Navy nuclear engineer and wife arrested for trying to sell submarine secrets

I get a 404 when clicking the link, to get to the article I have to truncate 'via@Cbs Politics' from the URL.

$10,000? Really? It always shocks me how cheap people are. You would think that if any actual adversary wanted information they believed would be helpful in replicating or attacking a nuclear submarine, the price tag they would be willing to pay would be much higher. The guy and his wife are both idiots and they are undoubtedly facing severe consequences. Let’s all hope they never had the opportunity to have children.

Not a nuke tech but knowing output/efficiency of the powerplant could tell you max speed of these subs which is probably highly classified

Building a basic (large, loud, inefficient, expensive, unsafe) reactor is "easy", by the standards of nuclear shit. Building one that's suitable for use in a submarine is decidedly less so.

How often do you need to refuel the reactor? That's inconvenient on land, but in a submarine you need to cut through the pressure hull to access anything and "inconvenient" doesn't even begin to describe it. Modern American reactors are designed to run for 20+ years without refueling for exactly that reason.

How much do you need to run the coolant pumps and how loud are they? A loud sub is a dead sub. If your reactor can run on convection at low power, that's wonderful.

How power dense is the reactor? You need to fit this in a relatively narrow tube, after all! And higher density means higher speed.

How safe is it? How easy is it to cause a meltdown? That directs staffing requirements, and subs don't have staff to spare. A reactor shutting down at the wrong moment can very easily cause the sub to be lost, even out of combat. See the USS Thresher for a demonstration.

And finally, how much maintenance does it need? What portion of this tractor's life needs to be spent tied up alongside a pier having work done, or even worse spent in drydock? The higher the proportion, the more subs you need in order to maintain a given number on station.

So yes, there's PLENTY of things that aren't in a textbook reactor design. And the largest current buyer of nuclear reactors is the US Navy. Number two is the People's Liberation Army Navy.

Because they don’t want to say CHINA