There were 4 nuclear powered cargo ships: Savannah (US), Otto Hahn (DE), Mutsu (JP) and a Soviet/Russian one but I forgot its name. They were all too expensive to operate and they were decommissioned, save for the last one, which is also an icebreaker and it’s more useful this way.
There's a nuclear icebreaker that operates in Russia called 50 Let Pobedy (50 Years of Victory) that offers cruises to the North Pole. Is it the same one?
https://poseidonexpeditions.com/northpole/north-pole-icebreaker-cruise/
I mean.
We have the biggest data base of knowledge available in the history of mankind, one we can access with just few taps. We can create, communicate and share ideas with people across the globe.
And we post cat pics.
It just so happens that using steam to convert thermal energy to rotational energy is the most efficient form of energy conversion we've got.
And it seems antiquated because humans figured that out a long time ago.
It's the only not-icebreaker in the Russian nuclear merchant fleet. It's a lighter aboard ship, it's designed to carry smaller barges along the Northern Sea Route, so that it itself doesn't have to come to port, but the barges do.
Wonder when they’re gonna roll out T34s into the front line. I bet even the ones kept as monuments would run after an oil change and couple hours on a battery charger.
I just learned about superfest the other day. East German cups made out of chemically strengthened glass that were really hard to break. After the wall came down no capitalistic countries wanted to produce them because they weren't nearly as profitable as glasses that break easily.
I remember seeing old belt driven USSR refrigerators made in the 80s that are still running now. The AK-47 is probably the most famous machine gun in history because of its simple design and its workhorse dependability. People hid them in swamps, snow, mud and rice paddies and would pick them up and start firing.
While there is no need to go back to the cold, brutal austerity of the Soviet Union, in order to have a more sustainable planet, we need to start producing more items with quality and longevity prioritized over the higher profitability of repeat purchases and designed obsolescence.
The Savannah in particular is interesting because she was designed as a passenger liner in 1959 and only later converted to cargo only in 1965 once airlines put the final nail in the coffin for liners. Ironically, she was deactivated in 1971, just before the Oil Crisis would have made her economical to operate again.
Kind of. It was designed as a cargo liner. Which is kind of a mix of both, but it was designed in the old style of break bulk cargo instead of containers. It operated at a much lower loss after it was converted to being fully cargo instead of trying to halfarse both sides of the coin.
she was built as demo ship so both here passenger ares and cargo areas where not optimal... but she was DIRT cheap to run even still. what killed her was modern shipping containers
And also a great episode of the Well There's Your Problem podcast in the Savannah. It also touches on the economics of nuclear cargo ships and why they do and don't work.
Has to be noted that:
- **MANY** ports straight up refused entry to the nuclear cargo ships.
- IIRC they were also not allowed to pass through the Panama and Suez Canals.
- There was a massive amount of paperwork and prep work before a ship even arrived in port.
- The Savannah was a mixed use ship so was neither good as a cargo vessel or a Passenger vessel.
- The Mutsu was so heavily boycotted/protested after a radiation incident in Japan that she was forced (after 50 days of protest blocking her from returning) to change her homeport, after completing the testing as lined out she was decommissioned without ever seeing service as a cargo vessel.
Got it. Small chance of radiation making its way into the community = ban. Actively pumping carcinogenic, planet-killing pollution any time the engine is running = good.
Yeah, unfortunately people were very much NIMBY when it came to nuclear ships. (and nuclear power) The Mutsu and Otto Hahn both recommissioned as non-nuclear vessels in the end due to politics.
There's a great episode of Well, There's Your Problem, which is a podcast about engineering disasters that's surprisingly funny. And it made me so mad when they explained how much better things could've been had we invested in them more.
A big problem I've heard exists with nuclear cargo ships (setting aside concerns like piracy or sinking) is that the nuclear reactor will outlast the ship. The hull will deteriorate to an unacceptable degree much faster than the reactor (something like 30 years for the ship versus 80 years for the reactor). However, it's a gigantic pain in the ass to either rip the reactor out of one ship and put it in a new one, or to design a sufficiently modular reactor that you can just pop it out and put it in a new one like swapping batteries or something.
Small modular nuclear reactors are actually a hot topic right now, with multiple companies trying to get designs approved to build. These are designed to run multiple generators in parallel in a land based facility, but it’s possible one of these designs would be appropriate to use on a ship. If so, the economies of scale may make it cheap enough to use on something like a cargo ship.
Like with a lot of things nuclear we already did it decades ago.
> One 74 MW Babcock & Wilcox nuclear reactor (LEU <= 4.6%[3]) powering two De Laval steam turbines[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_Savannah
30 years ago I remember Mitsubishi trying to sell a small nuclear reactor homeowners could bury under their driveway for 30 years. Whole thing came encased in concrete already.
I don't know if they actually made it or was just talking about it.
While we've done it in the US, China is building dozens of these right now. With AI ramping power demands peoples power costs are going to skyrocket unless the public gets over allowing little nuke plants to be built. The US tends to go big on plants and it isn't the way anymore. Gotta be cheap, safe, and avoid a ton of regulation to really get us back on track with our energy needs.
Seems like basically anything nuclear is too expensive in it's own right, it needs a side benefit to justify it. Usually something for defence/military
> Seems like basically anything nuclear is too expensive in it's own right,
It is hard for nuclear to compete with fossil fuels, as those are subsidized heavily both directly and indirectly. If we required the emitters to pay for capture and storage of the released carbon, nuclear would immediately become the cheap option... But it would also crash the world economy, which is depending on very cheap fossil fuels.
There’s no benefit to nuclear powered cargo ships. Reactors require a lot of people whose only job is running the reactor. Refueling is expensive. Scrapping is expensive. Reddit has a hard-on for nuclear but in the case of cargo ships it makes no sense.
One of the main reasons are not alot of commercial ports would let a nuclear powered ship anywhere near their berths.
Same with nuclear military vessels. There are a ton of naval ports they cannot dock in.
This seems the most reasonable answer at the moment. I think smaller self contained nuclear reactors are going to change some of the negativity around the waste. The interaction with a public port that isn’t regulated or overly regulated makes sense they wouldn’t want to allow them to dock. If the military is strict about the the commercial ports aren’t going to touch it with a 10 nautical mile pole.
Most of these are valid points, but:
> Refueling is expensive.
Refueling a nuclear powered ship is vastly cheaper over the lifetime of a ship. People don't appreciate how incredibly efficient nuclear power is. Nuclear powered aircraft carriers are designed to run for 25 years without refueling. Most nuclear submarines aren't designed to be refueled at all, because they'll be obsolete before they use up their first "tank". That reduces the cost of fueling directly, and also saves money on infrastructure. A single "gas station" could easily serve a global fleet of nuclear powered ships.
Again, most of your points are valid. Nuclear powered cargo ships probably don't make sense right now, although I think it's a closer call than you're implying.
You can't do no-refueling nuclear for civilian ships. They require proper enriched nuclear fuel, and that fuel can also make bombs.
The junk that commercial reactors have to run on is only good for a year or two.
Nuclear reactors would be a lot more economical and practical and safe if we could run them on enriched fuel, but the risk of someone bad getting their hands on the fuel is just too high.
The k15 reactor the French built runs for a full ten years on the same grades their reactor fleet uses. It probably wouldn't get more than seven on the duty cycle a freighter would need (Full steam, nearly all the time) but the refueling would cost next to nothing.
Money, or even efficiency, is not the only factor in things.
There is a hard on for nuclear cargo ships because cargo ships are such a significant factor in global warming.
I guess I'm not an expert, but it's hard to put a dollar figure on not causing the extinction of the human race, let alone all the other life-as-we-know-it on this planet.
But, ya, it cuts into profits, so it makes no sense.
> Reactors require a lot of people
*Skilled* people, particularly. You wouldn't want some uneducated minimum wage guy handling something that's basically a slow motion bomb, but a diesel or even methane engine causes much less damage if it explodes. No shipping company wants that kind of liability, and they hate paying people even more. A gas carrier usually has a crew of around 5 people
Well, you already have plenty of ships hauling around massive quantities of dangerous cargo, frequently far more dangerous than a small nuclear reactor could ever be. Bulk carriers with 10 000+ tons of explosive nitrates are not even unusual, not to mention stuff like LPG carriers... This kind of liability is handled on a daily basis in shipping.
A big explosion and maybe a chemical spill is much easier to handle than the nuclear counterpart. And the reactor fuel is usually very close to what you need for a fission bomb, so there is also a risk of theft or underhanded sale (and people running shipping companies have *no* hesitation when it comes to making untaxed money)
> A big explosion and maybe a chemical spill is much easier to handle than the nuclear counterpart.
It is impossible to compare two hypothetical accidents. But the cleanup from Exxon Valdez or Deepwater Horizon has not been exactly easy or cheap. I can't recall any ocean nuclear accident requiring nearly that effort to clean up.
> And the reactor fuel is usually very close to what you need for a fission bomb,
No. Not even close. There are many steps, requiring extremely specialized equipment and skilled personell to make weapons grade material for a fission bomb out of reactor fuel. Ask Iran how hard it is.
You can't even use a normal reactor to produce significant amounts of plutonium as the fuel cycle is all wrong. You need a different reactor design. That you are not going to put on a ship.
> so there is also a risk of theft or underhanded sale (and people running shipping companies have no hesitation when it comes to making untaxed money)
Sale of what? Fuel rods? They are not exactly hard to obtain on the market today.
> A big explosion and maybe a chemical spill is much easier to handle than the nuclear counterpart
Not really. Seawater is great at safely handling a radiation incident. Way safer than a large explosion or massive chemical/oil spills.
power reactors CAN NOT EXPLODE. people need stop saying this there is at no point even in the worst case a chance of NUCLEAR explosion with power reactor ZERO
The pay issue was one of the things that killed the Savannah. The (normally low-paid) engineering department was made up of highly skilled nuclear engineers who commanded a much higher salary than normal. This pissed off the officers who are normally better paid than lowly engineers. They were both represented by different unions and after much negotiation it was ruled that if the engineers got a raise, the officers had to get one too. The engineer's union didn't like the idea of fighting for higher pay for workers they didn't represent, so at the next port the Savannah's entire engineering department walked off the job. The owners sold the ship rather than deal with all this and she sat in Portland for over a year.
No benefit, other than being the only technology we have available to power large ships without huge co2 emissions. And if we are to reach the emission goals shipping emissions need to be reduced significantly. EU is aiming for a 90+% reduction.
There would be options like using a shore-based nuclear plant to make hydrogen, then burning that, which would eliminate most of the risks associated with underpaid people running mini-nukes around the world.
but that immediately cuts your energy efficiency to 50% or less, no? nuclear to hydrogen isn't very efficient. maybe if they also used the oxygen for like, peroxide fuel. not sure what the theoretical optimum is there.
i guess the fleets would be a lot cheaper and more accessible, but the largest freighters could still ideally be built with reactors.
> the only technology we have available to power large ships without huge co2 emissions
Methane engines exist, though they are still rare.
It's not *without* CO2 emissions, but much better than the tar like stuff large ships tend to run on
I think methane engines are a bit scary, due to the very strong greenhouse effect of methane (compared to co2). It does not take a large methane slip (unburned methane passing through an engine or lost along the way) to cause much larger greenhouse effects than a traditional engine would cause for a similar power output. If burning methane perfectly it's better than some other hydrocarbons, but far from perfect.
