BWXT and Crowley Developing Nuclear Power Generation Ships | Hacker News Reader

BWXT and Crowley Developing Nuclear Power Generation Ships

maritime-executive.com

66 pointskaiwen156 comments

Floating nuclear power plants are very intriguing. You get extremely reliable cooling, decouple from high G earthquake accelerations, and, most importantly, can build in a fully serialized shipyard based manufacturing facility, tackling the major cost issues of nuclear in general.

The first one the US ran was the MH-1A Sturgis, built out of a converted liberty ship. It powered part of the Panama Canal for a while. [1]

The big story, which is nearly forgotten, is that Westinghouse and Newport News jointly developed large floating nuclear plants as Offshore Power Systems. They installed the world's largest gantry crane on Blount Island in Jacksonville, FL at their nuclear reactor mass production gigafactory and got an actual manufacturing license from the NRC to build the first 8 units. [2]

I consider this one of the most promising ways to get nuclear power's ducks in a row, enabling it to mass produce reactors at a pace relevant more relevant for a rapid global energy transition. And starting out with a relief ship is a very appropriate way to kick this off again.

NPR's Science Friday covered that story back in 2020 [3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MH-1A

[2] https://whatisnuclear.com/offshore-nuclear-plants.html

[3] https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/floating-nuclear-powe...

I think the objective benefits of this approach look promising, but my concern is that nuclear isn’t held back by being objectively worse, it’s held back by psychological trauma from the Cold War and general scariness of nuclear in the eyes of the lay public. By that metric, this is worse! “What if it melts down? Then you will pollute our oceans and create mutant fish and make the whole planet uninhabitable!”

The public seems really bad at understanding dilution of small amounts of nuclear discharge for example; see Fukushima.

It is being held back by being objectively worse, that is, expensive and slow to build.

If it made money, it could be used to overcome the political problems. Just look at oil. Huge ecological disasters and it still keeps on chugging because it makes lots of $$$ for lots of people.

It’s expensive largely because of regulatory requirements to be 10x safer (in deaths per MWh) than fossil fuels. You’d have to look at less-regulated countries like China to get the “apples to apples” comparison of how much it would cost without crippling regulation.

Nobody ever actually explains what requirements would be reasonable to drop and still maintain safety. Because it turns out a whole lot of them are expensive and necessary.

Skimp on containment building? You get Chernobyl. Skimp on wall and backup power? Fukushima. Skimp on relief valve? You get TMI, which while overall harmless was still expensive.

Thanks to Fukushima it got even more expensive, because now they concluded that backup power must be available quickly in the event of a disaster. Which means the availability of the required parts close enough and the ability to bring them by helicopter, if I recall correctly.

Rather than relax safety requirements, it's better to design reactors to meet those requirements without backup power or human action. If you can throw the "off" switch and take a vacation, then safety gets fundamentally cheaper.

High-temperature reactors based on molten salt or TRISO can generally be air cooled, so a ship-based version 'just' needs to survive the worst-case hurricane or tsunami without sinking.

That's probably not going to happen at this rate.

The proposition here is to throw a lot of time and money into a design that might not even work satisfactorily, and might not ever make any money even if it does.

The first is for practical reasons. I'm sure the theory works. But what if the practice is something like a pipe leaking, a liter of highly material spilling on the floor, and it being too contaminated to touch for a year? Yeah, that won't kill anyone, but won't be good business either. There's lots of possibilities for it working perfectly as promised, but just having various issues that make it non-viable anyway.

And I have a very hard time imagining a design that could compete with renewables. Because no matter how you slice it, nuclear has complex requirements that say, solar can just completely ignore. This is especially so when you start talking about not yet production designs, so maybe the first one will be built in 15 years from now.

Assuming that humanity actually has enough collective sense to stop burning fossil fuels and scrap the infrastructure, maintaining 99.999% grid uptime will be very challenging. There are theoretically possible ways for renewables to meet that challenge, but until that actually happens, I think nuclear can remain competitive.

