The Case for Nuclear Cargo Ships | Hacker News Reader

The Case for Nuclear Cargo Ships

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43 pointsBrajeshwar63 comments

Renewable methanol (ultimately via atmospheric CO2 + hydrogen from water) looks a lot more plausible as the long-term option, and is being deployed already. Much cheaper and no unusual risk profile, see Maersk and JP Morgan:

https://www.fastcompany.com/90923816/maersk-first-cargo-ship...

https://www.offshore-energy.biz/jp-morgan-confirms-deal-for-...

> "The utilization of green methanol on vessels is capable of eradicating SOx and Particulate Matter (PM) pollutants, while delivering a 60% reduction in NOx emissions. Furthermore, when measured on a tank-to-wake basis, it achieves nearly 100% reduction in CO2 emissions when compared to conventional marine fuels."

As far as nuclear, I can't imagine many port operators are going to take the risk of irradiating the entire port for decades due to a catastrophic accident or deliberate attack that lightly. Countries might be more willing to accept stationary floating nuclear power plants as they'd have tighter control over them (although putting a floating nuclear power plant in SF Bay or similar locations also seems unlikely).

We lose ~31 cargo ships per year, has "nuclear reactor shipwreck cleanup" been factored into the insurance costs to operate these in industrial ports?

https://www.statista.com/statistics/236250/looses-of-ships-w...

When I've promoted the idea of nuclear cargo ships it's in conjunction with the US military running a fleet of them as a federal service. So these aren't just cargo ships, they're a navy presence around the world. Hopefully better funded, better ran, and better defended. What's nice about this is you get both the American "left" (environmentally conscious) and "right" (pro military) with one new initiative.

Is that economically sustainable or would the US have to be subsidizing this significantly? Or would the reduced shrink rate / easier inspections make up the cost difference?

Do you realize how much it costs to do nuclear on a ship? It’s not financially viable. The US Navy only uses it because they don’t want to have to fuel carriers.

Does it need to be financially viable if you’ve got the military budget at your disposal?

I don't know if we need any more military scope creep. The military already has to deal with Russia v. Ukraine, Israel v. Gaza, pirates blowing up ships in the Suez canal, North Korea rattling its sabers, and an almost-inevitable invasion of Taiwan.

The military budget isn’t some unlimited supply of cash coming from the void. I’ll agree if we cut one carrier for each nuclear container ship or two that we add, then we’re not spending more.

Came here to make a comment like this. Could also be a civilian retirement path for nuke sailors, rather than just going to manage a civilian power plant :P

This take may be way off base but instead of trying to avoid 100% of nuclear incidents, shouldn't we be comparing the relative risk of nuclear environmental damage to the guaranteed and ongoing environmental and climate damage done by burning 200 million tonnes of heavy oil every year?

Maybe a few sunken nuclear reactors is already a better alternative? Again, I may be completely wrong, just seems like something that isn't being discussed.

In an ideal world, maybe so. But we haven't managed to clear the hurdle for ground-based power production so upping the ante to something that can sink would be even more challenging.

Or just use hydrogen or hydrogen derived syn-fuels without any of the disadvantages.

I'm with you on the sunken ones in deep water.

The "smeared along a beach or headland" ones are more worrying. What if the storm gets the reactor above the water line? What if a houthi anti ship missile wrecks/ignites the reactor compartment? What if armed men burst out of some of the 20000+ containers and deliberately try to engineer a disaster?

The golden ray (a car transporter) capsized in calm waters in a sheltered bay and the cleanup cost $850m. Fukishima is a twelve figure number.

Chernobyl on the rocks would be uninsurable.

It quotes someone saying we need nuclear ships because we don't have enough clean fuels.

Then much later quotes someone making the every obvious counterpoint, that we could install the nuclear on land and use that clean electrical power to manufacture the clean fuels.

Now just replace those land based nuclear plants with a cheaper source of clean electricity and we have a solution that looks more feasible.

E-fuels are so inefficient that you need to bump carbon taxes to absurd levels before they become lucrative; it's cheaper to not ship most goods than to power ships with e-fuel. It's a niche solution for niche markets - say, racecars, supercars or piston aviation - not a green transport solution.

