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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
The environmental impact on shipping is massive:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_shipping" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_shippi...</a><p><a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1229857/How-16-ships-create-pollution-cars-world.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1229857/How-1...</a><p>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.
"How does a nuclear-powered ship work? In simple terms, conventional ships use diesel-powered boilers to produce steam to drive turbines"<p>Eh what? Boilers? Nope. Massive, bigger-than-house diesel ENGINES are used.
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.<p>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.<p>[1]<a href="http://www.oregon.gov/energy/nucsaf/docs/naval_nuclear_reactor_fact_sheet.pdf?ga=t" rel="nofollow">http://www.oregon.gov/energy/nucsaf/docs/naval_nuclear_react...</a>
"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."<p>"In her first year she had to release more than 115,000 gallons of low-level radioactive water into the sea"<p>On the balance, I think I would prefer the greenhouse gases.