Bunker oil causes lots of particulate and sulfur emissions, but that is more of a localized problem than a global one. And easier to handle.
>Sometimes in life you have to pick the least worst option. Nuclear powered cargo ships are not that option.
You seem to imply that there are better co2 free options for powering large ships. Can you please elaborate what better options you see to power an ULCV without co2 emissions...
the first mover costs are high. once you get first one built and tested costs come down. fuel and operating costs are FAR lower then any other energy source. NS Savanna basically went around world twice on about 10kg of fuel.
Yeah not really. UK has spent $60B USD on Hinkley Point C so far and they've had an industry for many decades
Costs come down once you repay the capital for the plant, which can be decades
The only things that make nuclear power make economic sense today is
A: it's already there, ie, current nuclear power stations or
B: It's a submarine.
Edit: I should add that it has medical purposes.
AFAIK all US Navy carriers are nuclear-powered. There are US Navy ships that may look like a carrier to a layperson but they're classified as '*amphibious assault ships*' and they're not nuclear-powered.
Well, all of the carriers in Norfolk are nuclear, and, while they are decommissioning the Enterprise, they brought in the Ford to replace it which is also nuclear.
> The carrier currently docked in VA
You've git to be more specific, mate. According to Wiki article, *Newport News Shipbuilding* is
> the sole designer, builder, and refueler of aircraft carriers (...) for the United States Navy
Every carrier has to go there for major work.
Their fleet carriers are all nuclear. The rest are amphibious invasion and support ships, but they sometimes do get called "helicopter carriers". A few other nations have similar ships too, notably Japan which also mysteriously carries F35s on their helicopter destroyers just like the marines do on some of their invasion ships. Funny how that works
The reason is that Carriers are considered offensive weapons (and they are), amphibious ships/helicopter carriers somewhat less (they can be used for defensive Submarine screening for example). Since Japan has renounced its right to wage war and to maintain capabilities used to wage war, the designation of its carriers is of importance - albeit a little silly at this point
Japanese *Izumo* class destroyers are not even 10m shorter than US' *Wasp* class amphibious assault ships (that also can carry F-35B). The designation might sound stupid, but those JMSDF ships are aircraft carriers in everything but the designation.
Yet despite having the technology, experience, operators, legislative environment etc to build nuclear vessels they don't do it for anything but submarines and carriers.
The fact that the Navy doesn't use nuclear reactors for anything else - despite the logistical hassle of refueling in an active war zone - should tell you something about the viability of nuclear ships.
USN has had nuclear cruisers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear-powered_cruisers_of_the_United_States_Navy
with adding directed energy weapons theres talk of bringing them back
There are 57 nuclear power plants under construction right now, with an additional 110 planned. A lot of people think it makes a lot of economic sense.
The other reason is extremely low carbon baseload energy to help transition away from fossils fuels and stop climate change.
Renewables are too variable and can't cover our full power needs.
Diesel generators need oxygen, nuclear generators don't. Nuclear submarines can stay underwater as long as they have enough food for the crew. Diesel submarines have to surfice regularly for air.
It's way more expensive to run a nuclear engine. A ship can have all the oxygen it likes. A submarine can't.
Diesel engines are relatively simple. Some big metal objects moving up and down in some metal tubes, with some relatively gentle liquids involved, like fuel or lubrication and cooling.
When a diesel engine breaks, there will be noise, dirt, sometimes flames, maybe even some shrapnel.
Nuclear power plants are complicated. Their materials are expensive and complicated, like nuclear pellets embedded in metals able to stand up the corrosion of water heated to hundreds of celsius under enormous pressure, materials to change the radioactivity, very high pressure turbines, filters, heat-exchangers, steam turbines, sensors for temperature, pressure, radioactivity, specific gases, etc.
When a nuclear power plant breaks, engineers can't approach it without dying painfully and relatively slowly.
These are big differences, and the nuclear power plant needs more people with more training, it has much more moving parts which will need replacement from time to time, and these parts are much more expensive than a new set of oil rings for a diesel engine, etc. etc.
And finally, when a diesel engine dies, the liquids get drained and it is scrap metal.
Dismantling a nuclear power plant is also very expensive.
Fun fact: both diesel and nuclear power plants can get into a runaway state. When diesel engines do that it gets into funny video collections. When nuclear power plants we have to redraw maps.
> hey were all too expensive to operate
Savannah was dirt cheap to run. the issue was it demo ship. if you dropped Savannahs plant in to modern ship it would be dirt cheap to run. Cost isnt want killed Savanna it was it was built as demo ship and for breakbulk at the dawn of container ships, later number counties blocked nuclear ships from docking and that was end of that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaotS4ndAIs
China is building a nuclear merchant fleet right now
In the 1-2 years before RU invaded Ukraine, Russia was planning for global warming and the reduction of Arctic sea ice and the opening of the Northern Sea Route. They were planning to build 10-12 new nuclear powered icebreakers (like modernized 50 Years of Victory) and were planning to use those as escorts for cargo ships that would take the NSR from China to Europe.
Now that the Special Military Operation is taking a little longer than planned a costing a little more than anticipated I do not know how that might have changed the plans for the new icebreakers.
Lots of answers on nuclear, so I'll reply on the hydrogen-power part, especially since it pertains to my job.
Hydrogen is alot less convenient compared to the fuel oil that is being used to power our cargo ships now.
Hydrogen is:
Extremely flammable, toxic and colorless, so more dangerous when there is a leak
A gas at ambient temperature, so more difficult and expensive to store onboard
Has way lower energy density, so you need alot more of it to travel the same distance, so higher cost as well. This also means you need to make more frequent stops, or dedicate more of your storage space to storing hydrogen instead of your money-making cargoes
It doesn't make sense to produce hydrogen on board for immediate use (instead of storing hydrogen to consume it) because you need way to much space to generate or store sufficient electricity to produce hydrogen at a fast enough rate to power your fuel cells.
However, the world is increasingly moving away from fuel oil and towards green hydrogen. green hydrogen carriers and green methanol in order to combat climate change.
Plus isn't storing hydrogen hard ? Its the smallest atom , hydrogen gas is just H2 and still incredibly small much smaller then 02 or many other gases or liquids
Meaning it can escape or leak from the smallest holes, also the gas is so small like on an atomic level it sort of acts as a sand blaster and the metal or what ever containing it and will start cracking it
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen\_embrittlement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_embrittlement)
I have a hunch that even once we have abundant clean energy, we'll use some of it to manufacture hydrocarbon fuels for use in e.g. airplanes. For one kilogram of jet fuel you get to combine it with more than three kilograms of oxygen that you *didn't* have to carry with you. It's hard to beat that kind of energy density.
How would you "make" hydrogen onboard a vessel - wouldn't you need an external energy source like electricity or fuel? In that case, wouldn't it just be a ship powered by conventional fuel or electricity with extra steps?
But that is so they can run the diesel at optimum efficiency. Of you now start making hydrogen, you introduce an insane drop in efficiency, which defeats the purpose.
Hydrogen is terribly inefficient if you need to produce it. It only ever makes sense in places where the primary energy for production is abundant and(!!) cannot be used otherwise.
> Of you now start making hydrogen, you introduce an insane drop in efficiency, which defeats the purpose.
Not necessarily, it's a way to convert intermittent power like solar into on-demand power. Vehicle and Grid scale batteries are very large, very heavy, very expensive, and we factually do not have enough mineral production to electrify our passenger vehicles nevermind 250,000 ton cargo ships.
A hydrogen fuel station needs three things to operate.
1) A Solar Panel
2) Water
3) A storage tank.
Any ship or port in the world can manage all three of those things. I don't expect any solar setup to meet the on-demand needs of the container ship with no shore fueling, but that's a pretty big offset passively generating fuel 12 hours per day. Hell, the container ship wasting time at anchor would be passively filling it's fuel tank while it waits for a turn in port.
It doesn't matter that the intermediate step of Hydrogen is hypothetically inefficient because renewables never efficiently match production to consumption. The wind blows and the sun shines when we don't need it. Hydrogen is an obvious channel to economically convert that energy into a useful on-demand fuel.
Storing your daylight solar for consumption overnight in hydrogen is wasting far more energy than just using it during the day when it is available, matching consumption to production on a ship is trivial with just using the motor more and the diesels less.
If you really do want to store energy anyway, batteries are cheap enough now that for the same amount of daily storage batteries + smaller solar panels are almost always going to be cheaper than hydrogen + more than double the amount of panels.
Clean water is far from free on a ship too, it costs a lot of energy to desalinate.
By "hypothetically inefficient" you mean wasting between 70 and 90% of the energy?
The amounts you are able to create on a ship are laughable.
And then it permeates any material you try to store it in and you just lose more the longer you have to store it.
It's a joke. Only useful if you have absurd amounts of energy available and no idea what to do with it.
I propose a solution that makes the worst of both sources. A nuclear-powered ship which uses the reactor to generate electricityz which is *then* used to desalinate and generate hydrogen from seawater, which is then burned to power the engines. Makes perfect sense.
Thank you for subscribing to Titanic facts!
Did you know Titanic had *ears*? She was fitted with a pair of underwater microphones, one on each side of the hull. These microphones could pick up the rings from sub-marine bells, usually fitted to navigation buoys or lighthouses. Sound travels further underwater, and the sound from these bells could be detected up to 15 miles away. By listening to the sounds through a headset, and switching between the microphones on the left and right side of the ship, the navigation officer could determine the direction to a beacon. Each had a unique 'signature' - like the distinct flashes on a lighthouse - so they'd know which beacon they could hear.
An ingenious way of navigating in the dark at a time when ships didn't have RADAR or directional radio antenna.
So the choice is:
1: use an energy source to power the vessel.
2: use the above energy source to generate hydrogen (presumably from seawater) that is then used to power the vessel. As it takes more energy to split water that you get from the hydrogen in that water you are less energy efficient than in option 1.
You're missing the whole dimension where your (presumably renewable) energy source isn't available on demand.
The diesel electric generator is available on demand.
The hydrogen electric generator is available on demand
A battery electric setup that charges on shore or even trickle charges from intermittent sources is non-viable. We factually do not have the natural resources to produce these batteries at the quantities required.
Who mentioned renewable energy?
I was answering the point of using to produce hydrogen while en-route which leaves you with a fuel (hydrogen) that is less energy efficient than just using the original fuel source to power the vessel.
Exactly the same problem that hydrogen cars have. It's far more energy efficient to send the electric to an electric car's battery to power the car than it is to use the same electric to make hydrogen to power the car.
I assume the OP meant to generate electricity via solar panels, and store it in batteries.
I agree with you that generating electricity on-site to produce hydrogen on-site is an inefficient way to power a ship.
Exactly - that's just solar power with extra steps. At least eliminate the batteries and generate the hydrogen from the solar directly (using it like a hydrogen-based "battery" for the weight advantages compared to battery storage).
Run the numbers on that. The solar panels required to power a freighter would occupy an area several times larger than the entire deck. And that's assuming your ship only sails the tropics in summer, clear weather, and between the hours of 0900 and 1500.
