
When America Dreamed of a Nuclear-Powered Cargo Fleet - nols
https://www.flexport.com/blog/nuclear-powered-cargo-ships/
======
douche
I really think it is a tragedy that nuclear power got such bad PR. In the
U.S., outside of military applications, we really only got 20 or so years of
refinements on the technology, before the greens and Three-Mile Island made
nuclear power, well, nuclear. Imagine how much safer and more efficient the
technology could have been with forty years more of large-scale investment and
attention.

20 odd years in aviation only brought us from the Wright Flyer to the Spirit
of Saint Louis. 20 odd years of automobiles brought us from the original Benz
to the Model T. 20 odd years of computing only brought us from the ENIAC to
the Intel 4004.

~~~
pstuart
Agreed. We traded "no nukes" for the potential heat death of the planet.

~~~
Theodores
Does anyone here have the actual statistics to back this up? In terms of
Joules of energy, what is the cost of a nucular power plant? Equally, in terms
of joules of energy (rather than some fiat petro-dollar debt money with
compound interest), what is the price for any competing power source, be it a
coal plant or a farm of wind turbines?

It seems we can do the maths for this easily to dismiss solar and wind, but,
when it comes to nucular we are in denial. It takes a lot of energy to dig up
Canada/Australia/wherever to get the U308 stuff, then a whole lot more to
process it. Then there is the building of the nucular plant plus the
decommissioning. Oh, and the waste disposal along the way, not cheap in raw
energy terms.

Some costs such as the brains of the boffins needed to build these things may
not have a raw energy price, that you might have to measure in pobble beads
and pence, but, I just want a simple energy in -> energy out ratio. Do nucular
power plants actually work out as cheap as the proponents imagine?

This I do not think is clear because there are so many other reasons nucular
power plants get built. In the UK we ended up with so many nucular power
plants because of the Cold War 'requirement' to have the bomb, and to create
the bomb grade material needed for the U.S. (where there never were things
like 'fast breeder' reactors).

France lost out when the oil reserves were carved up by Churchill and
Roosevelt after WW2 so nucular became quite a thing in France. Their power is
cheaper than what there is in the UK and most of the rest of Europe. So
nucular is cheap, the French proven it so? Again, not really. They had their
own reasons, e.g. also desiring nucular weapons, a seat at the UN and some
(non-fossil) power. Sure, economics came into it but there were these other
imperatives.

There is also the matter of 'Lockheed Martin' accounting. Bribes, billion
dollar cost over runs, project delays, pork barrel politics and vested
interests. We don't seem to have that in Denmark where the wind turbines seem
to come from these days but nucular is mired in 'Lockheed Martin' accounting
issues.

~~~
TeMPOraL
[http://www.withouthotair.com/](http://www.withouthotair.com/) \-- this book
(available for free on-line) goes into very detailed energy-math-based
comparison of all major power sources, focusing especially on various forms of
wind, hydro and solar. It might be especially relevant to your concerns
because it focuses on various ways of combining the above to make the UK run
fully on sustainable energy.

RE various problems of costs you've mentioned, I do think we're applying a
double-standard here, but it's a double-standard _against_ nuclear. I rarely
see people talking just about how much solar is subsidized (two or three years
ago AFAIR it was government subsidies that made PV installations make any
economical sense for anyone, though I've heard it might have changed
recently), or how much bribery is going on with those infrastructure projects.

------
chiph
I went aboard the NS Savannah when she was on display in Charleston SC harbor.
And the criticism that she was neither fish nor fowl is correct. Too much
space was taken up by visitor/passenger compartments that could have been used
for cargo. Or vice-versa.

The article also mentioned that she was built just as the container revolution
was beginning, and that also doomed her to a diminishing availability of bulk
cargo to haul.

Overall impressions were that it was a really nice ship. Too nice. It had
portholes with rotating shades made of polarizing filters - you spun the inner
one 180 degrees to block out the sun. Which is very very cool, but not
something a cargo ship would normally feature.

Would a modern mega-huge container ship benefit from being nuclear powered?
Maybe. The additional shielding and steel bracing needed to protect the piping
and core would add significant cost to the construction, but the zero extended
fuel cost might make that cost efficient. A larger question is whether a
nuclear powered ship would be allowed in some ports, such as Japan or New
Zealand.

~~~
logfromblammo
It would only need to be allowed into LA/Long Beach and Shanghai to be
profitable. And it would probably be allowed in those ports, even if it were
emitting a bright Cherenkov glow while underway.

In fact, on the list of busiest ports by container volume, Rotterdam, at #11,
is the first I might be worried about, and then Hamburg and Antwerp, at #15
and #16.

With the size of cargo container ships built nowadays, the additional
engineering requirements of a full-blown built-in nuclear reactor is more than
justified. Even retrofitting the largest bunker-burning ships might be
justified.

------
pippy
The environmental impact on shipping is massive:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_shippi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_shipping)

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1229857/How-1...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1229857/How-16-ships-
create-pollution-cars-world.html)

Utilizing nuclear power would be a great way of minimizing greenhouse
emissions, plus it would be more cost effective in the long run. It's a shame
the engineers were lazy and dumped eradicated waste overboard in their
designs.

~~~
protomyth
I'm curious how the new attempts at wind will work out. Some of the hybrid
designs seem to be a good attempt especially since a lot of the bigger ships
were being run at half-speed anyway.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Probably just much easier to drop Thorium reactors onboard in armored cargo
containers. No meltdown risk, no proliferation risk, easy refueling, zero
carbon impact.

You could even provide power to local ports if necessary during humanitarian
efforts. Or sell power to the local utility while docked and get a check in
the mail.

EDIT: Are you a Thorium startup reading this on HN? GO AFTER THIS MARKET.