One efficient solution for marine transportation would be Hydrogen storage as Ammonia, but it requires a new engine and it's a technology that is still in its infancy.

Nuclear ships and submarines exist for decades and are a workable technology. The economics might still be off, especially considering the full maintenance and decommissioning. But if there is a place to try small modular reactors that get cheaper and more reliable as they are produced in series, this is it.

On the historical experience curve, electricity from PV could get so cheap that, per unit energy, it will be cheaper than thermal energy from burning natural gas. So don't presume e-fuels will stay expensive.

Yes. The cool thing about efuel is that it replaces the need for both battery electric vehicles and grid storage which are incredibly expensive too. People try to compare efuel to battery electric vehicles alone but that’s not accurate.

Which efuel?

Surely not hydrogen since its risk of exolosion is terrifying

Ammonia is talked about as a fuel for ocean going ships. It's derived from hydrogen.

I think efuel refers only to synthetic hydrocarbons like gasoline not hydrogen gas or ammonia.

No.

From Wikipedia: Electrofuels, also known as e-fuels, a class of synthetic fuels, are a type of drop-in replacement fuel. So no, neither Hydrogen gas nor amonia are drop-in replacements for gasoline or diesel fuel.

It doesn't say what they're a replacement for in that definition.

In this review article, hydrogen and ammonia are classed as e-fuels.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910

> Another example is transforming electricity into e-fuels (like hydrogen)

> hydrogen can be further converted to synthetic electricity-based fuels (e-fuels) as chemically bound RE and such as e-methane [27], [28], Fischer-Tropsch fuels [29], [30], e-ammonia [31], [32], and e-methanol [33], [34].

(that last paragraph doesn't say hydrogen is not an e-fuel, it says it's not a "synthetic" e-fuel, as hydrogen is as feedstock for synthesis here.)

You’re suggesting powering large tankers using PV cells? I think it’s less about cost and more that there’s insufficient power density to power a tanker. Hydrogen fuel is probably the only way to do that and you’d probably need a nuclear plant close to ports generating it on demand because hydrogen is energy intensive to create and supremely difficult to store (+ storage would still be a problem on ships and massive explosions would be a real risk)

PV cells on land overproducing leading to 0 or negative electricity prices, upturning the economics of using electricity for hydrolysis -based fuels, iiuc

The suggestion is that electricity from PV could be so cheap that generating fuels with electricity could be cheaper, even with the massive inefficiency of it.

It won't be hydrogen, because hydrogen is volumetrically not dense enough, it would likely be something like methanol or methane or maybe, with the right tech breakthrough, longer chains of carbon.

You definitely don't want a nuclear plant generating this, because nuclear is way too expensive. Today, right now, solar energy stored in batteries is cheaper than new nuclear. And every year that price falls further. And most of the energy would never even have to be stored in batteries, and PV is cheaper than operating already-paid-for natural gas generators in most markets right now, (and getting cheaper).

The energy world is being disrupted, but the incumbents aren't paying attention, and most of the US media is devoted to covering it up and discrediting cheaper energy, to benefit incumbent fossil fuel energy companies, the ones buying lots of advertisements.

Carbon-containing fuels have the problem of either requiring CO2 to be retained on the ship for regeneration, or capture of CO2 from air to close the cycle.

I wonder if metal e-fuels like, say, magnesium could be used. These might be more compatible with direct conversion of chemical energy to electrical energy. Oxidized magnesium could be directly released into the ocean to help reduce its pH. More aggressively: sodium?

> Today, right now, solar energy stored in batteries is cheaper than new nuclear. And every year that price falls further.

Can you provide links to data supporting this? Everything I’ve read is that major solar installations that don’t have the perfect conditions are still often more expensive than nuclear.

No solar installation is cheaper than nuclear once you start factoring in batteries for many reasons (one is that large scale battery installations are still expensive and the other is that you have to charge the battery which means a non trivial part of your solar/wind capacity is going to charge the batteries)

He probably means solar + four hours of batteries at the field's rated peak power (which is typically what's going in these days, I think.)

