One thing the article doesn't mention is that the Savannah was designed for an earlier age -- like the Bristol Brabazon, a large piston-powered airliner that arrived just in time for the jet age, the Savannah was a traditional break bulk cargo ship (with passenger quarters) that arrived just as the multimodal freight container revolutionized freight shipping (and the passengers who had formerly travelled by sea finally made the transition to cheap-enough jet travel).
Savannah was called for by Eisenhower in 1953 but didn't enter service until 1962 -- just too late to be an attractive proposition. Multimodal container transport really caught fire between 1955 and 1970 and the Savannah couldn't be retrofitted as a container ship (nor would it have been efficient as one: its cargo capacity of 14,000 tons is tiny by modern container freight standards).
If the phrase "Multimodal container transport really caught fire between 1955 and 1970" ignites anyone's interest, you should check out a book called The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson. It's a somewhat dry (by nature) but fascinating history of the topic.
The Box is more than a history of container transport and its world-changing impact. It's a real lesson for entrepreneurs: Visionary takes on tradition-bound oligopoly; regulators can't cope with radical concept; international standards committees are about settling past political grievances and settling for laughable compromises, rather than setting the best course future efficiencies.
Highly recommend, as did Bill Gates, who ties it explicitly to developments in computing:
Can't recommend this book highly enough. Among other details, HN readers will appreciate that the global continer system represents packet switching in its original form.
I'm reading through Martin Booth's biography of his life in Hong Kong, and was struck by his family's transit from England to Hong Kong by ship. His family didn't bring any cargo, just suitcases, so I had assumed that their trip was during the 30s or early 40s by the description of things.
Turns out it was during the 50s. I guess right before global jet transport became commonplace. Not long after they arrived, Martin's father flies off to Japan. But the opening month long sea voyage (now a slightly uncomfortable 12 hour flight) has colored the rest of the story for me as some kind of strictly "pre-modern" feel.
A ship like the Savannah serves as a demonstrator. It wouldn't matter if the nuclear powerplant was used to ship people, cargo or both - the point is that it could fit inside a large container ship just as well as it would fit on a passenger ship or anything in between.
As I see, the biggest reason not to have a nuclear ship is not to risk giving a fully fueled nuclear reactor to pirates.
There were also a couple of more modern nuclear cargo ships; one Japanese, one West German, and a slightly weird Soviet one which is still in operation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sevmorput
Just three other nuclear merchant ships were built - the German oil transporter Otto Hahn; Japan's freighter Mutsu; and the Russian ice-breaking container vessel Sevmorput. Like the Savannah, they are no longer in service.
Umm, so the first nuclear ice-breaker was built by the Soviet Union in the 50s and was in service since 1959, 3 years before Savannah made its maiden voyage. Unlike Savannah, Lenin was in use for 30 years until it was decommissioned in 1989. Also in contrast to Savannah, its success led to 8 more Soviet nuclear ice-breakers built between 1975 and 1990. In fact, the most recent nuclear ice-breaker was built by Russia and entered service in 2007.
But the real point isn't to strictly define the benchmark, but more what it looks to elucidate: large scale nuclear ships and their outcomes.
Russia (probably from not having to deal with protests as much as Western countries) made their nuclear ships and they perhaps proved to stand the test of time. (?)
I was surprised to read that the cost of the Costa Concordia cleanup - involving a refloat - is over $1.5 billion, not including disposal. That's for a conventional cruise liner, not nuclear.
The idea was to also have nuclear powered merchant ships and passenger ships. As the article comments:
> Unlike the commercial shipping industry, the military did embrace nuclear. Of the estimated 700 nuclear-powered vessels which have seen service over the years, including the 200 currently at sea, the majority are military ships and submarines. Dedicated Russian ice-breaking ships are the only civilian examples.
The NS Savannah was previously at Patriot's Point in Charleston SC, and I got to go through her. She hadn't been de-fueled so you couldn't go through the reactor spaces, but there was a window that you could look through and see it (Oooo! Atoms!)
The polarized windows are interesting -- you rotate the inner half until at 90° they are dim. But it never got dim enough where you could sleep during the day in a cabin.
