Non fossil fuel propulsion

anything but nuc is a waste of time. suppose you could move a ship using the waves energy, how are you going to make it cruise at 15 to 20 knots all the time. another option could be sail assisted nuc. where you could utilise a smaller power system and supplement it with something like skysails kites.

 

A miniature Candu reactor would be perfect.

 

Nuc is far from economically viable and its environmental cost is ludicrously high.

The simple reality is all other considerations aside, its mind bending costs have killed the nuclear fantasy once and hopefully for all.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24457

and better yet lets look at the decommissioning costs which are estimated ( partly because there's no where to store the spent fuel or radioactive debris ) to cost anywhere between 2 and 8 times the construction costs.

http://archive.greenpeace.org/comms/no.nukes/nenstcc.html

 

i partly agree boston, but technology is improving all the time and these problems will be overcome. can you think of anything that compare with nuclear power. it is not a fantasy, there are a lot of successful power plants in operation . the world wide demand for electricity is increasing as places like china and india develop. there is no alternative to nuc at the moment. if a ship can travel for years between refueling with nuc power, how would the cost of building it compare to the fuel saving when the same ship would have burnt tons of fuel oil per day during those years. pretty favourable i think.

 

Just design giant wave snakes to cross oceans with cargo. They could be automated. Oh yeah, people would steal them. Nuclear power would great if it wasn't for terrorist wanting to blow them up. Given sufficient money, very safe, passive Nuclear reactors can be built.

 

the nuclear industry banked on the development of technology to solve its decommissioning and storage issues. It never happened, there is no safe way or place to store the waste and there is no economically viable way to decommission a spent plant, Which is why we have numerous plants just sitting.

I'm not seeing a technological breakthrough that will enable us to stabilize radioactive substances anytime soon. The problem is one of alchemy, and we all know how viable that science is.

as far as there being no viable alternative I'd have to say that unless you have a few hundred million tax payers footing the bill nuclear driven ships are wildly cost inefficient. Not sure the Navy even releases the life time costs of a nuclear carrier or sub for that very reason. I can't imagine the technology ever becoming economically viable any time soon. What it did for the navy is allow them to loose the fuel tanker that used to have to chase every carrier around. The group still has a tanker or two in it but its no longer the Achilles heal of the carrier itself.

what we need is a carbon negative fuel that will not only provide the power we need but also as a chemical function of its production reduce the levels of CO2 in our atmosphere down to pre industrial levels.

algae based bio diesels is a good start and feeding the atmospheric CO2 to the grow ponds using the new polymer to draw it out of the atmosphere just seems to perfect not to be using. The technology is here now, and there's big money going into the start ups. So I think it a few more years we're going to see some very positive changes coming down the pipes.

 

Part of the cost of building and disposing of nuke powered ships and power plants is political. It irrationally scares populations, and their elected officials so much they add even more costs to any potencially viable project with unreasonable regulations.

This I think is the most difficult obstacle to overcome. Look at the hysteria over the shut down of the nuke plant in Japan after the tsunami, even with stupid/poor planning, only tiny amounts of radiation was leaked, and everyone panics over it. There were people on this side of the Pacific that bought radiation measuring meters to "monitor" the fall out from Japan.

Finding safe way to dispose of nuke waste is not so difficult, after only 100 years it is back down to the level of radioactivity as it was when originally mined. The thousands of year half life is a red herring and irrelevant to safety.

Until the population feels safe, and perhaps trusts the large companies that build them, and the government agencies that over see them (as if that is going to happen soon), very costly regulations are never going to allow nuke power for anything to be economically viable.

 

every aspect of what happened in Japan was underestimated, including the survivability of the reactors themselves. Sure they survived he earth quake but not the power outage. One would think that any nuclear plant would have accommodations for an unpowered shut down, but not even that simple scenario was foreseen.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/07/japan-doubles-fukushima-radiation-leak-estimate

it might go a long way to eliminate those fears you mention if we could have any confidence at all in the honesty of the people running the nukes

but your right in that its part fear and part caution. When you have a big fat unknown like nuclear energy and no way to control it when accidents happen then you end up with people reacting fearfully. I'd say its justified given that there's no going back once something is contaminated. But there's not much of that fear cost in the decommissioning fiasco's we've seen so far. Overruns by as much as 1000% simply can't all be shrugged off as being the fault of paranoia

We simply don't have the technology to un-irradiate stuff.

 

The interesting and informed discussion of nuclear is appreciated.

 

three big screw ups in Japan's reactor......

1)I hear they build the sea wall high enough for a "100 year event". Wasn't any reason they couldn't have built it higher, just figured "100 year" was good enough.

Given the stakes, I say a 100,000 year would be minimum.

I get the feeling that somewhere someone's brain locked onto the idea that "100 year" would mean the wall would keep out an waves for 100 years, guaranteed.


