An interesting concept. I was totally unaware that there are companies operating sail cargo ships in the current century. The conclusion is a little disheartening though. That seems wildly...
An interesting concept. I was totally unaware that there are companies operating sail cargo ships in the current century. The conclusion is a little disheartening though.
The international ocean freight trade increased from 4 billion tonnes of cargo in 1990 to 11.2 billion tonnes in 2019...
That seems wildly unsustainable without some kind of fundamental breakthrough technology that makes shipping much cheaper in terms of ecological impact. Without that theoretical breakthrough, it seems we need a huge curtailment of international cargo of all kinds, which I very much doubt is forthcoming.
A decent portion of ocean traffic is petroleum, gas, and petrochemicals; so you could see a significant reduction there alone. A mindset shift might be able to get us to stop buying so many...
A decent portion of ocean traffic is petroleum, gas, and petrochemicals; so you could see a significant reduction there alone. A mindset shift might be able to get us to stop buying so many trinkets and bits of junk (but I wouldn’t count on that sort of wholesale change). And you might even see an increase in passenger traffic if air travel becomes more expensive due to carbon/energy pricing. Ultimately, if you want to maintain fast maritime transport with zero emissions, there’s only one way to do it:
N U C L E A R
M A R I N E
P R O P U L S I O N
That’s not to say there wouldn’t be challenges involved (operating cost and public acceptance come to mind), but nuclear-powered ships do have several advantages: we can build a large fleet with a common reactor design to keep unit costs down, they use existing technology (PWRs), long range, high speeds (in excess of 30 knots for U.S. Navy carriers, 20+ for Russian icebreakers), and an experienced pool of naval reactor operators and naval reactor designers to draw from.
It wouldn't surprise me if nuclear marine propulsion ended up with similar carbon emissions to the mentioned sailing ships, or even lower. It blows my mind that ships burning bunker oil were only...
It wouldn't surprise me if nuclear marine propulsion ended up with similar carbon emissions to the mentioned sailing ships, or even lower. It blows my mind that ships burning bunker oil were only about five times worse than sailing ships, the economies of scale are ludicrous.
Yeah. There's a lot of emissions in the manufacturing and ore processing required for nuclear power. So from that alone, I'm certain its more emissive than even a lithium-ion battery powered ship...
Yeah. There's a lot of emissions in the manufacturing and ore processing required for nuclear power. So from that alone, I'm certain its more emissive than even a lithium-ion battery powered ship would be. I'm just as certain it would be less than that of a fossil fuel powered ship though, given reactors tend to live fairly long lives with proper maintenance. But it wouldn't be zero.
You’d be surprised. Land-based reactors have a very low carbon-intensity, on average second only to onshore wind. I suspect maritime reactors would be similar (possibly less, considering concrete...
You’d be surprised. Land-based reactors have a very low carbon-intensity, on average second only to onshore wind. I suspect maritime reactors would be similar (possibly less, considering concrete requirements).
I doubt that. Lithium ion batteries are very carbon intensive to make, and you'd need a hell of a lot of them to run a ship, with replacements due to cycle wear every decade or so...
I doubt that. Lithium ion batteries are very carbon intensive to make, and you'd need a hell of a lot of them to run a ship, with replacements due to cycle wear every decade or so (conservatively). For all the carbon that goes into fuel production, nuclear power is unbelievably dense, so per kwh emissions are equivalent to or lower than renewables, and that's without batteries.
https://xkcd.com/1162/ A fact I like ("like"), which is really anti-coal but does illustrate this well, is this: coal contains trace amounts of uranium. In the amount of fuel required to generate...
A fact I like ("like"), which is really anti-coal but does illustrate this well, is this: coal contains trace amounts of uranium. In the amount of fuel required to generate a given amount of energy, burned coal contains more uranium than fissioned uranium does
Do you have a good source for that? Not that I disbelieve it, there's certainly a lot going around about uranium content in coal, I just want to see the numbers.
Do you have a good source for that? Not that I disbelieve it, there's certainly a lot going around about uranium content in coal, I just want to see the numbers.
Oh, man, you're going to make me go back and dig up wherever I got that number from when I first calculated that? ;) This report by the USGS from 1997 suggests a typical uranium content of coal in...
Oh, man, you're going to make me go back and dig up wherever I got that number from when I first calculated that? ;)
This report by the USGS from 1997 suggests a typical uranium content of coal in the one to four parts per million range. (Interestingly, it also points out that coal is nothing special in this regard—most rocks contain trace uranium. The reason to care about uranium in coal is specifically that we burn it. Few people will ever try to burn granite, and many fewer will actually succeed in doing so.) Taking the energy densities from that xkcd, uranium fission delivers about three million times as much energy per unit fuel as burning coal; therefore, coal contains three to twelve times as much uranium as the uranium reactor fuel required to generate the same amount of energy.
