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?
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The international Maritime Organisation (IMO) is working on it. It is waaaay better than fossil fuel based ships. Just to highlight a little bit:
The United States built two similarly sized aircraft carriers a few years apart, the USS John F. Kenned and the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower. The Ike is nuclear powered and the Kennedy burned oil.
When steaming all-ahead-flank on all four screws, launching aircraft off all three steam catapults, cooking 4,500 meals for lunch, and desalinating sea water into fresh, the Kennedy got 13 inches to the gallon of marine distillate fuel oil.
That meant 1000 gallons were burned for the Kennedy just to travel its own length. Or over 125 million gallons to circumnavigate the Pacific Ocean once.
The Ike uses almost no fuel to carry out the same mission. The Ike steamed for 20 years on a chunk of uranium the size of a grapefruit, travels 50% faster, and is still active today. The Kennedy is mothballed.
But. Some reasons that are holding it back:
* The ships would become even bigger targets for terrorists and nations wanting nuclear technology.
* Some countries have bans on nuclear powered ships entering their ports.
* Large scale production would see an increase of nuclear powered vessels sinking / polluting the waters. About 40 merchant ships go down per year on average.
* They can and do leak while in operation. There have been 4 such ships built. The NS Savannah being the famous American one. All leaked. It killed the vision.
* Operating cost savings from lowered fuel costs are offset by massive upfronts and a huge increase in manpower costs, requiring nuclear technicians to sail a ship. This is somewhat manageable for the military, but less so with a large private fleet.
But people are still weighing it out.
Nuclear reactors are fantastically expensive. The oil sludge they run container ships on is not.
As you mentioned there are big external costs society had to pay in CO2 and sulfur emissions. Evergreen and Maersk don’t have to cut a check to pay that cost, so they have no incentive to change. It’s a a perverse incentive of the market economy that a business will increase external costs without limit if it generates more profit for themselves.
The other reason is fear. Nuclear reactors are not something most of the public has experience or knowledge of, so they’re more vulnerable to stoked up to be irrationally afraid of it. I’m not saying nuclear reactors don’t have hazards. There’s radiation, heavy metals, a remote chance of fission product release, etc. But climate change is also hazardous and that’s what it needs to be weighed against.
Cost and scalabiltiy with speed.
Nuclear reactors are good at generating a constant output which is useful on vessels expected to operate for long periods without having to dock(like carriers which can have supply support ships come to them), but not as useful when you actually have to get to ports often and stopping to Load/unload.
this sort of reactors are not large enough to manage the cost of having to start and stop them somewhat regularly, and making them large enough for this to not be an issue means they arent really usable on Ships anymore due to their sheer size and weight
as others have said, the reason cargo ships do not use nuclear is cost and complexity. most of the comments on here seem to think that the navy went with nuclear so that they would not have to refuel, but that is not right. they went nuclear for speed, so they could push that giant ship up to 30 knots and get where they needed to be, and to satisfy the power needs for all the electronics aboard.
Nuclear just isn’t worth it (in general) on ships that want to travel between ports. A cargo vessel generally wants minimal crew and a safe and minimal maintenance marine diesel
However, russias near-arctic icebreakers and one of its arctic cargovessels are nuclear as it’s difficult to serve the North east passage with oil and other supplies. Especially the icebreakers benefit from having so much energy available and being able to stay at sea for long periods of time.
Regardless of the cost argument (which is valid), you can’t really have nuclear reactors and nuclear fuel floating around defenseless in the middle of the ocean or going to random foreign ports. Piracy is already a huge problem for cargo ships, and this would make every such ship the biggest target in the world.
> I Heard that the 10 largest cargoships produce that Same amount of pollution then all cars combined.
They also transport more containers than all cars combined.
(It’s true if you only measure sulphur oxide, I think).
Because bunker-fuel is super-cheap.
You need to buy gasoline, right? Can’t get to work without it? It is a NECESSITY. So you’re gonna buy it no matter what, really. (it’d take a lot to change that). So gasoline is the most expensive product made out of crude oil. But EVERYTHING ELSE that gets made out of crude oil is going to be cheap. And it MUST be made because we must produce gasoline. It’s a package deal, if you want a gallon of gasoline, you pour in x amount of crude oil and get some fraction out as gasoline and some fraction as bunker-fuel, plastic, asphault, kerosene (which is jet-fuel and RP-1 rocket fuel).
Bunker fuel is terrible, and not even diesel engines can take it. Impurities, viscous, needs pre-heating. It’s not even good for boilers. It’s also hellishly polluting, worse than other fuels. But cargo ships are huge and are made to take it.
We will have bunker-fuel burning cargo ships until it is cheaper to switch to alternatives. The international nature of their business means it’d be a nightmare to try and regulate. It will not be cheaper until we pivot away from such drastic gasoline dependence. When we say electric cars are good for the environment, in part, this is what we’re talking about.
(But they’d probably work more with sail-power than nuclear. It’s just really expensive to run a nuclear power plant if you’re not subsidized by the military.)
There was one built by the US in the 60s as a proof of concept. It actually worked perfectly but the economics never worked out.
I predict that we will see it sometime in the near future with the type of giant ships that are being built but who knows when.
Answer: you’re thinking of just sulfur. The way to fix this is for big ships to use low sulfur fuel instead of high sulfur fuel. Sometimes the simple answer is the best.
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