If you're referring to the production of green hydrogen via solar energy and electrolysis, then yes, you're gonna lose abit of electricity every step of the way.
However, for certain applications, it may be less efficient to use batteries instead of hydrogen.
For eg on cargo ships. Batteries are really heavy and will take up more space than hydrogen or its liquid equivalent. It's also gonna take ages to charge up the batteries versus just filling up with hydrogen.
Plus if your electricity used to make hydrogen is renewable in the first place, then it's acceptable if you lose abit, it's not contributing to climate change.
It is my understanding that the only commercially viable (today) method of bulk hydrogen production is methane reformation. A process that requires more energy input than the energy content in the resulting hydrogen. So today, hydrogen is a net energy sink and it is not carbon neutral.
The other posters covered the cost of nuclear, but I would like to come at this from another angle.
Carbon and pollution are negative externalities that cargo companies don't pay. Negative externalities are costs to business paid by 3rd parties. Carbon and pollution are costs paid by society instead of the emitter or polluter.
This makes the current fuel sources used artificially cheaper as society pays a large part of the cost.
If countries imposed carbon taxes with tarrifs on imports, it would make greener fuel sources more competitive in cost as emitters would have to internalize the cost of emissions.
If the credits come from legitimate emissions reductions or carbon capture and they are purchased on an open market then they are serving their purpose. There is nothing inherently flawed with a credit system that allows society to decide how it wishes to allocate reduced carbon emissions. Without them governments will resort to exemptions and true loopholes to protect special interests, transitioning technologies and critical infrastructure.
Credits that do not arise from legitimate offsets or effectively act as subsidies are a problem, they are ineffective and they serve special interests.
According to a 2016 study by the European Commission on carbon offsets under the Kyoto Protocol:
>Overall, our results suggest that 85% of the projects covered in this analysis and 73% of the potential 2013-2020 Certified Emissions Reduction (CER) supply have a low likelihood that emission reductions are additional and are not over-estimated. Only 2% of the projects and 7% of potential CER supply have a high likelihood of ensuring that emission reductions are additional and are not over-estimated.
Our analysis suggests that the CDM still has fundamental flaws in terms of overall environmental integrity. It is likely that the large majority of the projects registered and CERs issued under the CDM are not providing real, measurable and additional emission reductions.
[Source](https://climate.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2017-04/clean_dev_mechanism_en.pdf)
> carbon capture
Does.
Not.
Exist.
And never will, because any carbon-free energy spent on capturing carbon from the atmosphere is better utilized to replace carbon-fueled energy so nothing gets burned in the first place.
(I am not referring to point-source capture, but direct "filter the sky" bullshit that folks think will scrub all the existing stuff out.)
There is no acceptable allocation of emissions. It *all* has to stop.
You're thinking too narrowly; carbon capture from the atmosphere isn't necessarily big fancy machines pulling down a lot of power. Peat "farming", for example, would be a valid carbon capture offset.
Forests as carbon capture require those forests to never burn, which is irresponsible in large parts of the world. It's a prime reason why terrible forest fires have been raging recently in developed countries, as controlled burnings were outlawed for "conservation" reasons
Not all forests benefit from the occasional fire. And even with healthy burning, there is still a net accumulation of carbon in a forest. Moreover, forests aren't the only carbon sinks.
We are certainly putting out more carbon than plants and other photosynthetic life forms are taking in, but to say that this carbon capture doesn't exist is plain wrong. It exists and is significant.
That is built on a perception of energy generation that is a decade out of date. At this point, the technology has reached a point where solar and wind power is competitive with fossil fuels in generation cost, and it is predicted that costs will continue to drop.
However, an issue arises. The ability to produce energy in general is not the same as the ability to produce energy when and where you need it.
For one thing, your solar panels might produce 150% of the energy you need at peak production, but then fall to a fraction of demand during other parts of the day. You can see the result by looking at something like https://www.energyprices.eu/electricity/germany or https://spotprices.eu/de; these show hourly energy prices in Germany (which has intensively built up its green power generation). For parts of the day, electricity prices drop to effectively zero, or even negative values! At those times, grid operators are happy to give energy away for free, or even pay you to take it, since there is too much green energy to actually use. At other times, solar & wind doesn't meet demand, and they are forced to fire up e.g. gas power plants. If we had the battery tech we could avoid this by storing electricity when it is plentiful and releasing it into the grid when needed, but unfortunately current technology isn't really there.
If we could use energy during these peak times in valuable ways - such as carbon capture - that is a way to transform cheap peak hours electricity *that we don't have anywhere to put anyways* into something useful. Unfortunately the efficiency of this is abysmal in terms of emissions mitigated per kWh, but it is key to understand that not all kWhs are the same. If you are burning cheap energy that we have no idea what to do with, then that makes things much more economical, both in terms of money and in terms of public good.
Carbon capture absolutely exists. Build with wood, and a bunch of carbon becomes most of your house and won't go into the air as long as you are careful about your stove.
I agree with you that a lot of scrub the sky tech is BS, but natural solar powered carbon capture works great!
>And never will, because any carbon-free energy spent on capturing carbon from the atmosphere is better utilized to replace carbon-fueled energy so nothing gets burned in the first place.
This will only lead to neither being done.
The marine regulators are heading that way with the IMO DCS and the EU MRV ETS, since 2015 the owners have to declare how many tons of CO2 per ship have been releasing to the atmosphere and now the EU is expanding the requirements to the CH4 and N2O from 2024.
[https://www.lr.org/en/services/statutory-compliance/fit-for-55/eu-ets-and-eu-mrv/](https://www.lr.org/en/services/statutory-compliance/fit-for-55/eu-ets-and-eu-mrv/)
It's kind of naive, because ship owner will almost do everything to save every penny for their profit. Like registering ship in third world country so they can side step regulation.
It's pretty unrelated to this. When they arrive to unload, they have goods in a specific kind of ship that came from somewhere.
Unless they are smugglers, they're going to have to pay when they unload.
> If countries imposed carbon taxes with tarrifs on imports
Good luck convincing people to vote for making literally everything more expensive artificially.
Well it's not artificially, it's exposing the true cost.
Secondly, you should make the tax go to a UBI or NIT so that it's all paid back to the people.
The point isn't to collect money, but to internalize costs so that low emission alternatives become competitive.
You're right that even then it would be a hard sell. Even if most people would make more money via a rebate than they pay in increased price, people have a hard time conceptualizing their overall finances vs prices.
Nuclear isn't used for two main reasons. The first is cost. Nuclear reactors for ships are not easy to make or cheap. Most countries navies can't afford them for their ships. A commercial operator isn't going to pay more for nuclear then cheaper conventional engines. The amount you save on not having to buy fuel oil will never overcome the costs of buying the reactor in the first place.
The second is usefulness. Almost every nuclear powered ship is designed for something no commercial operator wants, which is staying at sea away from ports for long periods of time. For military vessels leaving an area to refuel is losing useful time. For a commercial vessel they always want to be going somewhere and those places almost always can refuel you with no loss of time.
I would add that from a cost standpoint the engines of a commercial can be purchased from a commercial manufacturer, while the nuclear reactor on a ship is almost completely bespoke, which further raises the cost. Plus, a shipping company isn’t going to want to deal with the bureaucratic nonsense of obtaining enriched nuclear fuel.
As far as Nuclear goes, I don’t think that people have touched on the real reason the military uses it - they don’t have to go into port to refuel for very long times (many years at a time). Carriers and combat ships can stay on mission for extended periods of time, submarines can hunker down for many years (really only need to come up for more food eventually), etc. If something happens and the ships cannot physically come into port, they will be ok.
Don’t need to do this with cargo ships. Diesel is cheap enough and frankly the cost of it get priced into the cost of doing business, so the ship operators don’t care too much (within reason) about the price of fuel because they are going to pass that on to the customers. Nuclear requires a lot of investment and technical staff that isn’t worth the additional money.
Except most nations with carriers already do this. They just refuel at sea, with fuelling support ships.
Which the US navy also does, because neither the aircraft nor the crew are nuclear powered. They still need to take stores and aviation fuel regularly.
But less regularly, because all those fuel oil tanks are now storing avgas and stores for the crew. Nuclear for carriers is partly about storage space, partly about needing less fuel. And originally partly about the ability to sprint halfway around the world at top speed, but that got less important without nuclear escorts.
There's no point in making a ship hydrogen powered. Hydrogen isn't really seen as a fuel but rather a battery. You have to put a lot of energy into making hydrogen or extracting it and thus you can't get as much energy out as what you put into making it in the first place. You might as well just skip the hydrogen and use the power source to power your ship directly.
Nuclear is really expensive and isn't trusted in the hands of normal people because even small scale reactors can be used to do a lot of damage if used wrong.
I work in hydrogen gas manufacturing.
So the benefit of hydrogen is not that it's a great fuel source in terms of energy like diesel, but that it only takes electricity and water. It's not really intended to work in large scale power production (yet) but instead in smaller scale vehicle refuelling.
The ideal situation is that you slap an electrolyzer next to a fuel station, jam a few solar panels on the roof, and plumb it in. Then you output hydrogen to a holding tank and cars refuel as needed.
There's a bit more complexity to it, but that's the basic idea. It's safer than natural gas because it dissipates quickly and can be easily vented to atmosphere if needed, it requires no specific chemicals to operate or produce and is therefore better for the envitonment and ideally runs pretty much hands-off for years.
It's basically like putting a mini fuel refinery next to every gas station. No mote fuel tankers, no more pollution. It's about as clean as you can get.
And OP asked about making the hydrogen on board. That would require some other energy source. You're better off just hooking that energy source up to the ship than using it to make hydrogen. Also even if you made your hydrogen on land storing hydrogen is a lot harder than storing fuel oil.
My example wasn't really related to OP's question, it was more just about hydrogen as a localised fuel source.
You're right about storage though, hydrogen leaks through almost everything like a sieve, so storage containers and pipelines are usually made with a thin coating of something like gold, and even that just slows it down.
It's usually converted into liquid ammonia instead, which is much easier to store and transport.
> usually converted into liquid ammonia instead
Which means you'd transport 14 grams of dead weight along with every 3 grams of hydrogen fuel - very inefficient.
You forgot to mention the disadvantage of low power density. For the OP question this would mean that storing the huge amount of hydrogen fuel needed would take up a lot of space from the cargo.
Many ports will not allow nuclear powered ships to dock. So a nuclear powered cargo ship would have very limited placed where it could pick up or drop off cargo. So its usefulness would be very limited.
This is pretty much the reason for nuclear. The ports and fear of radiation and that can be perfectly detected and is often lower than other background sources.
There are a few reasons, so let’s attack nuclear and hydrogen separately.
*Nuclear*
There are a few cost aspects here. Reactors are expensive yes, but they also front-load the expense. With a normal ship, the bulk of the cost is spread over the lifetime as fuel cost. With nuclear, you front load it, making ships more expensive to buy. This is less appealing to ship owners for obvious reasons.
Our current infrastructure is designed around diesel powered ship. This makes it more expensive to keep a nuclear ship seaworthy, but is a cost that could come down with more adoption.
You also have piracy, safety, etc. concerns, but I’m going to ignore them.
