As nuclear is already used on aircraft carriers, and with a major cargo ship not having a large crew including guests so it can be properly scrutinized and managed by engineers, why hasn’t this technology ever carried over for commercial operators?
Similarly for hydrogen, why (or are?) ship builders not trying to build hydrogen powered engines? Seeing the massive size of engines (and fuel) they have, could they make super-sized fuel cells and on-board synthesizing to no longer be reliant on gas?
In: Engineering
There were 4 nuclear powered cargo ships: Savannah (US), Otto Hahn (DE), Mutsu (JP) and a Soviet/Russian one but I forgot its name. They were all too expensive to operate and they were decommissioned, save for the last one, which is also an icebreaker and it’s more useful this way.
Hydrogen is not a power source unless it is produced from fossil fuel, otherwise it is just an energy storage. You can’t “synthesize” it without having another energy source at hand.
Nuclear is problematic because for many of the same reasons cargo vessels don’t have armed guards to deal with pirates as standard, it reduces the number of possible ports of call because countries don’t want foreign armed forces/nuclear reactors in their territory.
Nuclear isn’t used for two main reasons. The first is cost. Nuclear reactors for ships are not easy to make or cheap. Most countries navies can’t afford them for their ships. A commercial operator isn’t going to pay more for nuclear then cheaper conventional engines. The amount you save on not having to buy fuel oil will never overcome the costs of buying the reactor in the first place.
The second is usefulness. Almost every nuclear powered ship is designed for something no commercial operator wants, which is staying at sea away from ports for long periods of time. For military vessels leaving an area to refuel is losing useful time. For a commercial vessel they always want to be going somewhere and those places almost always can refuel you with no loss of time.
Nuclear power is one of the most expensive ways of generating power we’ve yet come up with. There have been a few civil nuclear powered ships, they’ve all been impossibly stupidly expensive to run. Russia still runs a bunch of nuclear powered ice-breakers, because ocean-going ice-breakers just genuinely need so much power and for such extended amounts of time that it makes sense in that application. But it’s genuinely the only application it’s ever worked out for in the civil space.
Even in the military space, the US gave up on running nuclear cruisers and destroyers after the cold war, once again because they cost a fortune to run. Russia only operated one class of nuclear-powered surface warship. China, Britain, and India all have nuclear submarines, yet choose to run conventionally powered carriers.
Many ports will not allow nuclear powered ships to dock. So a nuclear powered cargo ship would have very limited placed where it could pick up or drop off cargo. So its usefulness would be very limited.
The other posters covered the cost of nuclear, but I would like to come at this from another angle.
Carbon and pollution are negative externalities that cargo companies don’t pay. Negative externalities are costs to business paid by 3rd parties. Carbon and pollution are costs paid by society instead of the emitter or polluter.
This makes the current fuel sources used artificially cheaper as society pays a large part of the cost.
If countries imposed carbon taxes with tarrifs on imports, it would make greener fuel sources more competitive in cost as emitters would have to internalize the cost of emissions.
Because synthesizing hydrogen from sea water is just using electricity with many needlessly complicated and expensive steps.
I think the real question is “why don’t cargo ships use sails”. Which I’m sure is due to routes not being in optimal winds. But it would bring their fuel costs to near zero.
There’s no point in making a ship hydrogen powered. Hydrogen isn’t really seen as a fuel but rather a battery. You have to put a lot of energy into making hydrogen or extracting it and thus you can’t get as much energy out as what you put into making it in the first place. You might as well just skip the hydrogen and use the power source to power your ship directly.
Nuclear is really expensive and isn’t trusted in the hands of normal people because even small scale reactors can be used to do a lot of damage if used wrong.
The purpose of a cargo ship is to take cargo from port to port regularly and continuously. The goal is to do this reasonably quickly and at reasonable cost to win customers. Nuclear is not useful. Port to port means the ship doesn’t really need to fuel itself for ultra-long journeys like patrolling oceans etc. And nuclear power is expensive to maintain and not many place can do that and the down time is super high compared to regular old engines. So the cargo ship ends up being out of service for long periods – all bad for business.
Politically too, it is an issue. Many countries don’t allow nuclear powered vessels into their ports further limiting the customer base.
Hydrogen is expensive to store and is less energy dense. Facilities to refuel hydrogen ships are rare (probably none) and expensive since it is TOTALLY different from oil/diesel and therefore there is no sharing of infrastructure. Companies are now experimenting with commercial ammonia fueled ships which is sort of “near” hydrogen. So there is a chance this will work in the future.
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