Battery cost declines raise prospects of all-electric container shipping | Hacker News Reader

Battery cost declines raise prospects of all-electric container shipping

nature.com

123 pointsjseliger245 comments

I think all-electric is a stretch goal. Start off with replacing all of the electric loads on a container ship with batteries.

I’m going to rule-of-thumb it and say 10% of a cargo ship’s energy load is electrical. It’s better to quickly convert 100% of cargo ships to hybrid operation than getting 10% of cargo ships to become 100% electric.

Edit: this paper says that electric loads are 17% of energy on a medium sized cargo ship: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335751506_STUDY_ON_...

The least efficient part of any ship is turning mechanical energy into electrical, so just leave alone the mechanical part (thrust) for now.

(It’s an old idea of mine that never happened: a kit that could turn any ICE vehicle into a hybrid. More and more loads are becoming electrical instead of mechanical, e.g. electric cooling pumps, electric power steering pumps, electronic transmission, electric hvac, in addition to what was always electric: fuel pump, lighting, control systems).

> The least efficient part of any ship is turning mechanical energy into electrical

Electrical generators can reach 90+% efficiency at turning mechanical energy into electricity. Did you mean to claim turning chemical energy into electrical?

No, I meant chemical to mechanical to electrical is inefficient.

THIS, but even more so. Electric ships sound cool, but shipping is giga-scale global infrastructure. The mines, battery factories, electric motors, dockside equipment, etc. needed to do this at scale don't exist. If they did, the national power grids sitting behind most major ports could not reliably take the additional load.

So, yes, start small. As in: "Here is one self-contained, mostly self-managing battery, inside one cargo container. We'll modify the electrical system on one ship, so that this battery can connect to it, and looks (electrically, and to the ship's control systems) like one extra generator in the engine room. Once we see how well that works, and fix round 1 of bugs and crew training issues, then we'll try to scale up to 10 ships."

Maybe we could build out the ships, the battery factories, the dockside equipment, the new generation capacity and the grid upgrades at the same time?

Is it really a problem that the dockside equipment doesn't exist if the electric boats don't exist either?

We'll all feel foolish if we turn round in the year 2050 with a global fleet of electric container ships ready to go and then we start arguing about who was supposed to build the sockets to plug them in.

California can’t even build a train that’s useful without blowing obscene amounts of money.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevore/2020/02/26/californ...

Big things cost a lot of money. I expect better arguments than "$X billion is a lot of money" and "theyre only doing it to spite Trump" if someone wants to argue against a big infrastructure project.

Rail is a good and useful thing. The USA should probably have more of it. I have no real knowledge about this specific project, but my priors are that any "crazy", "green" project from California is perfectly fine, sensible governance that is probably saving lives, the environment and money, and that the people screaming about it don't know what they are talking about.

But I'm open to credible info to the contrary.

(A quick glance at Wikipedia tells me that the people of California think it's a good idea, and that the people who don't are generally older and republican leaning, which pretty much meshes with my priors, so I'm fairly confident it's a good thing overall).

By this logic we shouldn’t question how much we spend for anything.

California HSR is projected to cost $100B for 500 miles. That’s $200M/mile.

By comparison, the 160 mile LGV Méditerranée in France cost €3.8B in 2001 [0]. That’s roughly €25M/mile. Even after accounting for exchange rates and inflation, that’s still roughly an order of magnitude cheaper.

Yes, big things cost a lot of money, but they shouldn’t cost 10x more what they cost in other industrialized countries. High speed rail is great, but it should not be funded with a blank check.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGV_Méditerranée

I glanced at Wikipedia earlier to learn about the California project and they claim that despite costing x2 or x3 what similar European and Chinese efforts cost, that's mostly due to the cost of land and 3 mountain ranges being in the way.

It also mentions that it's costing less per mile than HS2 in London. So if this is extravagant waste, it's not that extravagant.

>I glanced at Wikipedia earlier to learn about the California project and they claim that despite costing x2 or x3 what similar European and Chinese efforts cost

This is based on an outdated cost estimate that's roughly 2x lower than the current projected cost. From Wikipedia:

>In July 2014, The World Bank reported that the per kilometer cost of California's high-speed rail system was $56 million, more than double the average cost of $17–21 million per km of high speed rail in China and more than the $25–39 million per km average for similar projects in Europe at the time.

That was in 2014. Costs have ballooned 2x to $125M/km; this has not happened in Europe or China.

>the cost of land and 3 mountain ranges being in the way

If you want to control for mountain ranges, consider the Suseo–Pyeongtaek branch of Korea's high speed rail network, opened in 2016. It's a 38 mile line, 31 of which are in a 50 meter deep tunnel. It cost ₩4.18T (approximately $3.2B), which comes out to ~$85M per mile. Again, 80% of the line is in a 50 meter deep tunnel.

That's still less than half the cost per mile of California HSR, which will not be 80% underground. There is simply no excuse for the inflated costs of CHSR.

>It also mentions that it's costing less per mile than HS2 in London. So if this is extravagant waste, it's not that extravagant.

HS2 is notorious for being a boondoggle with massive cost overruns. Not exactly a flattering thing to compare to.

HS2 seems to be similalry rated as "expensive but probably worth it overall", so if its still less than that it seems okay.

I'm not looking for perfection in big projects, but I am looking for vaguely informed comment.

Florida is connecting Miami, Ft Lauderdale, and Orlando this year for a total cost of $3-4 billion. That’s $7.3 million per mile, and it was mostly paid for by private enterprise instead of the government. Development started in 2012, with Miami to West Palm Beach opening in 2018. CHSR started development in 2008, and isn’t slated to operate anything until 2029. When it does operate, it’ll link Merced and Bakersfield.

Florida will be operating the fastest trains in the US this year.

This thing? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brightline

That's not a high speed service. There _was_ a planned high-speed service with a similar route (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_High-Speed_Corridor), but it was killed.

Conventional rail is, of course, a lot cheaper than high-speed rail; this isn't a revelation.

It's also a one train per hour service. CHSR:

> In addition, the achievable operating headway between successive trains must be less than 5 minutes

While CHSR _is_ definitely on the expensive side for high speed rail, it's a little silly to compare it to the Florida system, which is a fairly standard intercity rail.

Incidentally, I'm not saying there's anything _wrong_ with the Florida system; I've no idea of the background, but it may be that the expected ridership didn't justify a high-speed high frequency system. It's very much not comparing like for like, though.

I wonder though.

I live on a dirt road, out in the country. It was built by a contractor, who was selling farmland for housing, 50 years ago.

Instead of digging down, putting aggregate(gravel, etc), the road was just laid over farmland, with a foot of gravel.

Once the municipality took over, it was fine for a while, but maintenance costs were through the roof. Springtime flooding, washouts, and heavy trucks woild sink (no drainage, mud) in the spring.

Eventually, the municipality had to dig down 4ft, put in proper drainage and gravel base, to reduce failure and ongoing maintenance costs.

(I'm in Canada, and frost/snow/ice creates loads of maintenance, especally without drainage.. a southern American in Arizona might wonder what the big deal is)

Anyhow, now there are laws for road quality and developers here, 50 years later, bit I wonder....

Could that private rail developer be shifting initial cost, to higher maintenance costs?

And further, mountains have issues with freezing/etc, and it does make a massive diff...

Perhaps...in an ideal world, with a centrally planned economy, and extremely powerful central authority. OTOH, recent history suggests that centrally planned economies don't work all that well, especially when they attempt complex "great leap forward" projects.

The reality is that global shipping is controlled by huge patchwork of corporations, political authorities, etc. Most of them very focused on the short-term. And greedy for money, power, & political benefits. Similar for the national power grids, mining industry, battery industry, ...

Barring internal labor politics, infrastructure immediately near docks and rail shouldn't be an issue to upgrade as the sheer scale of modern cargo vehicles means you could get all the resources for such in a single load.

Also I believe most ships are "hybrids" anyway, in that their props are driven by motors directly connected to generators on their engines, since when you are dealing with engines that are literally two stories tall creating a matching gearbox becomes quite difficult. As such the biggest pain point will be battery capacity, but if we are willing to forgo the logistical difficulties of super-massive ships can be brute-forced with lower quality batteries in even more massive ships.

While trains are typically hybrids like that, I don’t think ships are.

So they’re optimized for cruise and horribly inefficient while accelerating or decelerating. But it’s a propeller in water so it just spins inoptimally which isn’t as bad as a steel wheel doing the same.

I would start with smaller ships and shorter distances and build from there.

https://zeroemissionservices.nl/en/homepage/ seems to work for short distance inland shipping (‘seems’ to because from what I can tell, they only have a single customer with a single ship, making it more like a demonstrator)

I’d like to see a fleet of autonomous small ships. Start with car carriers for expensive cars.

Part of the logic of current big ships is fuel efficiency.

If fuel was much cheaper, (which is true for renewable energy) then more, smaller ships might make sense.

If the crew could be automated, that further tips towards fleets of smaller ships.

This then has knock on effects for variable delivery times (fast and expensive as well as slow and cheap) and the size of canals and ports, and dredging requirements which allows things to arrive closer to their final destination.

I don't think most people appreciate how automated commercial vessels already are. The ship navigates autonomously from port to port. If you have a twenty man crew on a commercial vessel, they are split across two 12 hours shifts, you may only have one officer on the bridge during on watch, a few engineers below supervising the engines and performing preventative maintenance while underway, and able seamen will be doing the rounds checking nothing amiss such as loads moving etc. The crew are largely there to respond in the event of a crisis as commercial vessels are such an expensive asset.

I think it's better to think of the crew doing underway asset management than "sailing" the vessel.

If the automation is there, is there a reason why more container ships at least partially utilize wind for locomotion? Is it just that retrofitting a giant sail isn't feasible onto existing ships?

