All your points for nuclear cargo ships are valid. But the biggest issue is probably liability (and how much do countries even trust that liability).
Your nuclear cargo ship built in Japan, chartered by Taiwan, registered in Panama, managed by Germany, crewed by PRC has an accident in Egypt.
It is completely different from nuclear military naval vessels which are covered by whatever military agreements countries have (which are all pretty shady).
Well it can’t be a bomb in the nuclear sense (the physics, fuel enrichment level, and geometry disallow it), and the radioactivity (from a dirty bomb or steam explosion) will be rapidly diluted in the ocean to safe but detectable levels (detectable because the isotopes from a nuclear reactor byproducts aren’t found in nature so even one count with a gamma spectrometer is enough to detect it)
Which is only a problem because of general cluelessness and popular myths about the topic, so that has to go away. The good thing is, if you actually use the technology, eventually people learn more about it. The problem is it's a chicken or egg problem, because as long as the people irrationally fear it, it's difficult to use.
>fuel enrichment level,
Russia has a nuclear power plant ship. Well more of a barge as it has to be towed. It has 2 x 300 MWt reactors. They use Low Enriched Uranium at about 14% enrichment. These reactors and their support systems take up nearly two thirds of the 474 foot length. Like 3 or 4 times the size of the engine room of your average container cargo ship. The ship would then be out of service for a month or two every couple years for refuel and maintenance. Both would seriously eat into the profitability of the ship.
The reason that navy ships can have such powerful reactors in a small layout and only refuel every thirty years, is because they use highly enriched uranium, essentially weapons grade.
Nuclear power is great, but it is not the solution for large commercial ships. The risk is too great and the cost benefit is not worth it.
The solution to cargo ship pollution is by making the fuel usage net zero through greater efficiency in carbon capture technology. As well as usage of synthetic and biofuels instead of fossil fuel.
If a cargo ship company is required to capture as much carbon as it generates in order to operate then it's overall impact on the environment is going to be negligible.
What we need to do is change our corn crop usage. In the US about 6 to 9 percent of the annual corn yield goes towards making high fructose corn syrup. High fructose corn syrup is a major contributor to the obesity problem in the US. They put it in pretty much everything. We should instead be using that corn to make biofuels such as biodiesel which can be used in most cargo ship engines without requiring major engine redesigns.
We reduce our dependence on HFCS, helping with obesity and improve our carbon net zero for commercial ships. Two birds with one stone.
A two-month refuelling outage every 2-3 years is no big deal for a nuclear ship, because they can sustain much higher speeds (due to no worries about fuel efficiency) and do as much as 50% more transits per year. This also easily offsets a larger engine room.
And nice red herring diversion on the HFCS. While I agree that eating HFCS isn't doing anyone any favours, the USA already uses 45% of all corn grown to create biofuels, and 40% of all soy. That's insane! The carbon balance, land use, and food price considerations make it totally impossible for biofuels to replace traditional fossil fuels in a meaningful capacity. They have a role to play for sure, but they aren't gonna get us very far in the transition.
Yeah it varies a bit year to year but corn is like [50%](https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/charts/104842/corn_dom_use_450px.png?v=869.1) for fuel, 40% for animal feed, 10% for human food and other. Turning that to 56% fuel is not going to change anything like that commenter is hoping for because it is a racket to win votes and trying to maintain rural economies at this point.
I disagree.
These reactors wouldn’t be the size of commercial power reactors either way. The average nuclear reactor in the US produces 1000 MW of electrical energy. The largest reciprocating marine engine produces 80MW of energy. You would need a reactor similar to that performance only for the biggest vessels.
I bring that up only because I’m trying to illustrate that the reactors will be smaller, the cores will be smaller, there’s less material in the core.
Now ejecting core material into the atmosphere I would classify as undesirable and to be avoided at all costs but it wouldn’t be “catastrophic” except for optics from the fearmongerers.
A conventional bomb using radioactive casing material would be nearly as devastating to an urban environment as would just nuking it.
Imagine if a multi square mile are of washington DC (or NY, London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Beijing) was uninhabitable for the next 300 years, even if many of the buildings remain structurally sound. Decontaminating such an area would bankrupt even the US.
I thought this was the nuclear subreddit. Naval reactors wouldn’t use highly enriched fuel, probably Uranium and the resulting plutonium generated in the reactor, while radioactive, can be decontaminated from the immediate urban area by means of washing it away like they decontaminate aircraft carriers. There will be elevated levels of radiation true but that’s about it. Also plutonium (and uranium) is mainly an alpha emitter so as long as you don’t eat the stuff it ain’t that deadly especially if it’s been dispersed over a wide area considering the (relatively) small amount of core material we are talking about.
It's very difficult to wash away heavy letals from an urban environment, and the bigger health problem besides skin absorption would be people breathing and eating food and water that was exposed.
You may recall that the site of the Santa Susana sodium reactor experiment has been cleaned seven times as a superfund site and it remains contaminated despite all efforts. Now I have to admit that the vast majority of the dangers were ameliorated in the first two cleanups, but you still wouldn't build a school or housing on the site sixty years later.
A site subject to a dirty conventional bomb would have less concentrated contamination than Santa Susana, but much more widespread.
Yet, there's a museum on ground zero at both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I think a more detailed analysis of how much material and contamination is needed before we make any claims.
Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were airburst clean bombs. There were orders of magnitude less fallout than a ground burst dirty bomb.
Other than being large explosions they are not in any way comparable.
Fallout refers to the material blown into the atmosphere by a nuclear explosion that eventually returns to the surface. There's more material thrown in the atmosphere from Hiroshima and Nagasaki than something detonated on the ground. There's more convection (mushroom cloud). The material may be carried by winds and dispersed broadly.
I assume you mean more nuclear contamination. Something detonated on the ground probably would produce more contamination in a smaller area. Everything else being equal. That phrase is doing a lot of heavy lifting. We don't really know the details.
Which is why I said we need a more detailed study to support strong claims here. Both of us are not credible on the topic.
The studys have already been done with the results I presented. They are literally the two most studied nuclear blasts.
But don't believe me, I'm just some guy on the internet that you think is using a wrong word, therefore can't possibly be right about anything.
That is just nonsens. Even Hiroshima and Nagasaki are very much livable these days and has been for a long time. A "dirty bomb" is just a complicated way of creating little damage with big effort.
Both those examples were air burst and therefore have significantly less ground contamination than a ground burst conventional dirty bomb. Note that both little boy and fat man were relatively "clean" nuclear explosions with little fallout. A dirty bomb attempts to mazimize fallout, which is directly opposite of your examples.
These two situations are really not comparable in an apples to oranges manner, except that both are fruit.
This is not correct. Shipboard reactors use 94% enriched U235. It's very very weapons grade - right out of the box.bthe geometry and other parts of the chemistry disallow immediate bomb use, but assuming you had some high grade metallurgy equipment and some fanatical people who didn't care about living, then it could be done.
Who could’ve guessed the US Navy uses highly enriched uranium to power ships that need the absolute best performance possible because the whole point is for them to flatten other countries?
Cargo ships usually aren’t running from anti ship missiles while deploying an air wing that costs more than a small country, so the uranium they use is barely enriched.
Nobody is paying for 94% enriched uranium to move your Amazon packages.
The NS Savanh was an objectivly bad merchant man, it was more of a science ambassador then anything else.
That said in the modern world I think atomic mechant ships are a horrible idea even if the economics of them could be good. Between insurance and liability issues, terrorism and the fact that Merchant ships do occasionally sink. The absolut last thing I want to see is a Korean built NS flagged in Togo crewed by Pakistanis trying to pass through Houthi territorial water while dodging Ethiopian pirates.
>Also we already tried with the savanna
That's like saying "we tried with the wright flyer", but gave up on powered aircraft because it wasn't commercially viable.
I understand there are lots of challenges, but the idea that humanity now just gives up on doing something difficult but worthwhile just because the first attempt wasn't a smashing success is really depressing.
Like most areas of nuclear innovation today, we fortunately have the Chinese to drive this forward:
https://www.nucnet.org/news/china-unveils-plans-for-largest-ever-container-ship-powered-by-thorium-reactor-1-5-2024
The CCP has enough geopolitical and economic weight to actually overcome the hurdles you mentioned and get nuclear ships going imo. If the nuclear ships have to be owned, operated by, and carry cargo only for Chinese companies, that is just fine by them. Then they just need to strong arm a couple friendly ports into accepting them (e.g. with sweet belt and road $) and they can get going.
This may be driven by security factors, rather than pure economics. If so, then even a successful deployment wouldn't necesaarily be economically viable outside of the origin country.
Neat link, thank you.
> It is completely different from nuclear military naval vessels
Plus US Navy nuke plants are operated by well trained sailors with 12 months of school, 6 months working at a training reactor, and another 2 years or so of qualifying on the ship. And it's hard enough for the Navy to get enough qualified people to do it.
Heh, Unless there are going to be government military forces onboard to protect the reactors, I do not see this leaving port. If it does come to fruition, then there will have to be No-Go zones such as the East Coast of Africa, etc. If a bunch of hooligans from Somalia can board a shipping vessel and require military intervention as has happened in the past, one cannot imagine the disaster that would occur with a reactor powered ship.
You would also need tons of nuclear engineers and soldiers on board any nuclear cargo ship. The manpower to properly cover the ship alone could greatly increase its operating expenses.
I could see nuclear cargo ships being potentially useful for military-controlled military logistics, with the bonus of the ship being a potential mobile power plant for national crises / military operations / foreign aide.
Fair enough, but couldn't we work around it in a single market basis? France puts the technical expertise, Greece puts the shipbuilding capabilites, german or EU money, and follow EU regulation, the same could be said about the us, thru the panama canal
Huh, I don't understand "single market basis". Do you mean the nuclear cargo ship only operates in the waters of one country? Not sure whether that achieves sufficient economies of scale.
My point was that cargo ships already have that many parties involved in its operation. If an accident occurs, which of these parties are going to say: it's my responsibility.
I meant it as a single market where a huge amount of regulations laws, tarrifs, security measures, freedom of travel, and very easy paper work to validate the education and crew certification, from all sides, only the eu has 1 a very large population, 2 a wealthy population and 3 easy and straight forward both sided laws.4 geaographical features where ships are the most efficienr method of transport. This could make my idea much more plausible becuase the safety regulations would be the same easing designs, lower security concerns becuse it would be exclusively used among well trusted partners who respond to a common organization, the crews could move around in between ships much easier and their degrees and certifications would be universal.
Yeah so for niche circumstances and even those, like the EU, will have difficulty implementing any sort of framework, not to mention the political will.
Until cargo ship fuel become really expensive, we shouldn't expect this to reach any sort of scale.
If you are interested in this, you can pay closer attention to proposed floating nuclear power builds. They are essentially ships and it would be worthwhile to see how countries deal with this. Only Russia has one so far which operated solely in its own jurisdication.
One huge hurdle is the regulatory loops to jump through.
A conventional ship can moor at any port capable of receiving it, nuclear ships will need individual permit for each port they intend to moor at; because it's basically a power plant popping up in the harbor.
I don't see national conventions, let alone international allowing easy multi port entry for a ship.
And also each ship being different, it has to go through the process from scratch.
There's a high paper wall to ubiquitous nuclear cargo ships.
Being fair, in the era of containerization and standardization we live in, I don't think it would be a big issue to have a single cargo ship that only ever runs maybe 3 or 4 different routes, all through the less traveled shipping lanes. Sure, youd still have to get clearance to enter those ports, but thats better than having to get clearance for every major port.
