Plans for Nuclear-Powered 24,000 TEU Containership Unveiled in China
gcaptain.com
gcaptain.com
Anyhow, interesting dual use and program derisking thoughts there.
Also, she's currently for sale if you're interested. If they don't find a buyer it'll be scrapped.
To be clear, the NS Savannah was a showpiece. It was part passenger, part freight in a way that made no economic sense but looked fantastic and showed the concept could work. It ultimately failed because it had to bear the brunt of port negotiations. But that's a policy hurdle.
Loss of the vessel is a unique concern for naval equipment. The reactors on the Scorpion and Thresher have been slowly diffusing into the environment for the past 50 years. I'd be interested to know how contamination from these compares to Fukushima.
> The conclusions of this report confirm the results of previous environmental monitoring expeditions and demonstrate that the THRESHER and SCORPION have had no discernible effect on the radioactivity in the environment
https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2019/09/f66/NT-19-1....
More than that: if I understand correctly, there are some newer designs which can take the waste of older plants, 'burn' it while extracting more energy, leaving a smaller amount of less-problematic waste at the end.
For that reason alone we should be building some of those newer plants. If (beyond burning through older plants' waste) they are safer, more efficient and/or have a 'nicer' fuel cycle of their own: bonus.
But for cost / climate etc: probably too little, too late. Renewables + storage will do the job. And later on, bring in fusion.
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2023/11/28/solar-surging-58-in-2...
Seasonal storage is another issue all together. Also, very northern latitudes may be better served by nuclear power.
https://www.goldmansachs.com/intelligence/pages/electric-veh...
> the US Navy has operated reactors for 70 years with a perfect safety record,
in no way implies that the notoriously fly-by-night shipping industry would achieve similar performance!
Also the largest historical concern about nuclear cargo ships has been proliferation: if a significant quantity of fissionable material is floating about (literally and metaphorically) in private hands, then it would become orders of magnitude easier for malicious non-state actors to get ahold of, with potentially disastrous consequences, on a world-historical scale. Given the instability, corruption, and hostility of various nuclear-armed states in the last couple of decades, that cat may already be out of the bag, and that concern could (and perhaps should) be disregarded. I don't know, and I doubt anyone does. Institutional conservatism in this area is, however, understandable.
I suspect China will care very little about our silly regulations.
I hope they make a lot of things work that our C-suite lawyers and MBAs never understood the math on.
Just start with a time-honed PWR to decarbonize now and deal with the uncertainty and challenge of MSR development as a potential upgrade for later.
MSRs need tons of development. See ORNL-5018 https://doi.org/10.2172/4227904
I think what you meant to say is the west needs tons of development to catch up.
China already has TMSR-LF1 cleared for startup and expects to be able to start building MSRs for other countries by 2030. Half of all currently under construction reactors are in China, and they have plans for 154 in the next 15 years.
I think it is naive to assume that an operation with effectively limitless funding led by the former director of CERN has only managed to clone a 50 year old research project without any advancements. Maybe a better perspective is that that given the strategic value they just aren't sharing the details with the rest of the world.
This is such a common myth that it inspired me to write a whole thorium myths page to explain how and why it's not true, back in 2014: https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium-myths.html#myth1
Happy to discuss more but I've said a lot on that page.
If you haven't read it already, Dr. Weinberg's memoir does a good job detailing the politics around the demise of the MSR.
Uranium-fueled commercial reactors never had anything to do with making plutonium for weapons. Plutonium was made by graphite and heavy water moderated reactors at Hanford and Savannah River.
I have read Weinberg! It's my favorite book. It's interesting that at the end he was more excited about the PIUS PWR than the MSR. Here are my reading notes: https://whatisnuclear.com/weinberg.html
Shipping industry could use nuclear. They’re large, in water, carry 1000s of containers. If all container ships are zero emission, that makes a decent difference in global emissions.