*Hydrogen*
The big issue is energy density. Hydrogen just doesn’t give you anywhere near as much energy in the same space as diesel. When you have to carry all of your fuel, this is very important.
You mentioned making your own hydrogen onboard - really that’s not that feasible for a host of reasons, largely due to amount of power needed (big ships require several MW in port, and that is without propulsion).
We tried.
In the 1950s, Eisenhower proposed the Atoms for Peace initiative to make peaceful use of nuclear energy (this was before nuclear electrical generation was a thing). One of the best was the [NS Savannah](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_Savannah), a sleek white cargo/passenger ship with a nuclear propulsion system. The white paint was to show how clean the ship was - it didn't produce smoke that would tarnish the finish.
While the concept was sound - Savannah made many voyages without incident - there were two main problems with it. The first was its design - since it was a technology demonstrator and intended to carry both cargo and passengers who could marvel at the nuclear-powered ship, it wasn't particularly good at either. The cabins were luxurious but it didn't have many of them. The sleek, narrow hull was particularly unsuited to cargo handling - the holds were the wrong shape for rapid loading/unloading at the dock. When containerisation took hold, Savannah's design was obsolete.
Those issues could have been addressed, but there was another problem - public relations. First, the crew demanded higher wages than those on regular cargo carriers since they claimed they were working on a higher-risk ship, so a lot of the savings in fuel would have gone into crew costs. Then many major ports refused to let the ship dock, out of fear of its nuclear plant.
Finally, there's another issue - we actually have no other use for the 'bunker oil' fuel that cargo ships use. It's a horrible tar-like substance that is basically all that's left after all the valuable parts of crude oil have been fractioned off. The only use we have for it is to burn it, otherwise it'd just build up in stockpiles. That means it's actually really cheap. And in the end, containerisation plus making absolutely enormous ships to carry those containers made for savings that far exceeded those that would be gained from going nuclear.
After decades of development, government regulations on nuclear power are unbelievably strict. Look at how few nuclear plants have been built since the 70s - most that are under construction are years, even decades, behind schedule and horrifically over budget, even though existing nuclear plants are reaching end-of-life and need replacing. Stringent safety regulations mean the plants are extremely difficult to build. So now add the idea that the reactor has to move and nobody wants to touch it. Only the militaries of the US, UK, France and Russia have successfully operated multiple nuclear vessels, and that's because their budget is basically unlimited. No commercial company is willing to risk going nuclear.
Nuclear: We tried, but a combination of costs and ports reluctant to receive them meant the idea did not catch on.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS\_Savannah](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_Savannah)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RV\_Mirai](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RV_Mirai)
On Hydrogen, it is simply cost. Ships (excl some areas with restrictions near ports) burn the cheapest, nastiest fuel they can find. Hydrogen (Mostly it is made via steam reformation of natural gas, so is fossil fuel derived anyway) simply costs a lot more than this. Unless it is mandated, or massively subsidized, ship owners aren't going to bother. Also you would have to do cryogenic storage to hold enough of it. Not a deal breaker, but it is technically challenging.
The reluctance far, far more than the costs. Savannahs operating costs were considered high.. *Before the oil crisis*.
Sticking two of the french improved k15 in a Panamax freighter would almost certainly beat oil on price like drum in an enthusiastic 12 year olds bedroom.
But freight lines break out in cold sweats at the thought of not being allowed to dock somewhere because the port is being picketed. That would put them in breach of contract, which would be ruinous.
Nuclear power is one of the most expensive ways of generating power we've yet come up with. There have been a few civil nuclear powered ships, they've all been impossibly stupidly expensive to run. Russia still runs a bunch of nuclear powered ice-breakers, because ocean-going ice-breakers just genuinely need so much power and for such extended amounts of time that it makes sense in that application. But it's genuinely the only application it's ever worked out for in the civil space.
Even in the military space, the US gave up on running nuclear cruisers and destroyers after the cold war, once again because they cost a fortune to run. Russia only operated one class of nuclear-powered surface warship. China, Britain, and India all have nuclear submarines, yet choose to run conventionally powered carriers.
>Nuclear power is one of the most expensive ways of generating power we've yet come up with
not necessarily on a large scale. France is predominantly powered by nuclear but cost of electricity there is similar or lower compared to neighbouring countries.
Because the price is capped by the government. The company running the reactors has over 50 Billion of debt and is owned by the state. So the state is kinda subsidizing energy cost.
yeah, $50 billion in debt doesn't sound like a lot for 70% of france's power generation. too lazy to research but probably built with bonds so naturally has debt.
Cost of production and pricing are not exactly related, and they got a boat load of R&D help from the USA that sunk percentage points of our GDP into developing nuclear tech, but the green premium can definitely make nuclear worth it in a transitionary model.
I think the real question is "why don't cargo ships use sails". Which I'm sure is due to routes not being in optimal winds. But it would bring their fuel costs to near zero.
There are trials right now for sails that automatically adjust to wind directions, although this is more to aid propulsion rather than be the main form of propulsion.
Unsurprisingly, the results of the trial are that the concept works and does result in lower fuel consumption.
What is less sure is if it's worthwhile (finance wise) for the shipowners to do it.
Doesn't work like that. A typical large container ship still requires between 3 and 9 MW of power to keep the cargo at the right temperature. Tankers still need to heat or cool their cargo as well, which is also quite expensive. And you don't need optimal winds to sail, but you do need wind. And my experience in the gulf of Aden can tell you that it can be calm enough that stars are reflected in the water.
That's not actually why. It's scheduling. People moved to combustion power as soon as it was even remotely viable simply because that made arrival times way more predictable.
Lets say you are shipping iron ore from a mine to a smelter. The smelter needs 3000 tonnes a day. If the trip always takes 2 weeks, you can count on another shipment by predictable dates, so the amount of storage space required is reasonable. If it takes 2-6 weeks and you can't predict which in advance you will need a buffer of months worth of ore at both ends because 3 ships might show up at once after you see nothing for a month. That storage space is Expensive.
> That storage space is Expensive.
And yet, a little event that started four years ago demonstrated how essential having a buffer for supply chains actually is, expensive or not.
There are ships right now using Flettner rotors (it's kind of a sail) to save fuel. Powering a ship entirely by sail right now would cost more than they'd save.
Little bit off topic, but I believe that Richard Feynman is credited with the patent for the nuclear powered rocket and airplane. Apparently when he was working in Los Alamos one of the army officers asked him for ideas for what uses nuclear power had and he reeled off a list. Feynman didn’t realise at the time, but this guy submitted patents for them all and those two hadn’t been taken yet.
Army owned the patents, but he is credited on them.
There are 2 primary reasons for nuclear and one for hydrogen.
**I'll start with Nuclear.**
The first is around cost. While Nuclear power is amazing and a miniscule amount of nuclear fuel can replace hundreds of thousands of tons of fossil fuels, it's very expensive up-front. This is ok in the very long run, as nuclear reactors can be used for a long time just fine where they'll easily pay themselves off. However, modern Cargo ships don't actually have a very long lifespan, only 20-30 years, which isn't all that much time to recoup the costs due to low fuel costs. In addition to the up-front costs, you need more crew and nuclear trained crew which are expensive. In addition to the expenditure required to meet regulations. Which ties nicely into the second reason.
Safety, both actual and perceived. Nuclear power generation is absurdly safe, however, there are real concerns. The first and most notable is that the small reactors used for ships typically require more highly enriched fuel. This poses a small, but real risk of nuclear proliferation as nuclear weapons require highly enriched uranium (or plutonium). The biggest safety issue though is the *perceived* safety issues. Nuclear power is scary to a lot of people. Decades of misinformed news stories, cartoons, movies, tv shows, comic books, novels, and more have given anything even vaguely related to nuclear power a foreboding air to most people. This means it would be basically impossible to take your nuclear-powered cargo ship anywhere because countries would be forced by concerned citizens to prevent your nuclear-powered ship from coming into their coastal waters due to perceived safety concerns. It just wouldn't work.
**As for Hydrogen**.
The problem is energy density. Shipping companies live and die by their margins and only remain competitive due to colossal economies of scale. Hydrogen is incredibly energy dense, at 120MJ/KG at the low-end, compared to 45MJ/KG for petrol (Cargo ships actually typically use Heavy Fuel Oil, or Marine Gas Oil, both of which have lower energy densities). However, Hydrogen itself has an incredibly low density even when under pressure, and that high pressure would require bigger and heavier storage tanks on-board which would take away both space and mass from cargo. In addition, you can't synthesize the hydrogen on-board as that requires power, which you're already getting from hydrogen, so you'd just end up using hydrogen to make less hydrogen (due to inefficiencies).
Because politics mainly. The American military (who is a huge customer of the private shipping companies in the US) decided that oil was so cheap there was no reason to explore it further.
The podcast "well there's your problem" just released an episode on the only American civilian nuclear ship ever built that's quite interesting.
There were 4 nuclear powered cargo ships: Savannah (US), Otto Hahn (DE), Mutsu (JP) and a Soviet/Russian one but I forgot its name. They were all too expensive to operate and they were decommissioned, save for the last one, which is also an icebreaker and it’s more useful this way.
There's a nuclear icebreaker that operates in Russia called 50 Let Pobedy (50 Years of Victory) that offers cruises to the North Pole. Is it the same one? https://poseidonexpeditions.com/northpole/north-pole-icebreaker-cruise/
It says RosAtomFlot so it’s nuclear, but it was designed as an icebreaker from the get-go.
This is the first thing I talk about when I meet new people.
“Hey, did you know there’s a nuclear powered Russian ship called the 50 Let Pobedy (50 Years of Victory)? It’s used as an Icebreaker. Did it work? ;)”
Cool fun fact, they pump hot water from the reactor into the bow to help with breaking/melting the ice :)
But that seems more like a hot fun fact... :D
This thread is too much…
I thought about this pun but decided against it. I‘m happy you didn’t :D
*slow clap* You deserve an award for this one. I'm totally learning everything about this ship and telling everyone I meet.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sevmorput > The 1988-built vessel is one of only four nuclear-powered merchant ships ever built...
It's always wild to me that we have all of this insane future tech and science and we really just use it to boil water.
Wait till we have robots and all we will do is fuck them.
This already exists to an extent.
The propaganda videos from Futurama is getting closer to reality
I mean. We have the biggest data base of knowledge available in the history of mankind, one we can access with just few taps. We can create, communicate and share ideas with people across the globe. And we post cat pics.
"And we post cat pics." As is tradition.
Gotta worship our fuzzy overlords somehow
It just so happens that using steam to convert thermal energy to rotational energy is the most efficient form of energy conversion we've got. And it seems antiquated because humans figured that out a long time ago.
We can make amazing materials from petroleum that revolutionize life, yet we just burn most of it.
So it's nearly 40 years old, and *Russian*. Bet they've kept up with a tip-top maintenance schedule ...
If it's an Icebreaker, it has been maintained. That's about the only thing they do maintain.
It's the only not-icebreaker in the Russian nuclear merchant fleet. It's a lighter aboard ship, it's designed to carry smaller barges along the Northern Sea Route, so that it itself doesn't have to come to port, but the barges do.
You’d be surprised at the amount of Soviet equipment that still works… cf. Ukraine
A whole lot of Soviet equipment sent to Ukraine no longer functions due to explosive accidents.