Flettner Rotor sails appear to be becoming a thing, they partner well with electric ships, similar to how some electric planes use multiple propellers and EV automobiles can do independent 4 wheel drive.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotor_ship

Actually the analog to the all wheel thing might be:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azipod

Container ships witch ICE travel 20 knots/hr.

Sail ships average 6 knots/hr and wind is less consistent.

There are some companies working on Kites to reduce fuel consumption. https://www.airseas.com/seawing

I forgot to mention sailboats, so zero fossil fuels.

Watch standing can be automated to a limited extent, which will allow minor reductions in crew costs. But vessels making long ocean voyages out of easy reach from shore will still need human crew members to conduct repairs and maintenance while underway. And no, if a ship breaks down in the middle of the Pacific Ocean it's not feasible to fly engineers out in a helicopter to effect repairs.

Hybrids, as with cars, provide the most benefit when you can run the engine at its sweet spot more often.

I believe some cargo ships have had relatively tiny batteries for a long time, for port maneuvering where the engine is throttled way down. To prevent pollution they now often are forced to plug in when in port too. So I'd guess this is already just going to happen as battery costs reduce and pollution controls and costs rise, but maybe won't have a big impact on long voyages, though every little bit helps.

The other big play in this space is green ammonia, but similarly early moves are to just burn it in modified diesel engines. Longer term they can electrify with fuel cells.

And obviously those two can work together as Fuel Cell vehicles are basically hybrids with the same drive trains as electric vehicles, just smaller batteries.

Ships run at constant power for entire journey, there is no occasion to store energy for later.

It only works with cars because we constantly slow down and speed up. The battery helps to smooth out the output of the engine. Cargo ships already have the output as smooth as possible, hence hybrid model makes no sense.

Good idea. There are these containerized iron salt batteries now that energy companies use to help with renewable energy storage (or at least plan to). Maybe loading a few of those instead of cargo containers could already take care of most of a ships electricity needs - and for recharging you can just load/unload them anywhere like regular containers.

Article with an image:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/02/23/1046365/grid-sto...

Yeah exactly, just think of the ship as an electric grid and the container interties into it.

A generator or an electric motor don't have a particularly low efficiency or don't wear much? Hybrids happened in locomotives and ships way before cars. Many ships have diesel engines turning generators and then have electric motor propulsion.

You can replace all 23 MW (consisting of 20 MW propulsion and 3 MW electrical) on one ship with batteries + propulsion motor.

Or you can replace just the 3 MW pure electric part with batteries, getting rid of the auxiliary motors and their generators, doing it on 8 ships.

In the latter case you don't need the one propulsion motor, that's true, so it might be somewhat better.

> Hybrids happened in locomotives and ships way before cars.

For locomotives: diesel locomotives were diesel-electric from the start, because conventional clutches were unable to cope with the requirements of getting a train to start. Diesel-hydraulic locomotives were a German post-war specialty, sadly the Wikipedia article doesn't say why [1].

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesellokomotive

Meanwhile, users buy the kit, convert, get tired of charging and also gassing up, so connect an inverter to an alternator and charge up that way.

"But I'm helping the environment!", they say.

Edit: just realised this may seem snarky. It is just that sometimes, this is the end result I expect, regardless of legit effort to help things.

I feel the same about some plug-in hybrids like the “ Cayenne Turbo S E-Hybrid gets 18 mpg combined in hybrid mode and has 14 miles of range in EV mode.”

But it qualifies for tax credit and HOV lanes while in single occupancy.

>The least efficient part of any ship is turning mechanical energy into electrical

I think you meant "most".

The least efficient step is converting chemical energy into mechanical energy.

Given the cheapness of fuel oil and geneator sets, and the expense of batteries, what possible financial argument is there for doing this?

Fuel oil is an expensive way of generating electricity, which is why few on-land power plants use it.

This is all about utilizing efficient grid power (hydro, nuclear, gas, whatever) on a ship. By grid-intertie at the ship level, re-fit costs are minimized. Kinda like rooftop solar.

Fuel oil is a very cheap way of generating power, when you have several thousand tons of it already on your ship :)

The possible few percantage difference in efficiency between ship-based oil-powered generation, and land-based power generation, is more than wiped out by the storage and conversion losses of a battery-based system. It's also very expensive (and heavy). Why pay to fill a container with batteries, and then pay more to charge them, when you can be paid to carry a container of other stuff as cargo?

Crude oil is about 3% of global electricity production and continues falling. And the efficiency is particularly bad when you’re using it in a reciprocating engine (as on a ship) instead of a turbine (as on land). Natgas and coal are cheaper hydrocarbons.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.ELC.PETR.ZS

Oil’s benefit is its density, storability and pumpability.

All I know is that a giant ship is the most cost-effective way to transport anything heavy by vehicle.

A few percent improved efficiency in exchange for losing a handful of container capacity on a ship carrying several thousand is a net positive. And cargo shipping is a tight business.

Battery storage and conversion losses are far less than the conversion losses from generating electricity from an ICE.

The primary issue with ships is you don’t get to recharge the batteries every night - so you need way more capacity than an equivalent application on land (even if ships are very efficient)

>Battery storage and conversion losses are far less than the conversion losses from generating electricity from an ICE.

No, they are not. Here's some research for large-scale battery storage systems:

https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1409737 Rround-trip energy storage efficiency is reported as 70% - 80%. Any crappy genset will match that.

I really don't understand this idea for a "hybrid" ship. What size battery would you need, to power the electricals of a ship for a sea voyage? What is the payback period to the shipping company?

> a kit that could turn any ICE vehicle into a hybrid.

Doable but unpractical in many situations. Internal combustion engine based vehicles are usually a lot heavier than their electric-born counterparts, so their performance would suffer.

It’s usually the opposite: electric vehicles are heavier than their ICE equivalents:

https://www.reviewgeek.com/116061/are-electric-trucks-heavie...

Nuclear ships and intercontinental renewable connections can fulfill all energy needs [1] [2] . Nuclear ships can be flexibly deployed to supply power anywhere in the world if there is an emergency. It is unlikely we'll have low power production worldwide at the same time. A small fleet can address a range of concerns.

Better yet, they can carry cargo, 40% of shipping, that is 4.5 billion tons out of the 11 billion tons of total maritime shipping is fossil fuels. [3]. We could have 40% of ships fleet as nuclear ships instead of carrying fossil fuels. If we have the tech to have 40% fleet nuclear, why not make it 100%? There are hundreds (or thousands?) of ships and they can carry cargo as well as supply power when docked. Of course, we have to add PowerDocks at ports and a connection from port to the grid.

Ships use the dirtiest fuel. Large ocean-going ships tend to use bunker fuel, the world’s dirtiest diesel fuel – a toxic, tar-like sludge that usually contains 3,500 times more sulphur than the diesel used for cars.[4]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link

[2] https://www.power-technology.com/projects/morocco-uk-power-p...

[3] https://qz.com/2113243/forty-percent-of-all-shipping-cargo-c...

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/may/18/dirty-diesel...

Ignoring all the safety and security concerns nuclear cargo ships would have, I can't imagine it being very economical.

Security is not much of a concern. An attempt to seize the ship means you can failsafe the reactor and drop it to the bottom of the ocean. Pirates and lesser nation-states won't have the resources to recover it.

Then there would be a nuclear reactor sitting on the ocean floor for some unknown amount of time.

But in the scheme of things, that’s fine. There are several nuclear subs and munitions at the bottom and there aren’t reports of terrible radiological effects.

The lack of reports means very little.

Nah, we all know that there are dozens of entities out there who would _love_ to publish the "Sunk US sub causing elevated radiation levels!" article. The incentive is high. So the absence of the report does mean something.

...and how are they going to collect evidence?

Literally nobody cares.

Denial of service attacks on ocean shipping are a lot easier if every ship dumps the engine at the first sign of trouble.

Unless you're actually boarded, why would you drop the reactor? The point is that a hypothetical commercial shipping reactor would have to be a self-contained, intrinsically safe design with no user-servicing - this is the sort of design pebble-bed reactors the general modular reactor concept points towards.

The idea is that the reactor is mounted at the bottom of the hull, basically only provides electricity out as a "black box". It's not reachable by the crew from inside the ship, and gets a set of failsafe charges which cut it loose from the ship if it becomes unhappy about it's situation - i.e. if its GPS signal is cut for too long, if it strays from it's geofence boundary, or if someone tries to breach it's location in the ship.

Even if you paid off the crew, they don't have control over the powerplant. Fairly obviously you wouldn't want to leave a reactor on the seafloor, but if it drops itself then like a blackbox it triggers a sonar beacon and whoever commissioned it (presumably a well-regulated US firm) would respond to collect it.

You've got to be kidding. Low paid commercial crews are subject to bribery, and often don't even keep a close watch for security threats. Plus no nation state will allow a nuclear powered merchant vessel into port if there's a risk of a damaged reactor getting dumped into their waters.

It's just totally unrealistic, the kind of thing that only a programmer with zero time on the water would propose.

But the web based interface would be beautiful and the [Jettison Core?] button fully A/B tested.

There are 100+ nuclear submarines. Who know where they are? What safety precautions do they follow? Which country's jurisdiction?

The right metric is deaths/TWH. Nuclear is the safest by a wide margin, 1000x safer than coal. [1]

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

This is true on average, but of the available nuclear technologies, reactors used on ships and subs have the highest enriched uranium (making them inherently more dangerous just as a target of non nuclear nations). I believe they are also responsible for a large number of accidents, although when those occur, the affected personnel are usually limited to the crew.

They're run exclusively by militaries, which have notoriously liberal budgets and conservative operational safety. Shipping merchants reverse both tendencies. Nuclear isn't safe by its nature, nuclear is safe in the right hands and horribly catastrophic otherwise.

It's a big difference whether the boat the reactor is on has guns and is run by a military or whether it's a random private enterprise without guns. You don't want enriched uranium like it's used in nuclear submarines to fall into the wrong hands.

