I really think it is a tragedy that nuclear power got such bad PR. In the U.S., outside of military applications, we really only got 20 or so years of refinements on the technology, before the greens and Three-Mile Island made nuclear power, well, nuclear. Imagine how much safer and more efficient the technology could have been with forty years more of large-scale investment and attention.
20 odd years in aviation only brought us from the Wright Flyer to the Spirit of Saint Louis. 20 odd years of automobiles brought us from the original Benz to the Model T. 20 odd years of computing only brought us from the ENIAC to the Intel 4004.
Does anyone here have the actual statistics to back this up? In terms of Joules of energy, what is the cost of a nucular power plant? Equally, in terms of joules of energy (rather than some fiat petro-dollar debt money with compound interest), what is the price for any competing power source, be it a coal plant or a farm of wind turbines?
It seems we can do the maths for this easily to dismiss solar and wind, but, when it comes to nucular we are in denial. It takes a lot of energy to dig up Canada/Australia/wherever to get the U308 stuff, then a whole lot more to process it. Then there is the building of the nucular plant plus the decommissioning. Oh, and the waste disposal along the way, not cheap in raw energy terms.
Some costs such as the brains of the boffins needed to build these things may not have a raw energy price, that you might have to measure in pobble beads and pence, but, I just want a simple energy in -> energy out ratio. Do nucular power plants actually work out as cheap as the proponents imagine?
This I do not think is clear because there are so many other reasons nucular power plants get built. In the UK we ended up with so many nucular power plants because of the Cold War 'requirement' to have the bomb, and to create the bomb grade material needed for the U.S. (where there never were things like 'fast breeder' reactors).
France lost out when the oil reserves were carved up by Churchill and Roosevelt after WW2 so nucular became quite a thing in France. Their power is cheaper than what there is in the UK and most of the rest of Europe. So nucular is cheap, the French proven it so? Again, not really. They had their own reasons, e.g. also desiring nucular weapons, a seat at the UN and some (non-fossil) power. Sure, economics came into it but there were these other imperatives.
There is also the matter of 'Lockheed Martin' accounting. Bribes, billion dollar cost over runs, project delays, pork barrel politics and vested interests. We don't seem to have that in Denmark where the wind turbines seem to come from these days but nucular is mired in 'Lockheed Martin' accounting issues.
http://www.withouthotair.com/ -- this book (available for free on-line) goes into very detailed energy-math-based comparison of all major power sources, focusing especially on various forms of wind, hydro and solar. It might be especially relevant to your concerns because it focuses on various ways of combining the above to make the UK run fully on sustainable energy.
RE various problems of costs you've mentioned, I do think we're applying a double-standard here, but it's a double-standard against nuclear. I rarely see people talking just about how much solar is subsidized (two or three years ago AFAIR it was government subsidies that made PV installations make any economical sense for anyone, though I've heard it might have changed recently), or how much bribery is going on with those infrastructure projects.
On the one hand, the last 20 years of study on politic science didn't bring much improvement, so only certain things have room for development.
On the other, an old article on HN criticized the fact than garage science/fablabs in nuclear area became forbidden since the war, which prevents disruptive young tinklers from stumbling upon a revolutionnary discoveries.
I went aboard the NS Savannah when she was on display in Charleston SC harbor. And the criticism that she was neither fish nor fowl is correct. Too much space was taken up by visitor/passenger compartments that could have been used for cargo. Or vice-versa.
The article also mentioned that she was built just as the container revolution was beginning, and that also doomed her to a diminishing availability of bulk cargo to haul.
Overall impressions were that it was a really nice ship. Too nice. It had portholes with rotating shades made of polarizing filters - you spun the inner one 180 degrees to block out the sun. Which is very very cool, but not something a cargo ship would normally feature.
Would a modern mega-huge container ship benefit from being nuclear powered? Maybe. The additional shielding and steel bracing needed to protect the piping and core would add significant cost to the construction, but the zero extended fuel cost might make that cost efficient. A larger question is whether a nuclear powered ship would be allowed in some ports, such as Japan or New Zealand.
It would only need to be allowed into LA/Long Beach and Shanghai to be profitable. And it would probably be allowed in those ports, even if it were emitting a bright Cherenkov glow while underway.
