[HN Gopher] The Soviet Union's Nuclear Icebreakers
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The Soviet Union's Nuclear Icebreakers
Author : picture
Score : 60 points
Date : 2022-10-19 17:03 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (asianometry.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (asianometry.substack.com)
| wiseowise wrote:
| > An oil burning icebreaker burned up to 70 tons of fuel in a
| single day. The Lenin by comparison burns just 45 grams each day.
|
| Huh.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Really puts the energy density into perspective, doesn't it.
| And nuclear powered steam turbines typically run at 5-10% lower
| efficiencies than diesel engines too.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| No icebreaker, but related in context of energy density:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Hahn_(ship)
|
| > In 1972, after four years of operation, her reactor was
| refuelled. She had covered 250,000 nautical miles (463,000
| km) on 22 kilograms of uranium.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Hmm, that seems oddly short. Don't nuclear subs regularly
| go 20 years between refuelling? But then again they use
| weapons grade enriched fuel so that's probably why.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Yes, in the german version of the article this is
| mentioned. It was mostly a small version of a light water
| reactor using U235 enriched to about 5%, like the larger
| versions on land used in NPPs.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Interesting choice, also makes it much less of a target
| than a military sub reactor running on highly enriched
| uranium.
|
| Considering these icebreakers are probably not very well
| guarded this is a very good decision for nonproliferation
| purposes.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Uhm, I referred to the german experimental ship from the
| 70ies. I actually don't know which type of reactor and
| fuel the russian icebreakers are using.
|
| Back to the only enriched to 5%, it would still make a
| good dirty bomb. But probably very unhealthy and
| impractical to assemble for the 'target audience'
| interested in such things.
|
| Edit: So it says
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OK-150_reactor , three of
| them. Each using 150.7kg U235 enriched to 90%.
| [deleted]
| MikePlacid wrote:
| There is a blog of the captain of 50 Years of Victory atomic
| icebreaker: https://dmitry-v-ch-l.livejournal.com/ (in Russian,
| but with a lot of videos and pictures).
|
| Note that cruises to the North Pole for tourists (mostly Western
| ones) were a regular thing before the war and sanctions.
|
| Upd. Actually, cruises to North Pole continue. This video
| features a recent one, with a lot of high school and college
| students: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7b8QMcGfsvY (the author
| talks too much, but the video is packed with info)
| aaron695 wrote:
| cwillu wrote:
| IIRC, the Russian icebreakers are suspected to be unable to
| operate in the antarctic. Not because they don't work there, but
| because they can't "cross the equator due to limitations on the
| maximum inlet temperature of their cooling water".
|
| https://www.navalgazing.net/Merchant-Ships-Icebreakers#fn1_3
| yohannparis wrote:
| A simple heavy fuel tug boat could solve that problem, at some
| remarkable cost.
| pastor_bob wrote:
| I wonder if you could just have it slowly push a barge that
| is pumping up cold water from a couple hundred meters and
| outputting it in front of the intakes.
| alex_suzuki wrote:
| Fascinating stuff. You've got to hand it to the russians. At that
| time, they sure knew how to build.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > Russians
|
| Are you sure about that?
| christophilus wrote:
| > Are you sure about that?
|
| No. But I'm curious what you're suggesting. The article
| mentions that the last 2 were built by the Fins. The rest
| appear to have been Russian-made. Are you suggesting the
| Russians didn't build any? Or... well... I'm not sure what
| you're getting at.
| mangosteenjuice wrote:
| The Soviet Union wasn't just Russians. Their shipbuilding
| industry and space programs were heavily Ukranian.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| Once they were done shooting all of the engineers for
| "wrecking" and got around to training a new generation and got
| all of the western blueprints back from the NKVD they really
| got to work!
|
| [*edit] If you're downvoting I suggest you read about the waves
| of purges of engineers[1][2][3] that continued well after the
| Stalinist purges. Moreover in this context we're talking about
| a ship powered with a nuclear reactor, and it's well known that
| Soviet reactor designs were stolen from the West[4] in the
| early days. Also it's a joke, lighten up.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrecking_(Soviet_Union)
|
| [2]
| https://www.egr.msu.edu/~amezqui3/personal/extracts/the_gula...
|
| [3] https://www.sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-
| resista...
