And the economic case for using cheap uranium and thorium rather than expensive diesel and not needing the Suez canal - with attendant security issues
Mind you at the proposed 30 knots they could outrun pirates anyway !
Interesting. It's only a matter of time before monster vessels such as those are mostly nuclear, I'm sure.
Michael
I cannot see any alternative myself. Oil wont last forever, and the far lower cost of fissile material which in this solution is amortised into the total ship cost anyway, makes it cost competitive, as does the fact that the same ship travelling at twice the speed will carry twice as much cargo in its service life, or in the period of repayment of the interest on the capital.
The reason steam blew sail out of the water was the reliability of even a 7 knot tramp steamer compared with the unreliability of wind. And the massive reduction in crew needed.
A clipper ship *could* do 25 knots. But mostly it didnt. Its the same story as the jet airliner. going faster is more passenger miles per year and jet engines needed less servicing
It's inevitable. And it's not as though there's anything new about nuclear-powered ships - the US navy has had them for decades, both surface and sub-sea vessels; we also have the latter. The Savannah cargo vessel was built in 1959, and the Russians have icebreakers.
Greenpeace will try and stop them using diesel powered rubber dinghies probably
Yes, except that while MSR has been around since the beginning, it has never got past the "prototype" stage.
OTOH the Russians have pretty well established PWRs for their icebreakers. I'm not sure how similar these are to the ones in their subs. And now they are talking about using the icebreaker ones for on-land SMRs in remote regions.
OK we can all be sniffy about Russian engineering and safety standards, but I am still inclined to think there is a lot to be said for sticking with established and proven technology, rather than spinning every new project with the line "This is New! This will be Better!".
In the end I don't think it matters much which technology you chose. You can see why EBR was a dubious decision. A politically driven merger between French PWR and German Konvoi, both derived from the original Westinghouse PWR concept, and as far as basic engineering goes not all that different. It's a natural thing for engineers / designers to want to change / improve stuff.
Kathryn Porter is fairly convinced that ABWR is the way to go, based on general experience around the world. (She is the first to say she is not a nuclear engineer, but she is a sound judge of politics and economics IMHO).
But yes, I am sure nuclear is the way to go for shipping, and who knows, it might even help with public acceptance in the long term. While there have been serious submarine accidents, there have been a lot of them around, for a long time, but people don't associate them with power generation. Even though the big American aircraft carriers are, essentially, a small town with a couple of nuclear reactors inside them.
Anything you put in a ship is a good candidate for an SMR, either moored at a suitable jetty or inland..
I sort of agree, but the article does make a better case for MSR than mots. particularly in the 'what happens when it sinks' case
EPR?
A politically driven merger
I would have said yes, too, but for the fact that Rolls Royce and friends are adapting their submarine reactors for passively cooled small modulars that can be production lined. I think in the end production lines are where its at: its not technology - to sidestep the fear factor we need passively cooled reactors under SCRAM conditions, and that means smaller ones. The ABWRs are almost too crude, although id be happy with ANY reactor that could be bu8lt in te next 5 years
Yes. The not so stupid thing is that a nuclear ship moored at Felixstowe could run the whole town...
It is an interesting idea, but I'm not convinced by the comments in the "How do you manage the public's concern of a nuclear incident at sea?" section. The wording at the end is very optimistic of what could happen during an accident: "There's no gas pressure in an MSR and therefore no way for radiotoxins to be expelled into the environment. The MSR fuel would simply cool until it's a solid rock, and that solid rock should be entombed inside the reactor vessel. If the ship sinks, the MSR will remain in its box. A ship may be lost at sea and may sink to 8000 metres on the ocean floor, but even then, it would not pollute the environment."
I wonder if he is really aware of the effect of pressure at those sort of depths, especially on something which might be partially damaged, and so experience uneven pressurisation. Also, by its very presence it is polluting the environment, whether it leaks radioactivity or anything else, or not. How is he so sure that the MSR would "remain in its box"? If even slightly damaged, currents (perhaps convection currents if there was any residual heat), would lead to a continuous flow of water and leakage of salts, even if they were pretty insoluble in water.
