Nuclear Ships

Nimitiz has 120 more megawatts of propulsion power than a CSCL Globe class container ship.

can do at least 10 more knots too.

An empty large cargo ship is at a minimum 2x the deadweight of an aircraft carrier and 15x the weight of fully loaded aircraft carriers and submarines respectivly.

>t. brainlet.
>whats a torque?
Maybe cargo ships use streamlines to be more efficient?
Maybe Deisel power is cheaper and more efficient on fuel?

>can do at least 10 more knots too
Holy shit an aircraft carrier can go faster than a cargo ship lierally 2-4x larger!!! Putting that engineering degree to good use.

There is no chance whatsoever that nuclear container ships are going to become a serious thing. Nuclear reactors and nuclear engineers just cost far too much money for that.

>1 volcano eruption releases more CO2 than all of europe's emissions over the last 40 years combined.
>CLIMATE CHANGE IS CAUSED BY HUMANS!!!!
really activates the action potentials

Cargo ships use little energy relative to the amount of material they move.

At a relatively fast cruising speed, big ship that carries ten thousand TEUs (equivalents of twenty-foot containers) will burn about a quarter-ton of fuel per km travelled. That's about 250 kg of low-grade oil per truckload of stuff brought all the way from China to the continental USA in under 2 weeks.

Wind certainly can cut it, especially with robotic sailing ships. It's a little slower, but then there's no cost of fuel.

For that matter, batteries can do it. What ships are really good at is hauling a lot of weight. A few tons of batteries per TEU is still a small percentage of the load.

The entire global shipping fleet burns less fuel than Japan alone, and is responsible for only about 3% of carbon emissions.

So yeah: wind, solar/battery, or bio, take your pick, any of it would work for ship and trains, which are inherently energy efficient ways to move cargo. Cars, aircraft, HVAC, and grid power are the big challenges.

2 words: somali pirates

>implying any ships other than heavily armed ships designed for battles go anywhere near there

user have you ever heard of the suez canal

>1 volcano eruption releases more CO2 than all of europe's emissions over the last 40 years combined.
The average volcanic eruption releases about 2 million tons of CO2.

The max observed was about 50 million tons from Mt. Pinatubo.

Annual manmade CO2 emissions from Europe = 5 billion tons

You are an idiot.

Lots of ports don't allow nuclear ships
Also insurance costs for nuclear reactors is too expensive

Volcanoes also release sulfur oxcides and particulates that reflect sunlight into space. So they are net coolers.

"Sustainability" cannot be based on non-renewable resources.

People do not know the definition of sustainability when they use it in sentences.

Many such cases.

Sad.

>t. brianlet
>what is the fusions?
>What is thorium?
>What is reproduction of uranium?

Oh ya my mistake. The fusions. Right.

Thorium is infinite. Right.

>you fucking dumbass

>oh no we're gunna use up all of the dirt as fuel
>ive never look at the stats of how much fuel we have but ill just assume its a tiny amount
>sustainability cant be based on anything that will increase entropy in the universe
>t. brainlet

The answer lies into the use of thorium as opposed to uranium
Look into it... Much easier to work with using a system that could be buried underground and ftmp left completely unattended for decades.

>thinks dirt is 100% thorium
>spouts random accusations about having never looked at stats on quantities of fuel, even though have never looked at stats regarding said fuel and wouldn't even know where to start looking
>spout big words like entropy to make people think I'm smart

>t. just another retarded fucking science illiterate consumer rationalizing his consumption

Have you ever looked up how much thorium is on earth? fucking retard. I literally have PHD in Nuclear Engineering so i can promise you that i know more on this subject than you.
plus only true morons would think the word entropy is a big word. Please kys.

Ships don't make that much CO2, but other forms of pollution are a huge problem. They burn bunker fuel, which is essentially tar left over from petroleum processing that no one else wants. It would be cleaner to burn used motor oil than bunker fuel. Coal power plants are regulated and must use such systems as scrubbers to remove pollutants from their smoke, and cars need catalytic converters. No such systems are in place for ships. Because of the crudeness of their fuel systems, shipping produces way more sulfur and nitrogen pollution than any other means of producing power.