|
| [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_spies
| vkou wrote:
| I think most of the downvotes aren't because of your claims
| about the purges, but because of your wink-nudge implication
| that Soviet engineers and mathematicians could not achieve
| anything of note without espionage.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| Well to be clear what I'm saying is that they literally
| murdered a whole generation of engineers, scientists, and
| technicians. What are you supposed to do from that starting
| point? Had they not captured train loads of Nazi scientists
| and literally stollen every significant piece of technology
| developed in the west for 20+ years it would have taken
| them FAR FAR longer to develop a lot of this stuff
| independently. They essentially cut themselves off from the
| global community and purged all of their talent. They had
| to bootstrap science and engineering somehow.
|
| No doubt, absent the stalinist purges and closing off of
| the USSR, then Soviet scientists could have equally
| participated in the science and engineering going on in the
| rest of the world.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| It was sufficient to say you've got no idea about the
| Soviet space program (which benefited the most from Nazi
| tech), no need for long posts.
|
| Soviet rocketry was demonstratively, intentionally, _in-
| your-face_ domestic, those low ranked Peenemunde
| engineers were sent home as soon as they helped to build
| R-1 which was a verbatim copy of V-2 indeed (US got much
| more from Nazis, namely the best engineers and actual
| V-2s and equipment and tech). For example practicaly
| everything in R-7, maybe except for the vague idea of the
| hydrogen peroxide gas generator to drive the turbopump,
| was novel at the time. In particular the control system,
| telemetry, aerodynamic modeling, material science, and
| both types of the hot separation mechanism. That was
| entirely intentional.
|
| What they got from Nazis more or less verbatim, was
| namely radars (later improved on and perfected) and
| electronic measurement equipment tech. Not nuclear
| weapons (part of the tech was later stolen by Fuchs and
| other commie sympathizers from US, but was used to
| control the scientists results, not directly as a base,
| so it didn't speed anything up). And especially not
| nuclear power tech.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Everybody and their mother went after Nazi scientists,
| scientist from the loosing side of the war. von Braun got
| NASA to the moon and his ex collegues got the satelite
| for the USSR into space. The USSR lost the technology
| race in the late 70s and early 80s, up to that point it
| was close enough to call it even. And that was long after
| Stalin.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| You're missing my point. The Soviets sent basically all
| of their scientists and engineers to the front, the
| GULAG, or to a wall. They had NO way to jumpstart
| jumpstart science and engineering without espionage and
| captured scientists a it's incredibly well documented
| that whole Soviet industries sprang out of NKVD
| activities.
| avmich wrote:
| The point you seem to be missing is that even with all
| that, Soviets both had their own ideas, their own
| implementation of ideas and got ahead of the West in some
| of the areas. Yes, I'd agree that harsh societal
| environment greatly diminished the possible outcome - and
| also that lots of spying was being done by Soviets (to
| say nothing about the West).
|
| > to the front, the GULAG, or to a wall
|
| Right, but still, after Stalin's death, USSR had a
| renaissance of sorts - art, science, tech, quality of
| life improvements across the board. Still not enough to
| win the Cold War - was likely impossible - but enough to
| maintain for some time the lead in some areas and be not
| terribly outpaced in most others. Unfortunately, effects
| (and conditions) of Khrushchev Thaw could hardly be
| repeated, and until Gorbachev the country leadership
| wasn't allowing enough of progress.
|
| One of the points of the article, I believe, is to remind
| that USSR had their own achievements.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| I'm not missing that at all, they did some novel stuff
| like their work with phages. But the whole of their
| nuclear industry and several others were built on NKVD
| theft. And the all of it was fueled by grain stolen from
| Ukraine and mines and logging camps full of millions of
| slaves. The brutality in my opinion overshadows
| everything else.
| avmich wrote:
| > But the whole of their nuclear industry and several
| others were built on NKVD theft.
|
| What do you mean? They didn't have world-class
| scientists? They didn't compete in thermonuclear weapon
| race, with test of their own design (Sloika)? They didn't
| built world first nuclear power plant for the grid in
| Obninsk? They didn't participate in particles research,
| e.g. with invention of Tokamak? Did they steal all of
| that? Or you're just saying that whatever they did, early
| on they used most important data from spying? Learning
| from others, and spying for your adversaries both predate
| USSR by millenniums.
|
| > And the all of it was fueled by grain stolen from
| Ukraine
|
| You mean, different part of the same country specialized
| in different activities? Which grain was stolen - and by
| whom - from Ukraine (you mean, Ukrainian SSR?) when
| nuclear research was going on, mostly after WWII?
| ch4s3 wrote:
| > What do you mean? They didn't have world-class
| scientists?
