For quite some time, I’ve argued that, if nuclear power is to make any substantial contribution to reducing CO2 emissions, its growth will have to accelerate in China and to be based on the AP1000, the only Gen III+ design likely to be built in numbers significant enough to achieve any kind of scale economy.
It now appears highly unlikely that this will happen. Although China notionally restarted its nuclear program in 2012, a year after Fukushima, approvals have slowed to a crawl. This article, from Nuclear Engineering International, explains some of the reasons.
More significantly, China appears to have abandoned the idea of using a Western design, and is instead pushing two designs of its own, the CAP-1400 (an adaptation of the AP1000) and Hualong 1, Chinese design with French antecedents, variously rated as Gen II, Gen II+ and “comparable to a Generation III”.
It appears that the cost of imported inputs to the current projects is seen as prohibitive. The hope that the Hualong will generate an export market, and the British government has just agreed in principle to the construction of one such plant, conditional on approval of the design. In the absence of any operational plants, that looks problematic, to put it mildly. The announcement looks to be driven more by diplomatic considerations than by economics, which suggests that actual construction may be a long way off.
John Quiggin 
There are a lot of problems with that notion, Ken, the biggest being who pays for the infrastructure ie who is the investor. Available land is not the primary viability factor. Neither is the proximity to the rail line. Feeding power to a train moving along a track over a great distance is not quite as straight forward as you might think. The feed is broken into sections and the power for those sections is not necessarily fed along side the track. However the biggest impediment is that the railways are hard pressed to fund their operation and rolling stock let alone generate their own power.
But I think that you already suspected all of that but thought the kite worth flying anyway.
BilB, Yes I was just floating a not altogether serious thought bubble, but ultimately we do need to face the decarbonising of transport and rail, if we lived in a nation that could plan for a decarbonised future, would almost certainly be significant.
Re a return to sail for cargo, there is some literature on retrofitting kite sails and a return to the older longer sailing routes.
The argument about the lifetime of nuclear vs solar reminds me of the story of the man who said he still used the same axe as his grandfather 50 years previously. Sure, he agreed, he’s replaced the axehead when it wore down, and got a new handle when the old one split, but he still had the same axe.
Similarly, this 2009 Scientific American story on nuclear plant life extension says
So, if you set up a big solar PV array, and replace modules as they fail (or as new ones become so efficient, the old ones aren’t worth keeping) the setup can presumably last forever.
Indeed that is the case,JQ. Dr Franz Trieb of the DLR told me that the experience for CSP Solar the mirrorannual breakage rate was about 1%, and this was covered by the insurance. So after 100 yearsall of the mirrors would be replaced.
BilB, I think you’ve overlooked the amount of nuclear fuel required for the type of ship reactors you have suggested. You wrote:
“The fact is that 100 Mw reactors have a very small amount of fissile material in them and the risk to the environment is near zero, even in the event of a sinking. The Toshiba 4S is a sealed unit designed to run for 20 years without refuelling (ie no maintenance) and requiring very little supervision.”
A (currently fictional) 100 megawatt reactor that doesn’t need to be fueled for over 20 years would have to have more nuclear material inside it than a one gigawatt reactor as the maximum refuelling cycle for current reactors is 24 months. Reactor number 4 at Chernobyl was one gigawatt.
Go back and read the information, Ronald. I gave an example of a particlar machine, even a published illustration with dimensions. I can only go on what is publically available. The Toshiba reactor is not fictional, it just is not in production as it has no customers to date.
@ John Quiggin,
No, it’s not like replacing an axe-head and handle and calling it the same axe. Nuclear plants will replace many parts and pieces of equipment, but the civil works are permanent. For example, the turbines may be replaced but the building housing the turbines probably won’t be. (Dominion is certainly not going to replace the reactor or containment building for Surry’s 80-year license extension.) If you replace your furnace and refrigerator and bathroom fixtures you wouldn’t say that you had replaced your whole house.
And of course, much of the repairing and replacing comes from the ordinary maintenance budget, not new capital expenditures. As I noted above, EDF’s plan to extend its nuclear fleet licenses to 60 years would require investments costing about a half-penny per kwh, not too much (and much of that is due to retrofitting for new regulations, not service-life issues).
Maybe solar farms will also rejuvenate themselves through piece-meal replacement, although the cost of that could be comparable to or even higher than the original capital cost. Building one big solar farm all at once is much more efficient in terms of labor than is replacing small sections of it or individual panels as they break down.