Oh ya, piece of cake. No worries whatsover. Technical difficulties?? Have some faith.

I guess I might as well go on that beach vacation then.

>Highschoolers being this ignorant.
Oh god dont you morons have finals to study for or something?

25% of the global supply is buried under poo in India so we can't get to it

>I literally have PHD in Nuclear Engineering
>t. just another retarded fucking science illiterate consumer rationalizing his consumption

Now that is fucking scary shit...

God fucking help us.

Mother fucker thorium is so abundant I could refine some in my back yard if I really wanted to.
Thorium is especially abundant in the Northern Hemisphere.

I'd just work on a degree and getting your head out of the space between your under educated thighs.

>I have no idea what i'm talking about so ill go for more insults
Nice! You sure got me man!

The US and cananda make up a very large portion of the supply though

>Oh no he's talking real science here
>/strawman /strawman /strawman

The main obstical for nuclear in general is that it is spooOOoooooOky radiation and thus gets zero funding. Throium, being a new type of reactor, has an incredibly high initial cost to build the reactors so they just overlook it. The Technical difficulties are next to none.

It's flattering that you guys think science is cool, but please quit pretending you know fuck all about it.

Don't you fucking morons have an ancient tree to consume, or an endangered species to mount on your wall somewhere?

>pic related

Can you take a pic of your phd, masters, and bachelors awards please?

You can hide the name but just have a timestamp for proof.

I'd like to believe there are genuinely some educated people on here but I've never seen actual proof before

>has an incredibly high initial cost to build the reactors
>so they just overlook it

I guess its good thing we have geniuses like you around then who won't over look research projects that are incredibly expensive.

>When youre wrong and your massive ego refuses to let you just google some quick facts so you can inform yourself
>Resorting to baseline insults to support your nonarguments
>Calling others antiscience when you are antiscience yourself.
Hmmmmmmmm.

Whats wrong with that statement? Do you not understand what he is talking about?
High cost=people hesitant=people ignore.
That spell it out clear enough for you moron or do i need to explain it like you're in gradeschool?

>When you don't know what you're talking about so you just wing it and spew insults

High cost = high resource expenditure.

And it might not work.

Smarter people than any of the idiotic consumers advocating for nuclear in this thread - people who spend their entire lives devoted to trying to squeeze even the smallest profit from every dollar they invest - decided it wasn't worth the risk.

Now piss off you useless, retarded, professional menial school failure.

Thanks for summarizing my posts:

Add these 2:

>High cost = high resource expenditure
High upfornt construction costs because its new. Not because it uses lots of supplies moron.
>Smarter people than any of the idiotic consumers advocating for nuclear in this thread - people who spend their entire lives devoted to trying to squeeze even the smallest profit from every dollar they invest - decided it wasn't worth the risk.
That's factually incorrect. Look up any of the literature on the subject before you type your dumb shit. Literally just even watch a youtube video for gods sake. Morons in goverment are the reason we dont have modern nuclear power like efficient uranium models or thorium.

I hate when losers get this "It's me versus the world!" attitude. It's not you versus the world, it's you versus factual information dude. Educate yourself first before trying to argue the points.

>neglects to mention research costs because its still theoretical
>trusts youtube videos on thorium reactors
>trusts for-profit business leaders to make the right decisions
>doesn't trust non-profit government employees

You don't see the contradiction? If there was profit to be made, business would already have done it. There is nothing stopping them. The government could use the tax dollars if it worked, so they aren't stopping them. If anything they'd provide funding for it, eg. solar/musk etc.

I'm done here...

This was a depressing waste of time and energy. Dealing with retards always is.