|
| The did in fact have some, of course it was a huge place,
| but the theft of nuclear secrets is well documented, as
| are other episodes of industrial tech. In fact the
| Mitrokhin Archives[1] revealed that industrial espionage
| was one of the primary purposes of Soviet spying. For
| example in 1971 Agent TONDA gave the KBG two volumes of
| documents on micro electronic components developed in
| Tokyo for US aerospace use.
|
| > Which grain was stolen - and by whom - from Ukraine
| (you mean, Ukrainian SSR?)
|
| I'm referring of course to The Holodomor[2] which was
| executed at gun point and overseen by Moscow via the
| NKVD. The whole thing was used by Stalin to clear our
| rebellious Ukrainians and to fund industrialization.
|
| What I'm saying is that a lot of touted Soviet
| achievements were built on a foundation of theft,
| slavery, and ethnic cleansing unrivaled since WWII.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitrokhin_Archive
|
| [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
| p_l wrote:
| And you're missing the part where majority of scientists
| and engineers in GULAG system had their camps be closed
| R&D and industrial facilities, with various levels of
| actual internment - considerable portion of it was simply
| part & parcel of relocation of industry to Siberia.
|
| In fact major names that westerners might know went
| exactly through that system (Mikoyan and Guryevich
| actually had a period that was euphemistically referred
| as "fell out of favour for bad results on MiG-1
| fighter"), and slowly relocated back to various locations
| in the timeframe between end of WW2 and Stalin's death.
|
| And do you know what Mikoyan & Guryevich design bureau
| did while in GULAG? Spent years building high performance
| planes that were pushing what was possible for propeller
| planes, which ultimately got them ready to get back in
| the high-end fighter design as jet era started.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| > where majority of scientists and engineers in GULAG
| system had their camps be closed R&D and industrial
| facilities
|
| This is so hilariously untrue I've never even seen anyone
| make this claim before. Tens of thousands of engineers
| are known to have died digging canals with their bare
| hands.
|
| Sure some folks like Mikoyan got lucky, but forcing
| scientists into slave labor is hardly an accomplishment
| to be proud of.
| p_l wrote:
| Then you read nearly nothing of the closed city system,
| which was also part of GULAG. Was there a lot of idiotic
| suffering involved and a lot of people killed by the
| system? Yes. It doesn't mean they had nothing left and
| had to spy for everything.
|
| And the reason I mentioned the "euphemism" is that they
| got really lucky - other teams also went through the same
| system, but for example Yakovlev OKB wasn't censured,
| whereas MiG OKB probably avoided digging canals only
| because MiG-3 cleaned some of the bad reputation they got
| from MiG-1 and for a time both were the major planes for
| certain categories of air war available in USSR (high
| altitude intercepts).
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| I think there was excellent higher education in the soviet
| union. You have many people with phds, engineers etc. They also
| promoted intellectual pursuits such as chess. The issue was/is
| the Communist system and now the unbelievable amount of
| corruption/organised crime at every level of government. The
| intellectual class in russia were robbed after the fall of the
| soviet union. They are scientists, mathematicians, engineers,
| they are extremely capable, but they have never been given a
| chance.
| adolph wrote:
| Asianometry also has a video "Why the Soviet Computer Failed"
| [0].
|
| If the Soviet Union had excellent higher education, why
| was/is Communism and then corruption/organized crime an
| issue? At what point do phds, engineers, etc take
| responsibility for the society in which they live? When do
| the smart people say "we have met the enemy and he is us?"
| [1] 0.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnHdqPBrtH8 1.
| https://library.osu.edu/site/40stories/2020/01/05/we-have-
| met-the-enemy/
|
| From the video description:
|
| _In 1986, the Soviet Union had slightly more than 10,000
| computers. The Americans had 1.3 million._
|
| _At the time of Stalin 's death, the Soviet Union was the
| world's third most proficient computing power. But by the
| 1960s, the US-Soviet computing gap was already years long.
| Twenty years later, the gap was undeniable and basically
| permanent._
|
| _Why did this happen? The Soviet state believed in science
| and industrial modernization. Support for research &
| development and the hard sciences were plentiful. They had
| the country's finest minds._
|
| _Goodness gracious, they launched Sputnik! They landed on
| Venus! How did it come to this?_
| roywiggins wrote:
| Not just corruption, at least during Stalin's rule:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Vavilov
|
| > Vavilov's work was criticized by Trofim Lysenko, whose
| anti-Mendelian concepts of plant biology had won favor with
| Joseph Stalin. As a result, Vavilov was arrested and
| subsequently sentenced to death in July 1941. Although his
| sentence was commuted to twenty years' imprisonment, he died
| in prison in 1943. According to Lyubov Brezhneva, he was
| thrown to his death into a pit of lime in the prison yard.