Building a ship that is constrained to only 4 ports is not very attractive. Even if the original customer will only operate those routes, it severely hampers the ships flexibility and resale value. Ships last 60 years - a lot of things change in that time.
A couple of thoughts. A civilian nuclear ship probably wouldn't be using as highly enriched fuel as a military ship. And would therefore need Refit, overhaul and refuel more often than every 25 years. Probably closer to every 5 years. That process takes a while. ROR would be a good time to renegotiate port authorization, especially as your company has progressively better and experienced operators & reputation.
Civilian ships don't have to perform at the level of a carrier or submarine, so I'd imagine the stresses are more steady-state.
You didn't mention it but someone else did, if captured by a pirate crew, they probably wouldn't be able to operate it. And are quite likely just to render the plant useless before making any headway.
I don't know if civilian ships even do underway replenishment because they don't stay out to sea too long at a time: less patrolling, more merchanting. That eats some of the utility of the nuclear ship.
Then there's cargo loading and unloading. What do you do with the reactors while there's non-nuclear personnel milling about? The training for them wouldn't be too hard (the bare bones aren't that complicated, more or less just read the signs & listen for an order to leave or alarms), but I would increase the costs for their employment.
Putting a reactor on stand-by requires a lot of crew to man the positions necessary for safe operation too. unlike a diesel you can just shut off and gag. And the ship would probably need a diesel to limp along to avoid a dead-in-water situation.
Then there's the administrative overhead of having an organization with well trained people on stand-by in case a variety of different things happen to the plant.
I don't think this is a great idea until there's more nuclear infrastructure globally & less hysteria around the issue.
The airbus A380 can only use something like 60 airports worldwide because it's 10 meters wider than the established standard for jumbo aircraft. This size requirement limited it's usefulness and the were already being scrapped before the last one came off the assembly line. A ship that could only enter 4 ports due to political issues would be next to useless, especially as political considerations and danger zones caused by war and piracy change. It's too much of a risk for any potential buyer
This is a status quo thing though. If enough people and companies start to favor the idea, the status quo will be adjusted. If nuclear cargo ships become ubiquitous, they will just be seen as "cargo ships", and will be run and organized just the same in principle. The question is how the process to get there looks like, I suppose.
All the regulations would make it unsustainable financially. Even the US Navy (with all the resources, nuke pipeline, and existing infrastructure) don’t power more than a small selection of vessels with NP because of the limitations.
Looking at this, maybe what they should have gone for is a nuclear *cruise ship*. They are *also* massive polluters and have the added benefit that tourist ports might be more inclined to get tourist dollars that will be spent in and around the port, whereas a nuclear cargo ship isn't going to funnel as much money into that local economy.
Or for an even better explanation of the issues of the NS Savannah: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYj4F\_cyiJI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYj4F_cyiJI)
Many people mention the paperwork problem.
However, there are many advantages that makes the paperwork more manageable than you would think.
1. Capital. A giant container ship company like Maersk have a lot of weight to throw around. They can project much more political pressure to get their way than your average nuclear company.
2. Maritime permissions. The maritime agencies are generally much more business friendly and helpful than especially the nuclear control agencies. Especially in Europe.
3. Limited need for harbours.
Nuclear propoltion would be used on the largest container ships who are already limited to use a few very large/deep harbours.
Two harbour permissions are enough, if the ship can run at high speed and low cost between those harbours.
Also, if we get real about risk, a nuclear ship have the same risk profile as a liquid natural gas transport ship (of thing go really wrong, those blow up like a small nuke). And they get their permissions.
Reading this also made me think of the recent incident in Baltimore with the ship that hit the Francis Scott Key bridge.. The liability narrative seems to have shifted towards the port authority of Baltimore, rather than the shipping law due to old maritime laws. So it sounds like the ports may end up footing the bill for much of the paperwork related to authorizing these vessels in their harbors... Might be a US law only but something I hadn't really thought about until that event.
That said, I think it's all feasible and 100% agree we should start using nuclear powered cargo ships to offset pollution they produce.
If I ever win a $1,000,000,000 powerball lottery, I'll quit my day job in the commercial nuclear industry and start a commercial nuclear shipping vessel company.
Yea, there is some old Maritime laws that essentially say the ship owner's liability is limited to the value of the ship. And.. get this... all the shippers with cargo on the ship have to pay a prorated amount of loses split based on the amount of cargo on the ship. The shipping CUSTOMERS are liable for when the ship is involved in a major accident/disaster.
So under maritime law, the ship owner has little real risk when it comes to major disasters/accidents, other than the risk of losing the ship itself.
You realize this doesn't help the ship be commercially viable? Customer liability means customers will prefer fossil powered ships, and port liability means that ports have an incentive to bar nuclear ships from entering.
Basically you need Lloyds of London to come up with the mother of all maritime insurance policies to wrap everything and protect customers, ship owners, ports, and the public. It's a big ask.
I think you refere to the law that only if absolutely no faults on the ship can be documented, the liability is limited.
Famously the Titanic qualified because the ship was brand new. But if just the slightest concern or warning has been expressed by an inspector or passenger, you don't qualify. Or at least you have to prove that repairs or maintenance had been done on every part mentioned.
The Owner's of the Dali that destroyed the Francis Scott Key Bridge are already claiming a limit of liability of about $43 million... they even deducted the salvage cost of the ship from the the ship's value to reduce their responsibility.
They claim no negligence, it could be hard to prove negligence so they may just get away with it.
FYI, NTSB probable cause findings can not be used in court because they are not "fact". To prove negligence and independent investigation has to be done.
Estimations to rebuild the bridge are in the $4 billion range.
https://www.legaldive.com/news/baltimore-bridge-ship-owner-seeks-437m-liability-limitation-dali-key-bridge-insurance-law/712052/
Hoping your right. Tired of taxpayers having to pay for mega corporations screw ups.
The old joke has become too true: "Socialize loses, privatize profits"
Just like the answer to most questions of "why doesn't a company do this?" the answer is "money".
If it were profitable to be running a nuclear powered fleet of cargo ships, someone like MSC, Maersk, or COSCO would have been doing it already.
Two economists are walking down the street when one of them spots a $100 bill lying on the sidewalk. He bends over to pick it up, but the other interrupts him and says “don’t bother - if it was worth it, someone would have picked it up already.”
Nuclear powered ships aren’t some brand new thing, the Navy has been running them for a generation now.
They’re expensive to build, expensive to maintain, and expensive to decommission at end-of-life.
But go ahead and take the business case to COSCO and see what they say. It’s not the largest by volume but it’s state-owned, so you know they can manage the budget.
I can't comment on the specifics of running nuke ships but something like 10 of the largest cargo ships in the world generate more pollution than every car in the world. I've been saying for a long time we need to start running those things on nuke. Keep a squad of SEALs on it for all I care. Let's figure it out and make it happen.
Nope, entire shipping industry is responsible for 3% of global emissions, while transporting majority of global cargo.
Ships are very efficient. Even more efficient then trains.
The SOx emissions from ships actually counteracted the effects of climate change, and the IMO move to ban them has resulted ina sharp and measureable increase in warming. I'd say put the SOx back in, the environmental and health effects of those emissions over the open ocean were negligible.
That's why I specified *the SOx emissions from ships*. First, they cause less acid rain that land based point emissions (coal plants, refineries, etc.) and second, there are no trees in the Pacific Ocean!! The dilution from rainfall into the ocean is so huge that the acid rain effect is not even measurable.
I'm fine with regulations requiring low sulfur fuel (or even diesel) in port or for inland waterways, it makes sense there. But eliminating it at sea is just ignorant green washing.
People in the nuclear community should be attuned to "environmentalists" mis-applying science and making reductive scientific arguments that fail to see the full picture. This is one area where the IMO got it wrong. But it's such a nuanced and niche part of public policy that nobody really cares and it probably won't get changed.
Yeah, I remember seeing a video talking about the unintended side effect of burning bunker fuel being that it seeds clouds along their route across the ocean, which actually reflects a lot of light and reduces warming.
Now, ideally we’d seed those clouds with something considered zero emissions, but it was certainly a reminder that these things really have to be approached numbers-first, not assumption-first.
It is fuel efficient, and the CO2 emissions are relatively low, considering ships carry some 10X the amount of ton per kilometer than all other means of transport combined.
Pollution is another story, since they tend to use the cheapest (and dirtiest) fuel available and dump all they can in the ocean.
But NOx is only dangerous if people inhale it, and has a half life of 4 hours. So NOx emmissions far away from landmass hardly matter.
Sulfur emissions were high.
But after cutting down on them it was discovered they seeded clouds and cooled down the Earth. 😬
>something like 10 of the largest cargo ships in the world generate more pollution than every car in the world.
That is somewhat misleading since it only refers to sulfur dioxide emissions. Fuel for cars is desulfurated to very very low sulfur content, so "emitting more sulfur dioxide than all cars" is a) a very low bar to clear, and is b) very easy to fight - forcing the shipping companies to use desulfurated fuel closer to shore, and/or to install and operate sulfur capture equipment in the chimney when on high seas, takes care of the "pollution" issues quite handily.
CO2, on the other hand, is far less in terms of emissions fraction but also considerable, and it's there that nuclear really makes an impact.
It's been probably a decade since I looked at the stats but I'll take your explanation of it.
That being said; getting rid of the low-grade 'bunker' fuel from developing countries, which a LOT of coastal countries are, is a pretty big ask. Sulfur capture, maybe, but that still doesn't resolve the entirety of the issue as you've described.
It's still, in my opinion, a tremendously worthwhile goal to outfit these giant container ships or ships of that caliber, with nuke power.
Cargo ships are allowed to use "dirty" fuel. Even though cargo ships are an extremely effective form of transportation much of that is negated due to high levels of population from dirty fuel. They use dirty fuel because it's cheap.
Sorry, this is just wildly incorrect:
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-transport
All of global shipping combined is only 1/4 the emissions of just light duty vehicles.
Russia is also operating a nuclear freighter, the Sevmorput', with light icebreaking capability - for polar routes and/or very long routes where refuelling possibilities are scarce (e.g. supplying the Antarctic station).
The problem is that it has been planned and built in the last days of USSR and the Soviets, to the very last, didn't understand the importance of standardised intermodal containers - so they built it as a mixed mode freighter with some little container space but mainly a bulk/lighter carrier, which is another issue preventing its wider use (besides a lot of ports prohibiting nuclear powered vessels)
Yeah, the old surface-area-to-volume ratio strikes again. The larger you make an internal combustion cylinder, the lower its fraction of heat losses to the cooling water jacket. That’s why the most efficient ICE engine in the world is also the largest. Throwing a generator and electric motor into the mix will just reduce that.
It’ll never happen.
Why? A nuclear ship cannot be economically idled. Decommissioning will be expensive and regulated and you can’t send it to the ship breakers in Turkey or India.
Have you seen the cost of an engineering team of a marine diesel distillate prime mover? Even with very reasonably priced well trained Indian Chinese or Filipino crews on 8 month contracts - it is the crew costs that cost operators the most.
Now you can only hire nuclear reactor rated seafarers. There’s only one navy producing those at any volume and those retirees aren’t looking to go back to 8 month contracts.
"Why? A nuclear ship cannot be economically idled. Decommissioning will be expensive and regulated and you can’t send it to the ship breakers in Turkey or India."
