Seawolf's sodium-cooled plant required makeshift repairs before the submarine completed reduced-power trials. Rickover had already judged the design too expensive, complex, vulnerable to long shutdowns after small failures, and difficult to repair. Replacing it with a water-cooled plant similar to Nautilus reinforced the U.S. preference for pressurized-water reactors. For naval reactors, reliability and disciplined simplicity mattered more than technical novelty for its own sake.
Notable Point · 29:38-32:51
Seawolf and the case for simpler reactors
The sodium-cooled reactor in Seawolf showed why naval nuclear programs often value a maintainable pressurized-water design over a more ambitious but fragile alternative.