It is a beautiful ship, and it's obvious from looking at it vs. a modern container ship why it wasn't a commercial success. But as a technology demonstrator, I think it was mostly successful.
In the late 80's, I snuck past the barricades and explored the engine room for over an hour. It was part of a boy scout excursion that had us camping on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown, so we had after-hours access to the facilities.
The catwalks were partially intact and it was a very dangerous, decayed industrial environment. Lots of negative space indicated that some large components had been removed.
The reactor was actually de-fueled long before that in 1975, but the reactor vessel has still not been removed and the associated parts await eventuall decontamination and decommissioning.
As a 6 year old child of the Atomic Age, my parents took me to tour the Savannah at her Port Everglades (Ft. Lauderdale FL) stop in 1964. The view through a window at the nearly featureless grey reactor vessel was anticlimactic. The most memorable sight for me was the stainless steel bar/lounge for the passengers. It looked like it had never been used.
When I was about 10 years old I built a plastic styrene model, which included a detailed reactor that I carefully painted in he assigned colors colors. All this detail disappeared forever into the grey containment vessel.
Even the US Navy is backing away from nuclear power. They only build nuclear powered aircraft carriers and submarines. They used to build nuclear powered cruisers.
It is more expensive to build, to maintain, to break down at the end, and to train the many crews that will serve over the ship's lifetime.
Only when you absolutely need a nuclear reactor does it make sense to absorb that expense.
That makes no sense-a nuclear powered carrier that doesn't require underway replenishment, would be much more capable if its escorts also didn't require conventional oil fueling.
If the US had continued to build nuclear powered surface ships through the end of the cold war, then it probably wouldn't be so expensive-economies of scale, plus you'd still have the infrastructure and training pipeline there.
Lack of qualified operators is real operational problem.
Majoring in physics pretty much guaranteed you a NROTC scholarship, if you wanted one, back when I was in undergrad. Around a third of my cohort (and the ones graduating immediately before and after mine) were in NROTC, and every last one of them was earmarked for the nuclear program when they finished school.
I'd speculate that the Navy simply doesn't have enough personnel to put a nuclear drive-train on every cruiser, much less the entire fleet.
Edit: grammar
Edit2: Also, keep in mind that aircraft don't run on uranium. A carrier group needs tanker replenishment anyway, so switching to nuclear ship propulsion doesn't save you from needing to worry about the logistics of transporting large volumes of flammable liquid to the group.
What I was always told when I worked as a nuclear power operator in the Navy is that it's not so much that the people could not be found and trained, it was that on anything smaller than a carrier the engine room crew ended up being half the crew of the ship. The larger engine room crew size necessitated designing the entire ship around a larger ship crew, which introduces a whole lot of other logistical and practical concerns.
> That makes no sense-a nuclear powered carrier that doesn't require underway replenishment, would be much more capable if its escorts also didn't require conventional oil fueling.
The battle group still needs underway replenishment for food, ammunition, avgas, maintenance materials, and all the other various and sundry items required to keep ships functioning. Fuel isn't that big a deal when combined with all of these other items.
Also, nuclear reactors were replaced with gas turbines in surface ships. Nuclear is attractive versus the older oil-fired boilers. Large gas turbines changed the calculus. The steaming range of cruisers and destroyers with gas turbine power plants is excellent, hence the reason fuel is not a big deal to add to all the other stuff that needs to be provided for the battle group.
Carrier attack groups have a refueling ship along with all the cruisers/attack ships. It probably makes sense, just going by the size differences the carrier would use more conventional fuel than all of its escorts combined, so having the carrier be nuclear powered doubles your range.
If I remember correctly, nuclear power also gives an aircraft carrier the speed to create more wind over the flight deck to help in aircraft operations.
The reason the Navy has moved away from Nuclear for cruisers is that nukes do not like their load to be highly variable. Cruisers, by their very nature want to throttle up and down very quickly. Carriers and subs, on the other hand, transition from full throttle to idle very infrequently.
The bottom of the ocean is generally a very good 'containment system'. That's not to say there won't be environmental damage, but we do have some examples to go off of to indicate how much.
