Your entire timeline is based on the assumption that the sCo2 reactor at the steel mill is the first experimental demo unit. But the way it was disclosed very much suggests otherwise. There wasn’t much fanfare about it being built and first put into operation as you would expect from a pioneering, revolutionary tech demonstration. Instead it’s just there, doing it’s thing like it’s just a regular Tuesday.
What seems more likely given the evidence so far is that sCo2 reactors were pioneered in secret and the steel mill application is just the commercialisation of it. And if you look back in recent history, that’s how things generally went. Apple didn’t pioneer any of the 10 key technologies needed to make the iPhone. Military research projects did the heavy lifting on pioneering and implementing those technologies, while Apple just took the end products of those military research projects, fine tuned it and combined it into the iPhone.
I would say it’s entirely possible that sCo2 reactors were first developed for the PLAN submarine programmes, and the steel plant reactor and planned icebreakers are just the commercialisation of that technology, rather then it being the other way around, that private industry fronted the developmental costs of making this thing work and the navy came sniffing around for its naval applications after the fact. In fact, I would say the balance of probabilities makes it far more likely that the navy developed the tech first as opposed to the other way around. Because if some private entity did indeed pioneer this tech, why the hell are they not shouting it from the rooftops and promoting it everywhere to start recouping some of that massive capital and development costs this would have taken?
If you broaden your prospects to consider the possibility that just because we found out about the commercial use of a sCo2 reactor first doesn’t mean that sCo2 reactors were first pioneered for commercial use and suddenly the possibility of it being used on the 09doesn’t seem so remote at all.
It would not be outside the realm of possibility that the 09V might not even be using the first gen sCo2 naval nuclear reactor, as it would have made far more sense to first validate the tech in a custom built 09III or SSK hull first. Indeed, it’s actually possible that the 09IIIB might be the first user of sCo2 reactors given the kind of delay you would expect before the fruits of cutting edge military R&D get’s declassified enough for commercial applications.
Indeed, I would say that the 09IIIB class, or at a minimum a test boat from the class running sCo2 is probably a prerequisite to the 09V running it, as the project management risks would be too great to incorporate it into the 09V design at inception if that was not the came.