What's next flat earther nonsense?

you =

>pic related

>>neglects to mention research costs because its still theoretical
Its been researched moron. You yet again fail to understand the problem. It's on the stage of real world application because succesful models have been created.
>>trusts for-profit business leaders to make the right decision
Ah yes because they are inherently evil because they want to invest in their own success.
>>doesn't trust non-profit government employees
Ah yes because they are inherently correct because they are controlled by the votes of uneducated morons like you.
> If there was profit to be made, business would already have done it.
Because noooothing else stands in their way. Because the government hasnt put incredibly high restrictions on the creation and use of nuclear power.
>There is nothing stopping them. The government could use the tax dollars if it worked, so they aren't stopping them. If anything they'd provide funding for it, eg. solar/musk etc.
Lol. Just lol. Go back to studying for your finals and stop shitposting of this board. You dont even grasp the minor complexities behind nuclear power and its use case in the modern world.

oh ya, makes sense

everything wrong with the world is because of big bad government interfering with benevolent and altruistic ceo billionaires running giant corporations

oh ya, and niggers

and jews

etc...

when you put it that way it makes perfect sense.

>what is a strawman?
>What is science?
>What are facts?

Who said anything about niggers and jews? Are you retarded? I'm not the one saying private is perfect or public is evil. You're the only one dealing with the absolutes and i'm just pointing out how atupud that is.

The answer is plain as day:

>slaves

Sometimes the best ideas are the tried and tested ones, user.

Solar is not sustainable either by that definition, the sun will run out of fuel in 4 billion years (and will absorb/roast Earth in a few hundred million years).

We have enough uranium on Earth to run with the current technology for 200 years (scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-global-uranium-deposits-last/)

Thorium is 10x more present, and regenerative GenIV reactors can use all the plutonium that is currently stacking up and produce fissile uranium from fertile uranium (which is 100x more present that fissile).

So we're good for at the very least 10 000 years, which is more than enough time for developing actually efficient solar (which is literally fusion) and fusion.

But still, nuclear on civil ships is plain retarded.

Every line you write is infused with 100% pure bullshit.

>Because of the crudeness of their fuel systems, shipping produces way more sulfur and nitrogen pollution than any other means of producing power.
...and they do nearly all of it out to sea, where it doesn't matter. That's why it's tolerated.

It quickly gets diluted, it's stuff that's naturally in the ocean, and it's not enough to affect the whole ocean's chemical composition.

dilution is not the solution to pollution

This thread AGAIN?

Write your fucking congressmen or something.

>wind will never cut it

Hurr.

Depends entirely on what the pollution is.

Acid rain from a power plant repeatedly falling on a given patch of land is a problem. Acid rain from shipping spread over 25% of the ocean is a non-issue.

it depends just how much acid rain these ships are contributing
ocean acidfication is a real problem, even right now

>out of sight, out of mind

Wow.

>it depends just how much acid rain these ships are contributing
>ocean acidfication is a real problem
Not from bunker fuel sulfur, from CO2 emissions.

Also, it's a rather overblown problem.

With cheap 3rd world crews. What could possibly go wrong?

The alternative is just to use less of them.

Slaves never rowed the ancient ships.

it doesn't matter if it's sulfuric or carbonic acid
and the ocean is one of Earth's largest carbon sinks, acidifying it reduces it's ability to dissolve CO2

>rather overblown problem
I guess it seems that way of you don't give a shit about corals or molluscs but it still has significant role in climate change and seafood

Hydrogen Combustion

It's up to you where you get your hydrogen, but solar would cut that.

>it doesn't matter if it's sulfuric or carbonic acid
The quantity certainly matters, and the specific chemical matters because of the processes which will neutralize or remove it. There isn't enough sulfur in the fuel for it to be a serious ocean acidification concern.

You're just throwing everything that seems like someone might believe it and seeing what sticks, not attempting to restrict your arguments to those you can ground in facts, numbers, and reasonable thinking.

>>rather overblown problem
>I guess it seems that way of you don't give a shit about corals or molluscs
Trying to turn it into a virtue signalling contest? Don't be a child.

I said it's overblown, not that it has no bad effects whatsoever. It's a shift in conditions, which harms some forms of sea life and benefits others (in a way that will tend to limit or reverse the shift). The effect is minor unless you extrapolate it out for hundreds of years, and that's not reasonable with technology changing so quickly.