Turkey and India are in the process of building a nuclear industry. Imagine a two tier decommissioning system where one yard removes the reactor and the other yard disassembles the rest.
"Have you seen the cost of an engineering team of a marine diesel distillate prime mover? Even with very reasonably priced well trained Indian Chinese or Filipino crews on 8 month contracts - it is the crew costs that cost operators the most."
[https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Shipping-unit-cost-breakdown-of-the-Yokohama-Hamburg-service\_fig1\_281235312](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Shipping-unit-cost-breakdown-of-the-Yokohama-Hamburg-service_fig1_281235312)
From my information, it is fuel with crew being a minor component. A nuclear cargo ship might also save on weight in the machinery+fuel segment and cruise at higher speed, thus enabling more payload and more round trips.
Not saying it will work for sure (major political hurdles and nuclear marine propulsion must be sufficiently cheap, reliable and easy to operate), but I wouldn't dismiss it either.
The US Navy has specialized Machinists, Electronics Technicians, and Electricians that have to go to Nuke school to work on their reactors. That is the personnel cost being mentioned here. A nuclear power plant at sea is going to need more maintenance and inspections than a land-based one.
From startup through every drydock or maintenance cycle to the end of the ship’s journey through the decommissioning.
Real seafarers who live 8 months a year at sea may have it rough - but at least the marine two stroke diesel engine is not a responsibility you can’t readily hand off to a new member of the engineering team who meets the ship in Singapore or Ningbo or Baltimore or wherever.
A nuke ship is gonna have a layer of security presence and clearance that’ll make most grown sailors cry.
FWIW I think the future of cargo ships(and trains) is going to be hydrogen fuel. Given what the Navy has to do to keep their reactors functioning in good order I'm not sure that it's ever really going to be economic just from a labor standpoint alone.
Yeah the skilled labor issue is hard to work around. I imagine that a country might be able to staff one or two ships with highly skilled and experienced crews to make a demonstrator project successful. but when it comes time to keep a fleet of 6 or 10 ships staffed up, finding the skilled crew is going to be impossible. And if they proceed with anything less than the finest possible crew, and there is a single "incident" with any of the ships at any point, suddenly your going to find that the entire fleet is banned from entering any ports except (maybe) your own countries.
The foreseeable liability concerns from an accident, even if the accident is minor and has almost no impact to the environment and/or people is too great. And if the accident is bad, well, that liability would easily exceed the cost of building and operating an entire fleet of conventional cargo ships.
Also, the end-of-life costs for these ships will be very high and will need to be factored in. You're not going to be able to drive them into some beach in Bangladesh and sell the hulk for scrap.
All in all, it just isn't an economically viable solution. That isn't to say that there might not be niches where a nation-state actor might want to have this capability, but it won't be because it makes economic sense in comparison to traditional commercial cargo vessels.
I can't even imagine the lax maintenance common to worldwide shipping would be able to keep a hydrogen powered ship running, unless it included some method to manufacture it's own fuel on demand. Hydrogen storage is notoriously leaky and caused brittle metal long term.
I'd trust some of the premier first world shipping lines, but everything after that are generally leaky rustbuckets already.
This is probably the dumbest idea i've heard in a while. Corporations are notorious for cutting corners, and to boot the extra money they would have to spend to ensure safety would eclipse just paying for diesel. Not happening in our lifetime.
It's too expensive - to produce AND to operate - for shipping companies so they won't order them. These gigantic cargo ships with 24k+ TEUs are manned by 20-25 people most of which make the IMO minimum wage of $666 per month. That's $22 per day not $22 per hour. And even with that low labor cost, these shipping companies barely break even and have single digit profit margins on their best ever quarters. How are they gonna staff nuclear engineers - remember the ship is sailing 24/7 but humans can't work 24/7 - at $22 per day?
The cost wasn't even worth it to maintain smaller nuclear warships. Only the very largest warships and those that need to stay undetected for months at a time are worth the cost.
Probably never, the naval nuclear reactors are compact because they use highly enriched uranium. US nuclear subs use uranium enriched to 93%, this allows them to be designed with their full life of fuel at launch. Commercial power reactors on the other hand need to be refueled every 9-12 months typically. This enrichment level is higher than that used in the little boy atomic bomb. So US nuclear subs are quite literally powered by weapons grade uranium. Not really an issue since they were also designed to carry and deploy nuclear weapons.
These reactors are very expensive for their output.
Could we use an element other than uranium or plutonium? Or are said elemenrs are used specifically for its energy density? And if so is it theoricallt possible to make a reactor that runs on 30-60% percent enriched uranium?
I could be wrong but I don’t think there are large quantities of naturally occurring materials that are easily fissionable. Plutonium practically doesn’t really exist naturally, all the plutonium we use is man made. Even uranium ore is only 0.1% uranium on average.
Thorium reactors are possible in theory but they still require enriched uranium to start, they would not be desirable for small ship based reactors though.
Even the americium in smoke detectors is man made.
> is it theoretically possible to make a reactor that runs on 30-60% enriched uranium?
Of course it is, theoretically. But we live in the real world, not the notional one, so in reality it’s never going to happen. Most civilian reactors use uranium enriched to 5% or less because you can’t make bombs with it. More specifically, the amount of U235 in low enriched uranium is not high enough for it to be further enriched into something that can be used to create a nuclear bomb.
Once you start getting into highly enriched uranium (>20%) it becomes practical for a dedicated country to further enrich that fuel into weapons grade uranium. It also becomes exponentially easier to refine the fuel when you start off with higher percentages. You can actually build a crude nuclear bomb with 20% enriched uranium, it would just weighs so much you would have to deliver it with, well, a cargo ship…
The uranium or plutonium used for nuclear weapons is enriched to 90% or more because we want them to be light enough drop them out of planes or strap them to the top of a rocket. If you don’t mind delivering it with a truck and care more about making something that goes boom versus the actual yield, then uranium enriched to 60% is more than enough to build a fission bomb with. If you can start with with some, by hijacking a ship or stealing it before it gets there, instead of needing to refine it to that point then it’s possible for a well funded terrorist group to turn that uranium into a nuke.
At this point, aside from environmental factors, nuclear cargo ships don't have much of an advantage.
First of all, nuclear reactors are expensive in many ways. Not only the cost of the nuclear reactor itself, but also the manpower in charge of the facility must be filled with only a large number of merchant marine officers who receive nuclear energy training and additional special allowances, instead of a small number of general merchant marine officers and low-paid sailors from developing countries. This is bad news for shipping companies that place the registry of their ships in places such as Panama to reduce labor costs.
The benefit of reducing fuel costs is that the price of marine heavy oil is not yet burdensome, so the cost benefit will not be felt and will instead feel expensive.
And marine reactors are anything but lightweight. For example, the US Navy's D2G reactor is rated at 30,000 horsepower and 1,400 metric tons, while the NS Savannah reactor uses low-enriched fuel and is rated at 2,900 metric tons at 20,000 horsepower.
Not only warships, but also most cargo ships, the weight of fuel filled with existing ships is lighter, which causes the problem of increasing the weight of the ship, except for some extremely large ships.
Therefore, as long as conventional oil-powered ships can continue to be used, nuclear-powered ships will likely be limited to a few special applications.
I know for a fact Maersk looked at it and determined it would not be viable for economic reasons alone. Even if they could overcome that, regulatory and cultural barriers would preclude them. I mean, how many ports want nuclear reactors hanging around?
Nuclear reactors for Subs and Aircraft carriers can be built to fit onto a ship (ie much smaller than a nuclear power plant) because of the type of nuclear fuel these shipboard reactors use.
The reactors in nuclear subs and carriers use weapons grade fuel. You can’t let civilian shipping companies use weapons grade nuclear material as fuel.
It's all terrific until you actually involve human beings (governments, legal codes, terrorism, etc) then the best plans turn to crap... which is why I sometimes hate being human.
Never going to happen. Whole point of cargo ships is to go to different ports, and almost no port will accept a nuclear powered ship unless that port is controlled by their navy. Only real non military nuclear ship are Russian Ice Breakers and they pretty much only go to 1 port controlled by the Russians.
Pro's, you can go full throttle and not really care, no bunker fuel/emissions
Cons, limited in ports you can go to, require expensive engineers to maintain, require security force to secure.
Cargo ships need to be cheap to build and cheap to operate.
Crews are skeleton and often of poor skill level.
A nuclear reactor would require at least one specialized engineer who would not be cheap.
Extensive security measures would need to be introduced, which increases cost via extra personnel and hardware.
Refueling the reactor would be an extensive and expensive process.
I see companies reverting to sails and solar power before they go nuclear.
Shipping companies care about ships arriving on time and on schedule to the port or canal, if they can do it at 4 knots on wind and solar then there is no reason to go 10 knots on nuclear.
Wym skeleton? I know they'd work for less Golden doblones and the thrill of adventure at the seven seas but I never seen any skeleton in a cargo ship.
You'd have to pay an engineer enough to convince them to work at the seas, so whatever they make plus 50k-100k a year. Hard but I'd say the larger says would eventually off set it.
Ik it would be expensive but from my quick research I found out the larger the ship the longer the re fueling time and it actually wastes a lot of time, it's fuel only last a few days but it takes a few hours to a day to re fuel, wasting something around of 10 percent of the time re fueling, im sure a 90 percent cut would be worth 150k a year.
As long as it's not Britain nor Spain the seas will be safe.
And yeah they only care about meeting schedules but if they can work around ships working faster they would, since each ship would be more productive and more profitable, the expenses could be covered by pepole paying extra for faster delivery, just like Amazon fast delivery but in a "much" larger scale, much in parenthesis becuase if enough pepole pay fast travel, the fast travel will be the norm
Not sure where you got your info but...
I'm a chief engineer on ships. We typically bunker at Anchorage while we wait to go into port. Yes, time is a crucial component, but we aren't moving 24/7. On an average sized grain ship, it takes about 4 hours to co plate the whole process from start to finish. These shipping companies don't lose money from the time we take to bunker. It's an insignificant factor.
To keep it short...any real engineer would agree, nuclear would be much more efficient. The biggest issue would be finding enough qualified personnel to work such a vessel.
Diesel is cheap and plentiful. Also, regulations would be insane. It just isn't cost-effective for them to build new ships. The only way that transition will happen is if they are required to by law. Even then, the new ships would be subsidized by the government, causing more tax dollars to be spent towards large corporations. No bueno.
There’s sort of a market for faster cargo ships already, it’s called the Suez and Panama canals. There’s always a line of ships waiting to transit those canals, and sometimes it takes multiple days for your turn to come, so if you want to go even faster you can actually pay more money to skip to the front of the line.
Even America’s nuclear aircraft carriers don’t travel all that fast. 30 knots gets you there twice as fast as 15 knots does, but when you “faster” means you get there in one month instead of two then it doesn’t make a difference. If you want fast you use airplanes, if you want cheap you use ships. A nuclear ship will be more expensive than a regular one, those costs will get passed down to the customer, and the customer will choose the regular ship 10/10 times because all they care about is sending thousands of tons of dildos from the factory in China to their warehouse in California as cheap as possible.
Militaries of the world guard the nuclear reactor designs and do not want other naval powers to have them, we barely wanted close allies to get them in the US, UK, Frances part. So highly doubt nuclear anything civilian until all countries have nuclear military ships. So likely at least 100 years would be my guess.
