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…
Largely, this is likely a good thing. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of better (than the status quo).
I read that article and I still don’t understand what it being a fluke would matter to anything? Strange title to me.
I’m disappointed that it wasn’t this clip https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxQ2mat7Oyk25hj1CbpTnCEB4KXh7c1hHU?si=nGBbLpr5frhBnUqh
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.
If you’re somewhere near Connecticut, the first-ever nuclear powered ship got turned into a museum in Groton
Which is ironic considering that fossil fuels have resulted in orders of magnitude more preventable deaths than nuclear. Bunker fuel is nasty stuff
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.
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Another possible innovation would be people onboard to row
Advertise it as a new fitness program that includes seeing the world for free.
Just drain the seas and drive them around on big tank tracks
Yeah but where to put all that water? On the moon?
If we can make the world hot enough it’ll just become clouds
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You… you know that clouds… rain, right?
I thought that was bebe Jesus crying when I touch myself
Just flush it down a big toilet
Hey I’ve seen that movie, it was fictional. Let’s not make it real.
A tethered ring would be cheaper, and also possible
With the labor shortage these days, we’ll definitely have people coming forward!
This is also being tried. The first such ship set sail recently.
I’ve only heard of big kites being used to help reduce fuel consumption on cargo ships. If you have a link to an example of a cargo ship that uses the wind as its primary power source, please share it.
https://trendydigests.com/2023/12/20/wind-powered-cargo-ship-sets-sail-on-historic-voyage-2/
Keep in mind that “primary” power source isn’t going to happen. You’re not moving modern cargo loads on wind power alone. But it can provide supplementary power, reducing fuel usage.
Is there a hard theoretical limit to the capacity of a primarily wind powered ship?
My understanding is that like most things you start running into issues with a) how mass scales (so at a certain point you start adding more mass of sails to push the mass of sails you added to push the mass of…) and b) structural integrity (ie, you can’t just make a sky scraper taller by doubling all the dimensions; at some point steel just isn’t strong enough).
There’s also the issue of speed; no matter how many sails you add, the wind only goes so fast, and it doesn’t go reliably. Modern shipping has deadlines and no one is going to settle for “We got becalmed” or “We lost two months because we were tacking into headwinds the whole time”.
The first sailing transport ship set sail recently…? Can we define “recent” lol
Yeah, um. The first modern …
An interesting alternative to sails are Flettner rotors. They’re pretty much just rotating pillars, and are being tested on some cargo ships to reduce fuel consumption.
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.
source: my ass
Be careful you can get stuck in the swamp!!! Lol
Yeah no fucking shot this works out.
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