| [deleted]
| sudobash1 wrote:
| > The debate went back and forth. But in the end, the Congressmen
| basically admitted that the only reason they wanted the US to
| build such a machine would be because the Soviets had one too.
|
| I want to see when that admission was made, and how someone got
| them to admit it. It was the most surprising part of the article
| for me.
|
| Wouldn't it be great to see more defense spending introspection
| and honesty.
| pvg wrote:
| Parity with and superiority to the Soviet Union was an overt
| part of US policy-making for decades. What's changed is that
| it's somewhat less overt now for various reasons one of them
| being the there's less of an explicit ideological conflict
| between the US/allies and its adversaries.
| SQueeeeeL wrote:
| Yeah, people underestimate how important the US/Soviet
| rivalry was towards the overall ambition of American
| policies. Having poor quality infrastructure and a poor
| disgruntled populis was unacceptable as it would be taciturn
| to admitting defeat. As soon as we lost an enemy, we lost a
| large amount of institutional motivation to be exceptional
| cpursley wrote:
| Looks like that's about to change (back) for better or
| worse. The unipolar world was never really tenable.
|
| I can't think of any major problems that the US government
| solved since the USSR collapsed. Maybe a little competition
| at the international level is needed.
| ethagknight wrote:
| Its reasonable to build something that your competitor has, for
| which you have no use for today, but may need ASAP tomorrow for
| unforeseen reasons. In the case of a nuclear icebreaker, it may
| be rescuing stranded covert operatives or getting a certain
| ship with certain capabilities to a certain location.
| bombcar wrote:
| Especially with a potential war partner - if they have a
| capability you do not, even if you can't figure out a
| _reason_ for that capability; the enemy may have and you 'll
| need to be able to counter it.
| embedded_hiker wrote:
| That is apparently the reason the USSR made the Buran space
| shuttle. They couldn't figure out what the US needed that
| capability for. Turns out, we didn't either, at least for
| military applications.
| bombcar wrote:
| Arguably the Buran was more advanced than the shuttle (it
| completed one solo flight, orbiting twice and auto-
| landing), but they never got a chance to do anything else
| with it.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| Put a bunch of nukes in the cargo bay and you have a good
| idea what the shuttle could be used for.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| This. For example, the Brits had developed more efficient
| engine designs which they reused in Spitfire which Germany
| didn't have because they were barred from competing in
| seaplane races https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schneider_Trophy
| thrown_22 wrote:
| See Buran.
|
| From the Soviet point of view the Space Shuttles were the
| largest and fastest first strike nuclear bombers ever
| created. With enough of them in orbit you just obsoleted all
| other nuclear delivery methods.
|
| Just because something pretends to be a civilian craft
| doesn't mean it can't be repurposed into a military one in no
| time at all.
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| Here's some more information about the congressional hearings:
|
| _"The United States Cannot Afford to Lag Behind Russia":
| Making the Case for an American Nuclear Icebreaker, 1957-1961_
|
| https://www.cnrs-scrn.org/northern_mariner/vol31/tnm_31_31-6...
|
| Its not surprising Eisenhower vetoed it. He vetoed 39 bills in
| 1958 alone.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| You probably know more about Eisenhower than I do - perhaps
| you grew up in the US and know its history well.
|
| Can you tell me why this isn't surprising? What about
| Eisenhower and his vetoing bills in great numbers?
| CapitalistCartr wrote:
| Eisenhower came from a military background, rather than
| political, and was pretty outspoken regarding his opinions,
| compared to most politicians. He was comfortable vetoing
| any bill he thought was wrong. In spite of his reputation
| as a hard-line anti-communist, his presidential farewell
| address famously warned against "unwarranted influence,
| whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial
| complex".
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| Eisenhower was notoriously prudent when it came to
| spending. The majority of his tenure from 53'-61' congress
| was controlled by the Democrats. His only power to
| constrain spending was the veto. Of the 181 bills he
| vetoed, only two were overridden by congress.
|
| Many people believe that because he vetoed so many bills,
| it allowed his administration to run a surplus in three of
| his eight years in office.
| nomel wrote:
| Was pork in bills as much of a problem back then?
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