This doesn't mean a drop-in 365/24/7 replacement for nuclear, but it's enough (if widely installed) to render nuclear irrelevant, as no one will want to build a new nuclear power plant if the grid is saturated with such solar plants -- nuclear will be utterly unsuitable for the wildly unsteady residual demand.

Battery price declines have accelerated recently, as usual driven by China. Last year LFP cells in China were going for $125/kWh; this year they could be going for as little as $60/kWh, with some predictions as low as $45/kWh.

https://cnevpost.com/2024/01/17/battery-price-war-catl-byd-c...

> nuclear will be utterly unsuitable for the wildly unsteady residual demand.

What’s the planned energy source that will be handling that unsteady residual demand? Sounds like in most cases that would mean there’s a blackout or fossil fuels no?

Also I think it’s telling that China, the center of PV and battery manufacturing is investing heavily in nuclear tech. The costs of nuclear are disproportionately high vs where they should be and they’ve already started building meltdown-proof gen iv reactors while we’re docking around with smr.

Combustion of e-fuels would do, and likely at much lower cost than nuclear.

China's nuclear investments are pulling up short compared to their renewable investments. They too are evidence renewables are beating nuclear.

It's going to be clear very soon even to the most recalcitrant nuclear fans that their technology is doomed.

> China's nuclear investments are pulling up short compared to their renewable investments. They too are evidence renewables are beating nuclear.

Source for this claim?

Big names in shipping (shipbuilders, shipping, big customers) have already committed to efuels like green methanol.

The ships are rolling off the production line now, the big task is a massive (massive!) ramp up of production of fuels to fill them.

Carbon and other pollution fees are part of the solution to kick the market off, but again they're already in place (and would help nuclear powered ships equally)

I think you're right but I got curious about the numbers:

> 48% of renewable electricity used to convert e-fuels into liquid is lost along the process, while up to 70% of the fuel's energy is lost upon combustion.

Not as bad as I thought tbh.

we need all of the above

deploy existingg tech, work on the remaining problems

if there are angels here for deep sea clean shipping, kindly DM me

pros: global moat, feasible tech, price parity at $80/barrel , massive upside

cons: very early, capex heavy, long timelines

So what other ships are ran on nuclear power? I can only think of military vessels who have basically unlimited budget, personnel and oversight and tons and tons of extrinsic factors to not want to have a failure.

How would you translate this to one of the most competitive, cost cutting industries with a notorious history of accidents and poor labor conditions?

Completely sealed power plant packs. Refueling requires swapping the entire power plant and sending it back to the manufacturer for recycling.

Doesn't cover lost or abandoned vessels. Who pays for the recovery when one of these sink? The insolvent carrier company? Who is accountable if the maintenance isn't done properly and one of these has some sort of serious malfunction that releases radiation?

So many scenarios that are covered by government in a military scenario that can be circumvented in a billion ways in the private sector.

The amount of legislation it would need to make this somewhat isotope tight is unfathomable and there would be a lot more money behind poking holes in it than to make it truly safe.

Submarines, aircraft carriers, some cruisers, icebreakers, and the one cargo ship Sevmorput. Safety's probably not as much of a prohibitive factor as raw cost.

All designed for the least price sensitive customers globally. Nuclear powers' navies.

Plus they conveniently already have a nuclear programme to source fuel and engineers from.

And even in those navies, most ships are not nuclear.

Yep. Even all aircraft carriers outside the US and France are conventionally fueled.

For example the British:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_Elizabeth-class_aircraft...

Or even within US navy the the WASP class capable of supporting F-35Bs. Not a true carrier but most nations would call it one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasp-class_amphibious_assault_...

The niche nuclear truly stands out in is for submarines where nuclear propulsion has unmatchable capabilities.

The Russians have had nuclear powered icebreakers since the late 1950s.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear-powered_icebreaker

The Russians have also left broken nuclear reactors at the bottom of the sea, because they don't care about the environment very much.