In Britain many developers have stipulated that they will entirely remove the solar farm after 25 years and return the site to nature, at Tewkesbury, Chailey, Chorly, etc. Maybe that’s just a British planning custom, but it doesn’t speak well of the longevity of these facilities. It may indicate that the developers themselves think it’s cheaper to trash them and build from scratch than to repair them.
Feeding power to a train moving along a track over a great distance is not quite as straight forward as you might think. The feed is broken into sections and the power for those sections is not necessarily fed along side the track.
Enh. Seriously this isn’t a real-world problem: if you’re using 1500V like sydney or melbourne, voltage drop means you need a substation every couple of km, but high-speed trains use 25kV: nearly twenty times the voltage means a twentieth of the current and twenty times the substation separation. And power consumption isn’t a huge issue: a train uses about as much electricity as a reasonably-sized factory, which the modern grid is built to handle. And AC rather than DC means no rectifiers — old railway power substations were built to house rotary transformers — and that the substation is about the size of one of those roadside transformers that can be put anywhere you’ve got a few spare square metres.
If you read old documents in a time of lower distribution voltages and grids that weren’t designed to handle the ubiquitous electricity demands of today you’ll see references to issues like this, but these days it isn’t a problem.
WillB,
You are making the assumption that if hardware is removed from a site that it is to be scrapped. If the hardware has failed that may be the case but if it is still functional and commercial it is most likely to be redeployed elsewhere. That does not reflect on the life of the hardware.
I have no specific knowledge here, CollinS. I am going on comments made about why regenerative braking on our Blue Mountains line is only marginally useful due to the way power is fed to the line. I will ask some more questions.
Realclimate, quite rightly, have a borehole for this stuff.
When we’re talking about nuclear reactors on ships we ought perhaps to remember that if present policies are anything to go by the ships will be manned by minimally qualified minimum-wage workers from whatever part of earth has the lowest wages – Somalia, say, or one of the Congos. Not a recipe for expert professionalism.
BilB, the main point of my last comment is that if a 100 megawatt reactor has enough fuel to run for over 20 years, then it must have more than 10 times as much nuclear fuel as a 1,000 megawatt nuclear reactor which is refuelled every 2 years. It is not possible for it to have, as you wrote, a very small amount of fissile material in them.
The reactor that blew a hole in its roof at Chernobyl was 1,000 megawatts, so a 100 megawatt nuclear reactor that runs for over 20 years would have about as much or more nuclear material in it than reactor number 4 at Chernobyl.
And since the reactors at Chernobyl appear to have been on a yearly refuelling cycle the 100 megawatt reactor would have to contain about twice as much nuclear fuel.
About 5+% of a reactor’s fuel at Chernobyl went up in smoke and dust and spread itself around the place. The Chernobyl exclusion zone is currently about 2,600 square kilometers. That area as a circle would be 57 kilometers across. A circular exclusion zone 57 kilometer wide centered on Sydney Harbour might require most of the city’s population be evacuated.
While the risk of a major release of nuclear material into the atmosphere may be very small, the effects can be extremely expensive. If three million Sydney siders have to be compensated $1 million each for loss of property, livelihood, life, etc. that would come to $3 trillion. And that makes insuring nuclear propelled cargo ships extremely difficult.
@Will Boisvert
Will Boisvert, I just mentioned the Chernobyl exclusion zone above, and since you made some interesting comments on the exclusion zone at Fukushima in the past, I was wondering do you think the exclusion zone at Chernobyl is necessary?
Ronald , the chance of a meltdown of a 100 Mw reactor of the SM kind is zero. The reason is largely to do with thermal mass as much as it is to do with the amount of fissionable mterial active at any time. It is the difference between fire crackers and dynamite. You are getting hot and bothered about nothng much at all.
By the way, I have been scratching my head over your average 7.5Kw per person. Could you please show me how you arrived at that figure. From an average I should be able to determine the total, so 7.5Kw times 24 million Australians gives 180 Million Kilowatt/Australians. What ever does that relate to? The total Load of all domestic Appliances?? Please help me here I do not understand your thinking.
@Will Boisvert
The promises by developers of rural solar farms in Britain to remove them after 25 years are certainly sops to pre-empt local NIMBY objectors. They don’t cost the developers anything. The economics of the plants are calculated round 25 years. There is a fifty-fifty chance that in 25 years nobody will mind any more, and removal plans may even spark a “save our pioneering solar heritage” movement.
@ BilB
“You are making the assumption that if hardware is removed from a site that it is to be scrapped. If the hardware has failed that may be the case but if it is still functional and commercial it is most likely to be redeployed elsewhere. That does not reflect on the life of the hardware.”
