6 ms·

A couple extra ideas for these beyond land-based power generation: 1) Put a couple of these on trans-Atlantic cruise ships, designed for speed, to make the jou

A couple extra ideas for these beyond land-based power generation: 1) Put a couple of these on trans-Atlantic cruise ships, designed for speed, to make the journey in 3 days (at 50 MPH) carrying 2,000+ people. 2) Cargo ships that operate on the backbone long haul routes. If there are concerns about these getting too close to shoreline or population, just have them only operate 10 miles from land. Other cargo ships can then load and unload them in open water. (This would require some faster loading/unloading mechanism, maybe something where the front would open up and slide out the entire deck into the other ship.) Thoughts?

yellow_lead 7y ago
The damage from an emergency at sea could be much greater than one on land.
- missosoup 7y ago
  The thing you get in the sea is unlimited free cooling and radiation shielding. You could dump the core onto the seafloor and not really have to worry about anything except the fuel elements eventually corroding and polluting a small area. There are 11 known reactors dumped into various oceans and nothing terrible has come about from them.
  - mechhacker 7y ago
    Correct The major concerns seem to be hijacking/piracy, clearance to dock at ports, and the general umbrella of proliferation concerns. They don't want people taking these and using the material for bad things. If there was a way around that, then maybe they would be economical. The cheap fuel costs in the past made the NS Savannah non-competitive, but I doubt that's true now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_Savannah https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_Savannah
    - djsumdog 7y ago
      That makes a lot of sense; probably why we only see nuclear reactors on military vessels.
      - loeg 7y ago
        I've thought about this somewhat. We only trust the military to run nuclear reactors; ok, can we work with that? The US military is already a grift and jobs program; maybe we can turn the Navy into a grift and jobs program that is also an electricity utility.
        andromeduck 7y ago
        Make them power all the shipping, oceanic towboats.
      - srg0 7y ago
        Not true. The fleet of Russian icebreakers relies mostly on nuclear propulsion. Wikipedia lists four different cargo ships equipped with a nuclear reactor at some point of time. The regulations and infrastructure are lacking but the interest is there. Burning oil to move goods around the world is not a sustainable long term solution. Nuclear propulsion might be.
    - missosoup 7y ago
      I wonder if we're over-reacting with anti proliferation. It takes 3 very difficult achievements to build a nuclear bomb. Access to reactor grade uranium is only one of them. I'm not sure the dangers of potential proliferation outweigh the tangible deaths per year that result from large ship pollution.
      - xorcist 7y ago
        Building a dirty bomb isn't difficult, if raw materials is readily available.
        missosoup 7y ago
        Dirty bombs are cold war FUD. You could build a dirty bomb out of some smoke detectors. You could build a dirty bomb from the countless orphan sources scattered around the world with far less fuss than attacking a ship and causing an international incident. You could also build much more potent terror weapons without using any nuclear materials. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_bomb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_bomb The biggest threat a dirty bomb poses is fear. Meanwhile shipping pollution is estimated to be responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths every year which we just take as a fact of life.
      - DennisP 7y ago
        Reactor-grade uranium isn't sufficient either. It's enriched to a maximum of 20% U235. A bomb requires over 90%, and getting to that requires the same kind of enrichment facilities you'd need if you started from uranium ore. But fission reactors also produce plutonium. Using that is another possibility, but you need very pure Pu239. Once the reactor has been running for over three months you start getting a lot of Pu240, which is a serious contaminant for bomb fuel. Separating those is not currently feasible. So one expedient for nuclear ships would be to run the reactors a few months in secure conditions before putting them to sea. Reactor-grade plutonium is still rigorously controlled, because it might be possible to make it explode, but nobody has ever done it. https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/fuel-recycling/plutonium.aspx https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fu...
  - doh 7y ago
    Godzilla? (It’s a joke of course. HN can be sometimes too serious)
    - ben509 7y ago
      Seems like coastal real estate is fucked either way.
  - masklinn 7y ago
    And there are already active civilian nuclear propulsion vessels, mostly russian: half a dozen icebreakers and the icebreaker cargo ship Sevmorput. A variant of the concept is the floating power plant Akademik Lomonosov, a barge housing 2x35MWe reactors. Though somewhat oddly it's not intended as a mobile power plant, it replaces a "normal" power plant being shut down in a far eastern autonomous district.
  - hwillis 7y ago
