance the reliability and safety of the plant. Although the digital PPS can be designed with high reliability, it is considered to be vulnerable to common mode failure (CMF) in the system software, resulting in a total loss of the built-in hardware redundancy. Therefore, a comprehensive evaluation has been performed to demonstrate the intrinsic capability of the KSNP design in coping with the design-basis events concurrent with CMF in the digital PPS. Instead of the conservative bounding analysis methodology, a best-estimate analysis methodology has been developed and utilized since the design-basis events accompanied by CMF in the digital PPS are categorized as beyond-design-basis events. An additional reactor trip function on high containment pressure in the diverse protection system (DPS), which is totally diverse from the PPS and is not affected by the CMF in the digital PPS, has been proposed to meet the acceptance criteria of the evaluation results. A variety of diverse means such as the DPS, process control systems, and operator actions including design modification have been verified to be effective in mitigating the design-basis events with CMF in the digital PPS.