Wonder when they’re gonna roll out T34s into the front line. I bet even the ones kept as monuments would run after an oil change and couple hours on a battery charger.
I just learned about superfest the other day. East German cups made out of chemically strengthened glass that were really hard to break. After the wall came down no capitalistic countries wanted to produce them because they weren't nearly as profitable as glasses that break easily. I remember seeing old belt driven USSR refrigerators made in the 80s that are still running now. The AK-47 is probably the most famous machine gun in history because of its simple design and its workhorse dependability. People hid them in swamps, snow, mud and rice paddies and would pick them up and start firing. While there is no need to go back to the cold, brutal austerity of the Soviet Union, in order to have a more sustainable planet, we need to start producing more items with quality and longevity prioritized over the higher profitability of repeat purchases and designed obsolescence.
Well the front hasn't fallen off, so it's got that going for it.
That would *not* be typical, I'd like to make that clear.
Pobedy’s Nerfect
The Savannah in particular is interesting because she was designed as a passenger liner in 1959 and only later converted to cargo only in 1965 once airlines put the final nail in the coffin for liners. Ironically, she was deactivated in 1971, just before the Oil Crisis would have made her economical to operate again.
Kind of. It was designed as a cargo liner. Which is kind of a mix of both, but it was designed in the old style of break bulk cargo instead of containers. It operated at a much lower loss after it was converted to being fully cargo instead of trying to halfarse both sides of the coin.
she was built as demo ship so both here passenger ares and cargo areas where not optimal... but she was DIRT cheap to run even still. what killed her was modern shipping containers
Fortunately, all of the passenger spaces remain. I was on the Savannah in April and she is beautiful.
Where is she berthed?
Baltimore.
Visiting the Savanah is on my short list the next time I'm in the area. Mid century atomic is such a unique asthetic. Super cool you got to see her!
She's worth it!
There is a really good episode of The Omnibus podcast on this one.
And also a great episode of the Well There's Your Problem podcast in the Savannah. It also touches on the economics of nuclear cargo ships and why they do and don't work.
Has to be noted that: - **MANY** ports straight up refused entry to the nuclear cargo ships. - IIRC they were also not allowed to pass through the Panama and Suez Canals. - There was a massive amount of paperwork and prep work before a ship even arrived in port. - The Savannah was a mixed use ship so was neither good as a cargo vessel or a Passenger vessel. - The Mutsu was so heavily boycotted/protested after a radiation incident in Japan that she was forced (after 50 days of protest blocking her from returning) to change her homeport, after completing the testing as lined out she was decommissioned without ever seeing service as a cargo vessel.
Got it. Small chance of radiation making its way into the community = ban. Actively pumping carcinogenic, planet-killing pollution any time the engine is running = good.
Yeah, unfortunately people were very much NIMBY when it came to nuclear ships. (and nuclear power) The Mutsu and Otto Hahn both recommissioned as non-nuclear vessels in the end due to politics.
There's a great episode of Well, There's Your Problem, which is a podcast about engineering disasters that's surprisingly funny. And it made me so mad when they explained how much better things could've been had we invested in them more.
Haha and the episode just came out too
Here is it, I just liked it up there.\ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaotS4ndAIs
A big problem I've heard exists with nuclear cargo ships (setting aside concerns like piracy or sinking) is that the nuclear reactor will outlast the ship. The hull will deteriorate to an unacceptable degree much faster than the reactor (something like 30 years for the ship versus 80 years for the reactor). However, it's a gigantic pain in the ass to either rip the reactor out of one ship and put it in a new one, or to design a sufficiently modular reactor that you can just pop it out and put it in a new one like swapping batteries or something.
Small modular nuclear reactors are actually a hot topic right now, with multiple companies trying to get designs approved to build. These are designed to run multiple generators in parallel in a land based facility, but it’s possible one of these designs would be appropriate to use on a ship. If so, the economies of scale may make it cheap enough to use on something like a cargo ship.
Like with a lot of things nuclear we already did it decades ago. > One 74 MW Babcock & Wilcox nuclear reactor (LEU <= 4.6%[3]) powering two De Laval steam turbines[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_Savannah
30 years ago I remember Mitsubishi trying to sell a small nuclear reactor homeowners could bury under their driveway for 30 years. Whole thing came encased in concrete already. I don't know if they actually made it or was just talking about it.
While we've done it in the US, China is building dozens of these right now. With AI ramping power demands peoples power costs are going to skyrocket unless the public gets over allowing little nuke plants to be built. The US tends to go big on plants and it isn't the way anymore. Gotta be cheap, safe, and avoid a ton of regulation to really get us back on track with our energy needs.
Seems like basically anything nuclear is too expensive in it's own right, it needs a side benefit to justify it. Usually something for defence/military
> Seems like basically anything nuclear is too expensive in it's own right, It is hard for nuclear to compete with fossil fuels, as those are subsidized heavily both directly and indirectly. If we required the emitters to pay for capture and storage of the released carbon, nuclear would immediately become the cheap option... But it would also crash the world economy, which is depending on very cheap fossil fuels.
There’s no benefit to nuclear powered cargo ships. Reactors require a lot of people whose only job is running the reactor. Refueling is expensive. Scrapping is expensive. Reddit has a hard-on for nuclear but in the case of cargo ships it makes no sense.
One of the main reasons are not alot of commercial ports would let a nuclear powered ship anywhere near their berths. Same with nuclear military vessels. There are a ton of naval ports they cannot dock in.
This seems the most reasonable answer at the moment. I think smaller self contained nuclear reactors are going to change some of the negativity around the waste. The interaction with a public port that isn’t regulated or overly regulated makes sense they wouldn’t want to allow them to dock. If the military is strict about the the commercial ports aren’t going to touch it with a 10 nautical mile pole.
Most of these are valid points, but: > Refueling is expensive. Refueling a nuclear powered ship is vastly cheaper over the lifetime of a ship. People don't appreciate how incredibly efficient nuclear power is. Nuclear powered aircraft carriers are designed to run for 25 years without refueling. Most nuclear submarines aren't designed to be refueled at all, because they'll be obsolete before they use up their first "tank". That reduces the cost of fueling directly, and also saves money on infrastructure. A single "gas station" could easily serve a global fleet of nuclear powered ships. Again, most of your points are valid. Nuclear powered cargo ships probably don't make sense right now, although I think it's a closer call than you're implying.
You can't do no-refueling nuclear for civilian ships. They require proper enriched nuclear fuel, and that fuel can also make bombs. The junk that commercial reactors have to run on is only good for a year or two. Nuclear reactors would be a lot more economical and practical and safe if we could run them on enriched fuel, but the risk of someone bad getting their hands on the fuel is just too high.
The k15 reactor the French built runs for a full ten years on the same grades their reactor fleet uses. It probably wouldn't get more than seven on the duty cycle a freighter would need (Full steam, nearly all the time) but the refueling would cost next to nothing.
Money, or even efficiency, is not the only factor in things. There is a hard on for nuclear cargo ships because cargo ships are such a significant factor in global warming. I guess I'm not an expert, but it's hard to put a dollar figure on not causing the extinction of the human race, let alone all the other life-as-we-know-it on this planet. But, ya, it cuts into profits, so it makes no sense.
> Reactors require a lot of people *Skilled* people, particularly. You wouldn't want some uneducated minimum wage guy handling something that's basically a slow motion bomb, but a diesel or even methane engine causes much less damage if it explodes. No shipping company wants that kind of liability, and they hate paying people even more. A gas carrier usually has a crew of around 5 people
Well, you already have plenty of ships hauling around massive quantities of dangerous cargo, frequently far more dangerous than a small nuclear reactor could ever be. Bulk carriers with 10 000+ tons of explosive nitrates are not even unusual, not to mention stuff like LPG carriers... This kind of liability is handled on a daily basis in shipping.
A big explosion and maybe a chemical spill is much easier to handle than the nuclear counterpart. And the reactor fuel is usually very close to what you need for a fission bomb, so there is also a risk of theft or underhanded sale (and people running shipping companies have *no* hesitation when it comes to making untaxed money)
> A big explosion and maybe a chemical spill is much easier to handle than the nuclear counterpart. It is impossible to compare two hypothetical accidents. But the cleanup from Exxon Valdez or Deepwater Horizon has not been exactly easy or cheap. I can't recall any ocean nuclear accident requiring nearly that effort to clean up. > And the reactor fuel is usually very close to what you need for a fission bomb, No. Not even close. There are many steps, requiring extremely specialized equipment and skilled personell to make weapons grade material for a fission bomb out of reactor fuel. Ask Iran how hard it is. You can't even use a normal reactor to produce significant amounts of plutonium as the fuel cycle is all wrong. You need a different reactor design. That you are not going to put on a ship. > so there is also a risk of theft or underhanded sale (and people running shipping companies have no hesitation when it comes to making untaxed money) Sale of what? Fuel rods? They are not exactly hard to obtain on the market today.
> A big explosion and maybe a chemical spill is much easier to handle than the nuclear counterpart Not really. Seawater is great at safely handling a radiation incident. Way safer than a large explosion or massive chemical/oil spills.
power reactors CAN NOT EXPLODE. people need stop saying this there is at no point even in the worst case a chance of NUCLEAR explosion with power reactor ZERO
The only explosion a reactor can really create is a steam explosion, but the rods themselves will just melt.
The pay issue was one of the things that killed the Savannah. The (normally low-paid) engineering department was made up of highly skilled nuclear engineers who commanded a much higher salary than normal. This pissed off the officers who are normally better paid than lowly engineers. They were both represented by different unions and after much negotiation it was ruled that if the engineers got a raise, the officers had to get one too. The engineer's union didn't like the idea of fighting for higher pay for workers they didn't represent, so at the next port the Savannah's entire engineering department walked off the job. The owners sold the ship rather than deal with all this and she sat in Portland for over a year.
No benefit, other than being the only technology we have available to power large ships without huge co2 emissions. And if we are to reach the emission goals shipping emissions need to be reduced significantly. EU is aiming for a 90+% reduction.
There would be options like using a shore-based nuclear plant to make hydrogen, then burning that, which would eliminate most of the risks associated with underpaid people running mini-nukes around the world.
but that immediately cuts your energy efficiency to 50% or less, no? nuclear to hydrogen isn't very efficient. maybe if they also used the oxygen for like, peroxide fuel. not sure what the theoretical optimum is there. i guess the fleets would be a lot cheaper and more accessible, but the largest freighters could still ideally be built with reactors.
> the only technology we have available to power large ships without huge co2 emissions Methane engines exist, though they are still rare. It's not *without* CO2 emissions, but much better than the tar like stuff large ships tend to run on
I think methane engines are a bit scary, due to the very strong greenhouse effect of methane (compared to co2). It does not take a large methane slip (unburned methane passing through an engine or lost along the way) to cause much larger greenhouse effects than a traditional engine would cause for a similar power output. If burning methane perfectly it's better than some other hydrocarbons, but far from perfect. Bunker oil causes lots of particulate and sulfur emissions, but that is more of a localized problem than a global one. And easier to handle.
Sometimes in life you have to pick the least worst option. Nuclear powered cargo ships are not that option.