The kind of fissile stuff being proposed for most forward-deployed reactor designs is not useful for weapons. The biggest danger is blowing up the reactor itself, causing it to be a type of dirty-but-conventional bomb, a non-nuclear (fission/fusion) blast.

Which I guess is completely fine in, let's say, the hands of Somali pirates :shrug:

That statistic is extremely misleading because it completely ignore systemic risk. And it does not account for environmental damage.

Additionally, it is not based on nuclear reactors on rusty cargo ships run by cash-strapped companies. Those companies are notoriously hiring the cheapest workforce they can find and dodging regulations in any way they can.

And you would trust them never to leak some radioactive coolant in the ocean?

I’m all for terrestrial nuclear power, but nuclear ships would need high grade uranium. At a minimum all existing nuclear ship reactors that I am aware of currently use more highly enriched uranium than a nuclear power plant. There are much safer ways to propel container ships across the world’s oceans without the rather enormous risk. I think hydrogen, methane, or any number of synthetic fuels including those derived from algae would make ore sense as stop gap measures while battery cost and density come down.

> but nuclear ships would need high grade uranium.

Why isn't a thorium salt reactor a good fit here?

Because we want a solution before 2050.

That an interesting suggestion. I don’t believe any miniature designs have been built, but there hasn’t been that much research into thorium salt reactors, so that’s not necessarily surprising.

Does nuclear (or could it) make financial sense for cargo transport though?

For the military, where victory is far more important than margins, sure. But can it compete with fossil fuel when there is a profit motive?

Nuclear would be much, much more expensive than battery for this application.

In these energy-related threads, it seems like there's always a top comment extolling the virtues of nuclear power, whether the link mentioned nuclear or not. And I would just encourage you to do the research about what nuclear costs. Safety is a red herring. We're not building out nuclear because it costs 2-4x more per kilowatt than wind or solar. [1]

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower/nucle...]

> Nuclear would be much, much more expensive than battery for this application.

But batteries of the capacity required to propel a container ship for long distances are impractical and would take far too much precious space and weight.

The article is about why that's not true for shorter distances, and as soon as it's true for those, you do the math and find that floating supercharger stations are cheaper than nuclear.

You could even build floating, nuclear powered supercharger stations, if nuclear didn't cost more than the alternatives.

Due to safety and security concerns (terrorism), most countries will never allow nuclear powered merchant vessels into their ports. You might claim they're being irrational and overly cautious but that's just the political reality and it won't change in our lifetimes. Plus the expense of hiring nuclear qualified engineering crew is ridiculous. Look how much the US Navy has to spend training those people in order to achieve a good safety record.

A more realistic approach is to build more nuclear reactors on land, then use the generated power and heat to manufacture carbon-neutral synthetic liquid hydrocarbon fuels for merchant vessels.

Always nuclear. It's like we're back in the atomic age of the 50s and forgot all the learnings since. Nuclear is horribly expensive and the entire maritime sector is a race to zero. Cheapest labor globally, cheapest material and so on.

This YouTube video is a nice summary on the issue of nuclear ships.

https://youtu.be/cYj4F_cyiJI

The largest container ships today are operated with tiny crews of 15-25 people.

That article regarding the exhausts is also old and wrong. New requirements came into force in 2020 either requiring fuel with less sulphur or the use of scrubbers.

https://www.imo.org/en/MediaCentre/HotTopics/Pages/Sulphur-2...

There's a lot of nuclear propaganda around these days. E.g.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31753566

It's pretty consistent about never addressing the cost factor. It's not too surprising that people are getting excited about it.

Thank you. Nuclear is a fantastic fit for most land-based use cases, but there is a reason why the existing fleet of nuclear vessels is mostly military, military submarines, and a handful of ice breakers constructed by the Soviets.

Nuclear is an even more awful fit for land based use cases. The one saving grace it has for transportation is the energy density, not that it matters when renewables to green hydrogen, ammonia or any other solution paying some efficiency cost is vastly superior.

On land energy density barely matters and the costs for nuclear energy is simply laughable.

Usually if someone posts a link to a 14 minute video from a source I never heard of, claiming it proved their point, I wouldn’t watch it. But I actually watched your entire video there and not only does the info there contradict you, but the narrator says at the end says public perception is the number one obstacle to nuclear in commercial shipping.

Yes I know. The narrator is also wrong about the sulfur claim, similarly like the GP. I like it because it plainly lays out the issues with nuclear shipping, which then allows you to draw your own conclusions. It then ends on the same cool tech bro solution looking for a problem if only society was smarter as we see around this thread which honestly is a bit sad. I hoped for better when first watching it.

The legal and insurance hurdles haven't become smaller with Fukushima, Three mile Island and Chernobyl since the time of the Savannah.

Consider the insurance required for an accident happening in Long Beach.

Also consider that from the time of the Savannah shipping has shifted from a skilled profession to crews from the lowest bidder. Crews today are mostly a jumble from South east Asia and around the Indian subcontinent.

Shipping is centered around one issue, that is cost. Public perception does not exist as a factor.

However cool nuclear sounds...you might want to look at crew sizes on a modern container ship (20 to 30 total, all departments, and trending downward). Then compare that (and their education & training levels) with what you'd need to operate a nuclear reactor 24x7. With good reliability and ~no mega-expensive accidents.

Nuclear ships are one of the dumbest ideas possible. Not from the technical point, various navies have proven it to be relatively safe, although there have been various incidents especially in (Soviet) Russia, but also in the US and UK [0] (and not to mention the Russians and Brits deliberately dumping nuclear reactors and ships [1]).

The problem with nuclear ships is piracy. Ships are already routinely robbed or otherwise attacked (see e.g. the current situation in the Black Sea, where merchant ships got hit by Russian rocketry or ran upon sea mines) - I do not even wish to think what efforts al-Quaeda or other terrorists would go to to obtain nuclear material from a ship, and if it's only enough for dirty bombs.

Additionally, there is also the "rat race to the bottom" that you mentioned: Maritime operators already go to flag states where they have the lowest requirements on crew pay, workplace safety and other rules (such as not requiring double hulls for oil tankers) and enforcement of the rules that exist usually is non-existent unless you fuck up so badly that the flag state all but is forced to intervene. The situation will be just the same for nuclear ships, but the stakes of a nuclear disaster are much MUCH higher - think of the Halifax explosion [2] and add nuclear fallout.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sunken_nuclear_submari...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax_Explosion

How about a wind-powered boat powered completely without any batteries or oil at all? Let's call it... a sailboat. Are we just going back in time to when sail-powered ships powered commerce? Of course a sail-powered container ship might not be as viable, but I'd love to see a 16-masted sailing behemoth. The Wikipedia article about the Thomas W. Larson makes for interesting reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_W._Lawson_(ship)

https://www.theoceanbird.com/ - are creating a 200m ship, slated for 2026 - with plans for retrofittable products..

There are still some smaller commercial cargo sailing ships, it’s somewhat ambiguous when the last major sailing ship stopped but 1949 is one reasonable date.

The less obvious issue is simply manpower and difficulty loading intermodal containers.

What sort of manpower is required? Seems like loading the intermodal containers could be somewhat automated as well (granted, space would be limited due to the mast/s)

I'm no sailor though. Just seems like we have more ability to finely control/automate stuff in ways that weren't available in 1949.

In terms of manpower, you can largely automate the sails today, though they do require maintenance. The issue is you basically need the same crew on a 20 TEU ship as a 20,000 TEU one, because you can’t safely operate with everyone asleep. Except sails scale in terms of surface vs drag scaling in part base on volume which makes mega sailing ships much more difficult.

Now these aren’t insurmountable issues on their own, but wind as supplemental power via kites or something seems like a far more viable option.

"1, I suppose."

The discharging and loading of containers is already automated. Modern container terminals work almost completely autonomously. What specific automation did you have in mind to help with discharging/loading?

New ship designs are starting to use wind energy to reduce the amount of fuel consumption.

It doesn't look like traditional sails, but large spinning rotors that interact with the wind to propel the ship forward. It's called the Magnus effect.

This link has more info on it including some of the challenging issues of actually implementing it on large commercial ships.

https://www.marineinsight.com/naval-architecture/flettner-ro...

https://youtu.be/GYNKW_w95lA Does a good job of explaining why this isn’t practical. Although some supplementary wind power is possible.

tl;dw: sails are tall and get in the way of (un)loading cargo. Fuel costs are borne by the lessee of the boat but sail costs are capital expenditures borne by the lessor.

> Fuel costs are borne by the lessee of the boat but sail costs are capital expenditures borne by the lessor.

tbf, that one's pretty easily resolved by financiers if fuel costs of typical operational use are greater than the capital costs of the masts amortised over the expected life of the vessel and the ropes and sails amortised over the expected life of the ropes and sales. There's an established market for leasing aircraft and aero engines whose value is a function of fuel economy and how much the lessees' use devalues their life limited parts.

These reasons are why kites are being prototyped. Kites take up little deck space, sail in stronger winds, and require less surface area.

there is a recent guardian article about such a project: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/14/replacing-cont...

There’s at least one company trying to do that: https://www.towt.eu/en/towt-home/

I've long thought this[*]. We'd not be talking about going back to Clippers (beautiful as they were), rather we'd apply all that we've learned of hydrodynamics since, and we'd certainly hook the ships' guidance computers into the global weathersat/weather forecasting services, so there's no chance they'd ever lack for wind (they'd just navigate by where the wind is/is going to be when they get there.) I see no reason why a sailing ship shouldn't be almost fully autonomous (modulo docking/harbour operations) and capable of hitting highly-predictable schedules. We might need more of them if we have to make them much smaller than today's container vessels, but I guess we might be able to live with that if they cost much less to run.

[*] about 45 years... ;)

I wonder if a series of small robotic tugboats could take turns hauling a container ship across oceans. As their battery wears down, another swaps in place. They could recharge at nearby fixed solar/wind floating platforms, or undersea cable recharge points.

