Comment by thelastgallon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thelastgallon | Hacker News Reader

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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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Because we want a solution before 2050.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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:

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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