[bigbadgoose]

> We could have imposed a similar level of discipline on civilian nuclear power plant operators ... when commercial plants started being built in the US in quantity ... Three Mile Island (...clearly showed inadequacies in the way civilian nuclear plants were operated). The fact that we didn't is a political problem, not a technical or operational problem.

Scaling any operation is going to introduce error. It's exponentially harder to control 1,000 outcomes in a civilian operation than 10 outcomes in a military operation. And when the failure scenario is nuclear debris beyond sovereign borders, it gets dicey.

So the real political problem seems to be, "I don't want to be any part of Chernobyl, USA"

[pdonis]

Comparing any reactor the US has ever built, commercial, nuclear, or even research, to Chernobyl is not in any way justified. Chernobyl was a seriously flawed design that no country but the Soviet Union would ever have considered building.

[sampo]

> 10 outcomes in a military operation

According to Wikipedia, US Navy has 70 active nuclear submarines, and 11 nuclear aircraft carriers. So 81 not 10. There is also a number of decommissioned ones.