The ship that failed to change the world
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Savannah was called for by Eisenhower in 1953 but didn't enter service until 1962 -- just too late to be an attractive proposition. Multimodal container transport really caught fire between 1955 and 1970 and the Savannah couldn't be retrofitted as a container ship (nor would it have been efficient as one: its cargo capacity of 14,000 tons is tiny by modern container freight standards).
Highly recommend, as did Bill Gates, who ties it explicitly to developments in computing:
Turns out it was during the 50s. I guess right before global jet transport became commonplace. Not long after they arrived, Martin's father flies off to Japan. But the opening month long sea voyage (now a slightly uncomfortable 12 hour flight) has colored the rest of the story for me as some kind of strictly "pre-modern" feel.
As I see, the biggest reason not to have a nuclear ship is not to risk giving a fully fueled nuclear reactor to pirates.
Umm, so the first nuclear ice-breaker was built by the Soviet Union in the 50s and was in service since 1959, 3 years before Savannah made its maiden voyage. Unlike Savannah, Lenin was in use for 30 years until it was decommissioned in 1989. Also in contrast to Savannah, its success led to 8 more Soviet nuclear ice-breakers built between 1975 and 1990. In fact, the most recent nuclear ice-breaker was built by Russia and entered service in 2007.
Russia (probably from not having to deal with protests as much as Western countries) made their nuclear ships and they perhaps proved to stand the test of time. (?)
I was surprised to read that the cost of the Costa Concordia cleanup - involving a refloat - is over $1.5 billion, not including disposal. That's for a conventional cruise liner, not nuclear.
That ship only cost $570 million new.
> Unlike the commercial shipping industry, the military did embrace nuclear. Of the estimated 700 nuclear-powered vessels which have seen service over the years, including the 200 currently at sea, the majority are military ships and submarines. Dedicated Russian ice-breaking ships are the only civilian examples.
The polarized windows are interesting -- you rotate the inner half until at 90° they are dim. But it never got dim enough where you could sleep during the day in a cabin.
It is a beautiful ship, and it's obvious from looking at it vs. a modern container ship why it wasn't a commercial success. But as a technology demonstrator, I think it was mostly successful.
The catwalks were partially intact and it was a very dangerous, decayed industrial environment. Lots of negative space indicated that some large components had been removed.
As a 6 year old child of the Atomic Age, my parents took me to tour the Savannah at her Port Everglades (Ft. Lauderdale FL) stop in 1964. The view through a window at the nearly featureless grey reactor vessel was anticlimactic. The most memorable sight for me was the stainless steel bar/lounge for the passengers. It looked like it had never been used.
When I was about 10 years old I built a plastic styrene model, which included a detailed reactor that I carefully painted in he assigned colors colors. All this detail disappeared forever into the grey containment vessel.
It is more expensive to build, to maintain, to break down at the end, and to train the many crews that will serve over the ship's lifetime.
Only when you absolutely need a nuclear reactor does it make sense to absorb that expense.
If the US had continued to build nuclear powered surface ships through the end of the cold war, then it probably wouldn't be so expensive-economies of scale, plus you'd still have the infrastructure and training pipeline there.
Majoring in physics pretty much guaranteed you a NROTC scholarship, if you wanted one, back when I was in undergrad. Around a third of my cohort (and the ones graduating immediately before and after mine) were in NROTC, and every last one of them was earmarked for the nuclear program when they finished school.
I'd speculate that the Navy simply doesn't have enough personnel to put a nuclear drive-train on every cruiser, much less the entire fleet.
Edit: grammar
Edit2: Also, keep in mind that aircraft don't run on uranium. A carrier group needs tanker replenishment anyway, so switching to nuclear ship propulsion doesn't save you from needing to worry about the logistics of transporting large volumes of flammable liquid to the group.
The battle group still needs underway replenishment for food, ammunition, avgas, maintenance materials, and all the other various and sundry items required to keep ships functioning. Fuel isn't that big a deal when combined with all of these other items.