2)For days(weeks?) after the wave hit, the reactor was without power, from onsite backup generators being flooded. Japanese authorities are notoriously slow to respond after earthquakes, cyclones, etc. Their Yakusa organized crime typically steps in first with basic aid.

Sure, their Govt had a lot of stuff to do after the wave hit, but they should have had big helicopters and c-130 flying in or air dropping generators, fuel and people to run them, with in hours. Any reactor should have that sort of stuff propositioned off site in at least 3 separate areas....one under ground, one up in hills, one on military base, etc. Close but not too close.

Japan has a huge military budget, and they could've and should've ordered the equipment all the way from Germany if needed.

3)While they make really good cars, and even aircraft, I get the feeling that an out of control reactor is sort of outside their comfort zone, intellectually, and once things got past what is covered in "G.E. Mark I Reactor Handbook" they were(and still are) lost. They should've(AND STILL SHOULD) get outside help from USA, Britain, Germany and France on this.


Chernobyl disaster included use of "Suicide Commandos"(who probably weren't told what was gonna happen to them). Well, Japan has world's strongest Self Sacrifice/Suicide ethic, and haven't had to lose any troops in any wars for last 60 years.


I've chatted with some guy involved in "Security" of nuclear facilites(Bomb Making) and of course they don't go into too much detail, but I think the idea that any defense would be good enough is straight from Maginot Line. When we're taking Nukes and meltdowns, fallout etc we aren't talking about bank robbers who need to get away and remain at large to be successful. Nerve Gas, large missiles and artillery, 18wheeler truck bombs by the convoy, etc are very much "on the table" for just cracking open a reactor.

 

I know nuc will never be in boats...and it's expensive.

But how much has it cost a day to keep the 5th and or 6th fleet in the Persian Gulf the last 40 years?

How much was the Iraq war?

How much does it cost in gov't subsidies to the oil industry when they cry about not making enough oil?

How much money goes to the Saudis/Arabs who hate Christian and westerner's guts?

What's wrong with having one small area where no one can ever go to dump the waste..like in Nevada?

If disposing of waste is so bad,then burn it in in a Candu,then that waste will be a tiny fraction.
Could fire Candus for centuries off the waste nuclear weapons and waste from regular reactors.
Or just dump in some thorium.

Is mining 1.1 BILLION tons of coal and burning it every year...in the US alone.... better?

etc etc

 

Bio diesel aint fossyl and not mentioned yet
we can grow fuell. Half times of milli seconds are
there too, many different reactors and fuel rods can be composed
no,dont have the specs up front but guess reaction must be faster than alque
science must show the way somehow soon it seems
synthetic fuell perhaps¿ Nothing wrong with good old wind energy tho
and all politicians debatting into the sails, keep the chains ready
how else to protect dark H thats only recently created
ah, planty more ideas but hate these small mobile keys

 

I do not think that short term there is a solution to the coming energy crisis except for a reactor that can burn spent fuel or thorium and the only candidate I have read about with these capabilities is the new generation candu . But I doubt that now that the fanatical prime minister or Canada has sold a 6 billion dollar public company for 18 million and sabotaged the ideas and efforts of two generations of Canada's best and brightest, all to demonstrate his antipathy for socialism , that it stands a chance of reaching its full potential.

 

if he sold a "6 billion dollar public company" for 18 million, perhaps that is all it was worth. So either there was corrupt govenment bookkeeping on its value, or there was a dishonest transaction. Also consider that if it has revenue of 6 billion, that does not mean it is worth that much. If it is loosing 2 billion on sales of 6 billion, the company has no value. It is a liablity and he was wise to unload it at any price.

None of this solves the need to power a modern economy, nor a transport ship. You can not grow enough biodiesel to replace diesel fuel demand, there is just not enough farm land (and it would drive cost of food way up too). Using waste cooking oil is not a bad idea, but there is only so much fried food that a given population can consume. Not even close to supplying the need. Same thing with wind power, just not enough power can be made that way, and rich people with custom homes in the passes hate hearing and seeing them.

There is just not a lot of options, near term or long term.

 

I don't see any particular problem with a few really big nuclear transoceanic tugs that collect smaller panamax sized diesels and shuttle several of them around at a time. From an overall system standpoint, you want to decrease the land transport as much as possible, especially truck-container hauling. Thus you want more smaller sea terminals and vessels which aggregate offshore for long haul. Container ships could be crossloaded while underway.

what you get is

1. A standardized shore terminal facility handling vessels of, for example, panamax dimensions and draft.

2. The ability to cross load at sea.

3. Reduced land transport, both truck and rail.

4. More transport efficiency due to lesser tankage requirements.

5. The option to lower installed power.

6. The option to run diesel electric, hooking the vessel's prop drive to the tug's gensets.

7. Reduced crewing.

8. By aggregating and crossloading at sea, you could pretty much make a mockery of the world's trade restrictions and require any nation that wants to participate to agree to policies that emphasize efficiency and not protectionism.

#8 above is probably why this will never happen.