Maybe, but I’m skeptical. The notion that the hardware will be dismantled, carted off to a different site and reinstalled doesn’t make much sense. If the performance is degraded will it still have commercial value? And if it’s fit for service, why dismantle the first solar farm?
Solar panels are getting cheap enough that the main capital costs are becoming installation and ancillary electronics that have pretty short service lives. That means that the costs of carefully dismantling the hardware, transporting, refurbishing and reinstalling it piecemeal will outweigh the value of reusing it. It likely will be cheaper just to trash it and buy new hardware in bulk.
@ Ronald Brak,
“ I was wondering do you think the exclusion zone at Chernobyl is necessary?”
There’s a strong case that mandatory exclusion zones do more harm than good, and that it’s better to let people decide for themselves whether they want to stay in an area after a nuclear accident.
The health risks of living in a fallout zone, even the Chernobyl and Fukushima evacuation zones, are well within the ordinary range of risks that people take every day and that society allows us to take. As I’ve noted elsewhere, the radiation health-risks for people living in the Fukushima EZ would be less than the health risks of driving a car.
Risks may be somewhat higher in some places near Chernobyl. But they are certainly no higher than the health risks of smoking or drinking, which society lets people do. And they are no higher than the health risks of living in Beijing or Mexico City, with their toxic air pollution, yet we don’t evacuate those cities.
They are no higher than the health risks from other radiation sources that we blithely accept. The US EPA estimates that 21,000 Americans die every year from lung cancer caused by household radon gas, which is nearly as many people as the Union of Concerned Scientists conjectures will die from the Chernobyl release over all time. Yet there are no laws in the US (or anywhere else that I know of) requiring people to evacuate houses with high radon levels, or even to test for radon and abate it. I’ve never seen Greenpeace protest radon.
So the practice of mandatory exclusion zones after nuclear accidents is drastically out of line with society’s response to other risks that are objectively comparable, or much greater.
And it surely has victims. Upwards of a thousand old and sick people died from the stress of the Fukushima evacuations, a number likely larger than the number of cancers averted.
One poignant thread in the Chernobyl literature is the plight of people uprooted from the EZ and packed off to strange cities, where they suffer from loneliness, unemployment, depression, alcoholism, etc, which definitely do have health risks.
As a counterpoint there are the stories about the Chernobyl babushkas, the thousands of people who filtered back to the EZ despite the ban on living there. They tell journalists that they feel happier in the villages where they grew up. Maybe they do face a higher cancer risk; I haven’t seen any scientific studies of that. But accepting heightened cancer risk is something people do willingly as a matter of course, because they like to smoke, drink, eat bacon cheeseburgers, get a deep suntan or live in Beijing.
The alternative to mandatory evacuations is for the government to do comprehensive radiation surveys, inform residents of the health risks if they stay in the area (using LNT to estimate cancer risk), then let people balance for themselves the costs and benefits of relocating.
The current binaristic exclusion protocols, where (as in Japan) the government declares an area uninhabitable if the air-dose is 21 msv per year and safe if it’s 19 msv per year, just perplex and infuriate people. But if people get good scientific information about radiation effects, put in the context of other familiar risks, the mystery and terror surrounding radiation could be dispelled. Then people can think more rationally and make better decisions about how to respond to a nuclear accident.
I live about 30 miles from the Indian Point nuclear plant. It’s not going to melt down, but if it did my risk of getting cancer would rise from the normal 40 percent to maybe 41 percent. Am I going to flee Manhattan because of that? Nope.
I also think nuclearization of the shipping fleet would be a very good temporary solution to the problem of shipping emissions, possibly the only one until fuel cells get up to speed. I wonder what the environmental consequences of an accident at sea would actually be? Potentially obviously very bad for the crew but I suspect that once it’s dumped in the ocean the plant won’t cause any harm at all.
I don’t think it’s going to happen though and the shipping industry needs to be cleaned up hugely for it to be wise. It could be worthwhile switching the largest ships to nuclear and having the navy run them though …
I’ve also wondered if putting solar panels over railway lines would be a good idea. In Japan the bullet train runs huge distances on a dedicated, separated line and would be very easy to put solar panels on, though I don’t know if that would interfere with its fluid dynamics. Would the solar panels be sufficient to power the train? I guess not, but it’s about a thousand kms of land surface being used for nothing else …
BilB, regardless of what the chances of a dangerous amount of radiactive material being released into the environment are, did my explanation of why a sealed 100 megawatt reactor that operates for over 20 years will have to have at least as much nuclear fuel in it as reactor number 4 at Chernobyl make sense to you? And you can see that they won’t have “a very small amount of fissile material” in them?