In fact, on the list of busiest ports by container volume, Rotterdam, at #11, is the first I might be worried about, and then Hamburg and Antwerp, at #15 and #16.
With the size of cargo container ships built nowadays, the additional engineering requirements of a full-blown built-in nuclear reactor is more than justified. Even retrofitting the largest bunker-burning ships might be justified.
Utilizing nuclear power would be a great way of minimizing greenhouse emissions, plus it would be more cost effective in the long run. It's a shame the engineers were lazy and dumped eradicated waste overboard in their designs.
Note that that Daily Mail article is incredibly misleading (as you can infer from the domain name). It says "as much pollution as all the cars in the world" but in fact it's one specific type of pollution where that is true.
The overall point is good, that's just not a good source.
I'm curious how the new attempts at wind will work out. Some of the hybrid designs seem to be a good attempt especially since a lot of the bigger ships were being run at half-speed anyway.
Probably just much easier to drop Thorium reactors onboard in armored cargo containers. No meltdown risk, no proliferation risk, easy refueling, zero carbon impact.
You could even provide power to local ports if necessary during humanitarian efforts. Or sell power to the local utility while docked and get a check in the mail.
EDIT: Are you a Thorium startup reading this on HN? GO AFTER THIS MARKET.
I propose that when we finally get thorium working, they should call them "Thorium Batteries" and avoid the word reactor or nuclear all together.
I think the sail technology is much nearer term, but thorium will probably be the long-term. Helps the space industry if I understand the waste product correctly.
I could not even find a thorium commodities contract nor a stockpile of thorium. Same for monazite which is 23% thorium on average. That's how fresh or bottom floor" this market would be.
The articles you submitted when written should have been the coup de grace for anti nuclear sentiments. Perhaps radioactivity as an plot device for movies and video games have made an undereducated public superstitious and very afraid? Thus people rather live with the devil they know then the invisible thing they can't see.
Aside from the real and perceived safety issues of nuclear propulsion, there is also the issue of operational availability. US submarines and aircraft carriers spend a lot of their careers unavailable due to planned maintenance. I wonder how much of that is due to the power plant? New naval reactors are designed to last from 1/2 to the entire life of the ship without refueling. And at the end of that life, the entire reactor compartments are cut out, defueled, and stored in open-air trenches at the Hanford Reservation.[1] Regardless of whether fission reactors are fueled with HEU, LEU, or Thorium, they leave a lot of long-term things that we been as-yet unable to muster the full technological and political means to deal with.
For the merchant ship application, it seems a reach to believe that the benefits of greenhouse gas reduction can be most efficiently achieved by replacing diesel engines with nuclear reactors.
"She was capable of circling the planet 14 times at 20 knots without needing more uranium. All this was accomplished while she emitted no greenhouse gases."
"In her first year she had to release more than 115,000 gallons of low-level radioactive water into the sea"
On the balance, I think I would prefer the greenhouse gases.
In fact, given the choice, I would rather drink the water directly out of the Savannah's holding tank than breathe the exhaust of a bunker-burning cargo ship.
While I couldn't find the numbers to back this up, I suspect that unfiltered water from the Mississippi River is more radioactive, thanks to the lingering fallout from nuclear weapons tests.
An item can be classified as low-level nuclear waste if it exits a controlled nuclear facility with lower levels of radioactivity than the same sort of item found in general commerce. A paper hospital gown discarded from a radiation therapy room is LLW, even if it is less radioactive than another paper gown from another part of the same hospital that had pureed banana spilled on it.
Gallon simply does not have a conversion factor to Becquerels. The total volume of waste released tells us absolutely nothing about the actual or potential environmental damage that release represents.
Why? Without knowing the exact quantity of "low-level" it is hard to say, but if that is the price for effectively removing several hundred thousand cars from the road (which is the amount of fossil fuel pollution the ship would have created had it been oil-fired) I'm all for it.
Do you understand what little effect 3 mile island had versus what the media affect was? Do you get that they put out a movie with Jane Fonda that was one of the nails in the nuclear coffin because of that little leak? Do you get that much radioactive water released was enough to trigger the paranoia?