A bit like stage coaches swapping horses at each inn along the way.

I don’t think tugs though can operate in anything above fairly calm waters.

I think you underestimate the distances involved. It'll be impossible to maintain the infrastructure. How are you going to get these people there? Additionally, You will need an enormous number of tugs. It's' not like there are clearly marked highways or anything. The area to be covered is going to be huge. What are they going to do in bad weather? Then, who is going to coordinate all of this? How do the tugs know where to go and when? If the weather is bad and there is no fresh tug available the ship will go down. Let's not even talk about how inefficient and slow this will be.

The forces of nature these ships work against are nothing to sneeze at. This stuff is not at all trivial.

The idea is clever because it does not require retrofitting the existing fleet, and it works because it can be done incrementally.

You can for example start with 1 tug boat that would shave off 200km of fuel usage.

No, it's not "clever." It's ridiculously uninformed. Tugboats are far less efficient than the ship running under its own power to start with. Add to that you now have a fleet of tugboats and their associated crews (robotic tugboats are nice in concept; not so great as a reality in 2022) sitting idle/travelling to meet a ship/recharging/etc. And more vehicles that require ongoing maintenance whether or not they're in use.

A clever idea would be supported by data that shows how it can be effective. This is just an off the cuff suggestion by someone who's thought about the problem for 30 seconds.

That would be a recipe for disaster. Towing sucks in any kind of heavy sea state, and swapping tow cables from one vessel to another is even worse.

As a generality, towing a substantial ship - even in light seas - is a far more problematic and labor-intensive task than having it run under its own power. Also slower and less energy-efficient.

For river shipping it might work, there tugs are commonly used and rivers have power close the entire distance. You need the ability to swap tugs, more often, but that isn't hard to build.

I wonder if you could skip the batteries and just put in overhead catenary like trains have. Tugs mostly have to follow the same paths anyway.

Tugs may follow broadly the same paths, but there's a big difference between along same channel, adjusting for wind and current differences and running on rails. An overhead catenary system suspended over a river sounds like it'd be a nightmare to build and maintain anyway.

for river shipping it would be better to have a train like traction system. It could be only placed on the one side of the river when you go upstream. Batteries would do the job for docking and going downstream. Similar to https://www.electronicdesign.com/markets/automotive/article/...

There's a reason this (tow-path boats) fell out of fashion 100+ years ago.

Like others have said, tugging seems to be highly impractical. If you'd really, really, really want to try anyways, you might perhaps habe an easier time with electric ships that are fully capable of going alone, just without enough battery for the whole way. And that can be take-extended on the go by a relay of battery boats supplying electric power via cable instead of some very high number of Newtons (battery boats would only carry enough engine to self-supply). But close formation in heavy weather would still be so hard that it might in fact be easier to "simply" make them all submarines... (yellow, presumably)

But we shouldn't start juggling around absurd amounts of batteries as long as we don't even utilize low hanging fruit like equipping all those cargo haulers with mighty propulsion kites. That's basically a solved problem, just not happening because the refinery waste ships are conveniently incinerating is still too cheap. Particularly as long as we still burning fossils for electricity on land. Ship engines operate much to optimal load than ICE car engines designed for a market that demands excessive peak power for short bursts of acceleration. The carbon break-even point for ships would require much cleaner electricity than that for cars. Cars are an absolute outlier because their cruise load is so much lower than their advertised power and ICE engines are almost comically inefficient at low load fractions.

Airbus's Airseas subsidiary is working on a kite system that can reduce fuel consumption by a claimed 20%: https://www.airseas.com/

Seems like a kite + battery combination could be quite effective.

I have been predicting this for the past few years. Batteries shaped as shipping containers with container ships replacing spent batteries on shipping ports they visit is the future for shipping.

And throw them on trains for electric freight without having to run expensive catenaries.

Shipping containers full of batteries are the basic shape of current grid storage too, which is growing exponentially even if it's only in the 10s of GW per year right now (corresponding to 4x the GWh, usually, but grid resources are typically defined primarily by their power rather than energy.)

Being able to place a shipping container of battery next to a distribution center to avoid an upgrade to transmission and distribution will also enable tons of savings on electricity grid costs, as transmission and distribution must be sized to peak capacity, and which often results in extremely low average usage of the expensive resource. In most places in the US, transmission and distribution is a bigger cost that the generation of electricity.

Storage is going to change everything, and the naysayers who make up fake "physics" to pretend it can't work have already been proven very wrong.

> And throw them on trains for electric freight without having to run expensive catenaries

I'd love to see the math on this, because I can't imagine it will cost less than electrifying railways (at least the heavily used ones) over a prolonged period of time (say, a decade or two). Batteries need to be swapped out which will waste time, and replaced every so often. Catenaries need maintenance and have a high upfront cost, but still..

https://pedestrianobservations.com/2022/07/13/in-motion-char...

Is a good discussion on why catenary is better than batteries for trains.

I generally agree that city centre busses are a better target than trains (or long distance coaches) but its a matter of degree.

As batteries get cheaper and better, the comparison to wires alters.

Even electrical grids, whose whole business is moving electricity on wires are installing batteries to avoid the expense of wires in certain situations.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-wires_alternatives

It's not a binary thing and the balance is relentlessly moving towards batteries over time.

Has anyone thought of large rafts of floating solar panels being towed behind a ship? Given the massive surface area of the ocean I wonder if a few football field sized floating solar panels can recharge the batteries during the day time.

Also, what about windmills on the ship itself?

Windmills on boats?

So like, sails? :)

Iirc there has also been wind-driven electrical generating devices on boats too.

> Also, what about windmills on the ship itself?

Great idea, powering a boat with wind. If only someone had thought of that sooner!

Less facetiously, it's usually better to use cylindrical rotating sails (which need power, but far less) or kites. Combined with solar could be an interesting prospect though.

Solar may be highly unlikely due to waves and salt salinization.

See windmill ships for more on the second question > https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windmill_ship

A few football fields would cause a lot of water drag and also probably not even be enough power. A solar panel is about half a kW, and I’m guessing a big ship like that will take upwards of 80 to 100 MW normally, so you need like 160k to 200k panels.

Large container ships are already larger than football fields. As in 61.5m wide and 400m long, though not a rectangle they are surprisingly boxy. You might get 4MW in ideal conditions and average a little over 1MW over the day, but those engines are putting out 58MW, these ships need a lot of power 24/7.

Remember for scale those 20,000 little boxes stacked up are the exact same thing you see semi trucks carrying.

It still might be worth doing, for a 2% reduction in fuel costs.

Kites are much cheaper and save you far more fuel.

Drag. If you really wanted to do only green shipping, you could have these pads sprinkled across the Atlantic/Pacific, and have boats pull up them to charge up so they can make it to the next pad and hop across the ocean.

I calculated it out once. The issue is container ships need MASSIVE amounts of energy to move.

As for windmills on the ship... well... sails are a thing we've used for generations :D No reason to convert mechanical energy into electric energy back into mechanical energy.

In terms of the scale of energy. The largest masts in the world are on the order of 100m. An 80m blade wind turbine is rated 8MW or so. A container ship produces 50MW or so.

It'd be feasible for slow steaming if you couldn't use sails for some reason.

I just don't see the point. That 8MW is after the energy loses of converting mechanical to electric energy.

That process is 20->40% efficient (meaning 12->32ish MW is ultimately lost to friction).

A mast is much more efficient simply because it's not doing the mechanical to electrical transition.

Perhaps it's worth it if you charged batteries while docked and used those batteries + mast mode while sailing? A hybrid if you will?

The potential upsides I can see are: ability to point or move through canals without tacking; time averaging; and geometry to work around the cargo better.

A kite seems like a better solution, but maybe a hybrid might be an option -- ie. get some power from wind and the rest from a battery. Then if you have to wait for a port or canal you're gaining range the whole time.

Could throw solar into the mix, but without high efficiency tilting panels it's hardly relevant.

> Also, what about windmills on the ship itself?

You mean, like sails?

Large surface area means a lot of friction. I didn't do the math, but my feeling is it's not going to be feasible.

Ships move such long distances that batteries will be very expensive and will eat a large proportion of the useful load. Ammonia fuel cells, or, as stopgap, even ammonia burned in diesel engines could be a much better fit.

https://techxplore.com/news/2021-03-world-high-temperature-a...

Absence of cheap bunker oil would though maybe motivate for more efficient designs / operations. Ie slowers speeds, variable schedules and all that.

>a 300 MW charging station

Assume 90% efficiency - that means dropping 30 Megawatts of heat into the water in port. That could be a problem.

Also - 300 Megawatt single point loads? What's that going to do to grid stability?

It’s nuts. You can’t take the study seriously. Charging a few of these ships will easily overwhelm the local grid.

An idea would be to load a fully-charged container battery onto the ship when it’s otherwise loading up. You’d probably want it on a (top) corner for cooling and security anyway, but that could cause centre of gravity problems…

Ports are usually well connected to infrastructure rights-of-way, so running a double or triple digit kV line to it isn’t out of line.

The article is suggesting 300 MW of power draw per ship for around 24 hours. There is no extra time to recharge separately from the ship. So even if you did that, it makes no difference to the power grid. You will need truly enormous grid upgrades to make this feasible.

It's sad that people on this website are falling for this. This is completely unrealistic. It will show up on one of those Youtube channels that mock scam energy proposals if it ever gets funding.

The idea of the container batteries is that they don't have to be rapid-charged, but having batteries sitting around isn't productive either.

I think the hard part is having 300MW (*#ships) of peaking capacity and the standby costs of when it's not being used.

For reference, Toronto uses about 4500MW on a hot summer day (like today).

Nothing is being rapid charged. You need 24 hours at 300 MW to charge one of these things. Either you use even more than 300 MW, or you have batteries charged many days in advance. Both are nutty ideas.

A nuclear plant dumps a lot more than 30 MW of waste heat into its adjacent body of water. Is that a problem?