There is no point in discussing the chances of nuclear material being released if you don’t think there is enough there in the first place to be a problem.
@Will Boisvert
Will Boisvert, thank you for that quite extensive reply.
On the subject of British utility scale solar, with the one I’ve looked into the initial lease is for a period of 25 years but with an option to extend it. So I presume the landowners have the opportunity to get their land back after 25 years if they want to do something else with it, and if they don’t they will leave it as a solar farm provided the solar farm wants to continue to operate.
RonaldB #71,
I do not have any information on the design of the Toshiba reactor. However, the point is taken that there has to be sufficient fuel for the duration of the burn. Looking at the published diagram it seems possible that the way the designers coped with the 30 burn life was to have sufficient fuel in the heat chamber but only a portion of it is active at any one time, and the way that they achieve this is by progressively raising the neutron reflector plates. This type of control would be likened to keeping wet wood burning. You can achieve that by providing the wood with either an external heat source or by blanketing the wood with a reflector so that any heat escaping is reflected back to dry the wood so that it will burn. It this technique the neutron reflectors start at the bottom of the fuel and over the years progressively move to the top of the suspended fuel. Regulating the burn is achieved by lowering the reflector plates over the spent fuel, or to where there is no fuel. That is a very robust design, but again, I am only guessing based on what I can see in the simplified diagram.
The other variable is the type of fuel and the type of reaction that is possible with the various fuels.
As far as final disposal is concerned for long lived nuclear wastes I am proposing that there should be an internationally managed site at a deep ocean tectonic plate subduction zone where the periodic plate movements will carry the waste material into the earth’s mantle effectively sequestered beyond the affect of all life.
http://www.shutdownindianpointnow.org/home.html
However, the point is taken that there has to be sufficient fuel for the duration of the burn.
When points are actually taken the active voice is generally used, and you generally see a bit more emphasis of the point “yes I am changing my mind”, some sort of explicit statement. Two sentences?
That’s how people act when they’ve changed their minds.
This excellent, fact-based article concludes;
“… nuclear’s prospects as a significant climate change mitigator are feeble to nonexistent.”
http://www.energyintel.com/pages/worldopinionarticle.aspx?DocID=906841#
The uneconomic high cost of nuclear power, compared to solar and wind power, spells the end of nuclear power even aside from issues of “… the potential for severe accidents, the linkage to nuclear weapons and the production of long-lived radioactive waste.”
Ikonoclast,
Please demonstrate and quantify how this
‘The uneconomic high cost of nuclear power, compared to solar and wind power, spells the end of nuclear power even aside from issues of “… the potential for severe accidents, the linkage to nuclear weapons and the production of long-lived radioactive waste.’
….is true in relation to marine propulsion.
Collin Street,
It was stated at the outset that the marine reactors were fuelled for 20 to 30 operating life. No mind changing at all. It is a matter of figuring out how that has been achieved ie as the fuel is there, where is it within the design or structure.
Bilb,
It’s not my job to do this. In business and ecological terms, it is the job of those in favour of merchant marine nuclear propulsion to make the case and then make it a reality if they can. To date, the latter has not occurred. The failure of merchant marine nuclear propulsion to take off to date is a clear piece of evidence in itself. What this raw evidence actually means of course is a debatable issue.
There is a recent paper which makes the case for merchant marine nuclear propulsion. I think only recent papers are worth reading. Papers from the 1960s are out of date in several important ways. Technology has moved on since then. Here is the paper. I haven’t even read it myself. People are trying to make the case. Let us see if they materially succeed in the mid to long run in getting a nuclear-propelled merchant marine on the water.
Click to access CMA-Nuclear-Paper_Benjamin-Haas-3.pdf
Thanks for that, Ikonoclast, that is a good discussion document.
I have no skin in this game at all, but my instincts tell me that if the issue of marine propulsion is not addressed it will ultimately come around to bite us in the worst possible way. Strategically the Nuclear industry needs to have somewhere else to go rather than into our back yards. There are places where Nuclear is needed in the most northerly locations and the world needs a healthy and safe industry. The best way to achieve this is by giving it the scope to work in a field where there are few if any renewable options. The other strategic factor is that by giving the oil industry a volume life line in marine bunker fuel it will keep a lot of wells, that could other wise be capped off, active. Furthermore reducing the profitability of oil will increase the cost for aviation progressively providing the impetus for more rapid development of hybride electric airliners that both Boeing and Airbus are researching.