I would rather they never built the damn ship since it is just another "look at them dumping radioactive waste" event.
We need nuclear, we don't need political pride projects.
You do know that The China Syndrome was released twelve days prior to the Three Mile Island incident? Did the filmmakers sabotage Three Mile Island, or was it the nuclear industry's carelessness? One thing that the nuclear industry has been good at is not being trustworthy when they say things are "safe".
I understand all of that. I also believe that confronting that crap head-on and reversing the public perception is the right way to proceed, not squirreling away nuclear technology under a cover until it is perfect and unassailable.
You've got a reactor in Japan that went batshit. Facts and figures won't do a damn bit of good now. After all, we've been saying nuclear is safe and that just got some great media stories.
My current hope for nuclear is thorium and I hope they have the common sense to hire a PR firm and brand it well. Maybe pebble reactors would be able to make a run at it. More PR and one hell of a story. Maybe someone like Musk to user it in as the next great thing.
Same end point I would guess ("Nuclear Good"). I just don't believe its safe to dump any amount of radioactive water given how it will look, and I don't believe that any argument will get you past the media safely. Arguing it was ok and within a safety margin is utterly hopeless.
That's just an engineering problem, and one easily (comparatively speaking) solved by applying the lessons learned with other nuclear-powered craft. The other problems with the concept were far more damning.
From the publics point of view, the dumping radioactive water would probably be the most damning. From a business perspective, you are correct, the other problems listed[1] are the true problems.
1) timing wise, wow, hitting just before containers is just bad luck
They say the best way to dispose of nuclear waste is to mix it with the concrete we use to build our elementary schools. 115,000 gallons is a very small amount of water. That's 40 ft x 40 ft x 10 ft of water. Mix that into the ocean and the pollutants will disperse widely. One cubic mile holds 1.1 trillion gallons.
I am in favour of nuclear but some of the arguments you hear from advocates make my skin crawl. The caution people exercise over nuclear power is exactly what we should want for any activity that carries risk to health or the environment. Radioactive material is very dangerous, and fission is intrinsically difficult to control. We may be able to successfully deal with those risk, but it is intellectually dishonest to pretend that those risks don't exist just because physicists are so wonderfully clever.
The problem is not lack of support for nuclear but tolerance for dirty and unsafe fossil fuels. We need to deal with that using nuclear or solar or whatever.
Care is certainly called for, but the way it's treated goes too far. Waste is a good example. People insist on perfect safety, and not just for today, but insist on storing waste so that in a hypothetical future 10,000 years from now when civilization has fallen and nobody knows what nuclear anything is, the waste is still safe. This is just not reasonable, and does more harm than good.
The problem is that you get people who think you'll glow in the dark if you live near a perfectly functioning power plant, then you get people on the other side who say it's fine to drink plutonium, and both sets of crazies are louder than any reasonable discussion in the middle.
I think you make a good point. And I wonder if the same criticism could be made about reactor design in general. Why do we need to constanly reinventing the technology, when it was acceptably safe 40 years ago? There is this strange dynamic where people argue vacifeoursaly that nuclear is safe, whilst also wanting to spend vast amounts of money on thorium and other novel designs. Why would that even be neccessary if existing proven technologies are safe?
I think the biggest restraint on the nuclear industry is that it is a complex social structure. Getting many different groups to work towards a common goal is fiendishly difficult. And with nuclear power this issue is safety critical. If the team does not function properly it could cause safety risk. The only way to resolve that premanantly is smaller reactors that don't need such huge teams.
What is the benefit of nuclear if we are left with uncontainable highly toxic radioactive waste? There are already problems with handling waste at existing storage sties. Radioactive waste isn't a problem to be solved 10,000 years from now, it's already a problem. Even guaranteeing safe containment for 50 - 100 years seems like a difficult task, and that is not an outrageous demand for people to make.
Handling waste isn't that difficult of a problem. There are better reactor designs which use a lot of that waste as fuel, and what's left just needs to be sealed up real good and left to sit behind some good fences.
Basically all of the real-world problems with handling nuclear waste are because anti-nuclear advocates prevent any action from being taken to handle waste, but meanwhile there are operating reactors producing waste and that hasn't stopped. So nuclear plant operators are forced into ad-hoc solutions for waste disposal because nobody will let them do it right.
