Trust lost is trust that either never comes back or it takes tremendous, long term continuous effort. Not holding my breath.

It’s not a casual undertaking and other nations will know you’re doing it. The major global powers are not interested in more nuclear weapons, not only to maintain their hegemony but also to limit the number of parties that could cause massive issues. Not to mention the likelihood that a national or political shift could mean nukes in the hands of those less…restrained.

Plus it raises the surface area of others gaining access to the material or capabilities. Proliferation is bad for the world, generally.

The challenges are primarily geopolitical. There are uranium enrichment operations in a number of countries around the world. Weapons grade enrichment is a lot harder, but nothing that a sufficiently funded and motivated nation state couldn’t achieve if they wanted to and, most importantly, didn’t have any other countries discover it.

> Processing, 700kg of uranium does not sound insurmountable, even with a terribly slow and inefficient process.

You have to get enough uranium ore, process that down, then enrich it on a large scale. Uranium ore deposits aren’t very uranium dense except for a few known mines, so pulling rocks out of the ground in another country may produce extremely low yields.

Enrichment is a very slow process requiring a lot of stages because U235 and U238 are barely different, so they don’t separate much in each stage. Everything has to work together and work well. Like you said it’s not insurmountable, but by the time a country has spent years mining low-yield ore and building complicated many stage centrifuges they’re likely to make a mistake that leads to an intelligence agency catching on.

Yes.

But people would notice, and get upset: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calutron#Iraq

Some technology doesn't get much easier or cheaper with time. Maybe the HN crowd is biased by the hyper-speed advances of computer technology.

And the US has an agreement with South Korea that limits domestic production of fissile material for military uses but it's a mutual agreement that we have with a bunch of countries (including China) and is essentially always renegotiable as situations change. Essentially it's just an explicit agreement of how much material a given country intends on producing for the purposes of requiring public political discussions domestically before ramping up production.

That is all very much a flexible situation and the US doesn't have any actual power to legitimately stop South Korea from manufacturing domestic nuclear reactors for military purposes.

Countries like SK seem to let the US do the heavy lifting, including fighting major wars with them and for them, and in return they give the US considerable influence over international relations and military affairs.

190 nations have signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty. This includes China, so the very US vs China premise here is misplaced.

[The US, UK, France, Russia, China and 185 other countries] won't allow south korea to enrich uranium on their own

That's why north korea has nukes? South Korea:US is not analogous to North Korea:China. Neither is Pakistan:China analogous to South Korea:US. If you analogy held, south korea would be a nuclear power.

Stop commenting on things you know nothing about. Honestly, do you think you are an expert in every geopolitical topic?

Seems like the record is 111 days submerged.

Nuclear Subs are typically pretty big so they can probably bring enough food to last for the entire time without resupply.

air is scrubbed and additional O2 is available via water splitting.

the main limit is food. food is stored under the floor boards and it can last a while but generally they are gonna try and restock every few months rather than running to empty (which on full stock can be close to a year)

The USS Thresher was lost at sea when it sunk below its test depth and imploded. I wonder if there was any damage whatsoever from the fallout. https://youtu.be/g-uJ1do3yV8?si=CLFS80oo564PKouo

Also the USS Scorpion if I remember correctly.

If the environmental effects don’t matter, then I’m surprised it’s ever been a big deal in the first place. Also slightly surprising that we don’t have nuclear sub-sized power plants powering neighborhoods or cities.

I guess one big difference is that any nuclear sub accident would be located far from populated areas. But has there been any studies of how bad the fallout from one of these smaller reactors could be? If it’s 1/100th the size of Chernobyl, it seems like the maximum damage could be 1/100th of Chernobyl, which may or may not be a sufficient buffer.

Someone downthread joked about using nuclear powered submarines to transmit electricity back to the mainland, but it seems plausible to build a nuclear sub sized reactor offshore (just the reactor, no sub) while enjoying the safety benefits that this class of nuclear reactor apparently has.

It's a very big deal because nuclear-powered submarines are very powerful weapons. Subs are about stealth, and other subs must surface regularly (daily?), greatly limiting their ability to hide. Nuclear-powered subs can stay submerged for many months and can be almost impossible to detect. They are, in a sense, unstoppable weapons.

And it's a very big deal because, as of five years ago, the US only shared this very difficult technology with one country (afaik), the UK. It is among the US's most valuable military secrets. The Biden administration shared it with Australia, apparently to cement the bond with Australia as a counter to China (Australia will require many years to develop the shipyards and capability to build their own nuclear-powered subs.)