The MCFC battery that Salient Green could be very relevent to aviation particularly if it is integrally built into an engine. I will be looking closely to see what Rolls Royce is doing with this technology. There is a huge amount of new technology to be rolled out to make a zero Carbon world. We have to be realistic about which battles can be won and which will be lost no matter how much effort is applied (CCS for instance).
On the up side it is going to be an exciting next 30 years. I was watching the French news coverage of the leaders arrivals in Paris. It is looking very positive.
Apologies for the excessive use of hand waving!
With regard to nuclear safety, there have been 16,000 or so reactor years of nuclear power generation so far. And there have been two accidents where large amounts of radioactive material was released into the environment. We don’t have enough information to say that the chance of a nuclear reactor having a major disaster is one in 8,000 each year. The real chance could be one in 32,000 and we’ve just been really unlucky, or it could be one in 2,000 and we’ve just been really lucky. But it’s what we have to go on.
If the chance is 1 in 8,000 then with about 438 reactors in the world we can expect a major nuclear disaster once every 18 years or so.
To be clear, by major nuclear disaster I mean the release of a large enough amount of radioactive material into the environment to cause a lot of damage, whether to people’s health or economic damage only. How the radioactive material is released isn’t the issue. It doesn’t matter whether there was a design flaw, an act of war, organised mass murder, operator error, intentional operator sabotage, a meteorite strike, or whatever. Radioactive isotopes don’t care how they got out, they act the same regardless.
If the chance of a nuclear cargo ship having a major disaster is one in 8,000 then if there were 10,000 nuclear propelled cargo vessels in the world we could expect about one and a bit major nuclear disaster resulting from them each year.
If modern safety methods reduce the chance of a major disaster down to one in 100,000 then we could expect about one a decade.
However, getting the chance down to only one major nuclear disaster a decade may be difficult. And even that low rate of one major nuclear disaster, which is only 3 times higher than what has been experienced with land based reactors, may not be considered acceptable thanks to scaredy cat nations full of sissies who are afraid of being irradiated and demand compensation when when only 100 citizens die of cancer as the result of a nuclear disaster, despite the fact that those same citizens would have eventually died of something anyway.
Some factors that could contribute to making it difficult to lower the risk of major nuclear disasters with nuclear cargo vessels are:
– Ships need to be mobile, which makes building a containment vessel that can withstand a very wide range of eventualities both difficult and expensive.
– The sea is a corrosive environment.
– Providing enough skilled personel on board to provide effective responses to potential disasters is likely to be difficult.
– Lifeboats and the fact that a disaster isn’t likely to happen in the area where the crew’s family lives creates a moral hazard.
– Cargo vessels can travel through or near regions that are in conflict or where piracy is common. Last year there were 212 pirate attacks on cargo ships.
– Providing security equivalent to that possessed by land based reactors is problematic.
On the bright side, while nuclear disasters that happen in the open ocean far from population centers can still cause disruption and major economic damage, for example by contaminating fishing stocks, the destruction is likely to be trivial compared to a nuclear disaster in a major port, which is where large cargo vessels spend a great deal of time.
@Ronald Brak
You are only counting level 7 incidents on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES). I think you really should be counting incidents down to level 4 and possibly level 3.
In railway terms, it is like saying only Lac-Mégantic level rail disasters count and anything less can be completely disregarded.
Footnote to above. Actually it’s worse than I said. You would be completely disregarding even Lac-Mégantic level rail disasters and counting only Queen of The Sea, Sri Lanka, the Bihar derailment, India and Saint-Michel-de-Maurienne, France.
Ikonoclast, nuclear accidents where only the plant is lost and/or workers die could be covered by existing forms of insurance. But major nuclear disasters that can result in hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars worth of damage and hundreds or thousands of premature deaths cannot be covered by existing private insurance and are not covered. So I think it is reasonable to consider them separately and perhaps examine what it might cost to insure against such disasters in the purely hypothetical case of nuclear propelled cargo ships being built.
On insurance: Nuclear powered cargo ships cannot be covered by current existing private insurers because none of them have the capital to cover a (hopefully) low probability but very expensive event such as city needing to be evacuated.
This means that governments will have to provide insurance. However, a small portion of the insurance required could be covered privately in order to discover what the market rate for nuclear cargo ship insurance is and then the government could set a similar rate for their insurance.
Now let’s say a govenment is extremely kind towards nuclear ship propulsion and offers to cover the cost of major disasters and only asks for insurance payments that are enough for the government break even on average over time. This represents a large subsidy and also supposes the government can somehow accurately determine what the risks are, but let’s just go with this very simple idea as the absolute minimum in insurance payments that would have to be made. For simplicity I’ll assume constant dollars so we don’t have to worry about inflation. And I’ll assume that smaller disasters simply don’t happen and don’t need to be covered.