On the other hand, if we continue to burn fossil fuels without paying for carbon emissions, then nuclear is economically doomed.

Nuclear already isn't competitive. Nobody is building anything new, they only maintain what was built, and even that is going down and not being replaced.

The problem is that nuclear is heavy on capital costs, and cheap renewables dig in very badly into its business model, making it even worse.

Also, nuclear isn't completely reliable either. Plants do go down. Spare capacity is still needed.

IMO the long term future is a mix of renewables supplemented by something like gas, batteries, other storage, overprovisioning and interconnection (eg, Europe).

> Nuclear already isn't competitive.

Because we're still burning fossil fuels. It's hard to compete when your opponent is cheating.

> Also, nuclear isn't completely reliable either. Plants do go down. Spare capacity is still needed.

That's what multiple plants are for, ideally of heterogeneous design.

> something like gas

If gas (as in fossil methane) is part of our long-term future, then we are quite screwed. Maybe it's viable with carbon sequestration, but that's unproven technology. The other options you listed will be required to make renewables 99.999% reliable.

> Because we're still burning fossil fuels. It's hard to compete when your opponent is cheating.

No, the cheapest are renewables. Because say, pumping out solar cells by the billion is what mass manufacturing does best, and nuclear has nothing remotely comparable to that.

> If gas (as in fossil methane) is part of our long-term future, then we are quite screwed. Maybe it's viable with carbon sequestration, but that's unproven technology. The other options you listed will be required to make renewables 99.999% reliable.

You seem to be treating this as a moral issue. I see it as a practical one. Gas is just fine to fill whatever holes we might have. Yes, it's not clean. But using say, 10% fossil fuels rather than 60% would be a vast improvement. We can always improve further.

> No, the cheapest are renewables.

Renewables are cheap most of the time, so we should build lots of them. The interesting question is what to do when the weather is bad. Currently the answer is to burn fossil fuels. We need to stop doing that.

> You seem to be treating this as a moral issue.

No, it's a physics issue. Every gram of CO2 we put into the air, someone in the future needs to remove at great expense. There is no reward for solving 80% of the problem and cooking our civilization a bit slower.

> There is no reward for solving 80% of the problem and cooking our civilization a bit slower.

Heh. The older generations said "we'll be dead by then so it doesn't matter." Now younger generations are thinking along the lines of "If we can delay it until after I'm dead, that'll do."

Nonsense. Perfection is the enemy of "good enough". There are carbon sinks on the planet, for one. We don't need to convert ourselves into some species of tree elves magically in tune with nature. We just need to be a lot better than we are now, which is a good deal easier.

And yes, delaying the problem has a huge value. Because stuff takes time to build, and theoretical stuff takes a long time to develop. If you think nuclear or fusion have something to offer, then time is a huge boon to you. If we need to convert everything NOW, then there's not even a point of thinking about nuclear, it just can't be built fast enough. Let alone fusion.

Certainly I wouldn't say no to complete carbon neutrality world-wide. But given how things are it's clear that this is an unrealistic goal on a short/medium term. But that doesn't mean there aren't big improvements we can't make.

Just gotta delay it until after you're dead, then it's future peoples problem to solve amirite.

I've still a got of life left, hopefully. So I do hope for a fix in my lifetime. Just not very soon either, that's not realistic.

Fukushima is a great example because the takeaway should have been “these systems are already over-engineered”, instead of “we need more regulations”.

Recall that more than 10k people died from the tsunami, of which on the order of 100 from the reactors when you account for lifetime exposure to radiation. I’d call that safe enough. (Maybe a better analysis around cost of cleanup, I haven’t run those numbers.)

More generally, I think a big part of the cost overruns come from the regulatory environment changing mid-project, requiring construction to rework things, or waiting for inspections.

