Latest Pentagon Brainstorm: Nuke-Powered War Bases

[n2doc]

By Spencer Ackerman February 18, 2011


Imagine the snow-capped peaks of mountainous eastern Afghanistan. Wouldn’t it be better topped off with a cooling tower for a nuclear reactor? The Pentagon’s way-out research arm thinks so. It’s all part of a big push to make the military more ecofriendly.

Buried within Darpa’s 2012 budget request under the innocuous name of “Small Rugged Reactor Technologies” is a $10 million proposal to fuel wartime Forward Operating Bases with nuclear power. It springs from an admirable impulse: to reduce the need for troops or contractors to truck down roads littered with bombs to get power onto the base. It’s time, Darpa figures, for a “self-sufficient” FOB.

Only one problem. “The only known technology that has potential to address the power needs of the envisioned self-sufficient FOB,” the pitch reads, “is a nuclear-fuel reactor.” Now, bases could mitigate their energy consumption, like the solar-powered Marine company in Helmand Province, but that’s not enough of a game-changer for Darpa. Being self-sufficient is the goal; and that requires going nuclear; and that requires … other things.

To fit on a FOB, which can be anywhere from Bagram Air Field’s eight square miles to dusty collections of wooden shacks and concertina wire, the reactor would have to be “well below the scale of the smallest reactors that are being developed for domestic energy production,” Darpa acknowledges.


more

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/02/nuke-bases/

[tnlurker]

1. What happens when

The base is over-run by enemy forces and the reactor falls into the wrong hands...Including the nuclear fuel???

[backscatter712]

2. Building a nuclear reactor in a war zone? BRILLIANT!!!

What could possibly go wrong?

[LibertyLover]

3. Oh good grief -

This almost sounds like one of the "Atoms for Peace" plans that got trotted out in the late 1950s. Need a new canal across Central America? Dig it with nukes! Want a plane that can stay aloft for days on end? Put a nuclear reactor in it and crew it with men whose families have all the children they want.

A nuclear reactor at a forward operating base? What could be safer? I mean, it's not like any American FOBs have ever been overrun and captured - right? :sarcasm:

[ProgressiveProfessor]

4. This is in the pattern of the neighborhood reator concept

There was a lot of buzz about it some years back, with the focus being pebble reactors. Small and safe sealed units that would power a neighborhood or small factory without the grid. Neat on paper, but so far unachievable. Who does the US government give the hard problems to? DARPA