Estimates of the total economic damage caused by the Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear disasters vary depending on who you ask. But there are estimates of $500 billion or more for each.
If there was a 1 in 10,000 chance per year of a nuclear cago vessel being involved in a major nuclear disaster that causes $500 billion in damage, then the minimal, government subsidised insurance payment to cover that would be $500 billion divided by 10,000 or $50,000,000. If this is for a 100 megawatt reactor that operates at an optimistic 90% of capacity and spends most of it time either propelling the ship, or as suggested, providing electricity to the grid when in dock, then it would come to 6.3 cents per kilowatt-hour of electricity the reactor produces. That is a lot of money and alone is higher than the average wholesale cost of electricity in many locations. If a fifty megawatt reactor that operates at 90% of capacity has to pay the same insurance it would come to 12.7 cents per kilowatt-hour. Note that this is a subsidised amount that only covers major disasters and the actual amount would be higher.
Modern land based nuclear reactors hopefully have a much than 1 in 10,000 chance per year of experiencing a major nuclear disaster. However, as mentioned previously, putting nuclear reactors in cargo ships presents many challenges which may make it difficult to make them as safe as new modern land based reactors. And we won’t have any accurate idea of the actual risk until we have a very large amount of data on real world operation. And until we have that information, insurance will have to factor in that risk which will increase premiums.
So, the cost of insurance alone is probably enough to make nuclear cargo ship propulsion a complete non-starter.
I think you are compleatly wrong in your argument on insurance, Ronald. For starters of thd ship bord accidents to date there have been no land consequences (that I am aware of) upon which to calculate risk. Further, your obsession is operating in a vacuum of knowledge fully unaware of the huge amount of sulpherous polution that ship bavd been aloub to release for decades but are now to be monitored.
Your handwaving dismissal of marine nuclear propulsion is meaningless. Insurance assessors base their decisions on actual performance, and from what I can tell that safety performance is quite impressive.
You are attempting to paint a picture of naked reactors with masses of dangerous nuclear material desperately wanting to be released. The reality is the complete opposite. If you look at the photo of the reactor fuel loading of the Savannah in the link upthread (that being one of thirty two bundles for a 20 year running life) you will see just how small the volume of material is needed. Secondly, you have been suggesting that there is no containment, false. The whole ship superstructure is the reactor containment, and that is far more than land based far larger reactors have. Thirdly marine reactors have more management options than land based reactors in the event of failures.
@BilB
Sarcasm warning! Do not read if you are too sensitive! 😉
Oh yeah great, let’s sink a few malfunctioning reactors on the great barrier reef or in significant fishing grounds. That will solve all the problems. If it doesn’t immediately kill or inconvenience land dwelling bipeds of (purported) high intelligence then it just doesn’t matter.
Honestly, I think you are going up and out on a high limb on this one. Not sure why. There is plenty of low-hanging, low-risk fruit on the same tree.
(1) As I showed, substantially removing coal and oil from the economy removes 50% of the dwt (deadweight tonnage) need for shipping.
(2) Reducing the current absurd number of global sea-freight kilometers could probably drop the remnant dwt need to 25%. Nations and regions can become partially self-sufficient again by reducing off-shoring and returning manfacturing to “home”. See Footnote.
(3) Continental areas (Asia, Europe, Americas, Australia, Africa) could all advantageously increase intra-continental rail freight and electrify these rail routes. In some cases this could be more efficient than coastal shipping (internal routes versus external routes).
(4) We can become energy efficient.
(5) We can stop being so materially greedy and consume less material goods whilst very likely consuming more high-quality goods with a higher service component like health, welfare, education, arts.
Footnote: As technology progresses, it may well be the case that 3-D printed cars (for example) will become more viable than other forms of manufacture (large robotised factories). In that case the 3-D car printing factory kit will be what countries like USA, Germany and China export. Then countries like Australia will set them up and print their own cars. Some resources (metals etc. will be on hand domestically, some may still need importing. Don’t forget 3-D printing has progressed beyond plastics and into metals. A proportion of machining or maybe all machining will be replaced by 3-D printing in metals. They are already making jet turbine components in this fashion. Technology can reduce freight needs.
I don’t know if you have noticed Ikonoclast but there is a huge need to be doing everything to reduce CO2 emissions all at the same time. There is no longer the luxury of trying one thing to see how it works before moving on to another.
Sinking ships in fishing grounds? Apart from being highly improbable, I see that as a good thing for the fish, extremely low risk of contamination, extremely high safety from trawlers. Reefs are an issue, but as I said earlier that can be managed with automtic navigation systems. If they can have driverless quarry trucks with higher safety outcomes, the same technologies just might work for ships as well.