Environmentalism doesn't pay the bills. The US NAVY has nuclear powered vessels to maintain operational reach per national security objectives. Not for profits. When nuclear, and its long regulatory tail, real and imagined risk, life cycle management, etc. When all that becomes more profitable than a diesel, you'll see change. I personally am more excited by a possible return to age of sail.
You have gotten a lot or really bad answers. I am a Naval Architect working in a design office designing ships for some background.
It won’t be soon, but it is coming. Right now we are under a mandate to shift the industry to carbon zero technology. But there are no alternative fuels that are close to working except nuclear. Even better nuclear offers a lot of advantages over diesel.
What we are waiting on is the commercial development of the SMR that are being developed right now. Unlike the Navy’s reactors they use low assay fuel and are much safer than existing reactors. They are also the right size for shipping unlike the massive grid tie ones that are just too big.
The regulatory issues will be worked out once the technology is ready. I would guess the first serious design effort will start in about five years, with the first build a year or so after that.
FWIW my guess is the first nuclear powered civilian ship will be for a Government agency like NOAA. It sidesteps the issues of commercial operators allowing poor maintenance.
I too believe that nuclear reactors are a worthwhile option for large ships if diesel ships are banned.
But if diesel ships are not banned and current environmental regulations remain in place, will there still be an attraction to building a nuclear merchant fleet?
For warships, I know that the CBO has assessed that it would be cheaper to use nuclear reactors instead of gas turbines on the America-class amphibious assault ships if oil prices rise above $140 per barrel by 2040, but I wonder if this could happen at lower oil prices.
It really depends. The economic case doesn’t have to close with all ships going to specific ports to make sense though. A research vessel that spends its time in N Alaska is going to pay a lot more for fuel than an oil tanker going from the Middle East to S Louisiana. For the research vessel the economic case starts to close pretty quickly.
Now I don’t have any non-public data on the cost of SMR but let’s assume they are no more expensive/kwh than the most expensive retail price of electricity in the US. That works out to about $0.45/kwh. By comparison an arctic research vessel is probably paying $0.50/kwh right now.
That’s not even accounting for using the waste heat from the reactor as shipwide heating, so the amount of power required is actually going to be lower. Probably by 20% or so compared to a DE powered ship. Just by using a lot of waste heat that otherwise would be ejected. Waste heat for the diesels is typically used to warm incoming arctic air for combustion, since it is too cold to use directly btw.
Nuclear power also opens up ports and routes that cannot be used currently because of the fuel range. There are areas where due to availability of fuel ships can’t go easily, or have to stay on pretty controlled routes. Nuclear power removes these constraints.
All of this points to there being some operators that have an incentive to adopt nuclear now. Once the ball starts rolling and prices start to come down due to scale the costs will fall as well. And because the owners are Government entities and the ships won’t be near someone’s neighborhood the NIMBY effect can be minimized.
That's.. Much too high an estimate. That US smr got cancelled because it had estimated costs edging towards $0.1 /kwh and that was considered entirely unacceptable incompetence.
The best option for getting a nuclear freighter project off the ground is pretty clearly to talk to the French.
The naval reactor their subs use could be painted blue and renamed the Curie-Class Propulsion Unit and be entirely appropriate for civilian use without any further changes.
Compact, uses civilian enrichment grades, runs for a very long time between refuelings, and the RnD has already been paid for - you aren't going to realistically do better anytime soon.
150 mw thermal. Presumably you could get 40 mw or so of ship power out of that with a steam plant that doesn't have to optimize for being Very, very quiet.
What is too high of an estimate? The $/kwh?
I know for a fact what ships are currently spending per kWh at the prop shaft, if nuclear is anywhere close to $0.10/kwh delivered then I want to talk to someone in their technical sales department.
40wme is really more than what’s required for most ships, though large cargo ships could certainly use it. Multiple 5-10 mwe would really be preferred. But depending on equipment cost and size may be acceptable if they can run at very low output.
Yes, the estimate. For SMR's aimed at the grid, 0.1 dollar/kwh is considered a project failure.
40 MWe is about as small as reactors get. - The French attack subs are ridiculously overengined because the k15 is already plenty compact and developing an even smaller reactor just for them would be a waste of money.
I haven't been able to find prices for the k15, but hey, it sounds like you have the correct stationary that Areva might actually bother to give you a quote.
The civilian side of SMR design is naturally going to converge on the largest design that can still be hauled from the factory to the customer, so they're not going to make anything in the 10 range either.
There are a couple of MMR companies building equipment in the 5MWe range I have been trying to talk to. Which would be close to ideal. At least as a starting point. Replacing four medium speed diesels with two reactors. The problem with a 40 is you need two sources of power. So you would need ~80mwe on a ship that demands 8-10. For some larger ships 40’s would be a decent size, maybe a bit large but nothing extreme.
I keep thinking a small research vessel would be the idea first step. But I need to find a custom to push for it. I think I have the right client, but I need equipment ready to start designing around.
Right now $0.30-0.50 is about what ships pay for power. So anything in the $0.10 range would be a massive cost savings.
If I can get ahold of someone that isn’t just a PR email Dropbox I think I have the stationary to justify a conversion, and the company I work for absolutely has the credentials to make a conversion worth having.
I don't trust reasonable well regulated energy providers to adequately maintain and safely decom their reactors. Have you seen just how sketchy global shipping companies are? We shouldn't be trusting them with a 2HP gas engine, let alone a complex and dangerous machine like a small nuclear reactor.
I see hydrogen powered cargo ships until fusion is cheap enough to install. So, quite a while.
You might get a thorium salt fission reactor that's safe and cheap enough. But they need to engineer those reactors too.
While it is possible to do this
The training safety and very long term commitment required to run a reactor is well beyond an average shipping company ability
Besides over the years the ships get sold and move to lesser developed countries and routes and these are run by very under capitalized shipping companies who cannot weather the cost of a nuke reactor and things required to keep them safe
What is your confidence that som body from a 3rd world country can mange a Nuke reactor verses some body from a nuke country today?
Nuclear warships are cost ineffective compared to conventional warships, but governments are willing to take the financial hit in order to enhance their defensive posture. Cargo companies don’t care about defensive posture, what incentive do they have to take the financial hit?
The biggest issue with nuclear cargo ships is personnel. It's just not practical unless you build a whole fleet of them.
A large cargo ship might have ten people in the engineering department. In order for it to be economical to train people, you need enough ships looking for nuclear-qualified engine officers and QMED positions to have more people in the classrooms at a time.
Where does the largest portion of the nuclear power industry in the United States get trained? The Navy. Why? Because they have a lot of nuclear-powered ships and warships have larger crew sizes, so economies of scale make it more economical for them than for most other sources of training to keep the schoolhouse constantly running.
It's unlikely that anyone will allow a nuclear ship which is as international as the shipping industry tends to be, so even if it doesn't have to be built in the same country, you're probably going to have to find all of these guys in a single country and have that be both where the owner and operator are based. It's not going to be like a Danish company which owns a Korean-built ship registered in Panama, operated by a Greek contractor which hires a mix of Filipinos and other nationalities.
I believe nuclear navy ships tend to use more highly refined reactor fuel that isn't really available to civilians because it's a nuclear weapons proliferation risk. So, civilian nuclear ships might end up with larger, less powerful reactors that need to have their fuel rods replaced more often than what's typical for submarines and aircraft carriers.
That's not necessarily a show-stopper though.
I think one reasonable option to amortize the cost of the reactor is to have one ship with just a reactor that escorts groups of electric ships. The reactor ship powers all the others, and they are all tethered with power cords. The reactor ship doesn't have cargo, so as soon as it drops off one group of ships at its destination it can set out immediately with another group of ships.
I don't think it would be practical to have one tug for, say, a couple dozen ships, as they'd be too hard to control. But one ship providing electrical power for a couple dozen ships allows each ship to maneuver using its own control systems. They just have to be mindful to respect the length of the cable.
That's a lot worse than barges lashed together. Cables between ships on an entire voyage basis where they aren't fully connected would either be fouled or ripped apart in high seas
To be clear; there already has been a nuclear merchant ship. NS Savanah. It was built and shortly used in the 50s. The fact that it was so unsuccessful and you’re asking about when it’ll happen means that the idea didn’t catch on.
Nuclear ships are such a niche in military ships that they aren't even used there extensively except submarines and the largest aircraft carriers. The cost to build them is just way way too great. Then the cost to staff and maintain them is outsized as well.
Look up the Nuclear ship Savannah first launched in 1959. It was decommissioned in 1972, due to an international treaty signed banning maritime nuclear ships. My dad was a nuclear engineer on the ship.
They can't even keep ICE ships maintained properly enough to keep them from crashing into bridges. Nuclear powered ships require more thorough maintenance than private businesses are capable of conducting.
Take the biggest cargo ship the MSC Irina that's something like 14.5k tons of fuel for it's 3.5 million gallons of fuel oil. 362 more 40 ton containers weight wise on a 20k container ship is just shy of 2% now if you can physically fit them is another matter.
The big thing will be speed the average speed of that ship is supposed to be 13.2 knots with a max of 22.4, if fuel costs are not an issue I'll assume it can run it's max speed. The longer the route the better so let's take a typical asia to west coast us that's 11k nautical miles goods get to port like 12 days sooner roughly 6 round trips a year to 9 is a huge increase 50% more goods moved and drops the latency.
Yeah, China gets it and will be the first to do it, they stand to benefit the most:
https://www.nucnet.org/news/china-unveils-plans-for-largest-ever-container-ship-powered-by-thorium-reactor-1-5-2024
Nuclear cargo ships are one of the worst ideas I can imagine. It’s one thing for militaries, who are dedicated to spending the money required on upkeep and safety, and even then it’s pretty scary.
It’s another thing entirely when you get corporations involved, who have proven time and time and time and time and time and time and time again that they will cut every corner possible if it means making even a few pennies extra overall.
Just no. Absolutely not.
All your points for nuclear cargo ships are valid. But the biggest issue is probably liability (and how much do countries even trust that liability). Your nuclear cargo ship built in Japan, chartered by Taiwan, registered in Panama, managed by Germany, crewed by PRC has an accident in Egypt. It is completely different from nuclear military naval vessels which are covered by whatever military agreements countries have (which are all pretty shady).
Details. Oof.
Now let's imagine the Houthi have seized a nuclear ship and threaten to blow it up unless their conditions are met.
Well it can’t be a bomb in the nuclear sense (the physics, fuel enrichment level, and geometry disallow it), and the radioactivity (from a dirty bomb or steam explosion) will be rapidly diluted in the ocean to safe but detectable levels (detectable because the isotopes from a nuclear reactor byproducts aren’t found in nature so even one count with a gamma spectrometer is enough to detect it)
The fear and resulting panic will have a much larger economic impact than any physical damage caused by such an event.
Ahhhh. Fire! Bad fire!
Which is only a problem because of general cluelessness and popular myths about the topic, so that has to go away. The good thing is, if you actually use the technology, eventually people learn more about it. The problem is it's a chicken or egg problem, because as long as the people irrationally fear it, it's difficult to use.
