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Comment by fooker | Hacker News Reader

Okay based on your calculation, here's a neat way to do this.

The battery capacity you have calculated needs about 500 shipping containers.

A large shipping vessel carries 24000 container. So make the batteries containerized, and easy to load/unload.

You could imagine pretty fast charging like this, and at some point in the near future using the same infrastructure with containerized nuclear reactors.

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Why would you bother with the complexity of containerized nuclear reactors when you have containerized batteries that can easily be loaded/unloaded by standard port facilities?

You can carry more cargo if you don't need all those batteries. If that difference makes economic sense is not yet known of course, as there are no containerized nuclear reactions that I know of.

> as there are no containerized nuclear reactions that I know of.

Even if you built one, as some people have proposed designs, it doesn't get you nuclear reactors you can just stack up on a ship or something. Containerized reactors could be convenient for getting a reactor to a remote site where it's needed but once there you'll have to provide substantial shielding for it; usually the way this is meant to be done in these proposals is digging a big hole and/or putting up earthen berms around it. And those earthen berms will be subjected to a lot of neutron radiation, so you need a plan to deal with the site after you run this reactor for any substantial amount of time; the whole site will be radioactive.

There's really no getting around this, and most of the people pitching container-sized nuclear reactors are hoping investors don't realize it. The amount of shielding that you could ever hope to place in an ISO container isn't anywhere near enough.

You can use the reactor in the open ocean where shielding is not a big deal, and switch to conventional fuels when needed.

Nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers already exist in pretty good numbers.

Reactor fuel remains radioactive even when the reactor isn't operating.

And the proposal was a containerised nuclear reactor, so you're going to irradiate the surrounding containers in the process.

Nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers are completely different beasts. The reactor core is very heavily shielded, is built into the ship/boat, and is tended by a team of expert operators, and (at least in the case of US/UK subs) uses bomb-grade uranium as fuel.

> as there are no containerized nuclear reactions that I know of.

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-power-...

Many in design, a few under construction, 2 in operation, by China & Russia. My point being still: the economics aren't clear yet.

To get paid more money for the additional +480[1] container capacity you gain over the ships life.

1. I'm ball-parking an onboard nuclear source would take up the equivalent displacement as 20-50 containers.

having to change batteries every 2 years instead of every trip would be one. Saving few tons would be another

What about the scenario where you just want to refuel? Shuffling containers around just to get the batteries out seems suboptimal.

Placing/moving containers for some specific loading/unloading goal has been a solved problem for a while.

You can imagine this needs solving pretty hardcore optimization problems.

Refuelling a cargo ship can take over a day. Quite a boring but well paid job.

How many kwh are you lifting at a time with a container? How many kwh are you pumping in the same period?

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