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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.
Shih-Hai Li, Hui-Ting Yang, Chun-Ping Jen
Nuclear Technology | Volume 148 | Number 3 | December 2004 | Pages 358-368
Technical Paper | Radioactive Waste Management and Disposal | doi.org/10.13182/NT04-A3573
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Performance assessments of high-level radioactive waste disposal have emphasized the role of colloids in the migration of radionuclides in the geosphere. The transport of colloids often brings them in contact with fracture surfaces or porous rock matrix. Colloids that attach to these surfaces are treated as being immobile and are called filtered colloids. The filtered colloids could be released into the fracture again; that is, the attachment of colloids may be reversible. Also, the colloids in the fracture could diffuse into the porous matrix rock. A methodology is proposed to evaluate a predictive model to assess transport within the fractured rock as well as various phenomenological coefficients employed in the different mechanisms, such as filtration, remobilization, and matrix diffusion of colloids. The governing equations of colloids considering mechanisms of the colloidal transport in the fractured media, including filtration, remobilization, and matrix diffusion, have been modeled and solved analytically in previous studies. In the present study, transport equations of colloids and radionuclides that consider the combination of the aforementioned transport mechanisms have also been solved numerically and investigated. The total concentration of mobile radionuclides in the fracture becomes lower because the concentration of mobile colloids in the fracture decreases when the filtration coefficient for colloids increases. Additionally, the concentration of mobile radionuclides was increased at any given time step due to the higher sorption partition coefficient of radionuclides associated with colloids. The results also show that the concentration of radionuclides in the fracture zone decreases when the remobilization coefficient of colloids or the percentages of the matrix diffusion flux of colloids increase.