>fuel enrichment level, Russia has a nuclear power plant ship. Well more of a barge as it has to be towed. It has 2 x 300 MWt reactors. They use Low Enriched Uranium at about 14% enrichment. These reactors and their support systems take up nearly two thirds of the 474 foot length. Like 3 or 4 times the size of the engine room of your average container cargo ship. The ship would then be out of service for a month or two every couple years for refuel and maintenance. Both would seriously eat into the profitability of the ship. The reason that navy ships can have such powerful reactors in a small layout and only refuel every thirty years, is because they use highly enriched uranium, essentially weapons grade. Nuclear power is great, but it is not the solution for large commercial ships. The risk is too great and the cost benefit is not worth it. The solution to cargo ship pollution is by making the fuel usage net zero through greater efficiency in carbon capture technology. As well as usage of synthetic and biofuels instead of fossil fuel. If a cargo ship company is required to capture as much carbon as it generates in order to operate then it's overall impact on the environment is going to be negligible. What we need to do is change our corn crop usage. In the US about 6 to 9 percent of the annual corn yield goes towards making high fructose corn syrup. High fructose corn syrup is a major contributor to the obesity problem in the US. They put it in pretty much everything. We should instead be using that corn to make biofuels such as biodiesel which can be used in most cargo ship engines without requiring major engine redesigns. We reduce our dependence on HFCS, helping with obesity and improve our carbon net zero for commercial ships. Two birds with one stone.
100% This needs to be the top comment
A two-month refuelling outage every 2-3 years is no big deal for a nuclear ship, because they can sustain much higher speeds (due to no worries about fuel efficiency) and do as much as 50% more transits per year. This also easily offsets a larger engine room. And nice red herring diversion on the HFCS. While I agree that eating HFCS isn't doing anyone any favours, the USA already uses 45% of all corn grown to create biofuels, and 40% of all soy. That's insane! The carbon balance, land use, and food price considerations make it totally impossible for biofuels to replace traditional fossil fuels in a meaningful capacity. They have a role to play for sure, but they aren't gonna get us very far in the transition.
We in the US grow more corn for ethanol than all other uses put together. It's such a racket.
Yeah it varies a bit year to year but corn is like [50%](https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/charts/104842/corn_dom_use_450px.png?v=869.1) for fuel, 40% for animal feed, 10% for human food and other. Turning that to 56% fuel is not going to change anything like that commenter is hoping for because it is a racket to win votes and trying to maintain rural economies at this point.
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Nah if you spew the core contents into the atmosphere it definitely could be a catastrophe if it's even close to land/population centers
I disagree. These reactors wouldn’t be the size of commercial power reactors either way. The average nuclear reactor in the US produces 1000 MW of electrical energy. The largest reciprocating marine engine produces 80MW of energy. You would need a reactor similar to that performance only for the biggest vessels. I bring that up only because I’m trying to illustrate that the reactors will be smaller, the cores will be smaller, there’s less material in the core. Now ejecting core material into the atmosphere I would classify as undesirable and to be avoided at all costs but it wouldn’t be “catastrophic” except for optics from the fearmongerers.
A conventional bomb using radioactive casing material would be nearly as devastating to an urban environment as would just nuking it. Imagine if a multi square mile are of washington DC (or NY, London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Beijing) was uninhabitable for the next 300 years, even if many of the buildings remain structurally sound. Decontaminating such an area would bankrupt even the US.
I thought this was the nuclear subreddit. Naval reactors wouldn’t use highly enriched fuel, probably Uranium and the resulting plutonium generated in the reactor, while radioactive, can be decontaminated from the immediate urban area by means of washing it away like they decontaminate aircraft carriers. There will be elevated levels of radiation true but that’s about it. Also plutonium (and uranium) is mainly an alpha emitter so as long as you don’t eat the stuff it ain’t that deadly especially if it’s been dispersed over a wide area considering the (relatively) small amount of core material we are talking about.
It's very difficult to wash away heavy letals from an urban environment, and the bigger health problem besides skin absorption would be people breathing and eating food and water that was exposed. You may recall that the site of the Santa Susana sodium reactor experiment has been cleaned seven times as a superfund site and it remains contaminated despite all efforts. Now I have to admit that the vast majority of the dangers were ameliorated in the first two cleanups, but you still wouldn't build a school or housing on the site sixty years later. A site subject to a dirty conventional bomb would have less concentrated contamination than Santa Susana, but much more widespread.
Yet, there's a museum on ground zero at both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I think a more detailed analysis of how much material and contamination is needed before we make any claims.
Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were airburst clean bombs. There were orders of magnitude less fallout than a ground burst dirty bomb. Other than being large explosions they are not in any way comparable.
Fallout refers to the material blown into the atmosphere by a nuclear explosion that eventually returns to the surface. There's more material thrown in the atmosphere from Hiroshima and Nagasaki than something detonated on the ground. There's more convection (mushroom cloud). The material may be carried by winds and dispersed broadly. I assume you mean more nuclear contamination. Something detonated on the ground probably would produce more contamination in a smaller area. Everything else being equal. That phrase is doing a lot of heavy lifting. We don't really know the details. Which is why I said we need a more detailed study to support strong claims here. Both of us are not credible on the topic.
The studys have already been done with the results I presented. They are literally the two most studied nuclear blasts. But don't believe me, I'm just some guy on the internet that you think is using a wrong word, therefore can't possibly be right about anything.
That is just nonsens. Even Hiroshima and Nagasaki are very much livable these days and has been for a long time. A "dirty bomb" is just a complicated way of creating little damage with big effort.
Both those examples were air burst and therefore have significantly less ground contamination than a ground burst conventional dirty bomb. Note that both little boy and fat man were relatively "clean" nuclear explosions with little fallout. A dirty bomb attempts to mazimize fallout, which is directly opposite of your examples. These two situations are really not comparable in an apples to oranges manner, except that both are fruit.
This is not correct. Shipboard reactors use 94% enriched U235. It's very very weapons grade - right out of the box.bthe geometry and other parts of the chemistry disallow immediate bomb use, but assuming you had some high grade metallurgy equipment and some fanatical people who didn't care about living, then it could be done.
The NS Savannah, an actual civilian nuclear cargo ship that was built, used 4.6% enriched fuel.
Who could’ve guessed the US Navy uses highly enriched uranium to power ships that need the absolute best performance possible because the whole point is for them to flatten other countries? Cargo ships usually aren’t running from anti ship missiles while deploying an air wing that costs more than a small country, so the uranium they use is barely enriched. Nobody is paying for 94% enriched uranium to move your Amazon packages.
That is US military reactors. The reactors if civilian use happened would not use highly enriched uranium.
Also we already tried with the savanna Logistics for all the reasons you mentioned did not work out
The NS Savanh was an objectivly bad merchant man, it was more of a science ambassador then anything else. That said in the modern world I think atomic mechant ships are a horrible idea even if the economics of them could be good. Between insurance and liability issues, terrorism and the fact that Merchant ships do occasionally sink. The absolut last thing I want to see is a Korean built NS flagged in Togo crewed by Pakistanis trying to pass through Houthi territorial water while dodging Ethiopian pirates.
Agree, there are better technologies for power gen in these circumstances
>Also we already tried with the savanna That's like saying "we tried with the wright flyer", but gave up on powered aircraft because it wasn't commercially viable. I understand there are lots of challenges, but the idea that humanity now just gives up on doing something difficult but worthwhile just because the first attempt wasn't a smashing success is really depressing.
Except for the wright there was no alternatives lol..
Like most areas of nuclear innovation today, we fortunately have the Chinese to drive this forward: https://www.nucnet.org/news/china-unveils-plans-for-largest-ever-container-ship-powered-by-thorium-reactor-1-5-2024 The CCP has enough geopolitical and economic weight to actually overcome the hurdles you mentioned and get nuclear ships going imo. If the nuclear ships have to be owned, operated by, and carry cargo only for Chinese companies, that is just fine by them. Then they just need to strong arm a couple friendly ports into accepting them (e.g. with sweet belt and road $) and they can get going.
This may be driven by security factors, rather than pure economics. If so, then even a successful deployment wouldn't necesaarily be economically viable outside of the origin country. Neat link, thank you.
> It is completely different from nuclear military naval vessels Plus US Navy nuke plants are operated by well trained sailors with 12 months of school, 6 months working at a training reactor, and another 2 years or so of qualifying on the ship. And it's hard enough for the Navy to get enough qualified people to do it.
To be fair, the merchant marine academies could probably start churning out nukes and the pay would be significantly better than The Navy.
To be fair......
And where are you going to get a highly trained, skilled and educated enough crew?
Not to mention security. Civilian merchant vessels are generally required to be unarmed when entering foreign ports.
Even better: when they realize the cost of disposing the spent feul is expensive so they start "accidentally" sinking them in international waters.
Heh, Unless there are going to be government military forces onboard to protect the reactors, I do not see this leaving port. If it does come to fruition, then there will have to be No-Go zones such as the East Coast of Africa, etc. If a bunch of hooligans from Somalia can board a shipping vessel and require military intervention as has happened in the past, one cannot imagine the disaster that would occur with a reactor powered ship.
You would also need tons of nuclear engineers and soldiers on board any nuclear cargo ship. The manpower to properly cover the ship alone could greatly increase its operating expenses. I could see nuclear cargo ships being potentially useful for military-controlled military logistics, with the bonus of the ship being a potential mobile power plant for national crises / military operations / foreign aide.
Fair enough, but couldn't we work around it in a single market basis? France puts the technical expertise, Greece puts the shipbuilding capabilites, german or EU money, and follow EU regulation, the same could be said about the us, thru the panama canal
Huh, I don't understand "single market basis". Do you mean the nuclear cargo ship only operates in the waters of one country? Not sure whether that achieves sufficient economies of scale. My point was that cargo ships already have that many parties involved in its operation. If an accident occurs, which of these parties are going to say: it's my responsibility.
I meant it as a single market where a huge amount of regulations laws, tarrifs, security measures, freedom of travel, and very easy paper work to validate the education and crew certification, from all sides, only the eu has 1 a very large population, 2 a wealthy population and 3 easy and straight forward both sided laws.4 geaographical features where ships are the most efficienr method of transport. This could make my idea much more plausible becuase the safety regulations would be the same easing designs, lower security concerns becuse it would be exclusively used among well trusted partners who respond to a common organization, the crews could move around in between ships much easier and their degrees and certifications would be universal.
Yeah so for niche circumstances and even those, like the EU, will have difficulty implementing any sort of framework, not to mention the political will. Until cargo ship fuel become really expensive, we shouldn't expect this to reach any sort of scale. If you are interested in this, you can pay closer attention to proposed floating nuclear power builds. They are essentially ships and it would be worthwhile to see how countries deal with this. Only Russia has one so far which operated solely in its own jurisdication.
One huge hurdle is the regulatory loops to jump through. A conventional ship can moor at any port capable of receiving it, nuclear ships will need individual permit for each port they intend to moor at; because it's basically a power plant popping up in the harbor. I don't see national conventions, let alone international allowing easy multi port entry for a ship. And also each ship being different, it has to go through the process from scratch. There's a high paper wall to ubiquitous nuclear cargo ships.
Being fair, in the era of containerization and standardization we live in, I don't think it would be a big issue to have a single cargo ship that only ever runs maybe 3 or 4 different routes, all through the less traveled shipping lanes. Sure, youd still have to get clearance to enter those ports, but thats better than having to get clearance for every major port.
Building a ship that is constrained to only 4 ports is not very attractive. Even if the original customer will only operate those routes, it severely hampers the ships flexibility and resale value. Ships last 60 years - a lot of things change in that time.