I think it’s a false dichotomy to say our only choices are strict and ever-increasing regulation, or Chernobyl. 10% less regulation would be positive, and you can bet the engineers working in the industry know which 10% is the most stupid.

> Fukushima is a great example because the takeaway should have been “these systems are already over-engineered”, instead of “we need more regulations”.

Absolutely not. There were a serious number of fuckups that were completely avoidable, had the proper rules been in place, and been followed, and had the right people been available. It would have been far cheap than dealing with the mess.

It was known the seawall was too low.

We have stories with heroic measures like workers collecting and hooking up car batteries to get equipment working. That's clearly an improvised effort, not a serious backup plan!

Apparently TEPCO refused US military generators, tried to send their own, and they got stuck in traffic.

There were multiple explosions, which resulted in broken equipment and evacuated workers.

Point is, it wasn't that some stuff got damaged in an ultimately harmless way, and everyone around just ran around like headless chickens for no good reason. Things indeed were serious, people were working around the clock to keep things together, and the situation was far from ideal. Without hard work it could have gotten considerably worse. So it absolutely wasn't over-engineered. Things held up, with a lot of effort and some good luck. They could have not worked out as well as they did.

And there were plenty instances in which the right measures and the right people could have saved a lot of trouble and made the whole thing go a whole lot smoother.

It's difficult to use China for a comparison.

Chinese labor is cheaper. If I know that Chinese solar farms or hydroelectric dams cost only $M per megawatt, I can't assume that the West should also be able to build those for about $M per megawatt.

It is difficult to search primary sources if you aren't fluent in Chinese. I personally can only search English-language information about China, the availability of which is influenced by the interests of the bilingual people who understand and translate primary sources.

China doesn't have anything like the press freedom or government transparency of the US. In the US we know when a nuclear project goes over budget because the press and government watchdogs both sound the alarm [1]. In China that may not be possible.

We do have some proxy measures relevant to the Chinese nuclear industry. The number of operating reactors is known and the time between construction start and initial operation is known. We also know the electrical output of each reactor. But turning those numbers into cost numbers requires a lot of guessing or assuming about unknown quantities.

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

You can also compare Japan or France both of which built out a lot of nuclear power. When you say "Chinese labor is cheaper" it sounds like an assumption based on comparing wages in the US with wages in China which is not how you would figure the cost for a Chinese business to build a reactor in China and sell the power to Chinese citizens and Chinese industry because all of those entities are within the same economy.

This is the reason. The only reasons nuclear plants are built at all is to 1) let civilians share the cost of maintaining an existing nuclear military (US, Russia) or 2) for countries that want to be able to build a nuke in a hurry (Iran, Sweden).

There are about 5-6 countries like Iran, each with a geopolitical imperative to want a bomb in a hurry.

While I agree there are some very positive aspects to floating nuclear power plants, I'm somewhat skeptic about some of these plans that use molten salt reactors. A thin-skinned reactor filled with a water-soluble fuel sounds like a potentially nasty accident scenario. At least with a traditional LWR the seawater (hopefully!) has to corrode through some pretty thick metal before it reaches the fuel elements, and even then the fuel is in a relatively inert state (oxide).

The reactors will be high temp gas cooled reactors, not molten salt, and use TRISO, which is much safer. [1]

[1] https://breakingdefense.com/2020/04/new-triso-nuclear-mini-r...

Fully agree. LWRs are perfect for floating. Going to some untested/underdeveloped reactor for especially the first one is really dumb. My favorite meme is the Anakin/Padme one where Anakin says he's going to build reactors on ships and Padme asks: "PWRs right?"

Interesting, I hadn't heard of those. I know a few countries (including the US) tried nuclear-powered civilian ships and they were...not successes. The problem is the viable lifetime of a sea-going hull is very limited, perhaps 25-30 years at the outside.

Decommissioning nuclear ships is a BIG problem. Salt is a formidable enemy.

