Monday, February 16, 2009

Nuclear submarine

nuclear submarine was involved in a collision in the middle of the Atlantic, it was reported. The crash between HMS Vanguard and French submarine Le Triomphant, which was also carrying nuclear warheads, is believed to have occurred on February 3 or 4, The Sun claimed." A nuclear submarine seems to be about 140 meters with a radius of 12. So that's a volume of about 16000 cubic meters.
The Atlantic ocean is 354,700,000 cubic kilometers. There are 1 000 000 000 cubic metres is a cubic kilometer. Of course subs can only dive to about 400 metres. So say they stay in the top 300 meters then the volume might be more like 106.4 million km squared * 300 meters=30 million cubic km.
This is assuming a submarine is a cylinder which it isn't.How many nuclear submarines are there? There seems to be about 50 in the world. Navies will keep their own submarines separate. But that still means there are nearly 50 submarines that the French or UK subs could run into. This does reduce the number of subs the Russians Or Americans can hit significantly though. They have a top speed of about 40 km per hour. So I assume they are wandering around at 30kph.

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