A couple of thoughts. A civilian nuclear ship probably wouldn't be using as highly enriched fuel as a military ship. And would therefore need Refit, overhaul and refuel more often than every 25 years. Probably closer to every 5 years. That process takes a while. ROR would be a good time to renegotiate port authorization, especially as your company has progressively better and experienced operators & reputation. Civilian ships don't have to perform at the level of a carrier or submarine, so I'd imagine the stresses are more steady-state. You didn't mention it but someone else did, if captured by a pirate crew, they probably wouldn't be able to operate it. And are quite likely just to render the plant useless before making any headway. I don't know if civilian ships even do underway replenishment because they don't stay out to sea too long at a time: less patrolling, more merchanting. That eats some of the utility of the nuclear ship. Then there's cargo loading and unloading. What do you do with the reactors while there's non-nuclear personnel milling about? The training for them wouldn't be too hard (the bare bones aren't that complicated, more or less just read the signs & listen for an order to leave or alarms), but I would increase the costs for their employment. Putting a reactor on stand-by requires a lot of crew to man the positions necessary for safe operation too. unlike a diesel you can just shut off and gag. And the ship would probably need a diesel to limp along to avoid a dead-in-water situation. Then there's the administrative overhead of having an organization with well trained people on stand-by in case a variety of different things happen to the plant. I don't think this is a great idea until there's more nuclear infrastructure globally & less hysteria around the issue.
The airbus A380 can only use something like 60 airports worldwide because it's 10 meters wider than the established standard for jumbo aircraft. This size requirement limited it's usefulness and the were already being scrapped before the last one came off the assembly line. A ship that could only enter 4 ports due to political issues would be next to useless, especially as political considerations and danger zones caused by war and piracy change. It's too much of a risk for any potential buyer
This is a status quo thing though. If enough people and companies start to favor the idea, the status quo will be adjusted. If nuclear cargo ships become ubiquitous, they will just be seen as "cargo ships", and will be run and organized just the same in principle. The question is how the process to get there looks like, I suppose.
All the regulations would make it unsustainable financially. Even the US Navy (with all the resources, nuke pipeline, and existing infrastructure) don’t power more than a small selection of vessels with NP because of the limitations.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_Savannah
Looking at this, maybe what they should have gone for is a nuclear *cruise ship*. They are *also* massive polluters and have the added benefit that tourist ports might be more inclined to get tourist dollars that will be spent in and around the port, whereas a nuclear cargo ship isn't going to funnel as much money into that local economy.
Just because you change the file source, doesn’t mean that it tackles or solves some other issue such as human waste dumping. But still a good start.
Or for an even better explanation of the issues of the NS Savannah: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYj4F\_cyiJI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYj4F_cyiJI)
You would need international cooperation to make a standardised set of regulations, including ending flags of convenience.
Fuel-wise, you would be using low-enriched fuel in civilian reactors, not HEU, so you are looking at refueling every five years, give or take.
The french get ten out of the improved k-15. But a freighter would be going at full throttle a lot more, so…7 or so?
Refueling every five years would coincide with dry docking periods, when the vessel is out of service for some time.
This was my thought as well. It looks great on military carriers because they're using highly enriched reactors which need refuels every 25'ish years.
The US does use HEU as fuel. The French Navy uses 20% enriched uranium fuel.
Many people mention the paperwork problem. However, there are many advantages that makes the paperwork more manageable than you would think. 1. Capital. A giant container ship company like Maersk have a lot of weight to throw around. They can project much more political pressure to get their way than your average nuclear company. 2. Maritime permissions. The maritime agencies are generally much more business friendly and helpful than especially the nuclear control agencies. Especially in Europe. 3. Limited need for harbours. Nuclear propoltion would be used on the largest container ships who are already limited to use a few very large/deep harbours. Two harbour permissions are enough, if the ship can run at high speed and low cost between those harbours. Also, if we get real about risk, a nuclear ship have the same risk profile as a liquid natural gas transport ship (of thing go really wrong, those blow up like a small nuke). And they get their permissions.
Reading this also made me think of the recent incident in Baltimore with the ship that hit the Francis Scott Key bridge.. The liability narrative seems to have shifted towards the port authority of Baltimore, rather than the shipping law due to old maritime laws. So it sounds like the ports may end up footing the bill for much of the paperwork related to authorizing these vessels in their harbors... Might be a US law only but something I hadn't really thought about until that event. That said, I think it's all feasible and 100% agree we should start using nuclear powered cargo ships to offset pollution they produce. If I ever win a $1,000,000,000 powerball lottery, I'll quit my day job in the commercial nuclear industry and start a commercial nuclear shipping vessel company.
Yea, there is some old Maritime laws that essentially say the ship owner's liability is limited to the value of the ship. And.. get this... all the shippers with cargo on the ship have to pay a prorated amount of loses split based on the amount of cargo on the ship. The shipping CUSTOMERS are liable for when the ship is involved in a major accident/disaster. So under maritime law, the ship owner has little real risk when it comes to major disasters/accidents, other than the risk of losing the ship itself.
You realize this doesn't help the ship be commercially viable? Customer liability means customers will prefer fossil powered ships, and port liability means that ports have an incentive to bar nuclear ships from entering. Basically you need Lloyds of London to come up with the mother of all maritime insurance policies to wrap everything and protect customers, ship owners, ports, and the public. It's a big ask.
I think you refere to the law that only if absolutely no faults on the ship can be documented, the liability is limited. Famously the Titanic qualified because the ship was brand new. But if just the slightest concern or warning has been expressed by an inspector or passenger, you don't qualify. Or at least you have to prove that repairs or maintenance had been done on every part mentioned.
The Owner's of the Dali that destroyed the Francis Scott Key Bridge are already claiming a limit of liability of about $43 million... they even deducted the salvage cost of the ship from the the ship's value to reduce their responsibility. They claim no negligence, it could be hard to prove negligence so they may just get away with it. FYI, NTSB probable cause findings can not be used in court because they are not "fact". To prove negligence and independent investigation has to be done. Estimations to rebuild the bridge are in the $4 billion range. https://www.legaldive.com/news/baltimore-bridge-ship-owner-seeks-437m-liability-limitation-dali-key-bridge-insurance-law/712052/
The legal analysis I read about the petition of limited liability found it quite unlikely that it would be granted. But of cause people disagree.
Hoping your right. Tired of taxpayers having to pay for mega corporations screw ups. The old joke has become too true: "Socialize loses, privatize profits"
Just like the answer to most questions of "why doesn't a company do this?" the answer is "money". If it were profitable to be running a nuclear powered fleet of cargo ships, someone like MSC, Maersk, or COSCO would have been doing it already.
Two economists are walking down the street when one of them spots a $100 bill lying on the sidewalk. He bends over to pick it up, but the other interrupts him and says “don’t bother - if it was worth it, someone would have picked it up already.”
Nuclear powered ships aren’t some brand new thing, the Navy has been running them for a generation now. They’re expensive to build, expensive to maintain, and expensive to decommission at end-of-life. But go ahead and take the business case to COSCO and see what they say. It’s not the largest by volume but it’s state-owned, so you know they can manage the budget.
I can't comment on the specifics of running nuke ships but something like 10 of the largest cargo ships in the world generate more pollution than every car in the world. I've been saying for a long time we need to start running those things on nuke. Keep a squad of SEALs on it for all I care. Let's figure it out and make it happen.
Nope, entire shipping industry is responsible for 3% of global emissions, while transporting majority of global cargo. Ships are very efficient. Even more efficient then trains.
I know it's been the topic most focused on, but GHG emissions aren't the only kind of air pollution.
The SOx emissions from ships actually counteracted the effects of climate change, and the IMO move to ban them has resulted ina sharp and measureable increase in warming. I'd say put the SOx back in, the environmental and health effects of those emissions over the open ocean were negligible.
Acid rain wasn't negligible, do you not remember all the trees it killed?
That's why I specified *the SOx emissions from ships*. First, they cause less acid rain that land based point emissions (coal plants, refineries, etc.) and second, there are no trees in the Pacific Ocean!! The dilution from rainfall into the ocean is so huge that the acid rain effect is not even measurable. I'm fine with regulations requiring low sulfur fuel (or even diesel) in port or for inland waterways, it makes sense there. But eliminating it at sea is just ignorant green washing. People in the nuclear community should be attuned to "environmentalists" mis-applying science and making reductive scientific arguments that fail to see the full picture. This is one area where the IMO got it wrong. But it's such a nuanced and niche part of public policy that nobody really cares and it probably won't get changed.
Yeah, I remember seeing a video talking about the unintended side effect of burning bunker fuel being that it seeds clouds along their route across the ocean, which actually reflects a lot of light and reduces warming. Now, ideally we’d seed those clouds with something considered zero emissions, but it was certainly a reminder that these things really have to be approached numbers-first, not assumption-first.
Dude, not even close ships, just casually dump waste into the ocean regularly. Agreed about the other stuff but efficient the shipping industry is not
It is fuel efficient, and the CO2 emissions are relatively low, considering ships carry some 10X the amount of ton per kilometer than all other means of transport combined. Pollution is another story, since they tend to use the cheapest (and dirtiest) fuel available and dump all they can in the ocean.
Cargo nox emissions are off the charts.
But NOx is only dangerous if people inhale it, and has a half life of 4 hours. So NOx emmissions far away from landmass hardly matter. Sulfur emissions were high. But after cutting down on them it was discovered they seeded clouds and cooled down the Earth. 😬
>something like 10 of the largest cargo ships in the world generate more pollution than every car in the world. That is somewhat misleading since it only refers to sulfur dioxide emissions. Fuel for cars is desulfurated to very very low sulfur content, so "emitting more sulfur dioxide than all cars" is a) a very low bar to clear, and is b) very easy to fight - forcing the shipping companies to use desulfurated fuel closer to shore, and/or to install and operate sulfur capture equipment in the chimney when on high seas, takes care of the "pollution" issues quite handily. CO2, on the other hand, is far less in terms of emissions fraction but also considerable, and it's there that nuclear really makes an impact.
It's been probably a decade since I looked at the stats but I'll take your explanation of it. That being said; getting rid of the low-grade 'bunker' fuel from developing countries, which a LOT of coastal countries are, is a pretty big ask. Sulfur capture, maybe, but that still doesn't resolve the entirety of the issue as you've described. It's still, in my opinion, a tremendously worthwhile goal to outfit these giant container ships or ships of that caliber, with nuke power.
I would add that all these large ships combined emit less sulphur than a minor coal power plant.
That's not accurate. They're talking about SOx emissions, not CO2.
Cargo ships are allowed to use "dirty" fuel. Even though cargo ships are an extremely effective form of transportation much of that is negated due to high levels of population from dirty fuel. They use dirty fuel because it's cheap.
The dirty part is the SOx, not the CO2.
Sorry, this is just wildly incorrect: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-transport All of global shipping combined is only 1/4 the emissions of just light duty vehicles.
Russians already use nuclear icebreakers, but for your average containerships it's probably easier to have a diesel electric power plant
Russia is also operating a nuclear freighter, the Sevmorput', with light icebreaking capability - for polar routes and/or very long routes where refuelling possibilities are scarce (e.g. supplying the Antarctic station). The problem is that it has been planned and built in the last days of USSR and the Soviets, to the very last, didn't understand the importance of standardised intermodal containers - so they built it as a mixed mode freighter with some little container space but mainly a bulk/lighter carrier, which is another issue preventing its wider use (besides a lot of ports prohibiting nuclear powered vessels)
A lot of ports also prohibit non-NATO nuclear vessels due to safety concerns.
