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> However, with solar and wind now far cheaper than nuclear due to no need for massive capital investments in concrete and steel upfront many years before produ
by krasin 2y ago
> However, with solar and wind now far cheaper than nuclear due to no need for massive capital investments in concrete and steel upfront many years before production starts, does it even make sense for governments to go down this route?
If we would like to stop polluting the air, the future of maritime shipping is nuclear (fusion or fission). China understands that, and invests in R&D necessary to make it happen.
Plus, on ships, there's no competition with solar or wind. And nuclear will actually be quite cheaper than bunker oil, if executed correctly.
- ok_dad 2y agoI’ll eat my hat if cargo ships go nuclear. Even the US Navy stopped using nuclear for all but carriers. Shipboard nuclear is on another level to regular power plants for many reasons.
- kibwen 2y agoThis. If you could make ship-sized nuclear reactors easy and affordable, the US navy would be knocking down your door. There's no lack of DoD funding, no lack of operator expertise, and no nimbyism from dolphins, so the fact that the USN doesn't have a reactor in every single Arleigh Burke is purely because it's not economical.
- photonbeam 2y agoThey could put out a big production line of cheaper reactors, but the problem is that their navy boats are a target for missiles, which means larger risks of bad incidents. So they pick carefully Cargo generally isnt a target in the same way
- ok_dad 2y agoThat’s not why they don’t do it, it’s because it’s way too expensive. That fact alone precludes it from being used on cargo ships. Now ask yourself this: do I want vessels flagged in the countries with the least regulations and the most corruption to be run by a for profit maritime shipping company that skimps on maintenance budgets and crew costs to be running nuclear reactors with highly enriched uranium (weapons grade) anywhere they want around the world, even through pirate territory? Fuck No I don’t. I barely trust the nukes running them in the USN!
- dotnet00 2y agoAs much as I'd love to see nuclear powered cargo ships, they do still have to give consideration to the possibility of getting damaged. Even putting aside exceptional situations like with the Houthis, we tend to get one or two highly public ship accidents per year. It would not be nice to have an incident like that involving a nuke ship every few years. I feel like the solution for decarbonizing shipping would be carbon capture. Have the ships store the combustion products rather than exhaust them out, then reprocess them back into fuel on land using some other energy source (say, nuclear).
- bobthepanda 2y agoone of the things being looked into is syngas from the carbon in the air, to produce net-zero hydrocarbons. if it worked out, it would at least be relatively easy since pretty much all our infrastructure is designed around hydrocarbons.
- coolspot 2y ago> I’ll eat my hat if cargo ships go nuclear. Would you like some ketchup or ranch sauce? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sevmorput https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sevmorput
- bonzini 2y agoDoes that count as "going nuclear"? Four have been built, and as of now they've all been decommissioned.
- ok_dad 2y agoGo nuclear means the future. Past experiments failing is why I said that ships won’t GO nuclear, implying the future. I was a navy nuke, I know a bit about shipboard nuclear reactors.
- TheDudeMan 2y agoAnd submarines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_submarine#United_States_Navy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_submarine#United_State...
- ok_dad 2y agoSubmarines are boats.
- mdorazio 2y agoI don’t really buy this argument. Maritime alternatives like hydrogen fuel cells and biodiesel seem like far more realistic plays than installing nuclear reactors on thousands of vessels.
- Angostura 2y agoNot to mention modern sail
- jazzyjackson 2y agowhat modern sail
- Angostura 2y agoSorry - was thinking about this kind of stuff https://newatlas.com/marine/new-aden-supertanker-sails https://newatlas.com/marine/new-aden-supertanker-sails https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-66543643 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-66543643
- semi-extrinsic 2y agoFuel cells don't scale well to multiple megawatts when compared with combustion technologies. Hydrogen is tricky to store. Most likely option is ammonia in steam or gas turbines or large slow ICEs; next most likely option is liquid hydrogen in the same engines. Biofuels is also severely limited in supply and will in the future most likely be reserved for aviation, which is a lot more constrained than shipping etc. when it comes to which fuel options can be retrofitted on existing systems.
- cyberax 2y agoAmmonia is simply nonsense. It's not going to happen for a variety of reasons. Liquid hydrogen is an even bigger nonsense. Realistic fuels that are being used now: 1. Methanol. 2. Liquid methane.
- vbezhenar 2y agoWhy is it impossible to use wind and solar for ships? I mean, most of our history, ships used wind.
- londons_explore 2y agoI suspect we're quite close to ships switching to wind simply because it's cheaper. Huge kilometer square kites would be pretty cheap compared to the fuel budget of a ship, and clever routing and control systems can probably mean they reduce fuel consumption 80% for the same travel speed.
- vlovich123 2y ago> The kite in question has been named Seawing, and may help ships reduce their fuel emissions by between 10 and 40 percent Not KM but 822m seems pretty close. I think you’re grossly overestimating the benefit from the kite. Seating’s current website says: > A 1000m² sail surface to harness the power of the wind and tow ships. Based on modelling and preliminary land-based tests, Airseas estimates that the Seawing system can reduce fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions by an average of 20%. I don’t think better routing will increase that to 80% even if you combine it with next gen tech that knows wave patterns and when a slot will be available to minimize speed and energy loss. We need a path to remove fossil fuels from ships (& planes). There’s also industrial applications that need high heat that solar can’t really accomplish. Finally, solar & wind need insane battery capacity which when included pushes the economics strongly back in favor of fission and fusion.
- nonplus 2y agoOne idea for high heat industrial requirements is to move those factory locations to places with geothermal power (like Iceland). We won't see discussions on that until we're serious about cutting fossil fuels.
- vlovich123 2y agoOn its face that seems like a pretty ridiculous suggestion when the alternative is to just build nuclear power plants which don’t have any real geographic considerations and thus can be built next to existing factories that are already built around such things.
- m463 2y agoI think it makes a lot of sense. You could probably seal the engine compartment for decades at a time. I read somewhere that running on bunker fuel was the equivalent pollution of 50m cars. https://sustainability.stackexchange.com/questions/10757/does-1-container-ship-really-pollute-as-much-as-50-000-000-cars https://sustainability.stackexchange.com/questions/10757/doe... I think it was russia? that had nuclear powered ice breakers. Made sense as the constant power demands must be phenomenal.
- CorrectHorseBat 2y ago>I read somewhere that running on bunker fuel was the equivalent pollution of 50m cars. For SO2 and NO2 pollution, not CO2. They are the most efficient way of transportation in terms of CO2 emissions. Ironically reducing their sulfur dioxide emissions is likely what caused the uptick in global temperatures the last two years. https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01442-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01442-3
- energy123 2y agoWhy not hydrogen?
- cyberax 2y agoLiquid hydrogen is impossible to work with at large scales, it causes embrittlement, leaks like crazy, has poor volumetric energy density, requires storage in vacuum-insulated tanks, etc.
- fsh 2y agoMolecular hydrogen does not cause embrittlement (neither gaseous, nor liquid). This is a concern in certain chemical reactions that produce atomic hydrogen, but not in any storage applications.
- cyberax 2y ago???? It certainly does. The higher the pressure, the worse it gets. And it absolutely applies to storage. There are companies that sell various technologies for hydrogen-resistant coatings for pipes, for example.