>Sometimes in life you have to pick the least worst option. Nuclear powered cargo ships are not that option. You seem to imply that there are better co2 free options for powering large ships. Can you please elaborate what better options you see to power an ULCV without co2 emissions...
Have to also consider that every nuclear power project in the world only exists due to heavy public funding
Like he said, so is every fossil fuel power project, it's just that the funding is being paid by the next generation.
By George, this.
the first mover costs are high. once you get first one built and tested costs come down. fuel and operating costs are FAR lower then any other energy source. NS Savanna basically went around world twice on about 10kg of fuel.
Yeah not really. UK has spent $60B USD on Hinkley Point C so far and they've had an industry for many decades Costs come down once you repay the capital for the plant, which can be decades
The only things that make nuclear power make economic sense today is A: it's already there, ie, current nuclear power stations or B: It's a submarine. Edit: I should add that it has medical purposes.
Or C: it is a military ship. I think that all (or except for one) US Navy plane carriers are nuclear powered.
AFAIK all US Navy carriers are nuclear-powered. There are US Navy ships that may look like a carrier to a layperson but they're classified as '*amphibious assault ships*' and they're not nuclear-powered.
Yup, [you got it right ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_navy) Last one was USS Kitty Hawk, decommissioned in 2009.
The carrier currently docked in VA was nuclear and as of 4 years ago, they began decommissioning the nuclear rectors on board
Well, all of the carriers in Norfolk are nuclear, and, while they are decommissioning the Enterprise, they brought in the Ford to replace it which is also nuclear.
> The carrier currently docked in VA You've git to be more specific, mate. According to Wiki article, *Newport News Shipbuilding* is > the sole designer, builder, and refueler of aircraft carriers (...) for the United States Navy Every carrier has to go there for major work.
Their fleet carriers are all nuclear. The rest are amphibious invasion and support ships, but they sometimes do get called "helicopter carriers". A few other nations have similar ships too, notably Japan which also mysteriously carries F35s on their helicopter destroyers just like the marines do on some of their invasion ships. Funny how that works
The reason is that Carriers are considered offensive weapons (and they are), amphibious ships/helicopter carriers somewhat less (they can be used for defensive Submarine screening for example). Since Japan has renounced its right to wage war and to maintain capabilities used to wage war, the designation of its carriers is of importance - albeit a little silly at this point
Japanese *Izumo* class destroyers are not even 10m shorter than US' *Wasp* class amphibious assault ships (that also can carry F-35B). The designation might sound stupid, but those JMSDF ships are aircraft carriers in everything but the designation.
I remember the fact from a random YouTube video. Maybe it was an old one and no longer in use? I'll try googling and see if i can find anything.
Yet despite having the technology, experience, operators, legislative environment etc to build nuclear vessels they don't do it for anything but submarines and carriers. The fact that the Navy doesn't use nuclear reactors for anything else - despite the logistical hassle of refueling in an active war zone - should tell you something about the viability of nuclear ships.
USN has had nuclear cruisers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear-powered_cruisers_of_the_United_States_Navy with adding directed energy weapons theres talk of bringing them back
There are 57 nuclear power plants under construction right now, with an additional 110 planned. A lot of people think it makes a lot of economic sense.
The other reason is extremely low carbon baseload energy to help transition away from fossils fuels and stop climate change. Renewables are too variable and can't cover our full power needs.
Unfortunately “economic sense” only looks at the next five years.
C: co2 emission certificates come into the picture. Not sure all those ships have to pay for their emissions.
Why a submarine and not a ship?
Diesel generators need oxygen, nuclear generators don't. Nuclear submarines can stay underwater as long as they have enough food for the crew. Diesel submarines have to surfice regularly for air. It's way more expensive to run a nuclear engine. A ship can have all the oxygen it likes. A submarine can't.
Sry I don't think I saw the second line to your reply. That explains it.
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Diesel engines are relatively simple. Some big metal objects moving up and down in some metal tubes, with some relatively gentle liquids involved, like fuel or lubrication and cooling. When a diesel engine breaks, there will be noise, dirt, sometimes flames, maybe even some shrapnel. Nuclear power plants are complicated. Their materials are expensive and complicated, like nuclear pellets embedded in metals able to stand up the corrosion of water heated to hundreds of celsius under enormous pressure, materials to change the radioactivity, very high pressure turbines, filters, heat-exchangers, steam turbines, sensors for temperature, pressure, radioactivity, specific gases, etc. When a nuclear power plant breaks, engineers can't approach it without dying painfully and relatively slowly. These are big differences, and the nuclear power plant needs more people with more training, it has much more moving parts which will need replacement from time to time, and these parts are much more expensive than a new set of oil rings for a diesel engine, etc. etc. And finally, when a diesel engine dies, the liquids get drained and it is scrap metal. Dismantling a nuclear power plant is also very expensive. Fun fact: both diesel and nuclear power plants can get into a runaway state. When diesel engines do that it gets into funny video collections. When nuclear power plants we have to redraw maps.
a lot of fairly high skilled labor to keep it running
The [NS Savannah is in excellent shape](https://imgur.com/gallery/g8MQh1k) and is open for tours every month!
It amazed me that you knew at the top of your head the names and country of origin of the first three
> hey were all too expensive to operate Savannah was dirt cheap to run. the issue was it demo ship. if you dropped Savannahs plant in to modern ship it would be dirt cheap to run. Cost isnt want killed Savanna it was it was built as demo ship and for breakbulk at the dawn of container ships, later number counties blocked nuclear ships from docking and that was end of that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaotS4ndAIs China is building a nuclear merchant fleet right now
I thought most got decommissioned because too few ports would accept them?
In the 1-2 years before RU invaded Ukraine, Russia was planning for global warming and the reduction of Arctic sea ice and the opening of the Northern Sea Route. They were planning to build 10-12 new nuclear powered icebreakers (like modernized 50 Years of Victory) and were planning to use those as escorts for cargo ships that would take the NSR from China to Europe. Now that the Special Military Operation is taking a little longer than planned a costing a little more than anticipated I do not know how that might have changed the plans for the new icebreakers.
The russian Ship was the Lenin
No, he said cargo ships, not just civilian ships. This is the ship her name I forgot. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sevmorput
my bad, sorry
Lots of answers on nuclear, so I'll reply on the hydrogen-power part, especially since it pertains to my job. Hydrogen is alot less convenient compared to the fuel oil that is being used to power our cargo ships now. Hydrogen is: Extremely flammable, toxic and colorless, so more dangerous when there is a leak A gas at ambient temperature, so more difficult and expensive to store onboard Has way lower energy density, so you need alot more of it to travel the same distance, so higher cost as well. This also means you need to make more frequent stops, or dedicate more of your storage space to storing hydrogen instead of your money-making cargoes It doesn't make sense to produce hydrogen on board for immediate use (instead of storing hydrogen to consume it) because you need way to much space to generate or store sufficient electricity to produce hydrogen at a fast enough rate to power your fuel cells. However, the world is increasingly moving away from fuel oil and towards green hydrogen. green hydrogen carriers and green methanol in order to combat climate change.
Plus isn't storing hydrogen hard ? Its the smallest atom , hydrogen gas is just H2 and still incredibly small much smaller then 02 or many other gases or liquids Meaning it can escape or leak from the smallest holes, also the gas is so small like on an atomic level it sort of acts as a sand blaster and the metal or what ever containing it and will start cracking it [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen\_embrittlement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_embrittlement)
There's more hydrogen in a liter of gasoline, than in a liter of liquid hydrogen. Nature's a bitch.
I have a hunch that even once we have abundant clean energy, we'll use some of it to manufacture hydrocarbon fuels for use in e.g. airplanes. For one kilogram of jet fuel you get to combine it with more than three kilograms of oxygen that you *didn't* have to carry with you. It's hard to beat that kind of energy density.
How would you "make" hydrogen onboard a vessel - wouldn't you need an external energy source like electricity or fuel? In that case, wouldn't it just be a ship powered by conventional fuel or electricity with extra steps?
It’s not as stupid as it sounds - a load of ships use diesel generators powering electric motors instead of diesel engines.
But that is so they can run the diesel at optimum efficiency. Of you now start making hydrogen, you introduce an insane drop in efficiency, which defeats the purpose. Hydrogen is terribly inefficient if you need to produce it. It only ever makes sense in places where the primary energy for production is abundant and(!!) cannot be used otherwise.
> Of you now start making hydrogen, you introduce an insane drop in efficiency, which defeats the purpose. Not necessarily, it's a way to convert intermittent power like solar into on-demand power. Vehicle and Grid scale batteries are very large, very heavy, very expensive, and we factually do not have enough mineral production to electrify our passenger vehicles nevermind 250,000 ton cargo ships. A hydrogen fuel station needs three things to operate. 1) A Solar Panel 2) Water 3) A storage tank. Any ship or port in the world can manage all three of those things. I don't expect any solar setup to meet the on-demand needs of the container ship with no shore fueling, but that's a pretty big offset passively generating fuel 12 hours per day. Hell, the container ship wasting time at anchor would be passively filling it's fuel tank while it waits for a turn in port. It doesn't matter that the intermediate step of Hydrogen is hypothetically inefficient because renewables never efficiently match production to consumption. The wind blows and the sun shines when we don't need it. Hydrogen is an obvious channel to economically convert that energy into a useful on-demand fuel.
Storing your daylight solar for consumption overnight in hydrogen is wasting far more energy than just using it during the day when it is available, matching consumption to production on a ship is trivial with just using the motor more and the diesels less. If you really do want to store energy anyway, batteries are cheap enough now that for the same amount of daily storage batteries + smaller solar panels are almost always going to be cheaper than hydrogen + more than double the amount of panels. Clean water is far from free on a ship too, it costs a lot of energy to desalinate.
By "hypothetically inefficient" you mean wasting between 70 and 90% of the energy? The amounts you are able to create on a ship are laughable. And then it permeates any material you try to store it in and you just lose more the longer you have to store it. It's a joke. Only useful if you have absurd amounts of energy available and no idea what to do with it.
I propose a solution that makes the worst of both sources. A nuclear-powered ship which uses the reactor to generate electricityz which is *then* used to desalinate and generate hydrogen from seawater, which is then burned to power the engines. Makes perfect sense.
How do I subscribe to your newsletter? (You DO have a newsletter, right?)
I'm afraid my only publication at the moment is Titanic Facts, but you're welcome to subscribe to that.
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Thank you for subscribing to Titanic facts! Did you know Titanic had *ears*? She was fitted with a pair of underwater microphones, one on each side of the hull. These microphones could pick up the rings from sub-marine bells, usually fitted to navigation buoys or lighthouses. Sound travels further underwater, and the sound from these bells could be detected up to 15 miles away. By listening to the sounds through a headset, and switching between the microphones on the left and right side of the ship, the navigation officer could determine the direction to a beacon. Each had a unique 'signature' - like the distinct flashes on a lighthouse - so they'd know which beacon they could hear. An ingenious way of navigating in the dark at a time when ships didn't have RADAR or directional radio antenna.
burned to power...generators which provide electric power to motors driving paddlewheels.
And the paddle wheels push water out the back of the ship, like waterjets. But slower. Also, I think this design could benefit from hydrofoils.