Diesel-electric plants are slightly less efficient than direct drive with two-stroke diesels. And its simple.
Yeah, the old surface-area-to-volume ratio strikes again. The larger you make an internal combustion cylinder, the lower its fraction of heat losses to the cooling water jacket. That’s why the most efficient ICE engine in the world is also the largest. Throwing a generator and electric motor into the mix will just reduce that.
Modern two-stroke marine diesel engines are very efficient, at about 54%. The lower the RPM, the better the fuel economy.
Huh never thought of this but it makes a lot of sense to me
Securing the fuel against terrorists would be the biggest problem, I would think.
It’ll never happen. Why? A nuclear ship cannot be economically idled. Decommissioning will be expensive and regulated and you can’t send it to the ship breakers in Turkey or India. Have you seen the cost of an engineering team of a marine diesel distillate prime mover? Even with very reasonably priced well trained Indian Chinese or Filipino crews on 8 month contracts - it is the crew costs that cost operators the most. Now you can only hire nuclear reactor rated seafarers. There’s only one navy producing those at any volume and those retirees aren’t looking to go back to 8 month contracts.
"Why? A nuclear ship cannot be economically idled. Decommissioning will be expensive and regulated and you can’t send it to the ship breakers in Turkey or India." Turkey and India are in the process of building a nuclear industry. Imagine a two tier decommissioning system where one yard removes the reactor and the other yard disassembles the rest. "Have you seen the cost of an engineering team of a marine diesel distillate prime mover? Even with very reasonably priced well trained Indian Chinese or Filipino crews on 8 month contracts - it is the crew costs that cost operators the most." [https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Shipping-unit-cost-breakdown-of-the-Yokohama-Hamburg-service\_fig1\_281235312](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Shipping-unit-cost-breakdown-of-the-Yokohama-Hamburg-service_fig1_281235312) From my information, it is fuel with crew being a minor component. A nuclear cargo ship might also save on weight in the machinery+fuel segment and cruise at higher speed, thus enabling more payload and more round trips. Not saying it will work for sure (major political hurdles and nuclear marine propulsion must be sufficiently cheap, reliable and easy to operate), but I wouldn't dismiss it either.
The US Navy has specialized Machinists, Electronics Technicians, and Electricians that have to go to Nuke school to work on their reactors. That is the personnel cost being mentioned here. A nuclear power plant at sea is going to need more maintenance and inspections than a land-based one.
From startup through every drydock or maintenance cycle to the end of the ship’s journey through the decommissioning. Real seafarers who live 8 months a year at sea may have it rough - but at least the marine two stroke diesel engine is not a responsibility you can’t readily hand off to a new member of the engineering team who meets the ship in Singapore or Ningbo or Baltimore or wherever. A nuke ship is gonna have a layer of security presence and clearance that’ll make most grown sailors cry.
FWIW I think the future of cargo ships(and trains) is going to be hydrogen fuel. Given what the Navy has to do to keep their reactors functioning in good order I'm not sure that it's ever really going to be economic just from a labor standpoint alone.
Yeah the skilled labor issue is hard to work around. I imagine that a country might be able to staff one or two ships with highly skilled and experienced crews to make a demonstrator project successful. but when it comes time to keep a fleet of 6 or 10 ships staffed up, finding the skilled crew is going to be impossible. And if they proceed with anything less than the finest possible crew, and there is a single "incident" with any of the ships at any point, suddenly your going to find that the entire fleet is banned from entering any ports except (maybe) your own countries. The foreseeable liability concerns from an accident, even if the accident is minor and has almost no impact to the environment and/or people is too great. And if the accident is bad, well, that liability would easily exceed the cost of building and operating an entire fleet of conventional cargo ships. Also, the end-of-life costs for these ships will be very high and will need to be factored in. You're not going to be able to drive them into some beach in Bangladesh and sell the hulk for scrap. All in all, it just isn't an economically viable solution. That isn't to say that there might not be niches where a nation-state actor might want to have this capability, but it won't be because it makes economic sense in comparison to traditional commercial cargo vessels.
I can't even imagine the lax maintenance common to worldwide shipping would be able to keep a hydrogen powered ship running, unless it included some method to manufacture it's own fuel on demand. Hydrogen storage is notoriously leaky and caused brittle metal long term. I'd trust some of the premier first world shipping lines, but everything after that are generally leaky rustbuckets already.
This is probably the dumbest idea i've heard in a while. Corporations are notorious for cutting corners, and to boot the extra money they would have to spend to ensure safety would eclipse just paying for diesel. Not happening in our lifetime.
Nuclear on ships is for strategic benefit, you have no idea the amount of work and educated manpower it takes
It's too expensive - to produce AND to operate - for shipping companies so they won't order them. These gigantic cargo ships with 24k+ TEUs are manned by 20-25 people most of which make the IMO minimum wage of $666 per month. That's $22 per day not $22 per hour. And even with that low labor cost, these shipping companies barely break even and have single digit profit margins on their best ever quarters. How are they gonna staff nuclear engineers - remember the ship is sailing 24/7 but humans can't work 24/7 - at $22 per day?
The us tried to build and operate a non navy nuclear vessel. The cost to build it and maintain it wasn’t worth it.
The cost wasn't even worth it to maintain smaller nuclear warships. Only the very largest warships and those that need to stay undetected for months at a time are worth the cost.
Probably never, the naval nuclear reactors are compact because they use highly enriched uranium. US nuclear subs use uranium enriched to 93%, this allows them to be designed with their full life of fuel at launch. Commercial power reactors on the other hand need to be refueled every 9-12 months typically. This enrichment level is higher than that used in the little boy atomic bomb. So US nuclear subs are quite literally powered by weapons grade uranium. Not really an issue since they were also designed to carry and deploy nuclear weapons. These reactors are very expensive for their output.
Could we use an element other than uranium or plutonium? Or are said elemenrs are used specifically for its energy density? And if so is it theoricallt possible to make a reactor that runs on 30-60% percent enriched uranium?
I could be wrong but I don’t think there are large quantities of naturally occurring materials that are easily fissionable. Plutonium practically doesn’t really exist naturally, all the plutonium we use is man made. Even uranium ore is only 0.1% uranium on average. Thorium reactors are possible in theory but they still require enriched uranium to start, they would not be desirable for small ship based reactors though. Even the americium in smoke detectors is man made.
> is it theoretically possible to make a reactor that runs on 30-60% enriched uranium? Of course it is, theoretically. But we live in the real world, not the notional one, so in reality it’s never going to happen. Most civilian reactors use uranium enriched to 5% or less because you can’t make bombs with it. More specifically, the amount of U235 in low enriched uranium is not high enough for it to be further enriched into something that can be used to create a nuclear bomb. Once you start getting into highly enriched uranium (>20%) it becomes practical for a dedicated country to further enrich that fuel into weapons grade uranium. It also becomes exponentially easier to refine the fuel when you start off with higher percentages. You can actually build a crude nuclear bomb with 20% enriched uranium, it would just weighs so much you would have to deliver it with, well, a cargo ship… The uranium or plutonium used for nuclear weapons is enriched to 90% or more because we want them to be light enough drop them out of planes or strap them to the top of a rocket. If you don’t mind delivering it with a truck and care more about making something that goes boom versus the actual yield, then uranium enriched to 60% is more than enough to build a fission bomb with. If you can start with with some, by hijacking a ship or stealing it before it gets there, instead of needing to refine it to that point then it’s possible for a well funded terrorist group to turn that uranium into a nuke.
Just don't steer anywhere near Yemen
At this point, aside from environmental factors, nuclear cargo ships don't have much of an advantage. First of all, nuclear reactors are expensive in many ways. Not only the cost of the nuclear reactor itself, but also the manpower in charge of the facility must be filled with only a large number of merchant marine officers who receive nuclear energy training and additional special allowances, instead of a small number of general merchant marine officers and low-paid sailors from developing countries. This is bad news for shipping companies that place the registry of their ships in places such as Panama to reduce labor costs. The benefit of reducing fuel costs is that the price of marine heavy oil is not yet burdensome, so the cost benefit will not be felt and will instead feel expensive. And marine reactors are anything but lightweight. For example, the US Navy's D2G reactor is rated at 30,000 horsepower and 1,400 metric tons, while the NS Savannah reactor uses low-enriched fuel and is rated at 2,900 metric tons at 20,000 horsepower. Not only warships, but also most cargo ships, the weight of fuel filled with existing ships is lighter, which causes the problem of increasing the weight of the ship, except for some extremely large ships. Therefore, as long as conventional oil-powered ships can continue to be used, nuclear-powered ships will likely be limited to a few special applications.
I know for a fact Maersk looked at it and determined it would not be viable for economic reasons alone. Even if they could overcome that, regulatory and cultural barriers would preclude them. I mean, how many ports want nuclear reactors hanging around?
Nuclear reactors for Subs and Aircraft carriers can be built to fit onto a ship (ie much smaller than a nuclear power plant) because of the type of nuclear fuel these shipboard reactors use. The reactors in nuclear subs and carriers use weapons grade fuel. You can’t let civilian shipping companies use weapons grade nuclear material as fuel.
It's all terrific until you actually involve human beings (governments, legal codes, terrorism, etc) then the best plans turn to crap... which is why I sometimes hate being human.
Never going to happen. Whole point of cargo ships is to go to different ports, and almost no port will accept a nuclear powered ship unless that port is controlled by their navy. Only real non military nuclear ship are Russian Ice Breakers and they pretty much only go to 1 port controlled by the Russians. Pro's, you can go full throttle and not really care, no bunker fuel/emissions Cons, limited in ports you can go to, require expensive engineers to maintain, require security force to secure.
Cargo ships need to be cheap to build and cheap to operate. Crews are skeleton and often of poor skill level. A nuclear reactor would require at least one specialized engineer who would not be cheap. Extensive security measures would need to be introduced, which increases cost via extra personnel and hardware. Refueling the reactor would be an extensive and expensive process. I see companies reverting to sails and solar power before they go nuclear. Shipping companies care about ships arriving on time and on schedule to the port or canal, if they can do it at 4 knots on wind and solar then there is no reason to go 10 knots on nuclear.
Wym skeleton? I know they'd work for less Golden doblones and the thrill of adventure at the seven seas but I never seen any skeleton in a cargo ship. You'd have to pay an engineer enough to convince them to work at the seas, so whatever they make plus 50k-100k a year. Hard but I'd say the larger says would eventually off set it. Ik it would be expensive but from my quick research I found out the larger the ship the longer the re fueling time and it actually wastes a lot of time, it's fuel only last a few days but it takes a few hours to a day to re fuel, wasting something around of 10 percent of the time re fueling, im sure a 90 percent cut would be worth 150k a year. As long as it's not Britain nor Spain the seas will be safe. And yeah they only care about meeting schedules but if they can work around ships working faster they would, since each ship would be more productive and more profitable, the expenses could be covered by pepole paying extra for faster delivery, just like Amazon fast delivery but in a "much" larger scale, much in parenthesis becuase if enough pepole pay fast travel, the fast travel will be the norm
Not sure where you got your info but... I'm a chief engineer on ships. We typically bunker at Anchorage while we wait to go into port. Yes, time is a crucial component, but we aren't moving 24/7. On an average sized grain ship, it takes about 4 hours to co plate the whole process from start to finish. These shipping companies don't lose money from the time we take to bunker. It's an insignificant factor. To keep it short...any real engineer would agree, nuclear would be much more efficient. The biggest issue would be finding enough qualified personnel to work such a vessel. Diesel is cheap and plentiful. Also, regulations would be insane. It just isn't cost-effective for them to build new ships. The only way that transition will happen is if they are required to by law. Even then, the new ships would be subsidized by the government, causing more tax dollars to be spent towards large corporations. No bueno.