A simple test for a knowledgable commenter. See if you can come up with a servicable alternative to fossil fuel powered shipping that moves the same product tonnage at the same rate of faster, but without CO2 emissions.
@BilB
I guess I am not a knowledgeable commentator but I will give it a go.
a. We don’t need to move the tonnages we are moving now. See my post above.
b. Use hybrid sail-gas turbine ships for the much lower necessary tonnages.
c. Use natural gas (CH4) and shift over as possible to solar manufactured CH4.
Your solution would be interim anyway. The current fleet of land-based fission plants will substantially exhaust all recoverable uranium resources by about 2050 anyway. Add ship propulsion to that and the time is brought forward.
On top of this, the nuclear plant fleet, land or sea, can’t be expanded fast enough to deal with CO2 emissions in a timely manner (even if there was enough uranium to last indefinitely which there aint). All of this has been explained before on J.Q.’s blog.
According to the International Chamber of Shipping (ICS);
“Global shipping, which transports around 90% of world trade, only produced about 2.2% of the world’s total GHG emissions during 2012 compared to 2.8% in 2007. Total shipping emissions have reduced by over 10% during the same period.”
It seems shipping is not the big, wicked part of the problem anyway. So again, your obsession with all-nuclear shipping looks decidedly off the mark with respect to the real parameters of the problem.
“Electricity and heat generation is the economic sector that produces the largest amount of man-made carbon dioxide emissions. This sector produced 41% of fossil fuel related carbon dioxide emissions in 2010.” – What’s your impact.
“Transporting goods and people around the world produced 22% of fossil fuel related carbon dioxide emissions in 2010.5 This sector is very energy intensive and it uses petroleum based fuels (gasoline, diesel, kerosene, etc.) almost exclusively to meet those needs. ….
Road transport accounts for 72% of this sector’s carbon dioxide emissions. Automobiles, freight and light-duty trucks are the main sources of emissions for the whole transport sector and emissions from these three have steadily grown since 1990.” – What’s your impact.
Getting rid of private internal combustion engine autos and small ICE trucks and replacing them with mass transit, freight trains and electric vehicles is far more important. You want to ignore all this low-hanging fruit and push nuclear martime propulsion as an idea. It makes no sense.
BilB, the 1 in 10,000 chance of a major disaster per reactor year which I considered as a possibility, is less than the 2 major disasters we have experienced in 16,000 or so reactor years of nuclear power generation.
Do you consider the world’s fleet of nuclear power reactors to be, “…naked reactors with masses of dangerous nuclear material desperately wanting to be released.”? Because if not, you may wish to take steps to avoid appearing inconsistent.
Ikonoclast,
There is a huge amount of wishful thinking and hand waving in your comment there. You’ve got to do a little bit more than throw a few words around, you have to also demonstrate that the words are quantitatively plausible.
On the percentages
http://www.ics-shipping.org/docs/default-source/resources/environmental-protection/shipping-world-trade-and-the-reduction-of-co2-emissions.pdf?sfvrsn=6
….you have just made the case for most of the countries in the world, Australia included, to do nothing about Global Warming, as each only contributes such a small amount to the total. Well done. However the shipping group in the link talk about their commitment to reducing their emissions as per their agreement. Go right to the bottom where they go to great lengths to not mention Nuclear propulsion while at the same time saying there hands are tied for the primary propulsion engines. In other words having squeezed efficiency to above 50% with the Sulzer engine and the use of ever larger ships, there is nowhere left to go. Also you clearly demonstrate that nuclear fuel will not run out due to Marine Propulsion.
All of the other sectors have solutions in development and or various stages of deployment, the exception being long haul trucking.
Ronald B,
Your failure figure is purely imaginary and has absolutely no relevance to the nature of the hardware designs under discussion. I’ve just had a long browse through reactor component failures to do with cores, and they predominately involve failures which can constrict the movement of internal components that moderate the reaction. In the Toshiba design the reaction enabler body, there is the primary design difference the reaction cannot proceed without this (external speed up device) versus inserted moderator rods (internal slowdown device) in traditional designs, and the other is that the reaction enabler is outside the reaction high heat zone.
The combination of those two features ensures that the reaction cannot run away and become super critical. The reactors are internally safe, as well as being contained in many layers of steel protection ie the ship itself. That does not mean that other things cannot go wrong, it just means that failures are not of a nuclear nature. Hence your insurance argument is dead in the water.
BilB, I will attempt explain this to you simply.
