submarines are great

[Agent]

bring back dazzle camo

[Despanan]

Question #1: Did they let you look down the periscope?

Question #2: Would they let me look down the periscope?

Question #3: How fucking cool is that periscope?

Question #4: Are you sterile now?

[Sage]

1: No, not yet.

2: Actually, yeah, if you were close friends to somebody who's on and pass a background check etc, etc. They have a family night about once every two weeks, they'd let you look down the periscope then.

3: Right so I never get to see it on a regular basis you dig? There are two basic halves to a submarine; the cone, which is everything forward of the engineroom, and then the engineroom which is a large, inaccessible nuclear reactor and the control systems for it. It's a pretty even split for space on Fast Attack subs, which is what I'm on, while ballistic missile subs and SSGNs (which are just refit ballistic missile subs that fire conventional missiles) have the engine room, missile compartment and cone each take up about a third of the space.
The cone has the periscope and the torpedos and the crew's mess and radio and sonar and stuff but I'm an engineroom kind of guy and coners and engineers don't mix much. So while I can, in theory, go do cone stuff they don't let us until we get qualified, which is ~a year long process. Until then it's engines and pumps and making the boat go and nuclears which is pretty cool I guess.

4: Fun fact! Even in the dark, dim days of nuclear power the naval nuclear program was safe enough that nobody exposed to it exculsively through the naval submarine program ever went sterile through radiation exposure. In fact, on deployment I'm likely to receive less radiation exposure than the typical human being is due to air recycling!
You see, the average person picks up ~300 mrem/year in terms of exposure from normal sources of radiation- potassium, marble decaying, solar radiation, etc. A good 200mrem of that is from Radon exposure! Radon is a naturally occuring element in dirt and decays rapidly (3.8 day half life) into several other particles. It's the decay of Radon and radon product daughters that generates the majority of the radiation exposure in nuclear power.
If I'm on deployment, however, we don't generally go back up to the surface for extended periods of time, which is more than long enough for both radon and its products to decay to negligible levels. And since the Reactor Compartment proper is sealed while in operation and kept behind many layers of shielding, new radon isn't generated very often. I receive daily doses of <1 mrem per day (by design, accessible areas of the engineroom have exposure rates of no more than 10 mrem/hour at full power, and while I can't share the details with you we generally don't spend hours on end in those spaces nor do we run around at full power all the time).
SO barring a spill or other unplanned incident (and even then) my exposure is negligible and unlikely to lead to sterility.

Incidentally, the lowest dose definitively linked to increased risk of cancer is 10 Rem/year (1000 mrem=1rem). While the navy doesn't track/personally care about our individual background doses, personnel have a hard limit of 5 rem/ year (2/qtr) and a soft limit of 500 mrem/year (250/qtr), barring extreme emergencies.

[Despanan]

My brother builds submarines. Were you on one that my brother built?

[Sage]

Probably not.

[Rip]

My wife says "you're a liar". I don't think she was particularly talking to/about any of you, though.

[Phantomgrift]

All things considered, I was most likely exposed to more radiation onboard the Enterprise than one would ever encounter on a sub save for a complete reactor failure or such.

[Samurai]

Those warp cores can be pretty dangerous if there's any chance they're gonnae blow.

Also, wouldn't one look up a periscope rather than down it?

[cain]

[Sage]

wait

you thought I was Rip's wife?