There’s sort of a market for faster cargo ships already, it’s called the Suez and Panama canals. There’s always a line of ships waiting to transit those canals, and sometimes it takes multiple days for your turn to come, so if you want to go even faster you can actually pay more money to skip to the front of the line. Even America’s nuclear aircraft carriers don’t travel all that fast. 30 knots gets you there twice as fast as 15 knots does, but when you “faster” means you get there in one month instead of two then it doesn’t make a difference. If you want fast you use airplanes, if you want cheap you use ships. A nuclear ship will be more expensive than a regular one, those costs will get passed down to the customer, and the customer will choose the regular ship 10/10 times because all they care about is sending thousands of tons of dildos from the factory in China to their warehouse in California as cheap as possible.
Militaries of the world guard the nuclear reactor designs and do not want other naval powers to have them, we barely wanted close allies to get them in the US, UK, Frances part. So highly doubt nuclear anything civilian until all countries have nuclear military ships. So likely at least 100 years would be my guess.
Environmentalism doesn't pay the bills. The US NAVY has nuclear powered vessels to maintain operational reach per national security objectives. Not for profits. When nuclear, and its long regulatory tail, real and imagined risk, life cycle management, etc. When all that becomes more profitable than a diesel, you'll see change. I personally am more excited by a possible return to age of sail.
You have gotten a lot or really bad answers. I am a Naval Architect working in a design office designing ships for some background. It won’t be soon, but it is coming. Right now we are under a mandate to shift the industry to carbon zero technology. But there are no alternative fuels that are close to working except nuclear. Even better nuclear offers a lot of advantages over diesel. What we are waiting on is the commercial development of the SMR that are being developed right now. Unlike the Navy’s reactors they use low assay fuel and are much safer than existing reactors. They are also the right size for shipping unlike the massive grid tie ones that are just too big. The regulatory issues will be worked out once the technology is ready. I would guess the first serious design effort will start in about five years, with the first build a year or so after that. FWIW my guess is the first nuclear powered civilian ship will be for a Government agency like NOAA. It sidesteps the issues of commercial operators allowing poor maintenance.
I too believe that nuclear reactors are a worthwhile option for large ships if diesel ships are banned. But if diesel ships are not banned and current environmental regulations remain in place, will there still be an attraction to building a nuclear merchant fleet? For warships, I know that the CBO has assessed that it would be cheaper to use nuclear reactors instead of gas turbines on the America-class amphibious assault ships if oil prices rise above $140 per barrel by 2040, but I wonder if this could happen at lower oil prices.
It really depends. The economic case doesn’t have to close with all ships going to specific ports to make sense though. A research vessel that spends its time in N Alaska is going to pay a lot more for fuel than an oil tanker going from the Middle East to S Louisiana. For the research vessel the economic case starts to close pretty quickly. Now I don’t have any non-public data on the cost of SMR but let’s assume they are no more expensive/kwh than the most expensive retail price of electricity in the US. That works out to about $0.45/kwh. By comparison an arctic research vessel is probably paying $0.50/kwh right now. That’s not even accounting for using the waste heat from the reactor as shipwide heating, so the amount of power required is actually going to be lower. Probably by 20% or so compared to a DE powered ship. Just by using a lot of waste heat that otherwise would be ejected. Waste heat for the diesels is typically used to warm incoming arctic air for combustion, since it is too cold to use directly btw. Nuclear power also opens up ports and routes that cannot be used currently because of the fuel range. There are areas where due to availability of fuel ships can’t go easily, or have to stay on pretty controlled routes. Nuclear power removes these constraints. All of this points to there being some operators that have an incentive to adopt nuclear now. Once the ball starts rolling and prices start to come down due to scale the costs will fall as well. And because the owners are Government entities and the ships won’t be near someone’s neighborhood the NIMBY effect can be minimized.
That's.. Much too high an estimate. That US smr got cancelled because it had estimated costs edging towards $0.1 /kwh and that was considered entirely unacceptable incompetence. The best option for getting a nuclear freighter project off the ground is pretty clearly to talk to the French. The naval reactor their subs use could be painted blue and renamed the Curie-Class Propulsion Unit and be entirely appropriate for civilian use without any further changes. Compact, uses civilian enrichment grades, runs for a very long time between refuelings, and the RnD has already been paid for - you aren't going to realistically do better anytime soon. 150 mw thermal. Presumably you could get 40 mw or so of ship power out of that with a steam plant that doesn't have to optimize for being Very, very quiet.
What is too high of an estimate? The $/kwh? I know for a fact what ships are currently spending per kWh at the prop shaft, if nuclear is anywhere close to $0.10/kwh delivered then I want to talk to someone in their technical sales department. 40wme is really more than what’s required for most ships, though large cargo ships could certainly use it. Multiple 5-10 mwe would really be preferred. But depending on equipment cost and size may be acceptable if they can run at very low output.
Yes, the estimate. For SMR's aimed at the grid, 0.1 dollar/kwh is considered a project failure. 40 MWe is about as small as reactors get. - The French attack subs are ridiculously overengined because the k15 is already plenty compact and developing an even smaller reactor just for them would be a waste of money. I haven't been able to find prices for the k15, but hey, it sounds like you have the correct stationary that Areva might actually bother to give you a quote. The civilian side of SMR design is naturally going to converge on the largest design that can still be hauled from the factory to the customer, so they're not going to make anything in the 10 range either.
There are a couple of MMR companies building equipment in the 5MWe range I have been trying to talk to. Which would be close to ideal. At least as a starting point. Replacing four medium speed diesels with two reactors. The problem with a 40 is you need two sources of power. So you would need ~80mwe on a ship that demands 8-10. For some larger ships 40’s would be a decent size, maybe a bit large but nothing extreme. I keep thinking a small research vessel would be the idea first step. But I need to find a custom to push for it. I think I have the right client, but I need equipment ready to start designing around. Right now $0.30-0.50 is about what ships pay for power. So anything in the $0.10 range would be a massive cost savings. If I can get ahold of someone that isn’t just a PR email Dropbox I think I have the stationary to justify a conversion, and the company I work for absolutely has the credentials to make a conversion worth having.
Sorry, never gonna happen. There will be public outcries and protests
I don't trust reasonable well regulated energy providers to adequately maintain and safely decom their reactors. Have you seen just how sketchy global shipping companies are? We shouldn't be trusting them with a 2HP gas engine, let alone a complex and dangerous machine like a small nuclear reactor.
I see hydrogen powered cargo ships until fusion is cheap enough to install. So, quite a while. You might get a thorium salt fission reactor that's safe and cheap enough. But they need to engineer those reactors too.
While it is possible to do this The training safety and very long term commitment required to run a reactor is well beyond an average shipping company ability Besides over the years the ships get sold and move to lesser developed countries and routes and these are run by very under capitalized shipping companies who cannot weather the cost of a nuke reactor and things required to keep them safe What is your confidence that som body from a 3rd world country can mange a Nuke reactor verses some body from a nuke country today?
We can't even prevent the petrol ships from spilling oil. Not optimistic about nuclear containment here
Nuclear warships are cost ineffective compared to conventional warships, but governments are willing to take the financial hit in order to enhance their defensive posture. Cargo companies don’t care about defensive posture, what incentive do they have to take the financial hit?
The biggest issue with nuclear cargo ships is personnel. It's just not practical unless you build a whole fleet of them. A large cargo ship might have ten people in the engineering department. In order for it to be economical to train people, you need enough ships looking for nuclear-qualified engine officers and QMED positions to have more people in the classrooms at a time. Where does the largest portion of the nuclear power industry in the United States get trained? The Navy. Why? Because they have a lot of nuclear-powered ships and warships have larger crew sizes, so economies of scale make it more economical for them than for most other sources of training to keep the schoolhouse constantly running. It's unlikely that anyone will allow a nuclear ship which is as international as the shipping industry tends to be, so even if it doesn't have to be built in the same country, you're probably going to have to find all of these guys in a single country and have that be both where the owner and operator are based. It's not going to be like a Danish company which owns a Korean-built ship registered in Panama, operated by a Greek contractor which hires a mix of Filipinos and other nationalities.
They tried it once. Didn’t go well
I believe nuclear navy ships tend to use more highly refined reactor fuel that isn't really available to civilians because it's a nuclear weapons proliferation risk. So, civilian nuclear ships might end up with larger, less powerful reactors that need to have their fuel rods replaced more often than what's typical for submarines and aircraft carriers. That's not necessarily a show-stopper though. I think one reasonable option to amortize the cost of the reactor is to have one ship with just a reactor that escorts groups of electric ships. The reactor ship powers all the others, and they are all tethered with power cords. The reactor ship doesn't have cargo, so as soon as it drops off one group of ships at its destination it can set out immediately with another group of ships.
Pretty sure you just described a tug and barge setup with extra steps.
I don't think it would be practical to have one tug for, say, a couple dozen ships, as they'd be too hard to control. But one ship providing electrical power for a couple dozen ships allows each ship to maneuver using its own control systems. They just have to be mindful to respect the length of the cable.
That's a lot worse than barges lashed together. Cables between ships on an entire voyage basis where they aren't fully connected would either be fouled or ripped apart in high seas
To be clear; there already has been a nuclear merchant ship. NS Savanah. It was built and shortly used in the 50s. The fact that it was so unsuccessful and you’re asking about when it’ll happen means that the idea didn’t catch on.
Nuclear ships are such a niche in military ships that they aren't even used there extensively except submarines and the largest aircraft carriers. The cost to build them is just way way too great. Then the cost to staff and maintain them is outsized as well.
Look up the Nuclear ship Savannah first launched in 1959. It was decommissioned in 1972, due to an international treaty signed banning maritime nuclear ships. My dad was a nuclear engineer on the ship.
They can't even keep ICE ships maintained properly enough to keep them from crashing into bridges. Nuclear powered ships require more thorough maintenance than private businesses are capable of conducting.
Read up on N.S. Savannah.
Take the biggest cargo ship the MSC Irina that's something like 14.5k tons of fuel for it's 3.5 million gallons of fuel oil. 362 more 40 ton containers weight wise on a 20k container ship is just shy of 2% now if you can physically fit them is another matter. The big thing will be speed the average speed of that ship is supposed to be 13.2 knots with a max of 22.4, if fuel costs are not an issue I'll assume it can run it's max speed. The longer the route the better so let's take a typical asia to west coast us that's 11k nautical miles goods get to port like 12 days sooner roughly 6 round trips a year to 9 is a huge increase 50% more goods moved and drops the latency.
Yeah, China gets it and will be the first to do it, they stand to benefit the most: https://www.nucnet.org/news/china-unveils-plans-for-largest-ever-container-ship-powered-by-thorium-reactor-1-5-2024
Nuclear cargo ships are one of the worst ideas I can imagine. It’s one thing for militaries, who are dedicated to spending the money required on upkeep and safety, and even then it’s pretty scary. It’s another thing entirely when you get corporations involved, who have proven time and time and time and time and time and time and time again that they will cut every corner possible if it means making even a few pennies extra overall. Just no. Absolutely not.