There are currently about 100,000 civilian cargo vessels, and about 500 civilian nuclear reactors. At these levels of activity, we get one major nuclear disaster about once per decade, and a shipwreck every couple of days.

If we added 100,000 nuclear reactors run by cost-sensitive, flag-of-convenience shipping companies, there would be major nuclear disasters every week.

Whatever you might believe about current pollution by cargo ships, it can't possibly be as bad as the situation would be if they used nuclear power.

There is A LOT of thorium on Earth, it is as abundant as lead.

When thorium is efficiently burned in breeder reactors, even low grade sources such as thorium in granite are a viable resource.

This means there is enough for billions of years at current consumption levels. Thorium power is actually a theoretical way for human race to continue living on Earth after the Sun goes out (of course in practice Earth will probably inspiral into the red giant Sun so it wont work).

By that time, humanity won't even exist either because it was destroyed or evolved into something no longer hominid.

sure, my point was to shut up those who say thorium is unsustainable just because it is not renewable. Similar thing applies to uranium and seawater extraction (however there are more technical issues with actually extracting it). Bottom line is, nuclear power using breeder reactors is at least in theory MORE sustainable than renewables. We are simply not going to run out of the stuff.

They already use biodiesel, friend, what do yoy think, biodiesel doesn't pollute??

relax man, I don't know the pollution numbers I just know about ocean acidfication

>citation required

Nice argument there.

>look, with conventional reactors we get:
>215 t of harmless pre-reactor non-waste, and it doesn't matter what you do with it, because it's less radioactive than what you took out of the ground in the first place
>35 t of spent fuel, 33.7 t of which is no worse than what you got out of the ground
>leaving us with 1.3 t of actual dangerous waste
>...0.3 t of which is fuel which can be separated out, if we do waste reprocessing (currently unpopular because it tends to result in leaks to the environment)
>leaving 1 t of fission products

>but with special magical THORIUM reactors, we assume waste reprocessing, and ignore the practical problems with it, so we get:
>1 t of fission products

So superior!

>the effect is minor
coral bleaching can be pretty significant

>High concentrations of u238 are "harmless"
>not realizing reprocessing Uranium leads to large amounts of plutonium...
>not realizing the massive size of the nuclear waste is what makes people have a distaste for nuclear
>The imediate output of waste is all that matters. I dont care if one goes through its decay chain in a few years and the other in multiple thousands of years la la la la la la im not listening
You sure showed him by ignoring all the information present! I wish i could make such strong strawman arguments like you man.

>claiming others dont research their arguments
>not reasearching your arguments and realzing ocean acidifcation is a huge issue
>not realizing a few cargo ships produce more co2 and sulfer than all of the worlds cars combined
You sound like those climate change denyers who say a bit of warming would do everyone some good because who likes the cold anyways

>>not realizing a few cargo ships produce more co2 and sulfer than all of the worlds cars combined
Sulfur yes (very little sulfur is tolerated in automobile fuel), CO2 no.

>>claiming others dont research their arguments
It is to laugh.

>>High concentrations of u238 are "harmless"
If "high concentrations" are the problem, you can dilute it. Uranium is ubiquitous in the natural environment at ppm levels in soil (similar to thorium) and ppb levels in sea water (unlike thorium, which is essentially absent from sea water), and the 235 is much more radioactive than the 238.

Natural or depleted uranium's a toxic heavy metal like lead or thorium, but that's all it is, and the amounts of heavy metal waste involved in nuclear industry are vanishingly small compared to other industries.

>>not realizing reprocessing Uranium leads to large amounts of plutonium...
Do you really not understand that's the purpose of reprocessing spent fuel? You get the plutonium, and other transuranics, you put it in the new fuel rods (unless you've got some better uses for them). Some take an extra neutron or two, but they'll all burn up and release their energy eventually.

This is the same exact principle by which thorium reactors would get rid of their fuel waste other than fission products.

All of the virtues commonly claimed for thorium reactors are actually virtues of fuel reprocessing and breeder reactors, since the kinds of thorium reactors proposed are mostly breeders with fuel reprocessing.