    > You could dump the core onto the seafloor and not really have to worry about anything except the fuel elements eventually corroding and polluting a small area. Absolutely not. What you're saying is true for nuclear disposal- if you bury nuclear waste under the ocean floor there are no currents and no water table to disturb it, unlike on land where coolant water will rush towards drinking water, smoke does not diffuse evenly, and sediment does not naturally bury heavy isotopes. It is absolutely not true for an accident. Radionuclides from Fukushima are measurable anywhere in the Pacific ocean. They're all over the planet. That's key though, because such even distribution means that even very dangerous isotopes are very quickly reduced to safe concentrations, or at least lower than background radiation. On the other hand it is extremely difficult or impossible to save a priority environment if there is a real disaster. Convection will be driving far more radioactive material into the area than a land accident. You're not gonna ever have a meltdown (they already basically don't happen on land), but even a relatively small breach would have the potential to kill an entire area. Over most of the ocean that might be fine, but spawning areas or corals would be huge losses.
    - missosoup 7y ago
      It doesn't matter. Because water is one of the most effective shields against radiation that you can possibly have. The effects are kept localised. Alpha to mm, Beta to cm, Gamma to 10s of m. To put things in perspective, you can take a swim in a spent fuel storage pond and be exposed to less radiation than outside it. The contamination from fukushima is detectable all over the planet just like all modern steel is detectably contaminated from 1960s nuclear testing[1]. It doesn't make it any kind of threat to the environment. We're talking about the same order of magnitude concentrations that are used in radiocarbon dating. And the very dangerous isotopes you speak of, they have a very short half-life. See also, the Oklo natural nuclear reactor complete with all the associated waste/contamination and the fact that it had little to no impact on the surrounding environment[2]. At the end of the day, there are 11 known and god knows how many unknown nuclear reactors dumped into the sea, and things have turned out pretty okay. One of them is even a popular dive site. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklo
- adrianN 7y ago
  I'd be more worried about people stealing the reactor. How many armed guards do you want to have on board?
  - petre 7y ago
    I imagine disconnecting a reactor would trigger an alarm. Not particulary easy to steal a hot two bus sized item with a structure built around it. You'd probably need several big cranes and other logistics involved.
laydn 7y ago
A ship can not go faster because it has a powerful engine or a near limitless energy source. A ship's speed is limited by design, especially with hull length. You cannot make a cruise ship go with 50kts.
- ErikCorry 7y ago
  50mph not 50 knots. I took one of these on a 75 minute trip last weekend. They cruise at 47mph and top speed is 55mph. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSC_Fjord_Cat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSC_Fjord_Cat They use huge amounts of diesel fuel, but that would not be the case for a nuclear version. Edit: This version does 67mph and is powered by two 25 megawatt engines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSC_Francisco https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSC_Francisco
  - laydn 7y ago
    Sorry, when you said cruise ship, I was thinking "royal carribean" type ships. Cats can go much faster obviously. My point is that the power alone can not make a ship faster. Hull length and shape determines max speed.
    - ksec 7y ago
      Still not quite understanding the point. You mentioned even with unlimited amount of energy and power the speed is still capped and limited by Hull Length and Shape. This reads to me if I could get a Nuclear Fusion reactor in my ship that has 10 times the power my Max Speed would still be the same. This doesn't sound right to me.
      - willis936 7y ago
        Drag increases dramatically above the hull speed. Obviously more power means more speed, but if you want more speed for a fixed power then your hull dimensions really matter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hull_speed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hull_speed
ErikCorry 7y ago
One of these ships could maximally transport about 100.000 people a year. 50 million cross the Atlantic per year, so you are looking at having 500 of them, probably more when you take into account that they won't be in service 100% of the time. OTOH if it took 3 days probably a lot of people would just stay at home.
- shkkmo 7y ago
  I personally would love to see the return of viable long distance semi rapid ocean. With the Advent of high speed and low latency satellite internet, a 3 day Atlantic crossing sound like a wonderful break. I already love traveling by train and I've taken numerous 3 day train trips accross the United States.
Florin_Andrei 7y ago
I'm thinking they're getting close to the scale where you could put wings and electric motors on them.
- lgats 7y ago
  Except crashes~~
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
onesmallcoin 7y ago
The New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament and Arms Control Act 1987 is arguably the strongest anti-nuclear weapon domestic legislation in the world. It bans nuclear weapons and propulsion from New Zealand's land, sea and airspace out to the country's 12-mile territorial limits.
- kortilla 7y ago
  Perhaps they might begin to care about the environment more than their fear of nuclear science and make exceptions for propulsion.
- loeg 7y ago
  How is this related? Are you quibbling with the 10 mile figure in GP's comment? Or suggesting that NZ is some substantial portion of the hypothetical target market for GP's hypothetical nuclear cruise ship? Something else? Nuclear-powered US military vessels (subs and aircraft carriers, at least) already sail all around the world. I guess they don't enter NZ's 12 mile zone, or get some exemption when they do.