I wonder if there is any possibility of something like a sea-going road train? There would be a strongly safety-orientated extremely powerful ship acting as a tractor unit, towing several container ship "trailers" (without engines). At ports, these would be manipulated by conventional tugs to allow loading and unloading.
I think it was Helen Sharman who commented on the differences between US and Soviet space technology. I paraphrase as I can't recall the exact quote, but essentially she liked the fact that on Mir, you flip a switch and can hear a valve operate, whereas on the US craft you touch a screen and hear a beep.
Large nuke ships seem a good idea, but I fear we'll just end up buying more junk, quicker and cheaper.
Not if they started using the UK-built RIBs that are the main-stay of drug smugglers from North Africa to Spain!
Correct: fingers!
I'd love to see RR and friends succeeding too. Their history with jet engines is a great precedent, and of course apart from submarine PWRs they have been dabbling in C&I etc for civil plant for years. Maybe, given the Covid/Green threat to the UK aviation industry, the UK Government will grow the balls to enable investment in some actual plant.
I've never looked closely at ABWR technology, because that is the one thing that has never been a serious candidate in the UK. But the statistics look reasonable.
Common on the large European rivers and canals. Do you think there might be a reason why it is not done at sea?
A cynical colleague used to say "improvement means deterioration".
Many years ago, circa 1960, there was a Russian exhibition in London that we were taken to see from school. They had one of the early space modules on show. I was not impressed. reckoned you could have assembled most of the interior pipework from your local ironmongers!
At the moment, time from build to scrap is relatively short for most container (and other bulk transport) ships. There is a "biggest ship in the world" new contender on a regular basis at ports such as Felixstowe. There are also regular issues with scrap vessels being sailed to Africa or India then run up on the beach to be chopped up for scrap. This model won't work for nuclear power. As I understand it there are still major issues with decommissioning old nuclear submarines.
Self contained power plants which can be moved from old ship to new ship could be a good thing.
NZ at the moment won't accept nuclear powered anything, so that is an interesting edge case.
Cheers
Dave R
Yes it was years ago back in the 1960s that a Nuclear powered Icebreaker built in Russia visited one of our ports, and people could go aboard and look at it. Nothing scary in the slightest, it would not have been allowed in port if there were! I think though on a vessel that carries cargo that could catch fire, that the protections in place need to be very much more than they would be on a good old bunker oil powered ship. Brian
Given the stresses caused by hurricanes and huge waves, holding them together might be difficult. Very large bulk cargo ships occasionally break in two under such conditions, and they've only got one hull.
er.. Not quite. You have to include load/unload time:-)
Interesting wake at 30 knots in relatively shallow water!
I remember the exhibition well, although I don't recall details of the spacecraft. Actually the American stuff of that era was pretty crude too. However you might argue that, with suitable quality control, proven off-the-shelf hardware is the way to go. Remember that, unlike the Americans, they did not have to save every last ounce.
Why not? You would design the ship so that you could crane out the whole reactor plant at the end of life. You might do that for refuelling too. (Modern UK subs are designed with very long fuel life).
As with civil nuclear plant, it makes much sense to store hardware for a few decades, after which the induced radiation has decayed to levels that make it much easier to handle. There are issues about when and how you handle used fuel. But the military has always been happy to leave stuff in the "too difficult" box.
Yes, and if container ships moved to electrical propulsion, as is the trend for cruise liners, then potentially you could swap out the reactor and generator as a single unit. Currently you have a reactor module that generates hot water, then a box that makes steam from it, then a steam turbine.
But hardly of global significance. I can live without NZ lamb.
Not quite as simplistic as that, else Concorde would still be with us.
They'd change their tune soon enough if there was nothing else!
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