Also, nuclear reactors were replaced with gas turbines in surface ships. Nuclear is attractive versus the older oil-fired boilers. Large gas turbines changed the calculus. The steaming range of cruisers and destroyers with gas turbine power plants is excellent, hence the reason fuel is not a big deal to add to all the other stuff that needs to be provided for the battle group.
I see the benefits, but attaching them en-masse to various classes of warships seems like a recipe for disaster if war does actually break out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Thresher_(SSN-593)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sunken_nuclear_submarin...
As it turns out the ocean is also really good at both shielding radiation (water is what the nuclear experts use in large amounts, after all) and diluting radioactive contaminants, if it came to that, until the radionuclides themselves decay away and become stable.
Additionally it's not as if radioactivity is infectious or permanent. If something is radioactive here and I move it over there, it can't be radioactive in both places, which is why dilution is so effective.
Before you answer, you might want to compare "biological half-life" with "radiological half-life" (as they are usually far different), and why the same issue of bioaccumulation has noted caused famine from hazardous materials that we know to have been dumped into the ocean in orders of magnitude much larger quantities. How many oil spills have fisheries survived in general?
It's none other than Richard Feynman, as related in this hilarious passage from his famous biography:
--- quote ---
One time when I happened to be home, the telephone rings: it's LONG DISTANCE, from California. In those days, a long distance call meant it was something very important, especially a long distance call from this marvelous place, California, a million miles away.
The guy on the other end says, "Is this Professor Feynman, of Cornell University?"
"That's right."
"This is Mr. So-and-so from the Such-and-such Aircraft Company." It was one of the big airplane companies in California, but unfortunately I can't remember which one. The guy continues: "We're planning to start a laboratory on nuclear-propelled rocket airplanes. It will have an annual budget of so-and-so-many million dollars . . ." Big numbers.
I said, "Just a moment, sir; I don't know why you're telling me all this."
"Just let me speak to you," he says; "just let me explain everything. Please let me do it my way." So he goes on a little more, and says how many people are going to be in the laboratory, so-and-so-many people at this level, and so-and-so many Ph.D's at that level . . .
"Excuse me, sir," I say, "but I think you have the wrong fella."
"Am I talking to Richard Feynman, Richard P. Feynman?"
"Yes, but you're..
"Would you please let me present what I have to say, sir, and then we'll discuss it."
"All right!" I sit down and sort of close my eyes to listen to all this stuff, all these details about this big project, and I still haven't the slightest idea why he's giving me all this information.
Finally, when he's all finished, he says, "I'm telling you about our plans because we want to know if you would like to be the director of the laboratory."
"Have you really got the right fella?" I say. "I'm a professor of theoretical physics. I'm not a rocket engineer, or an airplane engineer, or anything like that."
"We're sure we have the right fellow.'
"Where did you get my name then? Why did you decide to call me?"
"Sir, your name is on the patent for nuclear-powered, rocket-propelled airplanes."
"Oh," I said, and I realized why my name was on the patent, and I'll have to tell you the story. I told the man, "I'm sorry, but I would like to continue as a professor at Cornell University."
What had happened was, during the war, at Los Alamos, there was a very nice fella in charge of the patent office for the government, named Captain Smith. Smith sent around a notice to everybody that said something like, "We in the patent office would like to patent every idea you have for the United States government, for which you are working now. Any idea you have on nuclear energy or its application that you may think everybody knows about, everybody doesn't know about: Just come to my office and tell me the idea."
I see Smith at lunch, and as we're walking back to the technical area, I say to him, "That note you sent around: That's kind of crazy to have us come in and tell you every idea."
We discussed it back and forth--by this time we're in his office--and I say, "There are so many ideas about nuclear energy that are so perfectly obvious, that I'd be here all day telling you stuff."
"LIKE WHAT?"
"Nothin' to it!" I say. "Example: nuclear reactor . . . under water. . water goes in . . . steam goes out the other side . . . Pshshshsht--it's a submarine. Or: nuclear reactor . . . air comes rushing in the front. . . heated up by nuclear reaction . . . out the back it goes . . . Boom! Through the air--it's an airplane. Or: nuclear reactor . . you have hydrogen go through the thing . . . Zoom!--it's a rocket. Or: nuclear reactor . . . only instead of using ordinary uranium, you use enriched uranium with beryllium oxide at high temperature to make it more efficient . . . It's an electrical power plant. There's a million ideas!" I said, as I went out the door.