Power grids can be upgraded, and a grid-connected battery that can send 300 MW in the other direction during occasional supply shortages is actually really good for grid stability. In that case the ship sells some power at lucrative rates (maybe $1k/mWh?), then recharges later at night after the demand peak.

Bunkering (the process of loading fuel) already takes hours and often requires a rendezvous with a tanker ship at sea, so it's not like ships aren't already inconvenienced by their need to acquire energy.

>A nuclear plant dumps a lot more than 30 MW of waste heat into its adjacent body of water. Is that a problem?

Nuclear power plants near me generally have their own cooling ponds, covering vast amounts of ground, as they would otherwise emit too much waste heat into the ecosystem and kill all the wildlife. If there were multiple ships each dumping 30 MW of heat into a harbor, that could happen quickly.

>Power grids can be upgraded, and a grid-connected battery that can send 300 MW in the other direction during occasional supply shortages is actually really good for grid stability. In that case the ship sells some power at lucrative rates (maybe $1k/mWh?), then recharges later at night after the demand peak.

Ports are already at capacity, this would only make it worse.

Your average container ship produces as much waste heat when operating already.

Any idea which companies / ETFs one should invest in for the growing demand in batteries? Or are the evaluations at their limit already anyways.

Just use nuclear.

As a former navy nuke: no. I don’t want commercial vessels registered in Nosafetystandardsland to have nuclear power. Fuck no.

It’s also not even a little economical.

>vessels registered in Nosafetystandardsland

Ha will have to borrow that

It’s where the clouds from cloud-cuckoo land dump all their rain and the man with message in cleft stick returns.

Well by definition if nosafetystandardsland decides to build a nuclear ship you won’t have a say in it anyway. It just won’t get to enter ports in safetystandardsland.

For nuclear shipping to become viable a reasonable set of trading countries would need to come together and set the standards that it’ll operate under.

>As a former navy nuke: no. I don’t want commercial vessels registered in Nosafetystandardsland to have nuclear power. Fuck no.

These nuclear vessels will likely have to be registered in countries with nuclear power already deployed. Nobody will allow Panama or Costa Rica to have an atomic ship - I am with you on that.

>It’s also not even a little economical.

If somebody is ready to put money to try making it economical, I would be cheering for them. Just put transparent rules & regulations and wait. If somebody comes up with a safe & profitable atomic ship, we all win.

The hard part is the very highly enriched uranium. To make a compact and light naval reactor you need very pure U-235. I am not allowed to even say how pure, but trust it costs obscene amounts to do so. If it could be done safely I’d be for it, but I’m not going to hold my breath.

>To make a compact and light naval reactor you need very pure U-235

Yes, with the reactor designs used by US Navy.

Akademik Lomonosov ([1]), a floating nuclear plant, uses "low-enriched uranium (LEU) fuel, with 14.1% average enrichment, with a fuel cycle of 3 years".

Commercial atomic container ships will likely be closer to Akademik Lomonosov than the US Navy fleet. And that's fine.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov

Cool, yea it looks like the "KLT-40S" reactor can do LEU, so at least that part is a bit cheaper. I still think it's not a great idea, nor would it still be economical except for maybe some very specific applications, but perhaps it's more realistic than I thought.

Maybe you could have a very large ship, larger than could go into a port, and it could perhaps ferry cargo around the world and as it reaches ports it offloads the cargo onto some waiting barges to be tugged into port? I imagine you would need to ship a LOT of goods FAST to make it worthwhile to use nuclear.

Watching our civilization dance around infinite energy is like watching cave men hiding away from flames.

Nuclear has important limits and constraints.

Would unlimited, free, do whatever you want etc. nuclear power kill more people than our current trajectory?

Not trying to start a fight, just curious.

I guess there's enough people crazy enough to shoot/stab/invade that radioactive material being widely available is a bad thing.

So make it a navy ship.

One of nuclear's most important limits is that it is extremely expensive and nearly impossible to construct in modern Western economies.

Ignore all the people complaining about safety. Ignore any waste concerns.

Taking those off the table, nuclear looks incredibly undesirable, due to the uncertainty in ability to construct the project, inability to meet budgets. And the capex heavy, super long life, nature of nuclear which makes both the construction time and budget risks all the worse.

If you're a technologist/capitalist/industrialist without any hippy dippy concerns, nuclear is a damned nightmare.

Exactly this. That's why the industrialists have been building solar, not nuclear.

And if you and your political tribe have been telling people not to build solar and wind for decades, because it's so expensive, and useless and counterproductive and communism, and the exact opposite reality is arriving on schedule you're going to need some other argument to bring up to avoid looking like a total dupe.

Well, those hippies where right about global warming, and fossil fuels, and solar PV, and wind, and EVs, and insulation, and heat pumps, and government regulation but....

They're still wrong about nuclear, the fools, so we can still ignore them about everything, even the stuff they were right about. If they really think climate change is happening, why don't they like nuclear!!

Spoiler, they weren't wrong about nuclear either, just the fossil fuel lobby paid better than the nuclear lobby and the listen to the experts lobby took a long time to slowly establish credibility over time rather than just buy politicians.

You wrote: <<nearly impossible to construct in modern Western economies>>

What is France doing so well / different? As I understand, they have the highest mix of nuclear energy for any advanced economy. My guess: Most of their nuclear power plants were built by a single state-owned company: EDF (or some predecessor), and the designs were remarkably similar. (I have no idea if both are true, but it is my guess.)

Also (Re: "Western"): Is nuclear power really cheaper in Taiwan, Korea, Japan, and China? I doubt it. And did you see the price tag on UAE's quad @ "Barakah"? Staggering: 20B USD! How many solar panels could UAE lay for that price!!??

France is not doing well, they are sadly failing like everyone else in the Western Hemisphere, quite miserable!

Flamanville is a complete disaster. Olkiluoto continues to be a problem, and is still not running at full power.

Or perhaps you were referring to the reactors built 40-50 years ago? That is exactly what I'm not referring to, that was a different era with completely different economic costs and complete different economic capabilities. France has spent the last 15 years proving that they can no longer build nuclear on time or near budget. And the cost of France's reactors builds decades ago increases with additional reactors. A persistent amount of negative learning curve has been observed in France, and in the US.

Construction productivity has barely improved over the past forty years, and at the same time manufacturing productivity has gone through the roof. Since nuclear is a constructed technology, it's unlikely to ever be able to catch up to a power system where most of the costs come from manufactured components.

Excellent reply. Thank you to provide clear counterpoints that "France nuclear power is cheap". My feeling about out of control costs for nuclear power comes from the audit requirements. Each part must be carefully inspected and its origin must be fully documented. Compared to fossil fuel power plants, the cost must be 10x. As a result, nuclear power becomes unaffordable when considering this important requirement.

Real question: I know nothing about the actual realised cost of China nuclear power plants. So far, their safety record appears quite good. However, I assume their audit requirements for each part are much lower than highly advanced economies.

Lastly, you wrote "everyone else in the Western Hemisphere": Let's be real. If Japan were to ever build a new nuclear power plant the audit plus safety costs would be absolutely insane and unaffordable. I guess Japan will run down all of its plants in the next 25-50 years, then replace everything with renewables (including batteries).

Harnessing nuclear energy is about more than just saving civilization from extinction via global warming (our more immediate and easily reversible issue, materially speaking).

It opens up the reaches of space.

People can talk all day about cost, dangers, this and that. E=mc^2 doesn’t care about fraudulent, man-made economics.

An educated populace is capable of harnessing infinite energy. Photons will never have the energy density of a high speed neutron.

Even if this planet were covered in solar panels, how much energy will it take to move moons or propel ships the size if cities?

Physics shares a pretty clear direction to save this planet and progress to new heights. It doesn’t need to be so complicated. Just because it’s hard, does not mean it’s wrong. We have the intellect. It will just take work.

Yes. The second all the anti nuclear sentiment relents is the same second the exact same people that have been cutting corners and killing us for centuries with oil and coal start cutting the exact same corners with nuclear. We can't solve the fact that they kill people for profit by giving them more power.

Except it won't just be 20,000 hectares of amazon ecosystem destroyed, it'll be the water tables of entire countries, or 'oops, we illegally buried thousands of tons of hot waste that has now all eroded through and now cannot be recovered'.

Plus it won't help any due to jevon's paradox, and the fact that 'electricity too cheap to meter' will just lead to direct thermal forcing of the climate.

Tell me how great the “no restrictions“ on oil has worked out. I seem to recall whole oceans being contaminated and set on fire by oil.

Can you point me to source for an whole ocean being set on fire ?

I must have missed this one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill

I do like a bit of very very expensive energy with a 1/3625 chance of causing disaster every year: https://scitechdaily.com/likelihood-of-nuclear-accident-200-...

(for those who think that estimate is far too pessimistic - dont try to convince me - try talking some sense into those pesky insurance companies who absolutely positively refuse to insure nuclear power without a liability cap of $375 mil or 0.04% the cost of 1 Fukushima)

So you want people to convince actuaries because you think the actuarial risk profile is incorrect before you’ll admit the perceived risk profile is incorrect? Seems circular and possibly a distraction.

Just use nuclear.

I think the actuarial risk profile is probably more correct than the general public's press-release driven risk perception.

I'm stupid, so you'll have to elaborate on that. Are you saying that fusion power is close? Are you saying that fission nuclear power is infinite energy because we have so much uranium? Probably the former?

By the time we exhaust all nuclear reserves on Earth (after saving the planet via using environmentally friendly nuclear energy, the greenest energy known), we will have unlocked space via nuclear rockets (fission or fusion, makes little difference. People will be more okay launching from Earth’s surface via fusion rockets).

Space has boundless access to nuclear energy.

As soon as we could do fission as a civilization, our energy needs ceased being a concern intellectually speaking. So in a manner of speaking, yes — uranium gives us unlimited energy.

