Hacker News Reader

Comment by r0ckarong | Hacker News Reader

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?

View on HN

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com