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In my sci-fi addled mind, and massive ship would trundle over the worlds oceans extracting readily available uranium and CO2 to make synthetic fuels for all tim
by jvanderbot 2y ago
In my sci-fi addled mind, and massive ship would trundle over the worlds oceans extracting readily available uranium and CO2 to make synthetic fuels for all time from nuclear energy.
This skips a lot of important steps that likely cannot fit on one ship, but I love the idea of it.
- dylan604 2y agoThe oceans are big, so why limit it to one ship. Have a fleet of ships where each ship serves different purposes. Navies have been doing this for most of naval history.
- WillAdams 2y agoHal Clement posited schools of "pseudolife" fish processing seawater to extract gold/platinum and harvested by tenders in his short story "The Mechanic" --- it, "Raindrop" and "Halo" are still relevant today and highly recommended.
- photochemsyn 2y agoCosts to operate the ship would be more than the recovered uranium would generate. Meaning you wouldn't recover near enough uranium to break even on refueling the ship when it was needed. Same problem with gold (Fritz Haber famously tried this scheme thinking he could erase Germany's WWI war debts, usurious though they were, with gold from seawater). Concentration is just too low to make such processes feasible.
- jvanderbot 2y agoThe synthetic fuel is what you sell. The uranium keeps you producing fuel for cheaper than O&G traditional extraction. But you're right: Just put a off-the-shelf modular reactor on the ship, then use that power to synthesize payload fuel from CO2, and the gold, uranium, etc are just helpful extras.
- jlund-molfese 2y agoIf you haven’t already read it, Arthur C Clarke’s The Man Who Ploughed the Sea, which addresses this idea, is a short story that’s pretty interesting.