Okay, thanks for explaining. I get the idea, but I'm skeptical of the practical use of fission, because we haven't shown that in the last 40 or so years we can create reasonable new power fission generation systems. They always seem fragile, need huge unexpected maintenance and cost way more than projected. Of course they work, it's not like the uranium fission process doesn't work as expected. So there's this practical problem we have not solved yet. Of course vastly more clear than fusion's enormous potential.

What about all the new renewable things that are working and coming online more every day?

The unsolved question with nuclear, in my opinion, is how to make constant money with it for the already rich and powerful using unskilled, unintelligent workers.

With oil, you use a certain level of thought and programming in a human to generate massive profits on a recurring basis.

With nuclear, the power shifts. You need more thoughtful people, which means more distribution of the wealth. Providing unlimited, clean energy is bad for economic interests of the powerful, because of many reasons including it has less side effects and higher education requirements. A more educated populace demands more equitable treatment, which results in significantly diminished recurring profits.

I can explain the idea further, but the summary is that the physics of it make sense. The economics for benefitting general society is orders of magnitudes superior. The economics for the rich do not make sense in the least.

The question is how long will we all accept excuses so that a cluster of greedy, small-minded human beings at the top can continue to be comfortable? It is a delicate dance. Jeopardize the safety and security of these weak egomaniacs, and they may plunge our entire planet into an abyss.

Infinite energy directly threatens infinite profits. Scared energy. Our systems rely on scarcity. When scarcity ceases, it shifts to forcefully demanding scarcity. The mechanics of this are all explainable.

In response to your question more directly: renewables are not renewable. Solar panels need to be replaced every ~25 years or so. This makes them a kind of fuel like any other. They just generate electricity slower and with lower energy particles so the frequency of maintenances shifts. This extra time affords it less risk, but with increase “rent” in the space it occupies over time.

There is no such thing as free energy. It is a generation vs risk equation.

I find renewables to be mathematically inadequate for existing and growing energy needs by every metric imaginable, save we are in space constructing a dyson sphere and harnessing all the energy of the sun. Perhaps then, optimized solar panels will be very useful.

But given our time constraints as a species, renewables are a cliff. More importantly, they enable existing power structures to satiate public demand on taking action while simultaneously not realistically threatening the boundless streams of revenue from oil based energy. This provides a social comfort for them at the cost of our entire planet, and species, future.

Greed does not care about the future. It is reactive. When the cliff comes, greed will not see it.

Young lady, in this household we respect the laws of thermodynamics

E=mc^2 + an infinite universe filled with mass.

Sea pirates still exist and would love this… you’d need to provide protection and safety, that would probably negate the energy gains

I'm in the anti-nuclear camp. Mainly because I think the inertia around current consumption patterns is too strong to overcome, so adding a lot of nuclear to the mix would make things a lot more dangerous without making things much better.

This is how I think about the danger of nuclear power. Imagine a really safe nuclear power plant. How often will it fail? Let's say, once every 100,000 years. Assuming this probability is uniformly distributed over the 100,000 year time period, it has a 1/100,000 chance of failing in any given year. A failure seems pretty unlikely. But, there are something like 450 operating nuclear power plants in the world. The chance of a single power plant failing in a year is then 1 - (99,999/100,000)^450 which is around 0.5%. That's starting to look a lot more likely now. After 30 years, there is a 78% chance of a nuclear power plant failing somewhere on Earth.

Now what's even more interesting is if you look back on historic nuclear power accidents at INES level 6 or higher. 1957 - Kyshtym disaster, 1986 - Chernobyl, 2011 - Fukushima. And of course there have been other close calls (e.g. Three Mile Island). The cadence of these accidents seems to match the data from the thought experiment above.

Current consumption patterns didn't exist a century ago. Some alternatives to petroleum-powered consumption are already cheaper and more convenient than their petroleum-powered equivalents. Today landscaping tools and heat pumps, tomorrow cars and trucks, later ships and construction equipment, and maybe someday airliners. That combined with regulatory carrots and sticks will change consumption patterns. A century ago, people in cities burned a LOT of coal for heating. Air pollution in urban areas was pretty awful. We've changed consumption patterns before and we can do it again.

Imagine that we decarbonize most of our economy and mostly stop accelerating climate change, with a combination of renewables and nuclear. But somewhere in the world, a nuclear reactor melts down every 5 years. Sometimes it's like TMI and sometimes it's like Chernobyl.

Is that better overall than destabilizing Earth's climate?

Yes, without a doubt. Other than messing up a bunch of land, Chernobyl wasn’t even that terrible outside of a certain radius.

> Imagine that we decarbonize most of our economy and mostly stop accelerating climate change, with a combination of renewables and nuclear. But somewhere in the world, a nuclear reactor will melts down every 5 years. Sometimes it's like TMI and sometimes it's like Chernobyl.

Probably it would be better to de-carbonize the economy. But the global economy is literally a tragedy of the commons. There's really no hope of massive collective action, even has humanity faces greater calamity. My point is that building a bunch of nuclear power will make it more likely that a Chernobyl happens every 5 years, but it won't have a large impact on climate change.

As long as we need to fill the gaps around supply of renewables, we will need to build either nuclear or fossil fuel plants. Imagine a new 1 GW nuclear plant compared to a new 1 GW natural gas plant. Which is better for the world on the margin?

Also, the trend I perceive is that as societies develop, they gain both desire and ability to make the commons less tragic. China is the world's largest carbon emitter yet somehow their strategy to decarbonize feels more credible than the USA's (to the extent that we even have one at all).

It doesn’t seem wise to vastly increase risk just for marginal capacity when we are already vastly exceeding our carbon budget.

> As long as we need to fill the gaps around supply of renewables,

There are several assumptions hidden here.

One is that it's a choice between building new renewable and fossil fuel plants vs. new nuclear. The real choice is between moving some fossil fuels to renewable immediately, or leaving fossil fuels online while a nuclear plant gets delayed 5 times.

The second is the assumption that all capacity to consume energy much be fulfilled and must remain constant. We can turn down the aluminium smelter. We can smelt steel with electricity. We can use renewables to drive chemical reactions. We can make fertilizer with electricity. Noone dies if we stop doing these things sometimes. The only downside is it costs a little more.

But this is the downside of nuclear anyway, so where's the problem?

We can also time shift energy with things like thermochemical storage. A huge amount of emissions come from burning natural gas for heat. Thermochemical storage is a fraction of the cost of batteries and is compact enough to store a year's worth of energy.

Mister Martin: Another great post! Thank you to raise the idea of change. When I talk with people from developing countries, they frequently despair about the state of their environment, including air, soil, and water pollution. I tell them that Japan, UK, Germany, and the United States was a dirty mess in the 1960s and 1970s. Then, all of them awoke to environmentalism. Today, these are some of the cleanest countries in the world. In particular, Japan and German are still major industrial power houses (steel, chemical, manuf, etc.). Their air, soil, and water pollution declined dramatically in the last 50 years. Yes, sadly, some of this pollution has been exported to poor(er), developing countries. However, a lot of industry remains onshore and people and companies are fully committed to a clean environment. Really, I cannot stress enough how large are chemical companies in Japan. When you fly into Haneda (Tokyo) Airport, it seems like a 50km continuous line of chemical plants on the waterfront in Kanagawa-ken! The environment regulations are incredibly strict. Places that were an environmental disaster 50 years ago are now a "factory neighborhood", but no longer a polluted mess. Recovery and change is possible!

For other readers, I assume "TMI" means "Three Mile Island" nuclear accident. You can read more about it on Wikipedia.

> I'm in the anti-nuclear camp. Mainly because I think the inertia around current consumption patterns is too strong to overcome, so adding a lot of nuclear to the mix would make things a lot more dangerous without making things much better.

Adding lots of nuclear would vastly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which are the single biggest threat to humanity and life on earth.

> This is how I think about the danger of nuclear power. Imagine a really safe nuclear power plant. How often will it fail? Let's say, once every 100,000 years. Assuming this probability is uniformly distributed over the 100,000 year time period, it has a 1/100,000 chance of failing in any given year. A failure seems pretty unlikely. But, there are something like 450 operating nuclear power plants in the world. The chance of a single power plant failing in a year is then 1 - (99,999/100,000)^450 which is around 0.5%. That's starting to look a lot more likely now. After 30 years, there is a 78% chance of a nuclear power plant failing somewhere on Earth.

> Now what's even more interesting is if you look back on historic nuclear power accidents at INES level 6 or higher. 1957 - Kyshtym disaster, 1986 - Chernobyl, 2011 - Fukushima. And of course there have been other close calls (e.g. Three Mile Island). The cadence of these accidents seems to match the data from the thought experiment above.

Yes nuclear power plants fail at some rate. Contrary to the pro-fossil-fuel / green propaganda, even quite serious failures are just not very serious in the scheme of things. A single coal mine collapse will easily kill many more people than all the direct deaths attributed to nuclear accidents combined. As for indirect, coal mines (EDIT: that should be coal power stations) will pump out chemicals and radiation that kill vast numbers of people _when they are operating normally without any failure_. Other fossil fuel plants less bad than coal, but still very damaging.

EDIT: references - https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/c-change/news/fossil-fuel-air-p..., https://cen.acs.org/articles/91/web/2013/04/Nuclear-Power-Pr...

> Adding lots of nuclear would vastly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which are the single biggest threat to humanity and life on earth.

Does it though, or does it just distract from real solutions and prop up coal and gas for another decade?

Let's say there's a trillion dollars to spend today.

What is the net reduction in emissions between now and 2040 achieved by spending it on nuclear (hint: if the project takes as long as most in the west do it's negative)?

What is the net reduction achieved in the same timespan by spending it on renewables?

Even if there weren't a bunch of other problems (and there are) it's like claiming you need to stop and build a new engine so your car can go faster on the last lap of a race.

> Does it though,

Yes. See France, for example.