Nothing happened.
About three months later, Smith calls me in the office and says, "Feynman, the submarine has already been taken. But the other three are yours."
So when the guys at the airplane company in California are planning their laboratory, and try to find out who's an expert in rocket-propelled whatnots, there's nothing to it: They look at who's got the patent on it!
Also it would be very bad if one was taken by pirates, much worse than any existing cargo or oil ship.
Putting nuclear reactors on airplanes is just asking for trouble. Planes crash and it's very difficult to avoid, even a B2 has crashed and it's almost 100% computer controlled.
I don't know much about it, but I'm pretty sure much of it can be cracked and that the desulphurization is more expensive than it is impossible.
1: Fuel a Ship with nuclear power
2: Collect Radioactive waste
3: ???
4: Profit!
The waste management solution for fossil fuel engines is "dump the waste into the atmosphere." Is that a good idea? It turns out the answer is no, it's not.
Nuclear waste seems like a hard problem because we choose to manage it. Fossil fuel waste only seems easy because we pretend it doesn't exist. But it does, and someday we'll need to manage it too. I bet we'll find that it is at least as hard as nuclear.
Radiation will kill you relatively quickly and you won't even know you're dying.
> As always, I wonder, what was the plan exactly? What did the engineers of yesteryear actually plan to do with the stuff?
Some of it can be reprocessed, though there's a question of whether that's economical; France and Britain are the only countries to do it on a large scale these days. Really, though, it's not a new problem; industry produces a lot of very nasty waste.
Non-nuclear industrial disasters greater than any actual nuclear disaster which has ever occurred were a fact of life. For that matter, they still are, to a lesser extent; for all the worry about nuclear waste, power-plant waste has never killed anyone, excepting a small number (< 20) deaths at reprocessing plants, while conventional waste kills thousands every year.
The power nuclear fission got us was remarkable and when they started, the marked wasn't regulated, so the companies could make huge amounts of money. This money was free to pay lobbying. They just outperformed the law makers.
And "energy so cheap it's not worth metering" is a pretty big upside.
People will bring up the long life of nuclear waste. It's dangerous for ten thousand years! OK, how long is stuff like mercury and arsenic dangerous for? We accept much worse stuff dumped much less carefully for much less benefit.
Nuclear waste might get you if you're not actively ingesting it, but you still have to be within, what, a few dozen feet of a large chunk of it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_Global_Strike
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railgun
Thermobaric bombs are non-nuclear but do lots of damage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermobaric_weapon
These are big enough for most tasks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_Ordnance_Penetrator
http://theaviationist.com/2012/02/12/mop/
Unrelated but cool if you like massive weapons:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_HARP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Babylon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwerer_Gustav https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XT5jo7aZzTw
According to US law it would be considered a WMD:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapon_of_mass_destruction#Crim...
"any device or weapon designed or intended to cause death or serious bodily injury by causing a malfunction of or destruction of an aircraft or other vehicle that carries humans or of an aircraft or other vehicle whose malfunction or destruction may cause said aircraft or other vehicle to cause death or serious bodily injury to humans who may be within range of the vector in its course of travel or the travel of its debris."
"Indictments and convictions for possession and use of WMD such as truck bombs, pipe bombs, shoe bombs, and cactus needles coated with a biological toxin have been obtained under 18 USC 2332a."
A weapon should not be labeled a WMD unless it does at least as much damage as Little Boy and Fat Man did.
Chemical and biological weapons are commonly considered to be "WMDs", but do far less damage than a nuclear bomb.
No it's not. It has been co-opted by politicians (and that is the crux of my complaint and why I choose to not use/accept the politicians recent expansion/redefinition). You are correct, C&B do not do as much physical damage but at least biological can easily kill as many.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapon_of_mass_destruction#Evol...
Well dug in troops can survive a motor round a small nuke a lot less so.
WMD doesn't mean take out an entire city though.