Nuclear submarine nuclear-powered submarine was first proposed in the United States Navy by the Naval Research Laboratory's Ross Gunn in 1939. Construction of the world's first nuclear powered submarine was made possible by the successful development of a nuclear propulsion plant by a group of scientists and engineers at the Naval Reactors Branch of the Bureau of Ships and the Atomic Energy Commission. In July 1951 the U.S. Congress authorized construction of the first nuclear-powered submarine, "Nautilus", under the leadership of Captain Hyman G. Rickover, USN (sharing names with Captain Nemo's fictional submarine in Jules Verne's "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea",
UC3 Nautilus UC3 Nautilus UC3 Nautilus is a privately built Danish midget submarine. It was built over a three-year period as an art project by Peter Madsen and a group of volunteers, and cost approximately US$200,000 to build (1.5 million DKK). The submarine was Madsen's third submarine design, and at the time of launch on 3 May 2008, was the largest privately built submarine in the world. On 11 August 2017, "Nautilus" sank in the bay of Køge, in what investigators determined was a deliberate act. The following day, Danish police had the submarine salvaged and brought onto land as part of