> or does it just distract from real solutions and prop up coal and gas for another decade?

Nuclear is the real solution. The past 40 years of people alleging nuclear is too late and there are magical other solutions that should be employed instead is what has been propping up fossil fuels for decades.

The Hinkley C is a real project which is under construction in the west right now. It's prpjected to take 19 years since approval and 10 years since construction began and cost 26 billion pounds for a nameplate 3200MW capacity. Taking the ratio between nameplate and net for its predecessor of about 62%, we can expect around 11.8 pounds per watt. This does not include operating costs or the decommissioning when the taxpayer gets left holding the ball, or any of the other hidden costs such as the externalised costs of security and publicly funded administration overhead. Nuclear has a zero or even negative economic learning rate so there is no reason to believe any additional plants will be cheaper.

You personally can go buy a 1kW net system for less money per watt right now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxUgX3MLWYI

It will pay itself off before any nuclear project started now even opens. By that time batteries will be a third of the price and solar panels will have halved.

Wind is anti-correlated with sun and you can purchase a 10kW wind turbine right now for around 6000 pounds. Put 5kW of nameplate wind capacity into a copy of the same storage system and you have another 2kW average with lower price and even less downtime.

A hydrogen electrolyzer you can purchase right now costs $1000/kW, a 1kW fuel cell is around $4000 and low pressure hydrogen tanks are on the order of $20/kWh. These make weeks or even months of storage possible.

Nuclear is so expensive that even the fudged numbers of a gigawatt scale project with outcomes over a decade away do not compare favourably to end user retail prices of a system you can install in a month.

Any argument about the fission plant running longer are invalid, because the system outlined only has to make 9p/kWh (the same 9p that Hinkley C is being guaranteed via taxpayer funds even when electricity predictably falls below 4p/kwh wholesale) to pay itself back with enough left over for replacement in the two decades before it opens.

So to answer my question for you: money spent on a nuclear project will have a net increase in CO2 before 2040 because it will require concrete and steel and produce no power.

The same money spent on renewables and storage will produce net-zero carbon energy for at least 10 years of that timeframe.

It is only when we have enough renewables that the gas backup stays off even when there is 10% of the average solar or wind that we should consider diverting funds to nuclear.

This is one of the endless physics defying articles implying 'acceleration' towards a fantasy all-electric future. Batteries are really heavy and will be exhausted of power very quickly by the continuous load from underwater propellor propulsion.

A small nuclear reactor powered boat would work but the idea of battery powered container ships is specious at best.

> will be exhausted of power very quickly by the continuous load from underwater propellor propulsion.

Sorry, this is your "physics"?

Edit: just to be clear but there's an entire paper published in a high profile journal, peer-reviewed, and and the comment is "nuh uh" while appealing to non-existent physics principles to try to fake authority.

https://www.freightwaves.com/news/how-many-gallons-of-fuel-d...

A low end panamax container ship would require fifty-six million, nine hundred twenty-five thousand KwH of energy (56925 mwh).

Academics and beancounters tend to miss out critical factors in how things get done in practice, not in theory.

“Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you're a thousand miles from the corn field.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower

Is a tendency to miss some practical concerns the same as "physics defying" or have you just completely shifted arguments without acknowledging that your former one was completely fabricated and anti-scientific?

What does your number have to do with the practicality of the prospects of electric container ships? You threw out a number, now justify what you think that means. A big number is supposed to do what?

Do the math - container ships carry literally million of gallons of fuel to propel themselves through the ocean with enough spare to deal with inclement conditions, storms etc. A truck carries a rolling load, meaning once they are up and rolling the engine doesn't have to work as hard on a flat surface, boat propellors are continuous load.

What battery technology exists today that could even begin to store and deliver the amount of energy needed reliably, how long would they take to charge up? I suspect the size of the batteries would look like a fully loaded container ship.

This isn't 'anti scientific' it's a common sense practical rebuttal of a pseudo scientific/academic fantasy world

You are responding to an entire article all about the math. That you did not read. And dismiss because you apparently know better without even bothering to know what they are proposing.

There is nothing more anti-scientific than that. You are not even making a basic effort to understand what you are criticizing.

Oh I read it...

....We assume an ICE tank-to-wake efficiency of 50% and electric motor and inverter efficiencies of 95% each28. Batteries yield an 80% efficiency improvement compared to their ICE counterparts, which translates to a 30% decrease in total energy needs for the battery-electric ship….We assume a containership carries enough fuel for a day’s voyage; in reality, this figure is probably higher, because ships often carry fuel for several days after bunkering…

Most of the initial asssumptions are way off and rely on the 'tightening regulatory landscape' to make hte battery powered fantasy more convincing.

Discuss this with anyone in shipping and they will just laugh

If you have issues with specific assumptions and sources to cite showing how those assumptions are flawed, then you would be contributing to a productive conversation about the article.

Simply saying "Batteries are really heavy and will be exhausted of power very quickly by the continuous load from underwater propellor propulsion." when those specific points have been discussed in the article does not contribute anything to the discussions and simply makes it appear as if you did not read the article.

Could you, please, elaborate what realistic assumptions would look like? I am not in shipping industry nor am I a battery expert. I understand that batteries suffer from lower energy density and a number of other issues, but I'd really like to see how far off the tech is numerically.

As a start, they need a few weeks of fuel, not a day. Also, large ICEs are actually a lot more efficient than the little things we put in cars. Bunker fuel is also enormously cheaper than regular gasoline.

The overall takeaway for me is that we need a 10x improvement in battery density, electricity costs to be 1/3 of today, plus a 30x reduction in battery costs, for this to be feasible. At that point, it is 'just' a capex problem to replace the fleet. These are still 'decades away' numbers IMO.

Your comment is somewhat hostile. "Justify what you think that means"

OK. Well the large scale BES plants struggle to get costs below $200 per kWh. So that means that the cost for this battery is about $11,385,000,000. And this doesnt take into account the amount of space and weight this would take up on the ship. The cost of a panamax class appear to be about $300m. or about 38x increase in cost. This seems like a pretty clear case of it's not going to work.

thank you @10u152

And your reply doesn't take into account the cost saving from not buying fuel and not emitting pollution.

Figure 3 from the article specifically looks at the relationship between battery cost and density vs voyage length on the cost effectiveness of switching.

The article is analyzing balancing lifetime costs of the batteries and their recharging vs. the lifetime costs of fuel for an ICE powered ship.

56 million kWh. At current Australian wholesale prices that's $17m AUD to refuel.

Does that sound like a cheap tank of gas ?

Well that depends, is that a representative price for electricity across ports? What is the representative price for equivalent heavy fuel oil?

Yet again, stating a single big number with emphasis is no way to convince anybody of anything. What's the baseline? Or are people just supposed to be scared of big numbers and run away? This is yet again a highly unscientific way to think about a matter.

A quick google says traditional bunker fuel would be about $3.3m

https://www.morethanshipping.com/fuel-costs-ocean-shipping/

So 38x more expensive to build and 5x more expensive to fuel. And the big hitch with that is getting a power supply large enough to charge a ship in a couple of day turn around.

Your back of the envelope math is crap. You are comparing USD costs to AUD costs, using fuel costs from 4 years ago, using energy costs that are 50% higher than the article, and completely ignoring the costs of the pollution of burning all that fuel.

The entire peer reviewed article is about how to make this calculation and what figures to use as inputs. Instead of discussing the article, you are throwing around numbers you poorly calculated or pulled from random out of date articles you googled.

Absolutely I don't know the price of bunker fuel off hand so I googled it.

Are you saying you think that the price of fuel has dropped in the 4 years ? Because looking at the oil market that seems unlikely.

No argument on the pollution item. I'm not anti-electrification in general and yes I had read the article. I just think we should be looking at low hanging fruit. Airlines and large ships are going to be the hardest/most expensive to convert.

Again, stating a big number and expecting people to go "oh wow I better shut off my brain" is not a very productive way to talk about anything.

My questions may be blunt, but they are necessary to understand what point is trying to be made.

And your big numbers are all addressed in the article we are talking about. It should not be so much work to get people talk about these matters in frank and honest terms instead of allusions and vibes.

You could read the article, but your numbers alone are actually pretty positive.

Correct me if I'm wrong (skimming some sources and fermi estimating as I can't find it stated), but such a ship can spend about a month at sea at regular steaming speed and cover about 30,000km.

It's fairly widely acknowledged that batteries are getting cheaper. If we started designing a ship now, we could plan to fill it with $50/kWh batteries and investors would not balk. Then we could cut range by an order of magnitude and still serve some routes.

This takes the batteries down to roughly the cost of the ship. Slow steaming or considering more optimistic projections about sodium batteries might even halve it again. Will it compete with bunker oil for a round the world trip? No. Is it worth starting to think about? Totally.

Batteries are already being applied on smaller passenger focused routes. It has become mundane enough to not even make headlines anymore.

For example the ampere was ordered in 2011

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Ampere

Here's a ferry making locals news (use Google translate) which can operate for 3/4 of the day using batteries and has hybrid propulsion to optimally manage the level of charge. So no need for charging at each turnaround.

https://www.sjofartstidningen.se/goteborgs-nya-elfarja-dopt/

Here's a conversion from diesel to electric for a larger ferry on a short route.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MF_Tycho_Brahe

As the systems become more efficient and batteries drop in price more maritime use cases will be enabled. It's simply all about how long between each time you can charge, and which speed you operate at.

You seem to be trying to make a point while ignoring the fact that your point has been explicitly addressed by the article you are attempting to discus (apparently without having read it).

FTA:

> Past work has suggested that battery electrification of marine vessels is unfavourable given the low energy density of batteries relative to hydrocarbon fuels28,29,30,31. However, their assumptions about battery energy density and cost are outdated, differing in some cases by one to two orders of magnitude from today’s best-available figures of 210 Wh kg−1 specific energy32 and US$100–134 kWh−1 (ref. 33). Furthermore, these studies assumed that the maximum battery capacity is limited by the existing onboard space dedicated to mechanical propulsion systems and fuel storage, so their findings suggest that battery-electric ships would require several recharges to traverse even short routes.