None of these examples were worst case scenario. How well does the ocean absorbs the ionizing radiation from a meltdown or some other extreme event? Would part of the ocean's water become radioactive and spread through currents? Are the oceans so voluminous that the effect would be only a minor increase in radiation levels?
Well the mantle of the Earth (including its radioactive components that power plate tectonics) is literally pouring forth into the depths of the Atlantic Ocean (in the valleys of the mid-Atlantic Ridge) and that seems to have not caused noticeable calamities... which is because yes, the ocean really is that voluminous.
As it turns out the ocean is also really good at both shielding radiation (water is what the nuclear experts use in large amounts, after all) and diluting radioactive contaminants, if it came to that, until the radionuclides themselves decay away and become stable.
Additionally it's not as if radioactivity is infectious or permanent. If something is radioactive here and I move it over there, it can't be radioactive in both places, which is why dilution is so effective.
You seem to imply that I haven't heard of this. Does this contradict anything I said and if so, how?
Before you answer, you might want to compare "biological half-life" with "radiological half-life" (as they are usually far different), and why the same issue of bioaccumulation has noted caused famine from hazardous materials that we know to have been dumped into the ocean in orders of magnitude much larger quantities. How many oil spills have fisheries survived in general?
The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster gives a good approximation of what that would look like. "Pretty well", "yes, but well below what's considered safe limits", "yes, detectable but minor."
In a war where significant numbers of aircraft carriers are being blown up the environmental damage from this is probably among the least of our concerns.
Speaking of nuclear-powered aircraft, care to guess who holds the patent on that?
It's none other than Richard Feynman, as related in this hilarious passage from his famous biography:
--- quote ---
One time when I happened to be home, the telephone rings: it's LONG DISTANCE, from California. In those days, a long distance call meant it was something very important, especially a long distance call from this marvelous place, California, a million miles away.
The guy on the other end says, "Is this Professor Feynman, of Cornell University?"
"That's right."
"This is Mr. So-and-so from the Such-and-such Aircraft Company." It was one of the big airplane companies in California, but unfortunately I can't remember which one. The guy continues: "We're planning to start a laboratory on nuclear-propelled rocket airplanes. It will have an annual budget of so-and-so-many million dollars . . ." Big numbers.
I said, "Just a moment, sir; I don't know why you're telling me all this."
"Just let me speak to you," he says; "just let me explain everything. Please let me do it my way." So he goes on a little more, and says how many people are going to be in the laboratory, so-and-so-many people at this level, and so-and-so many Ph.D's at that level . . .
"Excuse me, sir," I say, "but I think you have the wrong fella."
"Am I talking to Richard Feynman, Richard P. Feynman?"
"Yes, but you're..
"Would you please let me present what I have to say, sir, and then we'll discuss it."
"All right!" I sit down and sort of close my eyes to listen to all this stuff, all these details about this big project, and I still haven't the slightest
idea why he's giving me all this information.
Finally, when he's all finished, he says, "I'm telling you about our plans because we want to know if you would like to be the director of the laboratory."
"Have you really got the right fella?" I say. "I'm a professor of theoretical physics. I'm not a rocket engineer, or an airplane engineer, or anything like that."
"We're sure we have the right fellow.'
"Where did you get my name then? Why did you decide to call me?"
"Sir, your name is on the patent for nuclear-powered, rocket-propelled airplanes."
"Oh," I said, and I realized why my name was on the patent, and I'll have to tell you the story. I told the man, "I'm sorry, but I would like to continue as a professor at Cornell University."
What had happened was, during the war, at Los Alamos, there was a very nice fella in charge of the patent office for the government, named Captain Smith. Smith sent around a notice to everybody that said something like, "We in the patent office would like to patent every idea you have
for the United States government, for which you are working now. Any idea you have on nuclear energy or its application that you may think everybody knows about, everybody doesn't know about: Just come to my office and tell me the idea."
I see Smith at lunch, and as we're walking back to the technical area, I say to him, "That note you sent around: That's kind of crazy to have us come in and tell you every idea."
