7 ms·
Just use nuclear.
by ianai 4y ago
Just use nuclear.
- ok_dad 4y agoAs a former navy nuke: no. I don’t want commercial vessels registered in Nosafetystandardsland to have nuclear power. Fuck no. It’s also not even a little economical.
- pxmpxm 4y ago>vessels registered in Nosafetystandardsland Ha will have to borrow that
- selimthegrim 4y agoIt’s where the clouds from cloud-cuckoo land dump all their rain and the man with message in cleft stick returns.
- ianai 4y ago
- sbierwagen 4y ago>Don’t have them be commercial. So the proposal here is to... nationalize all ocean freight?
- ianai 4y agoSounds similar to the Marshall plan don’t it?
- krallja 4y ago> Don’t have them be commercial What other purpose do you believe shipping vessels to serve?
- the_only_law 4y agoIt's just a troll.
- erentz 4y agoWell by definition if nosafetystandardsland decides to build a nuclear ship you won’t have a say in it anyway. It just won’t get to enter ports in safetystandardsland. For nuclear shipping to become viable a reasonable set of trading countries would need to come together and set the standards that it’ll operate under.
- krasin 4y ago>As a former navy nuke: no. I don’t want commercial vessels registered in Nosafetystandardsland to have nuclear power. Fuck no. These nuclear vessels will likely have to be registered in countries with nuclear power already deployed. Nobody will allow Panama or Costa Rica to have an atomic ship - I am with you on that. >It’s also not even a little economical. If somebody is ready to put money to try making it economical, I would be cheering for them. Just put transparent rules & regulations and wait. If somebody comes up with a safe & profitable atomic ship, we all win.
- ok_dad 4y agoThe hard part is the very highly enriched uranium. To make a compact and light naval reactor you need very pure U-235. I am not allowed to even say how pure, but trust it costs obscene amounts to do so. If it could be done safely I’d be for it, but I’m not going to hold my breath.
- krasin 4y ago>To make a compact and light naval reactor you need very pure U-235 Yes, with the reactor designs used by US Navy. Akademik Lomonosov ([1]), a floating nuclear plant, uses "low-enriched uranium (LEU) fuel, with 14.1% average enrichment, with a fuel cycle of 3 years". Commercial atomic container ships will likely be closer to Akademik Lomonosov than the US Navy fleet. And that's fine. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov
- ok_dad 4y agoCool, yea it looks like the "KLT-40S" reactor can do LEU, so at least that part is a bit cheaper. I still think it's not a great idea, nor would it still be economical except for maybe some very specific applications, but perhaps it's more realistic than I thought. Maybe you could have a very large ship, larger than could go into a port, and it could perhaps ferry cargo around the world and as it reaches ports it offloads the cargo onto some waiting barges to be tugged into port? I imagine you would need to ship a LOT of goods FAST to make it worthwhile to use nuclear.
- survirtual 4y agoWatching our civilization dance around infinite energy is like watching cave men hiding away from flames.
- depereo 4y agoNuclear has important limits and constraints.
- jvm___ 4y agoWould unlimited, free, do whatever you want etc. nuclear power kill more people than our current trajectory? Not trying to start a fight, just curious. I guess there's enough people crazy enough to shoot/stab/invade that radioactive material being widely available is a bad thing.
- ianai 4y agoSo make it a navy ship.
- epistasis 4y agoOne of nuclear's most important limits is that it is extremely expensive and nearly impossible to construct in modern Western economies. Ignore all the people complaining about safety. Ignore any waste concerns. Taking those off the table, nuclear looks incredibly undesirable, due to the uncertainty in ability to construct the project, inability to meet budgets. And the capex heavy, super long life, nature of nuclear which makes both the construction time and budget risks all the worse. If you're a technologist/capitalist/industrialist without any hippy dippy concerns, nuclear is a damned nightmare.
- ProjectArcturis 4y agoExactly this. That's why the industrialists have been building solar, not nuclear.
- 4y ago
- arriu 4y agoSea pirates still exist and would love this… you’d need to provide protection and safety, that would probably negate the energy gains
- atwood22 4y agoI'm in the anti-nuclear camp. Mainly because I think the inertia around current consumption patterns is too strong to overcome, so adding a lot of nuclear to the mix would make things a lot more dangerous without making things much better. This is how I think about the danger of nuclear power. Imagine a really safe nuclear power plant. How often will it fail? Let's say, once every 100,000 years. Assuming this probability is uniformly distributed over the 100,000 year time period, it has a 1/100,000 chance of failing in any given year. A failure seems pretty unlikely. But, there are something like 450 operating nuclear power plants in the world. The chance of a single power plant failing in a year is then 1 - (99,999/100,000)^450 which is around 0.5%. That's starting to look a lot more likely now. After 30 years, there is a 78% chance of a nuclear power plant failing somewhere on Earth. Now what's even more interesting is if you look back on historic nuclear power accidents at INES level 6 or higher. 1957 - Kyshtym disaster, 1986 - Chernobyl, 2011 - Fukushima. And of course there have been other close calls (e.g. Three Mile Island). The cadence of these accidents seems to match the data from the thought experiment above.
- chrismartin 4y agoCurrent consumption patterns didn't exist a century ago. Some alternatives to petroleum-powered consumption are already cheaper and more convenient than their petroleum-powered equivalents. Today landscaping tools and heat pumps, tomorrow cars and trucks, later ships and construction equipment, and maybe someday airliners. That combined with regulatory carrots and sticks will change consumption patterns. A century ago, people in cities burned a LOT of coal for heating. Air pollution in urban areas was pretty awful. We've changed consumption patterns before and we can do it again. Imagine that we decarbonize most of our economy and mostly stop accelerating climate change, with a combination of renewables and nuclear. But somewhere in the world, a nuclear reactor melts down every 5 years. Sometimes it's like TMI and sometimes it's like Chernobyl. Is that better overall than destabilizing Earth's climate?
- mwint 4y agoYes, without a doubt. Other than messing up a bunch of land, Chernobyl wasn’t even that terrible outside of a certain radius.