yellow_lead 7y ago

The damage from an emergency at sea could be much greater than one on land.

missosoup 7y ago
The thing you get in the sea is unlimited free cooling and radiation shielding. You could dump the core onto the seafloor and not really have to worry about anything except the fuel elements eventually corroding and polluting a small area. There are 11 known reactors dumped into various oceans and nothing terrible has come about from them.
- mechhacker 7y ago
  Correct The major concerns seem to be hijacking/piracy, clearance to dock at ports, and the general umbrella of proliferation concerns. They don't want people taking these and using the material for bad things. If there was a way around that, then maybe they would be economical. The cheap fuel costs in the past made the NS Savannah non-competitive, but I doubt that's true now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_Savannah https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_Savannah
  - djsumdog 7y ago
    That makes a lot of sense; probably why we only see nuclear reactors on military vessels.
    - loeg 7y ago
      I've thought about this somewhat. We only trust the military to run nuclear reactors; ok, can we work with that? The US military is already a grift and jobs program; maybe we can turn the Navy into a grift and jobs program that is also an electricity utility.
      - andromeduck 7y ago
        Make them power all the shipping, oceanic towboats.
    - srg0 7y ago
      Not true. The fleet of Russian icebreakers relies mostly on nuclear propulsion. Wikipedia lists four different cargo ships equipped with a nuclear reactor at some point of time. The regulations and infrastructure are lacking but the interest is there. Burning oil to move goods around the world is not a sustainable long term solution. Nuclear propulsion might be.
  - missosoup 7y ago
    I wonder if we're over-reacting with anti proliferation. It takes 3 very difficult achievements to build a nuclear bomb. Access to reactor grade uranium is only one of them. I'm not sure the dangers of potential proliferation outweigh the tangible deaths per year that result from large ship pollution.
    - xorcist 7y ago
      Building a dirty bomb isn't difficult, if raw materials is readily available.
      - missosoup 7y ago
        Dirty bombs are cold war FUD. You could build a dirty bomb out of some smoke detectors. You could build a dirty bomb from the countless orphan sources scattered around the world with far less fuss than attacking a ship and causing an international incident. You could also build much more potent terror weapons without using any nuclear materials. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_bomb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_bomb The biggest threat a dirty bomb poses is fear. Meanwhile shipping pollution is estimated to be responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths every year which we just take as a fact of life.
    - DennisP 7y ago
      Reactor-grade uranium isn't sufficient either. It's enriched to a maximum of 20% U235. A bomb requires over 90%, and getting to that requires the same kind of enrichment facilities you'd need if you started from uranium ore. But fission reactors also produce plutonium. Using that is another possibility, but you need very pure Pu239. Once the reactor has been running for over three months you start getting a lot of Pu240, which is a serious contaminant for bomb fuel. Separating those is not currently feasible. So one expedient for nuclear ships would be to run the reactors a few months in secure conditions before putting them to sea. Reactor-grade plutonium is still rigorously controlled, because it might be possible to make it explode, but nobody has ever done it. https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/fuel-recycling/plutonium.aspx https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fu...
- doh 7y ago
  Godzilla? (It’s a joke of course. HN can be sometimes too serious)
  - ben509 7y ago
    Seems like coastal real estate is fucked either way.
- masklinn 7y ago
  And there are already active civilian nuclear propulsion vessels, mostly russian: half a dozen icebreakers and the icebreaker cargo ship Sevmorput. A variant of the concept is the floating power plant Akademik Lomonosov, a barge housing 2x35MWe reactors. Though somewhat oddly it's not intended as a mobile power plant, it replaces a "normal" power plant being shut down in a far eastern autonomous district.
- hwillis 7y ago
  > You could dump the core onto the seafloor and not really have to worry about anything except the fuel elements eventually corroding and polluting a small area. Absolutely not. What you're saying is true for nuclear disposal- if you bury nuclear waste under the ocean floor there are no currents and no water table to disturb it, unlike on land where coolant water will rush towards drinking water, smoke does not diffuse evenly, and sediment does not naturally bury heavy isotopes. It is absolutely not true for an accident. Radionuclides from Fukushima are measurable anywhere in the Pacific ocean. They're all over the planet. That's key though, because such even distribution means that even very dangerous isotopes are very quickly reduced to safe concentrations, or at least lower than background radiation. On the other hand it is extremely difficult or impossible to save a priority environment if there is a real disaster. Convection will be driving far more radioactive material into the area than a land accident. You're not gonna ever have a meltdown (they already basically don't happen on land), but even a relatively small breach would have the potential to kill an entire area. Over most of the ocean that might be fine, but spawning areas or corals would be huge losses.
  - missosoup 7y ago
    It doesn't matter. Because water is one of the most effective shields against radiation that you can possibly have. The effects are kept localised. Alpha to mm, Beta to cm, Gamma to 10s of m. To put things in perspective, you can take a swim in a spent fuel storage pond and be exposed to less radiation than outside it. The contamination from fukushima is detectable all over the planet just like all modern steel is detectably contaminated from 1960s nuclear testing[1]. It doesn't make it any kind of threat to the environment. We're talking about the same order of magnitude concentrations that are used in radiocarbon dating. And the very dangerous isotopes you speak of, they have a very short half-life. See also, the Oklo natural nuclear reactor complete with all the associated waste/contamination and the fact that it had little to no impact on the surrounding environment[2]. At the end of the day, there are 11 known and god knows how many unknown nuclear reactors dumped into the sea, and things have turned out pretty okay. One of them is even a popular dive site. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklo
adrianN 7y ago
I'd be more worried about people stealing the reactor. How many armed guards do you want to have on board?
- petre 7y ago
  I imagine disconnecting a reactor would trigger an alarm. Not particulary easy to steal a hot two bus sized item with a structure built around it. You'd probably need several big cranes and other logistics involved.