Previously I discussed what it might mean for insurance if a nuclear powered cargo ships experienced major nuclear disaster on average once every 10,000 reactor years. A rate that is about 20% lower than what we have actually experienced with nuclear power generation.
So when you wrote in reponse, “You are attempting to paint a picture of naked reactors with masses of dangerous nuclear material desperately wanting to be released. ” You lied.
Or, rather than you lying, I could charitably interpret that as meaning you think the world’s current nuclear power fleet can be accurately characterised as “naked reactors with masses of dangerous nuclear material desperately wanting to be released.”
So which is it? Do you have a poor opinion of today’s nuclear fleet, or did you lie? Or is there some other option that I am missing. I would hate to present you with a false dilemma, such as cake or death, or sulphur pollution or nuclear cargo ships.
@BilB
Fine m8, you believe what you want to believe. 🙂
Ronald,
“naked reactors with masses …..” that is how you were describing the current fleet in risk terms, is the third option that you are missing. You are so determind that small marine nuclear reactors will fail, and in ways that will destroy endless amounts of property.
Cars are a machine that has thousands of violent explosions every minute occurring within their engines. In the early days of motor vehicles there was the occaisional cylinder block that would explode. Now with hundreds of millions of cars cylinder blocks never explode. Engineers changed their materials and their designs to eliminate those problems. Such failures have not required insurance coverage for a hundred years. The point is that when machinery is scaled appropriately and the designs refined and optimised even dangerous materials can be used safely.
Argentina decades ago decided to make small safe reactors that operate of decaying nuclear material. These are effectively nuclear compost piles the heat from which is used to generate power. The move to smaller reactors that operate on different principles is a good direction particularly where these reactors will only operate at full power well away from our populated areas.
I haven’t been following this one closely, but has anyone come up with a decisive objection to fuel cells (with the original energy being supplied by renewable electricity)? They seem like the obvious way to decarbonize shipping.
Fuel cells are currently being used for purposes such as providing electricity and heat to buildings and swimming pools. It is certainly possible to use them to power ships, but because of weight and cost issues they are not currently competitive for mobile applications. (They are not really competitive for stationary applications either.)
But there is no need to wait for fuel cells to improve and come down in cost and weight because we already have devices that extract energy from fluids with an efficiency that is close to what is possible with fuel cells. For example, burning fluid in a turbine with a Heat Recovery Steam Generator which makes it combined cycle, can be, in practice, about 60% efficient. A combined cycle reciprocating generator can burn fluid at 50% efficiency and is more durable and has lower maintenance costs. And it would be difficult at the moment to get more than 60% total efficiency using fuel cells.
There are a wide variety of potential fluids (liquids and gases) that could be synthesized using renewable energy. I will use the example of hydrogen, not because I am saying it is necessarily the best, but because it is simple and presents a hurdle anything else has to clear to be a contender.
If the production of liquid hydrogen from water is 50% efficient and is burned in a combined cycle turbine at 50% efficiency then 4 kilowatt-hours will be needed to make enough liquid hydrogen to produce one kilowatt-hour onboard a ship. If the average cost of electricity is 3 cents a kilowatt-hour then it will cost 12 cents to produce one kilowatt-hour for the ship’s electric engines.
Currently, at about $7 a gigajoule internationally, Liquid Natural Gas burned at 50% efficiency will cost about 5 cents per shipboard kilowatt-hour and it will emit about 0.13 kilograms of CO2. With at least a 7 cent a kilowatt-hour fuel cost difference, a carbon price of $540 or more a tonne would be required for hydrogen to be favoured over Liquid Natural Gas.
Since we are definitely able to remove and sequester CO2 from the atmosphere at a lower cost than this, hydrogen and other synthetic fuels appear to be non-starters since they all require more energy to go into making them than they give out.
However, if the cost of electricity decreases this could change. The 3 cent figure I used is already very low, but as wind and solar generation increase their penetration there could be regular extended periods where electricity prices are extremely low which would make the electrosynthesis of fuels for ships more attractive.
So at the moment, with current prices for industrial electricity, it would be far cheaper to use an efficient natural gas powered cargo ship and remove and sequester the CO2 it releases into the atmosphere than to electrically synthesize fuels. (Just to be clear, the CO2 would be removed from the atmosphere and not captured on board the ship.)
@Ronald Brak
I do not understand the logic here.
Who says switching to renewables such as hydrogen has to be subject whether more energy comes out than goes in???
This is not a suitable principle to declare hydrogen a non-starter.
If it takes 10 kw to get 1 kw with zero carbon – then this is what we should do.