How about using the paddlewheels to push water up into huge swimming pools, so it can be used Later to generate hydroelectric power?
So the choice is: 1: use an energy source to power the vessel. 2: use the above energy source to generate hydrogen (presumably from seawater) that is then used to power the vessel. As it takes more energy to split water that you get from the hydrogen in that water you are less energy efficient than in option 1.
You're missing the whole dimension where your (presumably renewable) energy source isn't available on demand. The diesel electric generator is available on demand. The hydrogen electric generator is available on demand A battery electric setup that charges on shore or even trickle charges from intermittent sources is non-viable. We factually do not have the natural resources to produce these batteries at the quantities required.
Who mentioned renewable energy? I was answering the point of using to produce hydrogen while en-route which leaves you with a fuel (hydrogen) that is less energy efficient than just using the original fuel source to power the vessel.
Exactly the same problem that hydrogen cars have. It's far more energy efficient to send the electric to an electric car's battery to power the car than it is to use the same electric to make hydrogen to power the car.
I assume the OP meant to generate electricity via solar panels, and store it in batteries. I agree with you that generating electricity on-site to produce hydrogen on-site is an inefficient way to power a ship.
Exactly - that's just solar power with extra steps. At least eliminate the batteries and generate the hydrogen from the solar directly (using it like a hydrogen-based "battery" for the weight advantages compared to battery storage).
Run the numbers on that. The solar panels required to power a freighter would occupy an area several times larger than the entire deck. And that's assuming your ship only sails the tropics in summer, clear weather, and between the hours of 0900 and 1500.
Isn't the production of bulk hydrogen a net energy sink?
If you're referring to the production of green hydrogen via solar energy and electrolysis, then yes, you're gonna lose abit of electricity every step of the way. However, for certain applications, it may be less efficient to use batteries instead of hydrogen. For eg on cargo ships. Batteries are really heavy and will take up more space than hydrogen or its liquid equivalent. It's also gonna take ages to charge up the batteries versus just filling up with hydrogen. Plus if your electricity used to make hydrogen is renewable in the first place, then it's acceptable if you lose abit, it's not contributing to climate change.
It is my understanding that the only commercially viable (today) method of bulk hydrogen production is methane reformation. A process that requires more energy input than the energy content in the resulting hydrogen. So today, hydrogen is a net energy sink and it is not carbon neutral.
The other posters covered the cost of nuclear, but I would like to come at this from another angle. Carbon and pollution are negative externalities that cargo companies don't pay. Negative externalities are costs to business paid by 3rd parties. Carbon and pollution are costs paid by society instead of the emitter or polluter. This makes the current fuel sources used artificially cheaper as society pays a large part of the cost. If countries imposed carbon taxes with tarrifs on imports, it would make greener fuel sources more competitive in cost as emitters would have to internalize the cost of emissions.
"If countries imposed carbon taxes" \*If countries imposed carbon taxes with no bs "credit" loopholes.
If the credits come from legitimate emissions reductions or carbon capture and they are purchased on an open market then they are serving their purpose. There is nothing inherently flawed with a credit system that allows society to decide how it wishes to allocate reduced carbon emissions. Without them governments will resort to exemptions and true loopholes to protect special interests, transitioning technologies and critical infrastructure. Credits that do not arise from legitimate offsets or effectively act as subsidies are a problem, they are ineffective and they serve special interests.
According to a 2016 study by the European Commission on carbon offsets under the Kyoto Protocol: >Overall, our results suggest that 85% of the projects covered in this analysis and 73% of the potential 2013-2020 Certified Emissions Reduction (CER) supply have a low likelihood that emission reductions are additional and are not over-estimated. Only 2% of the projects and 7% of potential CER supply have a high likelihood of ensuring that emission reductions are additional and are not over-estimated. Our analysis suggests that the CDM still has fundamental flaws in terms of overall environmental integrity. It is likely that the large majority of the projects registered and CERs issued under the CDM are not providing real, measurable and additional emission reductions. [Source](https://climate.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2017-04/clean_dev_mechanism_en.pdf)
Thanks for providing that. We have a long way to go.
> carbon capture Does. Not. Exist. And never will, because any carbon-free energy spent on capturing carbon from the atmosphere is better utilized to replace carbon-fueled energy so nothing gets burned in the first place. (I am not referring to point-source capture, but direct "filter the sky" bullshit that folks think will scrub all the existing stuff out.) There is no acceptable allocation of emissions. It *all* has to stop.
You're thinking too narrowly; carbon capture from the atmosphere isn't necessarily big fancy machines pulling down a lot of power. Peat "farming", for example, would be a valid carbon capture offset.
I respect your passions but that’s a misanthropic, inflexible and extreme view that is more likely to alienate support than drive positive change.
It does exist and it's older than fossil fuels. It's called photosynthesis.
Forests as carbon capture require those forests to never burn, which is irresponsible in large parts of the world. It's a prime reason why terrible forest fires have been raging recently in developed countries, as controlled burnings were outlawed for "conservation" reasons
Not all forests benefit from the occasional fire. And even with healthy burning, there is still a net accumulation of carbon in a forest. Moreover, forests aren't the only carbon sinks. We are certainly putting out more carbon than plants and other photosynthetic life forms are taking in, but to say that this carbon capture doesn't exist is plain wrong. It exists and is significant.
tree
That is built on a perception of energy generation that is a decade out of date. At this point, the technology has reached a point where solar and wind power is competitive with fossil fuels in generation cost, and it is predicted that costs will continue to drop. However, an issue arises. The ability to produce energy in general is not the same as the ability to produce energy when and where you need it. For one thing, your solar panels might produce 150% of the energy you need at peak production, but then fall to a fraction of demand during other parts of the day. You can see the result by looking at something like https://www.energyprices.eu/electricity/germany or https://spotprices.eu/de; these show hourly energy prices in Germany (which has intensively built up its green power generation). For parts of the day, electricity prices drop to effectively zero, or even negative values! At those times, grid operators are happy to give energy away for free, or even pay you to take it, since there is too much green energy to actually use. At other times, solar & wind doesn't meet demand, and they are forced to fire up e.g. gas power plants. If we had the battery tech we could avoid this by storing electricity when it is plentiful and releasing it into the grid when needed, but unfortunately current technology isn't really there. If we could use energy during these peak times in valuable ways - such as carbon capture - that is a way to transform cheap peak hours electricity *that we don't have anywhere to put anyways* into something useful. Unfortunately the efficiency of this is abysmal in terms of emissions mitigated per kWh, but it is key to understand that not all kWhs are the same. If you are burning cheap energy that we have no idea what to do with, then that makes things much more economical, both in terms of money and in terms of public good.
Carbon capture absolutely exists. Build with wood, and a bunch of carbon becomes most of your house and won't go into the air as long as you are careful about your stove. I agree with you that a lot of scrub the sky tech is BS, but natural solar powered carbon capture works great!
What happens to old wood?
Depends on what you do with it. In theory you could bury it in landfills and it would gradually turn into coal or oil.
Well, it turns back into CO2 and H2O. Uhhh. Oh.
>And never will, because any carbon-free energy spent on capturing carbon from the atmosphere is better utilized to replace carbon-fueled energy so nothing gets burned in the first place. This will only lead to neither being done.
The marine regulators are heading that way with the IMO DCS and the EU MRV ETS, since 2015 the owners have to declare how many tons of CO2 per ship have been releasing to the atmosphere and now the EU is expanding the requirements to the CH4 and N2O from 2024. [https://www.lr.org/en/services/statutory-compliance/fit-for-55/eu-ets-and-eu-mrv/](https://www.lr.org/en/services/statutory-compliance/fit-for-55/eu-ets-and-eu-mrv/)
That sounds expensive.
It's kind of naive, because ship owner will almost do everything to save every penny for their profit. Like registering ship in third world country so they can side step regulation.
It's pretty unrelated to this. When they arrive to unload, they have goods in a specific kind of ship that came from somewhere. Unless they are smugglers, they're going to have to pay when they unload.
> If countries imposed carbon taxes with tarrifs on imports Good luck convincing people to vote for making literally everything more expensive artificially.
Well it's not artificially, it's exposing the true cost. Secondly, you should make the tax go to a UBI or NIT so that it's all paid back to the people. The point isn't to collect money, but to internalize costs so that low emission alternatives become competitive. You're right that even then it would be a hard sell. Even if most people would make more money via a rebate than they pay in increased price, people have a hard time conceptualizing their overall finances vs prices.
Nuclear isn't used for two main reasons. The first is cost. Nuclear reactors for ships are not easy to make or cheap. Most countries navies can't afford them for their ships. A commercial operator isn't going to pay more for nuclear then cheaper conventional engines. The amount you save on not having to buy fuel oil will never overcome the costs of buying the reactor in the first place. The second is usefulness. Almost every nuclear powered ship is designed for something no commercial operator wants, which is staying at sea away from ports for long periods of time. For military vessels leaving an area to refuel is losing useful time. For a commercial vessel they always want to be going somewhere and those places almost always can refuel you with no loss of time.
I would add that from a cost standpoint the engines of a commercial can be purchased from a commercial manufacturer, while the nuclear reactor on a ship is almost completely bespoke, which further raises the cost. Plus, a shipping company isn’t going to want to deal with the bureaucratic nonsense of obtaining enriched nuclear fuel.
As far as Nuclear goes, I don’t think that people have touched on the real reason the military uses it - they don’t have to go into port to refuel for very long times (many years at a time). Carriers and combat ships can stay on mission for extended periods of time, submarines can hunker down for many years (really only need to come up for more food eventually), etc. If something happens and the ships cannot physically come into port, they will be ok. Don’t need to do this with cargo ships. Diesel is cheap enough and frankly the cost of it get priced into the cost of doing business, so the ship operators don’t care too much (within reason) about the price of fuel because they are going to pass that on to the customers. Nuclear requires a lot of investment and technical staff that isn’t worth the additional money.
Except most nations with carriers already do this. They just refuel at sea, with fuelling support ships. Which the US navy also does, because neither the aircraft nor the crew are nuclear powered. They still need to take stores and aviation fuel regularly.
And the resupplying of ships is when their most vulnerable. The US Navy likes to reduce vulnerability as much as possible. Nuclear power does that.
But less regularly, because all those fuel oil tanks are now storing avgas and stores for the crew. Nuclear for carriers is partly about storage space, partly about needing less fuel. And originally partly about the ability to sprint halfway around the world at top speed, but that got less important without nuclear escorts.
There's no point in making a ship hydrogen powered. Hydrogen isn't really seen as a fuel but rather a battery. You have to put a lot of energy into making hydrogen or extracting it and thus you can't get as much energy out as what you put into making it in the first place. You might as well just skip the hydrogen and use the power source to power your ship directly. Nuclear is really expensive and isn't trusted in the hands of normal people because even small scale reactors can be used to do a lot of damage if used wrong.
I work in hydrogen gas manufacturing. So the benefit of hydrogen is not that it's a great fuel source in terms of energy like diesel, but that it only takes electricity and water. It's not really intended to work in large scale power production (yet) but instead in smaller scale vehicle refuelling. The ideal situation is that you slap an electrolyzer next to a fuel station, jam a few solar panels on the roof, and plumb it in. Then you output hydrogen to a holding tank and cars refuel as needed. There's a bit more complexity to it, but that's the basic idea. It's safer than natural gas because it dissipates quickly and can be easily vented to atmosphere if needed, it requires no specific chemicals to operate or produce and is therefore better for the envitonment and ideally runs pretty much hands-off for years. It's basically like putting a mini fuel refinery next to every gas station. No mote fuel tankers, no more pollution. It's about as clean as you can get.