Or: they have correctly identified that environmental harms from a small amount of fissile material in the ocean are so negligible it rounds to zero.

Compared to the very real harms caused by oil leaking from existing cargo ships this would be a massive upgrade.

that's less of a problem than air pollution or global warming.

yeah nuclear cargo ships seem fancyful

if there are angel investors here for solving deep sea clean shipping, please email me

pros: global moat, commodity components, price parity at $80/barrel , massive upside

cons: very early, capex heavy, long timelines

Considering the shipping industry right now uses the absolute worst, most polluting terrible fuels they can find as soon as they're in international waters, we have absolutely zero chance they will handle the risks of nuclear responsibly.

A factor that is often ignored is that bunker fuel is an inevitability of the refining process. It’s not like you can stop making it without stopping other fuel production. So it’s either going to get burned or disposed of some other way.

Oil is naturally occurring and just because it exists doesn't mean we need to burn every component of it, releasing it into the atmosphere.

Bunker fuel could hypothetically be re-injected into depleted reservoirs, much like brine water which is a useless byproduct of production. This would increase production costs of other components but at the benefit of the world's climate.

> the shipping industry right now uses the absolute worst, most polluting terrible fuels they can find as soon as they're in international waters

This was the case before 2020, but I think it has now been addressed by IMO 2020.

https://www.imo.org/en/MediaCentre/PressBriefings/pages/34-I...

It is still used exactly as much as it was before, and sadly won’t change as a result of IMO for quite some time.

If it's still used just as much, then why are atmospheric SOx levels falling, especially over the oceans? [1]

I'm not saying there's 100% adherence, but you're saying this isn't related at all?

[1] https://twitter.com/LeonSimons8/status/1669667629844267008

I believe the better idea is to put a regular nuclear reactor on a regular ship some 20 miles off the coast and then find a way to make an high voltage transmission line to land, to deliver electricity.

At the first signs of trouble the ship can power up its regular diesel engines and go in the middle of the ocean so if a meltdown happens it's a solved problem already, in the worse case scenario you sink the ship and that would be the end of it considering how water is the best radiation shield and the ocean is immense

It could be a nice option to finally convince people to give nuclear a try, the fear of meltdown is engrained in their minds so no matter how many reassurances and design models you give them they'd always be in panic mode, so the answer might be to just say 'okay if meltdown happens it's going to be 1500 miles away from the coast, in the middle of the ocean and we can immediately bury the whole thing under 6 miles of water.

Another point to consider: many all-water routes are currently planned with excursions to allow picking up cheap bunker oil en route. Remove fueling concerns and you can run more direct routes.

This is silly.

If we ever get the capability to manufacture thousands of SMRs, then we are better off placing them on land, with the resulting decrease in emissions coming from land-based sources. A ton of CO2 is a ton of CO2. If we ever get to eliminate all the land based emissions, then we are well into net negative territory.

One flaw glossed over in the article is that having a nuclear reactor means your ship will be unable to visit many ports such as those unequipped to deal with, say, a fire on a nuclear powered vessel. That's not even to mention general nuclear opposition such as New Zealand's outright ban on nuclear powered vessels.

A lot of comments I see are assuming that the worst, least trustworthy shippers are going to be using these irresponsibly. Presumably we won't just be handing out nuclear engines. There would have to be a pretty robust regulatory regime that manages the whole lifecycle, and whatever random ship is not going to qualify for a nuclear fit-up.

The required regulation may render the whole thing infeasible, I don't know, but any realistic solution will be heavily regulated making most concerns about misuse unrealistic.

I’m sure those Somali pirates would pay no attention to them!

Iran is gonna love nuclear cargo ships. Now they won't just fund Yemeni Houthis to interdict the ships, but to weaponize and cannibalize their nuclear power source!

Fast track the Iranian nuclear program and maybe kickstart one in Yemen. Awesome.

Let's see if those SMRs ever get to the price points, reliability etc. In the early days of nuclear power people had great hopes about progress, too, and, yet, here we are.

Be real. Cargo ships are easy targets. You would need massive security to prevent hijacking, radioactive exfiltration, etc.

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