> For example, for a 5,000 km range small neo-Panamax ship, we estimate that a 5 GWh battery with lithium iron phosphate (LFP) chemistry, with a specific energy of 260 Wh kg−1 (ref. 34), will weigh 20,000 t and increase the draught by 1 m—a small fraction of the ship’s total height and well within the bounds of the vessel’s Scantling (maximum) draught. For voyages longer than 5,000 km, the increase in draught exceeds the vessel’s Scantling draught.

> We find that minimal carrying capacity must be repurposed to house the battery system for most ship size classes and along short to medium-length routes. For a small neo-Panamax containership, representing an average containership in the global fleet, the volume required by the battery system is less than the volume currently dedicated to the ICE and fuel tanks for routes under 3,000 km. For the longest modelled route of 20,000 km for this ship class, the battery would occupy 2,500 twenty-foot equivalent unit (TEU) slots or 32% of the ship’s carrying capacity. Supplementary Table 1 provides the baseline values used for each ship class.

> In the baseline scenario, the TCP of a battery-electric ship is lower than that of the incumbent ICE vessel only for ship classes larger than 8,000 TEUs over voyages of less than 1,000 km (refs. 5,40,47,49,50). Over longer voyages, the additional cost of the battery system, increased power requirements and charging infrastructure outweighs the savings from fuel switching and the efficiency gains of direct electrification. However, if the environmental costs of NOx, SO2 and CO2 are considered, the cost-effective range increases to 5,000 km across all size classes given the high emissions rates of HFO relative to the emissions intensity of the US grid.

A typical Panamax ship has a DWT of approximately 55000 t (more actually, but this is roughly the max in order to transit the Panama Canal). It's not tenable to sacrifice more than 1/3 of that for batteries. And this for a range of not even 3000 NM!

It's also not tenable to continue emitting CO2 at the levels we currently are. So something's going to have to give. It may end up being that we ship less things, and that shipping becomes more expensive. We can't just assume that we will be able to continue to consume at the levels that we currently do.

You must have read too quickly. The section of the article I quoted says that 3000 km range requires LESS space than is currently used for ICE engines and fuel so no carrying capacity is lost. It is for a 20,000 km that a third of the cargo space needs to be dedicated to batteries.

Again, the article goes into all of this. If you want to discuss this productively, you need to read the article and criticism where their assumptions, model, or calculations are flawed.

I was talking about 3000 nautical miles, which is a bit more than 5000 km. The section above the one you're referencing.

Even then, a ship with 5000 km range is only useful in very limited circumstances. 3000 km range is almost useless.

Again, this is already covered by the article:

> The sector’s trend towards containership gigantism has promoted a hub-and-spoke model of trade, whereby high-capacity mega-containerships transport goods over long distances from one hub to another54. From the destination hub, a host of smaller feeder ships transport the containers to their final destinations in smaller regional ports. Nearly all of these feeder ships traverse short routes that could be electrified, which would increase battery-electric containership adoption well beyond the potential suggested by intraregional trade figures. Figure 5 depicts the ten best-connected ports in the world, all of which are intraregional routes less than 5,000 km in length2. Moreover, feeder ships are older on average than their larger-capacity counterparts, and many are reaching the end of their useful service lives56. The 2020 IMO regulation limiting sulfur content will probably lead to the premature scrapping of these fuel-inefficient ships, creating an opportunity for battery-electric models to enter the fleet57.

> Although containerships, with their standardized cargo and volume dependency, are useful for understanding the technoeconomics of battery-electric shipping, they represent only 23% of total maritime shipping emissions58. Achieving larger emissions reductions will require electrifying additional ship types, including oil tankers, bulk carriers, general cargo ships and cruise liners. Of those, bulk carriers and oil tankers seem to have the largest emission footprint. Unlike containerships, some of these ship types are primarily constrained by weight rather than volume41. Energy density by weight is therefore the critical technical parameter for the batteries that would power these ships.

You should try reading the study. It is clearly a non-economical idea. Physics has nothing to do with it.

And BTW, there has been a zero emissions solution to this problem for thousands of years: sail-ships. The fact that we don’t use sail-ships reveals where the problem lie.

I'm glad you agree that physics has nothing to do with this, but the article spends quite a bit of time evaluating the economics, to the contrary of what you state. That's the entire point of this article. For exmaple:

> Under the near-future scenario, the TCP of battery-electric shipping is lower than that of the incumbent ICE ship at ranges around 3,000 km for all ship classes.

Science is one of those topics that HN does not do very well. Every time a science subject comes up there are lots of false statements that are very easily contradicts.

That figure comes from speculation about future technology. Right now, it breaks down at around 1,500 km. And that is based on (from what I can tell) very generous estimates regarding the cost of implementing the idea.

I think an honest person will admit that we cannot implement this concept right now. You can only say that maybe in the future it will be possible.

The title is literally "cost declines raise prospect." This is all that I have claimed. This is all that the article has claimed.

Agreed, an honest person can say that. But an an hoenst person can not say that it's impossible because of "physics" or for that matter that it's impossible because of economics!

I'm not sure why we should take your assessment that they are "very generous estimates" when you started with the false assertion that it's "very clearly non-economical" while pointing to the paper itself as evidence, when the paper refuted you. If you have a complaint, make it, please don't just smear with innuendo, especially since you are reading the paper.

The numbers of $100/kWh, which you talk about as mere speculation, are like forecasting future computing performance and thinking the safe move is to assume no improvement in computing costs.

People that have assumed that storage would stay at the same cost have been proven wrong year after year after year. Suggesting that somehow, just now, prices will stop decreasing, is wild speculation with no basis in fact and should be dismissed out of hand, unless the claimant can at least bother to come up with some resin for the change.

Just to be clear, they’re assuming $50/kWh, cheap infrastructure costs for the recharging system, alongside heavy taxes for tradition ships, plus other assumptions, to get to your claims. It’s much more of a stretch than you’re letting on.

Laser power beamed from space. Cover the top of the ship with a large cooled PV array.

What's the situation with cobalt? I know lithium is everywhere, but the fact that so much of cobalt is mined in DRC worries me.

Lithium iron phosphate batteries [1] do not use any cobalt and are becoming widespread in battery electric vehicles. Cheaper but less power and energy dense - worth it trade off. Similar calculations would likely apply for shipping.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate_battery

Also, LiFePo4 last for several thousands of full-depth charge cycles. Several times longer than lithium ion.

You can read about the current state of battery chemistry here: https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/961cfc6c-6a8c-42bb-... (July 2020 report on Global Supply Chains of EV Batteries by the International Energy Agency). Page 13 (PDF file count) is titled "Resurgence of LFP".

nuclear powered ships seems like a great fit for modern container shipping as it has already been tried on aircraft carriers and submarines.

Yes. Let's put 200kg of high grade U235 on a boat guarded by 6 guys and drive it past somalia.

That will work out great.

lets put tons of very dirty fuel on boat and drive it past somalia where pirates and criminals can actually make use of said fuel. And in meantime lets just burn it while the boat floats

I'm quite happy with a world where we do neither if that bothers you as much as you're pretending it does.

What happens when we run out of Lithium?

Then we mine more from whatever is convenient. Lithium is abundant in the earth, and can even be extracted from ocean water. Lithium is one of the easiest elements to acquire.

Lithium isn’t easy to mine, and basically impossible to extract in meaningful quantities from seawater. The word itself derives from lithos, meaning rock, because it is usually found in certain rocks. This hints at the challenges it takes to mine it.

Lithium is a lot like the rare earth element, which means while it is technically not a rare substance, good ores of it however are rare.

> basically impossible to extract in meaningful quantities from seawater.

The impossible has been made possible:

https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2021/EE/D1EE0...

Wrong. It is still impossible due to the extremely low concentrations of lithium. Studies like these are just wishful thinking. Just because you can extract minute quantities of it doesn’t make it remotely economically viable.

The earth's crust is 20ppm lithium, and the oceans are 0.17ppm.

A typical EV has ~22lbs of lithium per ~3000 lbs of vehicle weight, which works out to 7333 ppm lithium.

If my math is right, we would have to turn ~1/366th of the earths crust to EVs in order to "run out" of lithium.

Extraction costs are a different issue.

Thank you.

What if I reframed the question to: What amount of lithium is currently extractable at an effective cost and how long does it last if we replace every vehicle on the planet with an EV overnight.

My searches seem to come to a number of ~14million tonnes which seems to be enough for ~1.4b Tesla's(at ~10kg of lithium each)

Is my math here wildly incorrect or maybe I am not understanding the potential for increased extraction at a reasonable cost?

Neither 20ppm nor 0.17ppm are mineable reserves. The fundamental problem is that we run out of viable lithium ore, a realistic prospect if we’re planning to power ships with them.

Does it become like petroleum where we can extract greater quantities with more advanced (yet expensive and possibly dirty) extraction methods? Will there be a tar sands equivalent of lithium?

Likely at some point, yes. It can be argued that we're already at that point, since most new mining proposals are open pit mines.

Outside of Australia (where they do indeed mine Lithium ore) most lithium comes from brine water solutions.

Nearly all future mining proposals are lithium ore. We simply don’t have enough brine water to meet demand.

Can we just skip the inefficient electric market phase all together? It's not gonna last and its not any cleaner than fossil fuels so stop kidding yourselves... The military already uses nuclear power for their ships why not the cargo ships?

is a nuclear powered ship really that much more efficient? The aircraft carrier design goals isn't to make a lightweight, large carry capacity vehicle with low maintenance costs, so i don't see why those designs would fulfill a commercial shipping need.

Staffing a reactor is expensive and risky compared to electric tech. The risk to reward ratio is too skewed for this to be economically feasible.

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