We discussed it back and forth--by this time we're in his office--and I say, "There are so many ideas about nuclear energy that are so perfectly obvious, that I'd be here all day telling you stuff."
"LIKE WHAT?"
"Nothin' to it!" I say. "Example: nuclear reactor . . . under water. . water goes in . . . steam goes out the other side . . . Pshshshsht--it's a submarine. Or: nuclear reactor . . . air comes rushing in the front. . . heated up by nuclear reaction . . . out the back it goes . . . Boom! Through the air--it's an airplane. Or: nuclear reactor . . you have hydrogen go through the thing . . . Zoom!--it's a rocket. Or: nuclear reactor . . . only instead of using
ordinary uranium, you use enriched uranium with beryllium oxide at high temperature to make it more efficient . . . It's an electrical power plant. There's a million ideas!" I said, as I went out the door.
Nothing happened.
About three months later, Smith calls me in the office and says, "Feynman, the submarine has already been taken. But the other three are yours."
So when the guys at the airplane company in California are planning their laboratory, and try to find out who's an expert in rocket-propelled whatnots, there's nothing to it: They look at who's got the patent on it!
A nuclear-powered civilian ship could make sense today -- ironically, a Very Large Crude Carrier (VLCC) or bigger would be the most economical use -- at sea most of the time, on long trips, and huge.
It would be nice to put them on new oil tankers, but then what would we do with all the excess bunker fuel? Can low quality fuel be used for anything else?
Also it would be very bad if one was taken by pirates, much worse than any existing cargo or oil ship.
Putting nuclear reactors on airplanes is just asking for trouble. Planes crash and it's very difficult to avoid, even a B2 has crashed and it's almost 100% computer controlled.
The (historically) low price of bunker fuel led to the development of turbine locomotives for railroads[1]. The idea was that the low price made up for the inefficiency (in operational practice) of turbine engines. When the plastics industry figured out how to use bunker fuel, turbine locomotives became uneconomic to operate. I'd guess that nuclear cargo ships would simply lead to slightly cheaper plastic.
Why does nuclear always come in for special consideration when it comes to waste management?
The waste management solution for fossil fuel engines is "dump the waste into the atmosphere." Is that a good idea? It turns out the answer is no, it's not.
Nuclear waste seems like a hard problem because we choose to manage it. Fossil fuel waste only seems easy because we pretend it doesn't exist. But it does, and someday we'll need to manage it too. I bet we'll find that it is at least as hard as nuclear.
It's because you can dump lots and lots and lots of fossil fuel waste into the atmosphere for a long time before it starts becoming a noticeable health hazard -- and by then you can see it coming.
Radiation will kill you relatively quickly and you won't even know you're dying.
In 1952, 12,000 people died in a few days in the 1952 London Great Smog, caused by fossil fuel exhaust. In 1956, the world's first commercial nuclear plant went live at the Windscale/Sellafield site in the UK. The nuclear waste still stored at the Sellafield site may be scary, but it's not killing anybody; the fossil fuel waste very much did.
That's not the right comparison. The equivalent comparison would be, what if we just dumped nuclear waste out in an empty field, or in a river or something, or atomized it and pumped it into the air?
Conventional thermal power is so much better; we simply store the waste in the air, or in the case of coal partially in poorly-regulated fly ash ponds which periodically spill into rivers.
> As always, I wonder, what was the plan exactly? What did the engineers of yesteryear actually plan to do with the stuff?
Some of it can be reprocessed, though there's a question of whether that's economical; France and Britain are the only countries to do it on a large scale these days. Really, though, it's not a new problem; industry produces a lot of very nasty waste.
I'm curious as to the actual plans as well, but I suspect the early engineers seriously underestimated how dangerous the waste materials were going to be. Of course, now I think we overestimate.
They knew very well how dangerous it was. However, you have to look at the timescale. The first nuclear power plants were built in the 50s. In 1952, 12,000 people died in London in a few days in the Great Smog. The Love Canal catastrophe, which ultimately caused mass birth defects and cancers, would not be revealed for another 20 years. The Bhopal Disaster, which killed 16,000 people and caused 558,000 injuries, happened in _1984_.
