I Heard that the 10 largest cargoships produce that Same amount of pollution then all cars combined.
Why are there no nuclear powered cargo ships?
In: 35
Nuclear power can be very dangerous in the wrong hands, and most governments do not want to have a nuclear reactor floating out in the ocean where it would require additional protection from attacks or could cause a big environmental catastrophe if something were to go wrong.
Cost.
Not only is incredibly expensive to build and maintain a nuclear reactor, but you need someone with very specialized training to operate it. The military can do that, no problem, but private sector companies would have a much more difficult time finding someone who can do the job, and it would cost a lot more to hire that person. I’m not sure it would be logistically feasible.
Also, getting the necessary nuclear material in order to operate a nuclear reactor is not the same as filling up a diesel engine.
Afaik there has only been one civilian nuclear vessel to date, the NS Savannah, and it served as a merchant ship from 1959 to 1972, when it was decommissioned. It mostly served as a proof of concept.
Nuclear is insanely expensive at that scale. Not only is it expensive to get the equipment and fuel, but you also have to have nuclear engineers onboard who are able to resolve any issue with the reactor.
So what advantages do you get? For a surface vessel, you just don’t have to fuel up as often. That is a benefit for something like an aircraft carrier that doesn’t go into port very often and can have supply ships bring in supplies. However, a cargo ship is going from port to port and can easily fuel up at any of them that have the facilities.
The cost and infrastructure to maintain, service and refuel a reactor as the main limiting factors. Marine reactors are not the same as land based reactors. The upfront cost is the biggest issue to build a cargoship with a reactor. There might come a time when the market has enough demand that nuclear power ships will be the new normal, but we are not there yet. If you want a better understanding, go read out France’s New Nuclear Aircraft carrier or the challenges that Australia is now facing with their decision to switch to nuclear powered subs without having the needed infrastructure.
Nuclear power plants in aircraft carriers and submarines are _very_ expensive and require a lot of people to maintain. Like dozens of sailors to maintain. Very costly. Not to mention that at several times of the lifetime of the vessel you have to rip a hole open in it to refuel the reactor – in a special shipyard, only a few of which exist with the required size, facilities and people.
For military navies the amazingly stupid cost is justified since having a nuclear reactor acheives other more important goals: cruise length and stealth. Being “green” for a cargo ship is a distant secondary requirement to being as cost-efficient as possible.
Also there are safety/security concerns – for one, most naval nuclear reactor designs are still highly classified. If there _was_ a commercial nuclear ship reactor there’s still the safety issue. A naval reactor has so many safeguards and redundant systems (and therefore cost), but again, the navy doesn’t care about cost as much as other things. Commercial shipping is in a race to the bottom in terms of cost. KNow how ships are all registered in Panama or other weird countries? Ship maintenance and safety regulations are governed by the country of registration. Countries like Panama simply have more lax safety regulations. Which is cheaper to adhere to. I can’t imagine the corners that would be cut in a commercial nuclear reactor – and if a 3Mile Island nuclear incident happened in Boston Harbor, a lot of people would be super unhappy about it. Again, the risk of nuclear incident in a naval ship is 1) less likely 2) secondary to other objectives.
Cost effectiveness is the primary reason. But I think a small part of it too is public unease over nuclear anything – either the safety, or the spent fuel/waste. In the 80s shadow of Chernobyl and 3 Mile Island, these concerns were valid. But both of those incidents were easily foreseeable, avoidable, and wouldn’t have happened if proper safety procedures had been followed (in fact you could argue if the procedures hadn’t been followed 3MI would/could have been a lot worse). Since then, commercial nuclear power generation has a stellar safety record. And the fuel/waste issue is a nothingburger – the total sum of all spent nuclear fuel from ALL commercial nuclear reactors that have ever existed is less than the amount of garbage either of New York, Toronto or London send to landfill in a week.
Crew.
People are very expensive, and those with nuclear operations skills are even more expensive. The direction is cargo ships is autonomy, having a ship with a smaller crew, just to monitor the automation and call someone if pirates show up. Nuclear is for longer endurance, 6+ months without surfacing in a nuclear sub, and that’s not cargo ships.
They don’t. There is no way for 10 ships to exceed the pollution emitted by 1.4 billion cars. That is a myth.
Ships aren’t built to last forever. Nor can they be guaranteed to run continuously. Maintaining a nuclear reactor is not cheap and certainly not something that would be left unregulated and unmonitored. Many countries wouldn’t allow the ships into port. And there would be few (if any) commercial ports that would even know how to maintain the powerplants. Therefore, at this time, there are too many restrictions and limitations to make them feasible.
Not quite, there is actually 1 active nuclear cargo ship, the N.S. Sevmorput. But as others have said, nuclear ships are expensive and hard to operate.
There was an attempt, the NS Savannah was a nuclear powered cargo ship that was *heavily* subsidized by the US government
Cargo ships aim to be extremely low cost to operate, limiting crew requirements is one of the biggest goals and the really big ones can run with less than 20 people while moving hundreds of thousands of tons of cargo. Their hull forms and engines are all optimized for fuel efficiency at a relatively low speed (20 knots) and they are by far the most energy efficient form of transportation
Don’t get tripped up by stats about the emissions of the 10 largest ships, those ships are bigger than you can possibly imagine and moving that cargo any other way would result in significantly more emissions. Even trains are significantly more polluting than a large ship, trucks are ludicrously inefficient compared to water shipping
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