There are plans to convert the US attempt (NS Savannah) into a museum ship, but they can't even start on it yet because the hull is still, almost 50 years after the reactor was removed (1976) too radioactive.

Hulls can last a lot longer than 30 years if the hull is maintained. If you keep steel painted, it can last a long time.

It's also possible to repossess a floating power plant, perhaps making it easier for these projects to be financed.

Yes, that's another advantage. If the locale decides they don't want you, or if your PPA expires and you can get a better rate elsewhere, hoist anchor and head on over.

As a ship designed for disaster recovery they are very interesting, as they can provide power, clean water, food, medical care and basic services for a city, and they can travel rapidly, but only access costal cities.

Exactly. This happens with nuclear-powered military vessels sometimes, like in Haiti 2010 where the USS Carl Vinson rolled up and desalinated 150,000 gallons of seawater per day.[1]

[1] https://www.dvidshub.net/image/252518/soldiers-bring-fresh-c...

> One of the great benefits of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier is that we were able to proceed at 30 knots for two full days to arrive on station,” said Carl Vinson Commanding Officer, Capt. Bruce H. Lindsey. “Our flexibility, speed and sustainability enable us to immediately begin the relief efforts.” — MC1 Jason Thompson, militarynews.com, Jan 21, 2010 [2]

[2] https://www.militarynews.com/norfolk-navy-flagship/oceana/ne...

40 % of humanity.. https://www.un.org/esa/sustdev/natlinfo/indicators/methodolo... Not to bad..

They would be decoupled from immediate earthquake effects, but not from subsequent tsunamis.

Had there been such a ship moored off the Tohoku region of Japan in 2011, there would have been less than an hour to mitigate damage. Not even enough time to put to sea, let alone shut the reactor down. That might well be as if one of the Fukushima reactors had been uprooted and carried inland.

"Survive the worst-case tsunami" is an engineering problem with possible solutions. If they can convincingly solve this problem, they'll have a much easier time finding customers.

Wonderful typo in the image caption:

  > Crowley's concept is to place nuclear reactors on ships to provide power as a disaster and in remote locations

Power as a Disaster (PaaD) is such a hardcore business model

When disasters are part of your business model, doesn't that create some supervillain-tier incentives?

Supervillains are some of our best enterprise customers!

And a perfect fit for nuclear.

I've been playing too much Starfield, I was thinking nuclear-powered generation ships, as in spaceships which travel interstellar distances with multiple generations of people born onboard.

I parsed it the same way. "Generating" would probably be more clear than "Generation"

To be clear: I support both nuclear power generating ships and most types of generation ships.

What's the feasability of making nuclear powered cargo ship 'trains'? Is it possible to string them together with cables for power?

Not sure about trains, but large ocean-faring nuclear-powered tugboats have been considered to move container ship sized barges most of the way and then let battery or fossil powered tugs bring em the final mile into port.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1559-3584.1963...

Yo dawg we heard you like containers so we turned your container ship into a container!

Theres exactly one nuclear powered cargo ship in existence the Sevmorput.

There used to be 4. The reason there arent more is because like all things nuclear it just costs too much.

Well, if you don’t count the massive negative cost everyone has to bear when burning bunker fuel.

The cost of labor is too low, and the prevalence of pirates too high, to justify this idea. You're also talking about serious intermodal requirements to handle these things when they get to the interface between open ocean and restricted waters, because safe navigation is a near impossibility with the tug configuration you're proposing, especially once navigational constraints (e.g. land or shoal water) come into the picture. A large merchant vessel takes several miles to stop on its own, before you consider any towing configuration. If you've never operated around them, you probably don't have the instinct that you can be in serious danger of a collision while still several miles away from another vessel, but what you're proposing is scary.

Even without the navigational problems, you're necessitating armed guards by having these ships operate internationally, because these ships would be huge pirate targets on a much more severe level than the scrap metal and parts theft that is present throughout the world. That gets... tricky, legally (see https://www.swedishclub.com/upload/Loss_Prev_Docs/Piracy/PIR...)