>>not realizing the massive size of the nuclear waste is what makes people have a distaste for nuclear
It's the extreme nastiness of the waste, not the amount of low-hazard or harmless material it's diluted into. Concentrating the waste doesn't reduce the problem, it just makes it harder to handle and more likely that you'll leak some.

solar is probably going to be the solution along with more efficient designs.

irrrational fear of nuculear

>All of the virtues commonly claimed for thorium reactors are actually virtues of fuel reprocessing and breeder reactors

I was the one who posted that thorium pic and you are mostly correct. Thorium reactors such as LFTR are great but advanced uranium breeders have similar advantages, including a small volume of waste that only needs several centuries of storage and requiring 100x less fuel. This "thorium" hype should really be "advanced nuclear" hype in general, but oh well

The ability to not have to go into port to refuel for ages is not a particularly useful trait for a ship whos purpose is to go between ports via the most direct route available.

>This "thorium" hype should really be "advanced nuclear" hype in general, but oh well
More to the point, the "thorium" hype should be damped down by the same considerations and history of disappointments that leaves little enthusiasm for fuel reprocessing and breeder reactors.

Thorium's just an excuse to disregard what actually happened after the original wave of "clean, safe, limitless power, too cheap to meter" enthusiasm about nuclear power in the 1950s. It wasn't that they just didn't intend or try to go beyond once-through reactors, it was that they encountered serious technical and practical difficulties when they did.

When they first experimented with thorium reactors, they had a good careful look and cast them aside, not for the conspiracy-theory reason that they weren't good for making nuclear weapons, but simply because they weren't as promising as other breeder reactor designs.

So they went with these other breeder reactors, and had decades of problems. And they knew about thorium all along, but didn't switch because they still didn't think they'd be better. And nearly all of the experts still don't think the thorium reactors would be better, especially after decades of accumulated experience with uranium breeders. It's just a handful of people pushing thorium trying to make careers for themselves, and a cult of enthusiast laymen.

It should be telling that they've had the most success pushing thorium tech in China and India, countries known for corruption and limited technical competence mostly based on imitation.

Thorium has also never been proven on a commercial scale.

I also like it when cost analyses for nuclear reactors just look at land, materials and operation, and don't consider design and engineering costs. D&E is a huge reason nuclear projects end up costing 2-4X what they were billed at.

The biggest detriment to nuclear power has been blindly pro-nuclear people overselling and overhyping the technology. Then it doesn't live up to their own hype.

For real sustainability to happen, yes

Does that mean it will ever happen? no

Will it ever happen? Maybe

Nuclear power is not economically viable for shipping at the moment, and in the end, economic viability is all that matters.

If a nuclear reactor can't push a cargo ship because a cargo ship is so much heavier than an aircraft carrier, why can a cargo ship use an internal combustion engine if it's so much bigger than a non-nuclear aircraft carrier?

>People actually think nuclear ships aren't a thing because of stigma
You have any idea how much that shit costs?
It's more expensive than the navy and they run diesel at 30 knots

It's because they're all flagged for fucking liberia and nobody cares enough to regulate them coming and leaving

Use advanced nuclear power.
Either put a reactor on the ship itself or use a land-based nuclear reactor to make hydrocarbon fuels from atmospheric CO2 which the container ship can burn. Both options are carbon neutral, both eliminate all sulfides and other chemical pollutants. The second option gets around the fact that many ports around the world do not allow nuclear powered watercraft to dock. The first option is more efficient as it more directly leads from nuclear power to propulsion.

>use a land-based nuclear reactor to make hydrocarbon fuels from atmospheric CO2 which the container ship can burn.
Setting aside that ships can carry extra mass so easily that batteries are an option, capturing atmospheric CO2 is a needless expense. Hydrogen or ammonia can be used (these options are also suitable for aircraft, although the storage method for hydrogen would likely be very different on aircraft and surface ships), or the CO2 from burning the fuel can be stored for making more fuel (for instance, with a sodium carbonate solution absorbing carbon dioxide to make sodium bicarbonate).