~~~
protomyth
I propose that when we finally get thorium working, they should call them
"Thorium Batteries" and avoid the word reactor or nuclear all together.

I think the sail technology is much nearer term, but thorium will probably be
the long-term. Helps the space industry if I understand the waste product
correctly.

~~~
toomuchtodo
"Thorium Thermal Batteries". Yeah, I dig that.

~~~
dmm
It worked for MRIs. The technology was originally called Nuclear Magnetic
Resonance Imaging.

------
mschuster91
"How does a nuclear-powered ship work? In simple terms, conventional ships use
diesel-powered boilers to produce steam to drive turbines"

Eh what? Boilers? Nope. Massive, bigger-than-house diesel ENGINES are used.

~~~
jacquesm
Gas turbines are still common on war ships.

~~~
mschuster91
A turbine is, as the name says, massively different from a boiler.

~~~
jacquesm
Yes, but it is not a _diesel_ engine.

So there are other means of propulsion for large ships besides diesel.

Oh, and even steam turbines are still used (on natural gas carriers, they
simply burn some of the cargo!).

------
vibrolax
Aside from the real and perceived safety issues of nuclear propulsion, there
is also the issue of operational availability. US submarines and aircraft
carriers spend a lot of their careers unavailable due to planned maintenance.
I wonder how much of that is due to the power plant? New naval reactors are
designed to last from 1/2 to the entire life of the ship without refueling.
And at the end of that life, the entire reactor compartments are cut out,
defueled, and stored in open-air trenches at the Hanford Reservation.[1]
Regardless of whether fission reactors are fueled with HEU, LEU, or Thorium,
they leave a lot of long-term things that we been as-yet unable to muster the
full technological and political means to deal with.

For the merchant ship application, it seems a reach to believe that the
benefits of greenhouse gas reduction can be most efficiently achieved by
replacing diesel engines with nuclear reactors.

[1][http://www.oregon.gov/energy/nucsaf/docs/naval_nuclear_react...](http://www.oregon.gov/energy/nucsaf/docs/naval_nuclear_reactor_fact_sheet.pdf?ga=t)

------
protomyth
"She was capable of circling the planet 14 times at 20 knots without needing
more uranium. All this was accomplished while she emitted no greenhouse
gases."

"In her first year she had to release more than 115,000 gallons of low-level
radioactive water into the sea"

On the balance, I think I would prefer the greenhouse gases.

~~~
SamReidHughes
They say the best way to dispose of nuclear waste is to mix it with the
concrete we use to build our elementary schools. 115,000 gallons is a very
small amount of water. That's 40 ft x 40 ft x 10 ft of water. Mix that into
the ocean and the pollutants will disperse widely. One cubic mile holds 1.1
trillion gallons.

~~~
mikeash
"They" are idiots if they actually say that, and countering anti-nuclear
hysteria with pro-nuclear hyperbole doesn't do us any favors.

~~~
7952
I am in favour of nuclear but some of the arguments you hear from advocates
make my skin crawl. The caution people exercise over nuclear power is exactly
what we should want for any activity that carries risk to health or the
environment. Radioactive material is very dangerous, and fission is
intrinsically difficult to control. We may be able to successfully deal with
those risk, but it is intellectually dishonest to pretend that those risks
don't exist just because physicists are so wonderfully clever.

The problem is not lack of support for nuclear but tolerance for dirty and
unsafe fossil fuels. We need to deal with that using nuclear or solar or
whatever.

~~~
mikeash
Care is certainly called for, but the way it's treated goes too far. Waste is
a good example. People insist on perfect safety, and not just for today, but
insist on storing waste so that in a hypothetical future 10,000 years from now
when civilization has fallen and nobody knows what nuclear anything is, the
waste is _still_ safe. This is just not reasonable, and does more harm than
good.

The problem is that you get people who think you'll glow in the dark if you
live near a perfectly functioning power plant, then you get people on the
other side who say it's fine to drink plutonium, and both sets of crazies are
louder than any reasonable discussion in the middle.

~~~
Klinky
What is the benefit of nuclear if we are left with uncontainable highly toxic
radioactive waste? There are already problems with handling waste at existing
storage sties. Radioactive waste isn't a problem to be solved 10,000 years
from now, it's already a problem. Even guaranteeing safe containment for 50 -
100 years seems like a difficult task, and that is not an outrageous demand
for people to make.

~~~
mikeash
Handling waste isn't _that_ difficult of a problem. There are better reactor
designs which use a lot of that waste as fuel, and what's left just needs to
be sealed up real good and left to sit behind some good fences.

Basically all of the real-world problems with handling nuclear waste are
because anti-nuclear advocates prevent any action from being taken to handle
waste, but meanwhile there are operating reactors producing waste and that
hasn't stopped. So nuclear plant operators are forced into ad-hoc solutions
for waste disposal because nobody will let them do it right.

~~~
Klinky
You're simply hand waiving away the problems. Even reprocessing creates waste
that must be dealt with. Commercial fast/breeder reactors are always ten years
away, and it has yet to be proven that they could even be economically viable.