Also, cargo ships are already enormous. Trains pale in comparison. We don't need these headaches. Oceangoing shipping is miraculously cheap already.

Edit: I'll also point out that, regarding the sibling comment's link, oceangoing shipping was a much smaller club in 1963, so the navigational challenges would not have seemed so daunting. Containerized shipping didn't even exist until the mid-50s, and AIS and radar let us safely pack way more vessels into small spaces than they could have suspected.

Pirates and the habit of shipowners to hide responsibilities in a maze of sub contractors, charterers, and flags of convenience.

The the maritime industry's track record of preventing oil spills is pretty bad. Do we really want those people to routinely operate nuclear reactors?

This industry has an issue with faked crew certificates (https://www.hellenicshippingnews.com/fake-certificates-conti...) "An EU-sponsored pilot project, branded ‘GetQuality’, revealed that “nearly every tenth seafarer worldwide” has experienced fraudulent certificates"

Insurance is already a tricky issue for land-based nuclear power plants. Who would insure a nuclear-powered ship? This was a major issue for the German nuclear cargo ship Otto Hahn.

The feasibility of convincing enough countries/port authorities to permit you park a nuclear reactor in their port is fairly low. If something goes wrong, they'll be the ones that have to clean up the mess after your shipping corp declares bankruptcy or otherwise skips out on the cleanup bill.

They don’t mind doing it when the ship is signed for the US navy though

Some countries do mind even then (New Zealand particularly.)

But it's probably easier to believe the US would stick around to help clean up the mess, since the US Navy will presumably continue to exist and desire to operate in foreign ports in the future. A private shipping company on the other hand could effectively poof out of existence once they become liable for a nuclear accident cleanup.

Also the Navy has a nearly 75 year history of safely operating floating reactors.

That's way more comforting than anything out of the "move fast and break things" crowd".

Well, and an equally long history covering up major large-scale boondoggles and outright insane decisions that end up killing a lot of people.

I mean, you're probably still getting bombarded by Camp Lejeune ads. That's playthings to the military.

Am I the only one to think of the Boxing Day tsunami -- ~200,000 dead -- or Fukushima, for that matter?

There might only be minutes of warning to get one of these away from a shore connection...

Tsunamis are a shallow water phenomenon. If you are in deep water it’s not going to affect you. So a floating reactor would have been much preferable in Fukushima.

Also, a floating reactor (at least, traditional water-cooled design) can’t get into a runaway meltdown; worst case the core drops into the ocean with infinite cooling potential. Again this probably reduces the potential for radioactive discharge.

If some maritime modern pro-nuclear regulatory framework can get adopted for decarbonization of transport, then it would be good for nuclear.

Yeah, not going to back any design that isn't fundamentally meltdown-proof.

Probably one of the reasons why molten salt is referenced. Also because it seems more scalable, the liquid nature of the fuel means you could de-fuel it at a port more easily. But I could see pebble bed type stuff being worthwhile too.

It honestly makes logistics and waste transport a lot more interesting. A power plant comes with a ship to transport it as a minor portion of the overall cost. It forces the plant design to be fundamentally portable and modular even if it gets placed terrestrially.

Portability should make nuclear viable for lots of industry-specific use cases that nuclear

But LCOE on current nuclear is 6x more than wind and solar. As stated, it would need some regulatory freedom / clean slate, a sweet spot engineering design, and we could probably get to 2-3x (current price) of wind/solar and get to a palatable cost for decarbonization.

Tsunamis shouldn't be an issue for ships, but if the floating power plant is in a busy port you do have a risk of a Halifax, Texas City or Beirut scenario. Lots of fertilizer and sometimes explosives move through ports and a powerful blast could severely damage or even sink the power plant. It doesn't happen terribly often, but it does happen sometimes.

These would probably be put behind a breakwater

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