You're simply hand waiving away the problems. Even reprocessing creates waste that must be dealt with. Commercial fast/breeder reactors are always ten years away, and it has yet to be proven that they could even be economically viable.
I'm not sure why you say "they" are idiots -- it's just a thing I heard once, and it's something you can calculate with a math problem. Maybe there's not enough new school construction anymore, and you'd have to dilute some of it into children's hospitals and stadiums.
I say that "they" are idiots, because no matter how benign it may be to mix nuclear waste into elementary school building materials, there is no conceivable rationale which could make it the best way.
Radiation hormesis is at best highly speculative. And even if it were true, you'd still be far better off providing that stimulation in measured doses through some sort of medical intervention rather than some insane scheme where you screw with building materials.
Yes, and I'm saying that the rhetorical point is stated extremely badly because it goes beyond merely saying that this scheme would be harmless, and says that this scheme is somehow the best way to dispose of waste.
This is hyperbole, and my complaint is precisely that this sort of hyperbole is harmful to the cause of nuclear power.
(My deleted comment said, "We're talking about a rhetorical point about dilution, you know." For those wondering.)
I don't think that any reasonable person would take the claim that this was the best way literally. Also, nobody has any obligation to couch their comments to fit your lowest-common-denominator agenda. This is a discussion forum, not a place for slinging propaganda.
If it didn't actually mean "best" then you could have cut this whole thing short real fast if you had just said so at the beginning.
It's a real fun technique to say something outlandish, let people criticize it, then finally say "nobody would actually take that literally."
Certainly you can say what you want. And I can say what I want about what you say. Hyperbole about the "best way" to dispose of nuclear waste being to mix it into elementary school building materials plays right into the hands of anti-nuclear activists. It just reinforces the notion that nuclear power advocates (of which I'd consider myself one) care nothing whatsoever about the dangers.
Yeah, that's not going to fly as a suggestion nor will the public listen to that whole "small amount". I can here the pundits now if that happened today.
Sorry, too many movies and TV shows with nuclear as the bad guy. We need to get over it to replace current power generation, but someone is going to have to do one hell of a sales job.
No, I meant I as in first person as in "I wish they never had built it and I would have traded one more ship to output the gases". Political pride tours seldom work. Well, I guess the Navy did pretty well for itself with them, just not the civilians.
From the FSAR (Final Safety Analysis Report) for the ship, STS-004-002, section 7.1.2 we obtain the following:
"During the NSS's operational period, most of the leakage from the primary system was from the buffer seal (SL) system reciprocating charge pumps and from the diaphragm-operated relief valves. Maintenance techniques for the buffer seal charge pumps (which took suction downstream of the primary system demineralizers) were steadily improved. Improvements in the design and testing sequence of the relief valves reduced the leakage. As a result of these improvements, leakage was reduced from a maximum of 1200 gpd [gallons per day] to 50-100 gpd. Leakage from the buffer seals of the control rod drive shafts and from the valve stem packing was always well within acceptable and anticipated limits."
(The buffer seal system described above provided a positive inflow of water into the reactor through the control rod drive shaft seals, preventing leakage out of them; the diaphragm operated relief valves are overpressure protection for the reactor plant. The implication of the buffer seal pumps taking suction downstream of the demineralizers is that the water is highly purified after having passed through them; thus, any leak off is purified as well.)
The process was that accumulated leaked coolant was stored in tanks. Prior to discharging this liquid , the tanks were sampled to ensure they were within Federal (US 10 CFR 20, Table II, MPCW) limits. After this was guaranteed, the water was safely discharged at sea.
Significantly radioactive material, such as ion exchanger resin or any such, was not discharged at sea but rather at approved facilities such as that at Todd Shipyards, Galveston Texas or else onto dedicated servicing barge NSV ATOMIC SERVANT. No solid materials were dumped at sea.
20 odd years in aviation only brought us from the Wright Flyer to the Spirit of Saint Louis. 20 odd years of automobiles brought us from the original Benz to the Model T. 20 odd years of computing only brought us from the ENIAC to the Intel 4004.