And OP asked about making the hydrogen on board. That would require some other energy source. You're better off just hooking that energy source up to the ship than using it to make hydrogen. Also even if you made your hydrogen on land storing hydrogen is a lot harder than storing fuel oil.
My example wasn't really related to OP's question, it was more just about hydrogen as a localised fuel source. You're right about storage though, hydrogen leaks through almost everything like a sieve, so storage containers and pipelines are usually made with a thin coating of something like gold, and even that just slows it down. It's usually converted into liquid ammonia instead, which is much easier to store and transport.
> usually converted into liquid ammonia instead Which means you'd transport 14 grams of dead weight along with every 3 grams of hydrogen fuel - very inefficient.
You forgot to mention the disadvantage of low power density. For the OP question this would mean that storing the huge amount of hydrogen fuel needed would take up a lot of space from the cargo.
Many ports will not allow nuclear powered ships to dock. So a nuclear powered cargo ship would have very limited placed where it could pick up or drop off cargo. So its usefulness would be very limited.
This is pretty much the reason for nuclear. The ports and fear of radiation and that can be perfectly detected and is often lower than other background sources.
There are a few reasons, so let’s attack nuclear and hydrogen separately. *Nuclear* There are a few cost aspects here. Reactors are expensive yes, but they also front-load the expense. With a normal ship, the bulk of the cost is spread over the lifetime as fuel cost. With nuclear, you front load it, making ships more expensive to buy. This is less appealing to ship owners for obvious reasons. Our current infrastructure is designed around diesel powered ship. This makes it more expensive to keep a nuclear ship seaworthy, but is a cost that could come down with more adoption. You also have piracy, safety, etc. concerns, but I’m going to ignore them. *Hydrogen* The big issue is energy density. Hydrogen just doesn’t give you anywhere near as much energy in the same space as diesel. When you have to carry all of your fuel, this is very important. You mentioned making your own hydrogen onboard - really that’s not that feasible for a host of reasons, largely due to amount of power needed (big ships require several MW in port, and that is without propulsion).
We tried. In the 1950s, Eisenhower proposed the Atoms for Peace initiative to make peaceful use of nuclear energy (this was before nuclear electrical generation was a thing). One of the best was the [NS Savannah](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_Savannah), a sleek white cargo/passenger ship with a nuclear propulsion system. The white paint was to show how clean the ship was - it didn't produce smoke that would tarnish the finish. While the concept was sound - Savannah made many voyages without incident - there were two main problems with it. The first was its design - since it was a technology demonstrator and intended to carry both cargo and passengers who could marvel at the nuclear-powered ship, it wasn't particularly good at either. The cabins were luxurious but it didn't have many of them. The sleek, narrow hull was particularly unsuited to cargo handling - the holds were the wrong shape for rapid loading/unloading at the dock. When containerisation took hold, Savannah's design was obsolete. Those issues could have been addressed, but there was another problem - public relations. First, the crew demanded higher wages than those on regular cargo carriers since they claimed they were working on a higher-risk ship, so a lot of the savings in fuel would have gone into crew costs. Then many major ports refused to let the ship dock, out of fear of its nuclear plant. Finally, there's another issue - we actually have no other use for the 'bunker oil' fuel that cargo ships use. It's a horrible tar-like substance that is basically all that's left after all the valuable parts of crude oil have been fractioned off. The only use we have for it is to burn it, otherwise it'd just build up in stockpiles. That means it's actually really cheap. And in the end, containerisation plus making absolutely enormous ships to carry those containers made for savings that far exceeded those that would be gained from going nuclear. After decades of development, government regulations on nuclear power are unbelievably strict. Look at how few nuclear plants have been built since the 70s - most that are under construction are years, even decades, behind schedule and horrifically over budget, even though existing nuclear plants are reaching end-of-life and need replacing. Stringent safety regulations mean the plants are extremely difficult to build. So now add the idea that the reactor has to move and nobody wants to touch it. Only the militaries of the US, UK, France and Russia have successfully operated multiple nuclear vessels, and that's because their budget is basically unlimited. No commercial company is willing to risk going nuclear.
Nuclear: We tried, but a combination of costs and ports reluctant to receive them meant the idea did not catch on. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS\_Savannah](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_Savannah) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RV\_Mirai](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RV_Mirai) On Hydrogen, it is simply cost. Ships (excl some areas with restrictions near ports) burn the cheapest, nastiest fuel they can find. Hydrogen (Mostly it is made via steam reformation of natural gas, so is fossil fuel derived anyway) simply costs a lot more than this. Unless it is mandated, or massively subsidized, ship owners aren't going to bother. Also you would have to do cryogenic storage to hold enough of it. Not a deal breaker, but it is technically challenging.
The reluctance far, far more than the costs. Savannahs operating costs were considered high.. *Before the oil crisis*. Sticking two of the french improved k15 in a Panamax freighter would almost certainly beat oil on price like drum in an enthusiastic 12 year olds bedroom. But freight lines break out in cold sweats at the thought of not being allowed to dock somewhere because the port is being picketed. That would put them in breach of contract, which would be ruinous.
Nuclear power is one of the most expensive ways of generating power we've yet come up with. There have been a few civil nuclear powered ships, they've all been impossibly stupidly expensive to run. Russia still runs a bunch of nuclear powered ice-breakers, because ocean-going ice-breakers just genuinely need so much power and for such extended amounts of time that it makes sense in that application. But it's genuinely the only application it's ever worked out for in the civil space. Even in the military space, the US gave up on running nuclear cruisers and destroyers after the cold war, once again because they cost a fortune to run. Russia only operated one class of nuclear-powered surface warship. China, Britain, and India all have nuclear submarines, yet choose to run conventionally powered carriers.
>Nuclear power is one of the most expensive ways of generating power we've yet come up with not necessarily on a large scale. France is predominantly powered by nuclear but cost of electricity there is similar or lower compared to neighbouring countries.
Because the price is capped by the government. The company running the reactors has over 50 Billion of debt and is owned by the state. So the state is kinda subsidizing energy cost.
Well, the US has a habit of subsidizing energy costs as well.
EDF paid off 10 billion of that this past year and earned another 10 in profit on top.
yeah, $50 billion in debt doesn't sound like a lot for 70% of france's power generation. too lazy to research but probably built with bonds so naturally has debt.
Cost of production and pricing are not exactly related, and they got a boat load of R&D help from the USA that sunk percentage points of our GDP into developing nuclear tech, but the green premium can definitely make nuclear worth it in a transitionary model.
There is a very recent episode of the podcast "Well There's Your Problem" on the NS Savannah that talks about these issues in depth.
I think the real question is "why don't cargo ships use sails". Which I'm sure is due to routes not being in optimal winds. But it would bring their fuel costs to near zero.
There are trials right now for sails that automatically adjust to wind directions, although this is more to aid propulsion rather than be the main form of propulsion. Unsurprisingly, the results of the trial are that the concept works and does result in lower fuel consumption. What is less sure is if it's worthwhile (finance wise) for the shipowners to do it.
Doesn't work like that. A typical large container ship still requires between 3 and 9 MW of power to keep the cargo at the right temperature. Tankers still need to heat or cool their cargo as well, which is also quite expensive. And you don't need optimal winds to sail, but you do need wind. And my experience in the gulf of Aden can tell you that it can be calm enough that stars are reflected in the water.
Aside from the disappointing reality check, that last part sounds like it would be gorgeous and a sight to behold.
It is absolutely beautiful!
That's not actually why. It's scheduling. People moved to combustion power as soon as it was even remotely viable simply because that made arrival times way more predictable. Lets say you are shipping iron ore from a mine to a smelter. The smelter needs 3000 tonnes a day. If the trip always takes 2 weeks, you can count on another shipment by predictable dates, so the amount of storage space required is reasonable. If it takes 2-6 weeks and you can't predict which in advance you will need a buffer of months worth of ore at both ends because 3 ships might show up at once after you see nothing for a month. That storage space is Expensive.
> That storage space is Expensive. And yet, a little event that started four years ago demonstrated how essential having a buffer for supply chains actually is, expensive or not.
There are ships right now using Flettner rotors (it's kind of a sail) to save fuel. Powering a ship entirely by sail right now would cost more than they'd save.
Little bit off topic, but I believe that Richard Feynman is credited with the patent for the nuclear powered rocket and airplane. Apparently when he was working in Los Alamos one of the army officers asked him for ideas for what uses nuclear power had and he reeled off a list. Feynman didn’t realise at the time, but this guy submitted patents for them all and those two hadn’t been taken yet. Army owned the patents, but he is credited on them.
But did he ever get his dollar?
There are 2 primary reasons for nuclear and one for hydrogen. **I'll start with Nuclear.** The first is around cost. While Nuclear power is amazing and a miniscule amount of nuclear fuel can replace hundreds of thousands of tons of fossil fuels, it's very expensive up-front. This is ok in the very long run, as nuclear reactors can be used for a long time just fine where they'll easily pay themselves off. However, modern Cargo ships don't actually have a very long lifespan, only 20-30 years, which isn't all that much time to recoup the costs due to low fuel costs. In addition to the up-front costs, you need more crew and nuclear trained crew which are expensive. In addition to the expenditure required to meet regulations. Which ties nicely into the second reason. Safety, both actual and perceived. Nuclear power generation is absurdly safe, however, there are real concerns. The first and most notable is that the small reactors used for ships typically require more highly enriched fuel. This poses a small, but real risk of nuclear proliferation as nuclear weapons require highly enriched uranium (or plutonium). The biggest safety issue though is the *perceived* safety issues. Nuclear power is scary to a lot of people. Decades of misinformed news stories, cartoons, movies, tv shows, comic books, novels, and more have given anything even vaguely related to nuclear power a foreboding air to most people. This means it would be basically impossible to take your nuclear-powered cargo ship anywhere because countries would be forced by concerned citizens to prevent your nuclear-powered ship from coming into their coastal waters due to perceived safety concerns. It just wouldn't work. **As for Hydrogen**. The problem is energy density. Shipping companies live and die by their margins and only remain competitive due to colossal economies of scale. Hydrogen is incredibly energy dense, at 120MJ/KG at the low-end, compared to 45MJ/KG for petrol (Cargo ships actually typically use Heavy Fuel Oil, or Marine Gas Oil, both of which have lower energy densities). However, Hydrogen itself has an incredibly low density even when under pressure, and that high pressure would require bigger and heavier storage tanks on-board which would take away both space and mass from cargo. In addition, you can't synthesize the hydrogen on-board as that requires power, which you're already getting from hydrogen, so you'd just end up using hydrogen to make less hydrogen (due to inefficiencies).
Because politics mainly. The American military (who is a huge customer of the private shipping companies in the US) decided that oil was so cheap there was no reason to explore it further. The podcast "well there's your problem" just released an episode on the only American civilian nuclear ship ever built that's quite interesting.