China’s Nuclear-Powered Containership: A Fluke Or The Future Of Shipping?

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 206 points – China’s Nuclear-Powered Containership: A Fluke Or The Future Of Shipping?
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China’s Nuclear-Powered Containership: A Fluke Or The Future Of Shipping?::Since China State Shipbuilding Corporation (CSSC) unveiled its KUN-24AP containership at the Marintec China Expo in Shanghai in early December of 2023, the internet has been abuzz about it. Not jus…

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Nuclear powered ships are not a new thing. They've been around for decades. They would benefit our emission a lot. Let's hope that they will be allowed in the ports around the world, this has been the greatest limitation so far. Convincing general population that nuclear can be safe is no easy feat.

They're not a new idea, but the problem is that actually taking one into a port is a regulatory nightmare. Most jurisdictions have very, very strict rules around the handling of nuclear materials and would rather just say "Fuck off" than even contemplate the nightmare of getting something like into their waters with all of the proper tests and inspections completed.

This is what killed nuclear cargo ships in the past. Ports just don't want such things coming in all the time.

We are burning and drowning so I hope here is enough of a desire to make it happen this time.

Militaries have a stellar record of not melting down their ships (fact check me someone I havent looked this up) with barely trained 18 year olds, so until we have a renewable energy storage that can power a cargo vessel around the world without taking up too much mass, this might be the best option.

I hear sails are coming back too though.

Thresher.

Here's more if you want. I'm not against nuclear power but it's maritime use is far more dangerous than power generation on land.

Here's the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:

This article lists notable military accidents involving nuclear material. Civilian accidents are listed at List of civilian nuclear accidents. For a general discussion of both civilian and military accidents, see nuclear and radiation accidents. For other lists, see Lists of nuclear disasters and radioactive incidents.

^article^ ^|^ ^about^

If you're somewhere near Connecticut, the first-ever nuclear powered ship got turned into a museum in Groton

Problem.

There's a huge difference between an American carrier and a Panamanian flagged cargo hauler. Are we really ready to trust one of the shadiest industries, (there's still ships manned by slaves out there), with nuclear reactors?

Could you imagine India letting a nuclear hauler dock after it made a port call in Pakistan? New York letting any of them dock?

And this is why I said changing the missconception that nuclear can't be safe is hard. There are types of reactors safe by design.

Sure, no tech is foolproof, but have a look at how the molten salt reactor works. That kind of reactor doesn't have a meltdown issue. That doesn't mean things can't still go wrong, but we have to do something about the emissions from these container ships burning the most crap of the fossil fuels... If we look at how many people die of deseases caused by air polution, the tiny risk of a nuclear accident looks a lot more acceptable. And that's before we even consider how bad the climate changed in recent years.

We have to start educating ourselves and others on nuclear, because although renewables are cheaper, the energy storage for when there is no wind/sun is still very expensive and pretty crap tech(you have a phone, you know how the battery dies in 2-3 years). Also lithium won't last forever so until we figure out something to replace it, nuclear can cover the gaps with considerably less emissions than dino juices and ancient biomass.

Most nuclear accidents aren't melt downs. They're steam explosions and releases of irradiated material. It's great that they built such a failsafe for meltdowns but steam explosions have a bad habit of blowing holes in the containment system. Much less the idea of a steam explosion happening dockside or on something like a natural gas ship.

The only way it would be even close to trusted is if this Chinese ship only visits ports they can strongarm into accepting it and/or they use their military naval technology and have military personnel manning the engineering spaces.

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Largely, this is likely a good thing. Don't let perfect be the enemy of better (than the status quo).

Why do so many Chinese products have these weird alphanumeric names? They'll build the world's first cold fusion reactor and call it the RNG-42_Mk2.1(final).

They code pertinent information into the name so people who understand their convention can easily understand what a product is.

I'm no ship expert but it looks like the KUN-24AP has a standard capacity of 24,000 cargo containers. So I'd assume that the 24 is referring to the capacity.

If they announced a KUN-12AP I'd assume it was a boat about half the capacity.

I wasn't aware reactors using thorium were practical yet.

Yay, a tofu dreg nuclear ship.

Supposedly, a meltdown at sea is pretty low risk because you have the perfect heatsink literally everywhere around you, and its a molten salt design, which I think(?) (source: my ass) means that the fuel would at worst leak into the sea and immediately solidify back into some inert state.

and its a molten salt design, which I think(?) (source: my ass) means that the fuel would at worst leak into the sea and immediately solidify back into some inert state.

tmsr design has a freeze plug, a part of fuel that has to actively be kept below freezing temperature and if something goes wrong it melts and the fuel is dumped into a separate container where the reactivity drops to zero. It never leaves the system.

Well yeah but most accidents at sea actually happen fairly close to where there are people. At ports/canals as opposed to just in the middle of nowhere.

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