I’ve always wondered why bulk sea cargo is not nuke powered instead of air craft carriers and subs. I expect long haul trucks and trains could do the same. If we put time into it.
Electric is the next for sure, no one is stopping that. BUT power infrastructure needs to be able to cope with that massive demand that oil / petroleum will leave for them. Where are the governments ramping up supply to meet this and make it CO2 free.
I dont care if its a modern nuclear power plant or wind,solar, hydro or tide driven. Just CO2 free.
Once the mass is electric the R&D $$ will avalanche into battery or storage tech.
It doesn’t work for civilian use cases. Cargo ships don’t need to stay out at sea for long periods of time. While they would need to refuel less, a nuclear ship would require more crew with specialised training, special posts and equipment would be required to refuel the ships and deal with waste (there ain’t really any that do this), while the ships would produce less emmission they would be expensive to run. The same would apply to trains.
Subs, air craft carriers and ice breakers are long term sea going ships where refueling isn’t guaranteed and so for them it makes sense and works.
Nuclear power plants differ as well because we have the infrastructure to manage them, know how, have the personnel. There isn’t really a reason not to use them in conjunction with renewable power sources.
On a side note, some modern commercial cargos ships are using things like wind power to supplement power to their ships or sail through old cargos lanes though large sails.
Eden. Have you looked at the middle of Australia. You could build a thousand pyramids 1 mile high where no one is and there are no fault lines, its the middle of a tectonic plate. I dont think its an issue because this disposable waste which could be further used for even more power instead of tossed away with lot of energy left in it. We are just stuck with old tech.
Regardless of that we could go renewable focus and skip fission.
How many tech as on these carriers and subs just because its fission powered ?
Moving the mass we do via sea with sails and solar would be hell slow I think.
Eden, Im just a laymen and I dont have data etc to back me up. Im decent in science and of course this is my opinion
I still think as a planet not countries we could beat this issue in a generation.
Its not where to put it, its more that there are no ports built to handle civilian nuclear cargo ships. There have been some nuclear cargo ships in the past and for numerous reasons they just didnt work out.
On the crew side, to give an example (info from wikipedia), Arktika and Taymyr class nuclear ice breakers have crews of 138/120 with ability to crew over 200 on ths Arktika class. Large cargo ships while it varies depending on the type of cargo the ship takes generally has a crew of less than 30. Obviously that doesnt mean that there are 100 nuclear engineers on the ice breakers, but as far as im aware there has never been a nuclear powered ship with a small enough crew for comerical use.
Maybe they will try again, but ive no heard anyone wanting to.
You would think that, but it might actually be suprising. Keep in mind, it supliments the primary propultion not replace.
There are also “rotor sails” essentially verticle wind turbines as far as i can tell that are attached to the ship.
Sails can be used in the right conditions, sit on a shipping lane with a current and wind and a sail can give you a tonne of power. Its how we did it for years before engines were invented.
You no that every hospitals MRI is actually Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. They just dropped the nuke from it.
Ports can handle ship with oil or an MRI plant fine. It just a stigma.
When china makes nuke bulk carriers for products exported are you missing out. That the thing now. US said no to stem cells and china said sure. Gene mod, china sure. We are on one planet.
They use modern-day versions of sails, not turbines: Giant rotating cylinders that drive the ship forward due to the magnus effect. Cylinders generate less drag than wind turbines would and also avoid the superfluous step of generating electricity first.
Those are the tings. Its not something i’ve looked into detail on so i dont actually know how they function, unlike the sails they have been using for a while.
There’s a reason why nuclear accounts for less than 20% of the energy made.
I can only say that in The States the current administration has made it very clear they are heavily supporting coal. In addition, there is a big push for natural gas- i.e. the “American Engery Independance movement” lead by natural gas harvesting - see Oklahoma and Alaska. Finally, support for nuclear, here, is crickets.
That’s why, from my understanding, it’s going to come from coal or natural gas. Maybe else where it’s different, but IMO, unlikely here.
I wouldn’t mind this, but I don’t know if I would trust my government to actually use it how they say.
Those prices you listed are insane, I think it would be better to have a 10% tax reserved for the growth of renewable energy.
They could start with a low tax and bump the tax up over time to ease the growing pains.
MRI and a fission reactor are very different things.
One of the reasons a port wouldn’t be able to handle nuclear is the electrical requirements for a reactor. Other is processing facilitates for waste. And the biggest is security.
There a bunch of other logistical issues like maintenance and what you do with the waste from said maintenance.
@Eden said is it does require a larger crew. Granted, both US and Russia have made strides in automation you still need people for emergencies and repairs while out to see.
The training to be a propulsion plant operator takes around 2.5 years and cost around $100k per student. You really need to learn on a live reactor. Not every student will pass and what do you do with wash outs?
Not to mention you will have to monitor all or a at least most of the crews health and radiation exposure. So, at least one radiation health tech would also have to be on board.
Other issue is a starting up a reactor from a shut down state isn’t a push button there is a bunch that goes into it and it takes time. Same with shutting it down. Even when shut down you will have to have crew to monitor it unlike traditional engines.
Source: I was a nuclear propulsion plant operator and technician.
Will have to look into the cylinder sail tech because that is super cool.
Partitioning the increase into e.g. 6 month chunks over 2 years would give the majority of people plenty of time to go off fossil stuff and wouldn’t really have that frog boiling effect you typically get.
Thought about that, … turns out a) it’s a small percentage of population, and b) there’s plenty of space in those areas to do solar or wind generation.
I think they’re likely to be fine, even better than fine, they actually have an opportunity to become independent from the government in terms of power/fuel supply.
I’m more worried about suburban renters and poor/middle class city dwellers who are more likely to bear the brunt of the extra cost resulting in price increases in every step of the supply chain of food and other basic goods.
