5 ms·
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
by 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 agoThat makes a lot of sense; probably why we only see nuclear reactors on military vessels.
- loeg 7y agoI'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 agoMake them power all the shipping, oceanic towboats.
- srg0 7y agoNot 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 agoI 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 agoBuilding a dirty bomb isn't difficult, if raw materials is readily available.
- missosoup 7y agoDirty 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 agoReactor-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...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jabl 7y ago> Reactor-grade plutonium is still rigorously controlled, because it might be possible to make it explode, but nobody has ever done it. The US tested a bomb made from reactor grade Pu in 1962.