Rickover is the man most responsible for both the success and the failure of nuclear power. Thanks to Rickover, nuclear power became a reality as much as a decade earlier than it otherwise would have. But Rickover (along with Teller) was an originator of the Two Lies. He thought and taught that any sizable release was intolerable. My guess is that this doctrine was more a product of his concern for his program than his concern for humanity. But either way such a release must be prevented. He insisted this could be done if you followed Rickover's system of quality assurance religiously enough, cost be damned. The Intolerable Harm Lie and the Negligible Probability Lie put a crushing burden on nuclear power, which has prevented nuclear from realizing its promethean promise, and will continue to do so until they are renounced.

An instructive exception to Rickover's control of American nuclear effort was the Army's successful small reactor program in the very late 1950's. This included Camp Century. Camp Century was located at 77N in one of the most inhospitable places on the planet, 6000 feet above sea level on the Greenland Ice Cap, 800 miles from the North Pole, Figure 1. //

from a nuclear power perspective, Camp Century showed what is possible when you combine

1) a non-standard nuclear manufacturer accustomed to building large components in a competitive market [American Locomotive Company],

2) a plant built entirely on an assembly line,

3) transported by ship in blocks to site,

4) an erection time measured in weeks,

5) disassembled by reversing the process,

with an attitude that nuclear power is just another way of making electricity with its own benefits and hazards. [2]

When Camp Century was abandoned, the reactor and its fuel were removed; but just about everything else, including 200 m3 of diesel fuel and reactor coolant water with an initial activity of 1.2 GBq of activity, was left buried in the ice. The ice flow at the site has been tracked by the Danes ever since, most recently by Colgan et al.\cite{colgan-2023}. The ice is moving southwest at about 3.7 meters per year. But this will speed up as the ice gets closer to the shore. Colgan et al estimate it will hit the shore at Melville Bay in about 7000 years, Figure 4.

This has been promoted as a looming radiological disaster. 1.2 GBq is about 1/800th of the activity of a nuclear powered pacemaker. The deal with the Danes required that the site surface be left with no higher than normal background radioactivity. This was checked and signed off on by Danish personnel.

The longest lived isotope in the coolant is our old friend tritium. Tritium emits a weak electron which for all practical purposes is harmless. Tritium has a half-life of 12.3 years. If we conservatively assume all the ``initial" activity was tritium, by the time the Camp Century ice gets to the sea, the tritium will be reduced by more than a factor of 1.0e170. That's 10 followed by 169 zeros. //

Camp Century left us with a precious gift, Figure 6, a 1390 meter long ice core, all the way down to the ice base.3 This was the product of a multi-year effort to do what never had been done before. It was our first real record of the climate of the last 100,000 years. The single most important data is the ratio of heavy oxygen, Oxygen-18 to normal oxygen, O-16.. The lower this ratio, the colder the planet, since more of the heavy oxygen in the atmosphere condenses and precipitates out as it moves north before it gets to northern Greenland. //

CO2 measurements showed that atmospheric concentration of CO2 dipped to around 200 ppm about 20,000 years ago, barely above the level needed to support photosynthesis.\cite{neftel-1982}

There's more. The Army actually drilled about 3 meters into the sediment below the ice. Astonishingly, this portion of the core was pretty much forgotten, until it turned up in a freezer in Copenhagen in 2017. The sedimentary record spans pretty much the whole Pleistocene (roughly the last 3 million years). It contains plant material including well preserved twigs which showed that during that period the Camp Century location was ice-free, at least twice.\cite{christ-2021} The core is still producing papers.

NuScale is America's contender in the race to build a commercial, nuclear small modular reactor (SMR). The company has two buyers for its product lined up. But the stock's price seems to say that there is trouble ahead, especially after the recent release of a negative research report by a small short selling firm, Iceberg Research. Peak to trough the shares have fallen about 75% and since their initial $10 a share public offering via a merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) in May 2022 the shares (ticker SMR) have dropped to $3.80. //

To sum up. NuScale has about three months to find buyers for 250 MWs of power in the Intermountain West or its initial subscribers at UAMPs can walk away from the project receiving full refunds. Also, at some point next year NuScale will need more cash, which will likely lead to meaningful dilution for existing shareholders. And lastly, we have senior management engaging in a battle with a short seller who seems to view the Standard deal as something akin to a stock promotion scheme of dubious merit. //

All we can conclude. at this point, is that American development of SMR technology seems in real jeopardy for nontechnological reasons.

To us, this deal, if it gets approval from the EU, signals that the EU fully acknowledges that choosing nuclear power is a political decision. And that expanding nuclear power requires government actions and explicit government financial support. That clears the air. Now let's see what the policymakers do.

Even as the U.S. opens its first new enrichment plant in 70 years—ending Russia’s monopoly over a critical fuel cycle—questions persist about the economics of new nuclear.