Viscount Mockton, self-styled "hydrodynamics advisor to Prime Minister Thatcher," and "Chairman of the Blue Riband Commission on the Trans-Atlantic speed record" has gone ballistic with a WUWT stemwinder entitled The Economics of the Madhouse, in which he avers the UK power grid may soon:
This has left submariners chuckling silently but deeply, as the largest extant marine propulsion reactors are rated under 200 megawatts thermal, and a very big, very fast sub gets enough steam from a sixty megawatt (.06 GW) pair to leap half out of the water as shown above." Install 1.2 GW of new nuclear capacity each year ( the equivalent of two nuclear submarines ). But -- insanity upon insanity-- the low-spec civilian-grade reactors they are going to buy from Hitachi cost six times as much as the high-spec, military-grade Rolls Royce reactors in our Trident submarines."
No 600 megawatt propulsion reactors exist, and the .18 GW reactors that power carriers and other capital ships are physically too large to fit within a sub hull, a fact that soon impresses itself on technology S-2's to Cold War novelists obliged to crawl around the engineering spaces in question.
My late coauthor must be smiling at Monckton's modest proposal, for while the thunder of three quarters of a million shaft horsepower might scare the planckton and pop the ears of sonarmen for 20,000 leagues in all directions, it would provide turns enough to scare the hell out of the craziest Ivan in the seven seas.
