“You have to have protocols in place to say what would happen in the event of an emergency associated with a nuclear-powered vessel,” he explains. The task of switching to a world in which nuclear-powered vessels are commonly welcomed at commercial ports is “not trivial,” says Stephen Turnock, professor of maritime fluid dynamics at the University of Southampton. Commercial ships are occasionally subject to piracy and accidents, including large fires and explosions-the thought of adding nuclear fuel to such scenarios is unlikely to be met with enthusiasm. Plus, you would be left with the headache of removing the nuclear power plant components and making the vessel safe so that it could be scrapped-the NS Savannah, now essentially a museum piece, has yet to be fully decontaminated, more than half a century after it ended commercial operations.Īnd while there are lots of nuclear reactors operating at sea right now, they tend to be on vessels with some of the highest security in the world. A large container ship might only have a service life of around 20 years, which means you wouldn’t get much use out of the expensive new reactor specially made for it. That sounds good, but for ship owners it could actually be a problem. Nuclear reactors can operate for many decades-take the one at Nine Mile Point in New York, which has been running since 1969. Despite the significant upfront cost of building a new reactor, for the largest container ships, he estimates that switching from dirty fossil fuels to nuclear would be cost-effective in the long run. Nuclear fuel is incredibly energy dense, stresses Luciano Ondir Freire of the Nuclear and Energy Research Institute in Brazil. Meltdowns-where reactions in the solid nuclear fuel get out of control, causing it to overheat, melt, and risk breaching the containment of the reactor-are made effectively impossible in a molten salt design because the fuel is already in a molten state and can be drained to prevent a runaway reaction. Proponents say that, in principle, such reactors could have serious safety and efficiency advantages over other types, such as pressurized water reactors, which are used in the majority of nuclear power stations worldwide. Despite concerns from some over the viability of this technology, multiple countries are pursuing it. Such reactors first operated in the 1960s and are nothing new, but technical issues, including corrosion occurring inside the reactors, have hampered their widespread rollout. Instead of solid fuel rods, the nuclear fuel in these devices is dissolved into, for example, molten fluoride salts. He and colleagues plan to convert a liquefied natural gas tanker called the Cadiz Knutsen to run on nuclear power.īoth the South Korean and Norwegian efforts are considering molten salt reactors. “The progress is quite OK,” he adds, via email. The team behind it has come up with a short list of six possible reactor designs that could work in a demonstrator vessel, says project manager Jan Emblemsvåg of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. There is another project afoot, in Norway, called NuProShip (Nuclear Propulsion of Merchant Ships). “We still have a long way to go to achieve the commercial viability of nuclear energy sources.” “We believe it is too early to mention details on the tangible results of this partnership,” Hojoon Lee, a spokesperson for HMM, one of the shipping lines involved, tells WIRED. But they won’t say much else about the project. The group aims to develop nuclear-powered merchant ships equipped with small modular reactors. In February, a gaggle of organizations based in South Korea, including those behind multiple shipping lines, signed a memorandum of understanding with this in mind.
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