Non-nuclear industrial disasters greater than any actual nuclear disaster which has ever occurred were a fact of life. For that matter, they still are, to a lesser extent; for all the worry about nuclear waste, power-plant waste has never killed anyone, excepting a small number (< 20) deaths at reprocessing plants, while conventional waste kills thousands every year.
The power nuclear fission got us was remarkable and when they started, the marked wasn't regulated, so the companies could make huge amounts of money. This money was free to pay lobbying. They just outperformed the law makers.
That's not really the way it was; the regulation was always quite tight, and the lack of nuclear development today (outside China and to an extent France) is due to deep public mistrust more than anything else, though changes in the economics of power generation favouring high cost per kWh but low capital cost due to liberalisation of the market are also a factor.
Nuclear waste is a pretty small downside, too. The amount produced is tiny compared to the energy you get out.
People will bring up the long life of nuclear waste. It's dangerous for ten thousand years! OK, how long is stuff like mercury and arsenic dangerous for? We accept much worse stuff dumped much less carefully for much less benefit.
While mercury poisoning has affected major ecosystems (it's not a good idea to eat fish you catch in the Great Lakes), it's limited to where the chemical actually is. I suspect the problem with radioactive waste is that it's ranged: you don't have to touch the radioactive source to get a fatal case of acute radiation syndrome.
But it gets spread just about everywhere. Mercury only affects you where it actually is, but it's widespread enough to have significantly contaminated all seafood at this point.
Nuclear waste might get you if you're not actively ingesting it, but you still have to be within, what, a few dozen feet of a large chunk of it?
I wonder if the TerraPower or other small scale nuclear startups are thinking about this as a market. It seems a traveling wave reactor would be a good candidate given its fuel usage profile.
It's debatable. Fire it at a ship/building and most of the people on that ship/building would die. I don't think many objects could survive being hit by a railgun, is that considered mass destruction?
"any device or weapon designed or intended to cause death or serious bodily injury by causing a malfunction of or destruction of an aircraft or other vehicle that carries humans or of an aircraft or other vehicle whose malfunction or destruction may cause said aircraft or other vehicle to cause death or serious bodily injury to humans who may be within range of the vector in its course of travel or the travel of its debris."
"Indictments and convictions for possession and use of WMD such as truck bombs, pipe bombs, shoe bombs, and cactus needles coated with a biological toxin have been obtained under 18 USC 2332a."
Modern U.S. Law is an exceedingly poor source for definitions. It is purposefully vague, broad, and often misrepresented for political, propaganda and public relations reasons. i.e. the law that limits our rights being called "The FREEDOM Act".
A weapon should not be labeled a WMD unless it does at least as much damage as Little Boy and Fat Man did.
No it's not. It has been co-opted by politicians (and that is the crux of my complaint and why I choose to not use/accept the politicians recent expansion/redefinition). You are correct, C&B do not do as much physical damage but at least biological can easily kill as many.
Interestingly, the "Davy Crockett" nuclear rocket had a blast radius in the "building" range, not even quite "city block" range. That's probably why it didn't really catch on. Why use a nuclear weapon when a few, much cheaper mortar rounds would destroy the target just as well and not leave the spot uninhabitable for a long time?
Because the "uninhabitable for a long time" part is actually desired. Bomb Russia into the Middle Age and make sure it will never be a threat again basically was what fueled the Cold War. It will be a problem again when Ukraine finally blows up.
So could a large enough railgun, or laser, or even a large enough marshmallow could take out an entire city. Or even bats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_bomb
your payload does not need to be nuclear to take out a city, nor does your payload actually have to do that work if you hit the right target within the city of close enough to it (there are more than enough cities with some very hazardous manufacturer close enough to cause harm )
Savannah was called for by Eisenhower in 1953 but didn't enter service until 1962 -- just too late to be an attractive proposition. Multimodal container transport really caught fire between 1955 and 1970 and the Savannah couldn't be retrofitted as a container ship (nor would it have been efficient as one: its cargo capacity of 14,000 tons is tiny by modern container freight standards).