This is a huge simplification, of course. For one thing, reactor fuel is highly refined—if you magically extracted all the uranium from a bunch of coal, you couldn't just directly start fueling your nuclear reactor with it. For another, that number isn't directly useful for much other than making a rhetorical point; ironically, it actually understates how terrible coal is, because it contains other toxic and radioactive compounds that get released and dispersed through the smokestack or concentrated in ash.
An interesting concept. I was totally unaware that there are companies operating sail cargo ships in the current century. The conclusion is a little disheartening though.
That seems wildly unsustainable without some kind of fundamental breakthrough technology that makes shipping much cheaper in terms of ecological impact. Without that theoretical breakthrough, it seems we need a huge curtailment of international cargo of all kinds, which I very much doubt is forthcoming.
A decent portion of ocean traffic is petroleum, gas, and petrochemicals; so you could see a significant reduction there alone. A mindset shift might be able to get us to stop buying so many trinkets and bits of junk (but I wouldn’t count on that sort of wholesale change). And you might even see an increase in passenger traffic if air travel becomes more expensive due to carbon/energy pricing. Ultimately, if you want to maintain fast maritime transport with zero emissions, there’s only one way to do it:
N U C L E A R
M A R I N E
P R O P U L S I O N
That’s not to say there wouldn’t be challenges involved (operating cost and public acceptance come to mind), but nuclear-powered ships do have several advantages: we can build a large fleet with a common reactor design to keep unit costs down, they use existing technology (PWRs), long range, high speeds (in excess of 30 knots for U.S. Navy carriers, 20+ for Russian icebreakers), and an experienced pool of naval reactor operators and naval reactor designers to draw from.
It wouldn't surprise me if nuclear marine propulsion ended up with similar carbon emissions to the mentioned sailing ships, or even lower. It blows my mind that ships burning bunker oil were only about five times worse than sailing ships, the economies of scale are ludicrous.
Yeah. There's a lot of emissions in the manufacturing and ore processing required for nuclear power. So from that alone, I'm certain its more emissive than even a lithium-ion battery powered ship would be. I'm just as certain it would be less than that of a fossil fuel powered ship though, given reactors tend to live fairly long lives with proper maintenance. But it wouldn't be zero.
You’d be surprised. Land-based reactors have a very low carbon-intensity, on average second only to onshore wind. I suspect maritime reactors would be similar (possibly less, considering concrete requirements).
I doubt that. Lithium ion batteries are very carbon intensive to make, and you'd need a hell of a lot of them to run a ship, with replacements due to cycle wear every decade or so (conservatively). For all the carbon that goes into fuel production, nuclear power is unbelievably dense, so per kwh emissions are equivalent to or lower than renewables, and that's without batteries.
https://xkcd.com/1162/
A fact I like ("like"), which is really anti-coal but does illustrate this well, is this: coal contains trace amounts of uranium. In the amount of fuel required to generate a given amount of energy, burned coal contains more uranium than fissioned uranium does
Do you have a good source for that? Not that I disbelieve it, there's certainly a lot going around about uranium content in coal, I just want to see the numbers.
Oh, man, you're going to make me go back and dig up wherever I got that number from when I first calculated that? ;)
This report by the USGS from 1997 suggests a typical uranium content of coal in the one to four parts per million range. (Interestingly, it also points out that coal is nothing special in this regard—most rocks contain trace uranium. The reason to care about uranium in coal is specifically that we burn it. Few people will ever try to burn granite, and many fewer will actually succeed in doing so.) Taking the energy densities from that xkcd, uranium fission delivers about three million times as much energy per unit fuel as burning coal; therefore, coal contains three to twelve times as much uranium as the uranium reactor fuel required to generate the same amount of energy.
This is a huge simplification, of course. For one thing, reactor fuel is highly refined—if you magically extracted all the uranium from a bunch of coal, you couldn't just directly start fueling your nuclear reactor with it. For another, that number isn't directly useful for much other than making a rhetorical point; ironically, it actually understates how terrible coal is, because it contains other toxic and radioactive compounds that get released and dispersed through the smokestack or concentrated in ash.
Ah, I'd figured you'd found it somewhere, not worked it out yourself. If I had known you'd worked it out yourself, I would have done the same :)