laydn 7y ago

A ship can not go faster because it has a powerful engine or a near limitless energy source. A ship's speed is limited by design, especially with hull length. You cannot make a cruise ship go with 50kts.

ErikCorry 7y ago
50mph not 50 knots. I took one of these on a 75 minute trip last weekend. They cruise at 47mph and top speed is 55mph. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSC_Fjord_Cat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSC_Fjord_Cat They use huge amounts of diesel fuel, but that would not be the case for a nuclear version. Edit: This version does 67mph and is powered by two 25 megawatt engines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSC_Francisco https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSC_Francisco
- laydn 7y ago
  Sorry, when you said cruise ship, I was thinking "royal carribean" type ships. Cats can go much faster obviously. My point is that the power alone can not make a ship faster. Hull length and shape determines max speed.
  - ksec 7y ago
    Still not quite understanding the point. You mentioned even with unlimited amount of energy and power the speed is still capped and limited by Hull Length and Shape. This reads to me if I could get a Nuclear Fusion reactor in my ship that has 10 times the power my Max Speed would still be the same. This doesn't sound right to me.
    - willis936 7y ago
      Drag increases dramatically above the hull speed. Obviously more power means more speed, but if you want more speed for a fixed power then your hull dimensions really matter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hull_speed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hull_speed

ErikCorry 7y ago

One of these ships could maximally transport about 100.000 people a year. 50 million cross the Atlantic per year, so you are looking at having 500 of them, probably more when you take into account that they won't be in service 100% of the time. OTOH if it took 3 days probably a lot of people would just stay at home.

shkkmo 7y ago
I personally would love to see the return of viable long distance semi rapid ocean. With the Advent of high speed and low latency satellite internet, a 3 day Atlantic crossing sound like a wonderful break. I already love traveling by train and I've taken numerous 3 day train trips accross the United States.

Florin_Andrei 7y ago

I'm thinking they're getting close to the scale where you could put wings and electric motors on them.

lgats 7y ago
Except crashes~~
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

onesmallcoin 7y ago

The New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament and Arms Control Act 1987 is arguably the strongest anti-nuclear weapon domestic legislation in the world. It bans nuclear weapons and propulsion from New Zealand's land, sea and airspace out to the country's 12-mile territorial limits.

kortilla 7y ago
Perhaps they might begin to care about the environment more than their fear of nuclear science and make exceptions for propulsion.
loeg 7y ago
How is this related? Are you quibbling with the 10 mile figure in GP's comment? Or suggesting that NZ is some substantial portion of the hypothetical target market for GP's hypothetical nuclear cruise ship? Something else? Nuclear-powered US military vessels (subs and aircraft carriers, at least) already sail all around the world. I guess they don't enter NZ's 12 mile zone, or get some exemption when they do.