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I suspect we don't have nuclear powered cargo ships because then we'd need armed escorts for them. Otherwise any nations that want nuclear tech would try to hij

I suspect we don't have nuclear powered cargo ships because then we'd need armed escorts for them. Otherwise any nations that want nuclear tech would try to hijack those ships on the open seas.

tuatoru 5y ago
Mmm, perhaps. With the number of satellites around these days, everyone knows where ships are, all the time. There's a big difference in technologies between making power and making a militarily useful weapon. If you want to develop the capability to do the latter, it's probably better to start from uranium ore than from piracy. It'll take quite a few years either way, and ore refining is more scalable.
PaulHoule 5y ago
The nuclear reactors used in submarines use (very) high enriched uranium which would be useful for weapons. It's implausible that any kind of marine reactor would use HEU. I'm also not sure it's plausible that commercial marine reactors would be light water reactors. Chloride salt reactors eat nuclear waste from LWRs like it was candy and are a lot more compact. They start out with high-burnup plutonium that couldn't go anywhere near a nuclear weapon. https://corepower.energy/technology/ https://corepower.energy/technology/ A fear I have though is that even big ships go down to the bottom thanks to rare and mysterious phenomena like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_wave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_wave
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  There are on the order of 200 hull-losses per decade on commercial cargo ships. Much of that being concentrated along sea lanes which travel relatively close to shorelines, meaning both fisheries and marine habitats. There are about 80,000 cargo vessels presently registered --- that's a large number of nuclear engineers to train. And we probably won't be satisfied with flags of convenience. Or hauling bombs (ammonia fertiliser) in nuclear generating plants.

I suspect we don't have nuclear powered cargo ships because then we'd need armed escorts for them. Otherwise any nations that want nuclear tech would try to hijack those ships on the open seas.

tuatoru 5y ago

Mmm, perhaps. With the number of satellites around these days, everyone knows where ships are, all the time. There's a big difference in technologies between making power and making a militarily useful weapon. If you want to develop the capability to do the latter, it's probably better to start from uranium ore than from piracy. It'll take quite a few years either way, and ore refining is more scalable.

PaulHoule 5y ago

The nuclear reactors used in submarines use (very) high enriched uranium which would be useful for weapons. It's implausible that any kind of marine reactor would use HEU. I'm also not sure it's plausible that commercial marine reactors would be light water reactors. Chloride salt reactors eat nuclear waste from LWRs like it was candy and are a lot more compact. They start out with high-burnup plutonium that couldn't go anywhere near a nuclear weapon. https://corepower.energy/technology/ https://corepower.energy/technology/ A fear I have though is that even big ships go down to the bottom thanks to rare and mysterious phenomena like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_wave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_wave

dredmorbius 5y ago
There are on the order of 200 hull-losses per decade on commercial cargo ships. Much of that being concentrated along sea lanes which travel relatively close to shorelines, meaning both fisheries and marine habitats. There are about 80,000 cargo vessels presently registered --- that's a large number of nuclear engineers to train. And we probably won't be satisfied with flags of convenience. Or hauling bombs (ammonia fertiliser) in nuclear generating plants.