Welcome again to everybody! Make yourself at home. Today's picture depicts astronauts on the Tiangong space station, guaranteed 100% free of Nazis. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is our weekly discussion thread!
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Never forget what was taken from you.
This is a Soviet self-propelled atomic power station. In the format of a tracked heavy truck. From the 1960's.
That's really cool, but how often do you need to move a power station?
I think the point is to be able to construct it in an industrial facility and then move it to a remote area where it can provide energy for both industrial and civilian use
I want one.
Did this really work? I didn't realize it was possible to safely perform nuclear fission in such a (relatively) tiny space
It did work. The technology was lost alongside the USSR (yes, it is possible to lose technology). Rosatom is currently fiddling with floating reactors, in the format of a cargo boat
that's amazing and tragic
Don't give the dolphins access to nuclear power. We've been warned about this already!
Can you share some sources for this? This sounds both amazing and extremely tragic.
https://hexbear.net/comment/3789012
Someone else posted an authoritative looking PDF that says that the technical plans for the thing were declassified a few years ago. I don't see any basis for describing the tech as lost, actually kinda concerning nobody else called that claim out.
Like don't get me wrong I share the sense of grief for lost potential (esp wrt space exploration) but let's stick to reality
For the reactor itself? The link is in the post. For the floating one? I can offer wikifedia
If u read the link it says the whole plant takes up 4 separate platforms like the one in the picture. So not that tiny.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/View-of-the-self-propelled-vehicles-with-a-control-panel-and-a-turbogenerator-The-tracks_fig2_361599813
That’s pretty cool. I was looking into nuclear powered cars, and the issue was with miniaturization. Tons of aerospace and defence companies are making something similar currently.
FYI, the Soviet union’s space program cost a tenth of the US’s
This would be great to power small villages and outposts in Siberia.
Not just there. Think about every town and city in the global south suffering from water shortages, electricity shortages. You could power water desalination plants with these. Heck, if you have a small, modular reactor (small enough to be put onto a tracked chassis), you could just make them stationary and have a lot of them. The potential is immense
That is a horrible idea but i love it so much
Why do you think it's a horrible idea?
It's a nuclear reactor on wheels. That is kinda doomed to cause problems. I also do have questions about how it would be economically viable when compared to other available means of mobile power generation. It takes some really well trained people to safely operate this thing, and a natural gas/diesel generator can be used with barley any training and is both safer and cheaper, and on top of this has more capacity. That's not to say that this was a bad thing, the fact that they managed to build this thing, and at least according to the source i found it was also very stable and reliable, it was simply always doomed to not be very useful. But well, nuclear reactors use a lot of water, and well, mobile reactors on ships make a lot more sense, both because of this and because putting shielding on those is a lot easier. Ship based mobile reactors also can handle far higher capacities then land based ones. The only places where something like this might be useful is after natural disasters that destroy large amounts of infrastructure. That is mostly A) Earthquakes B) Tsunamis. Both of which also damage the streets that this thing would drive on, and well, after quakes and further flood waves would block practical operation for both of these. And well, there is diesel. It might not be as eco friendly as a reactor, but that just doesn't really matter here. You can carry a small diesel generator and anyone can use them. They are also a lot cheaper to make. And those are just things seen from the perspective of back then. Today we have mobile solar and wind generators, better batteries, and if you really want that mobile multi-megawatt power plant, use natural gas or hydrogen generators. Mobile nuclear reactors are just to expensive to make sense on a scale you can fit on a car. On a ship? sure. that works, that's why swimming nuclear plants exist. On land? no. It will always loose to other methods of power generation, both because you certainly can't make that thing very efficient power wise, and it will be pretty expensive as well.
There is also the problem that this thing probably, i can't find any non-Russian sources on this and don't speak Russian, this thing needs a lot of water for cooling. At least all other reactors do, and i don't see a way they could have gotten around that. This makes this thing useless in a lot of environments.
You can also simply consider this: The soviets agreed with me, they gave up on it.