If Russia and China can make civilian nuclear vessels a thing, there’s gotta be something that can be done to make a safe civilian nuclear cargo ship. Or some other very dense green fuel, or Hydrogen. That’s probably the only place on earth that hydrogen makes sense.
How did our navy manage to overcomplicate a dead-mans switch so much to make a nuclear ship significantly more complicated to operate than reactor power?
Huh? Nothing is stopping you from making a powerplant-on-a-ship, as long as you keep the civilian stuff and the military stuff separate, as they should be. A civilian nuclear powered power ship is a civilian power ship built with a civilian commercial nuclear reactor running on commercial grade reactor fuel available to everybody, a military nuclear submarine or aircraft carrier is a military vessel running on weapon grade nuclear fuel because the military need maximal possible energy density for combat capabilities.
I was explaining why it’s a bad idea to try to use a military vessel as a civilian power ship, but nothing is stopping you from building a ship that’s designed specifically for a nuclear powered civilian power ship from ground up, as China and Russia have both demonstrated already with success.
Most other country just haven’t done this for civil applications because they haven’t had a need for something like this that’s strong enough to justify the extremely high initial upfront cost of a civilian nuclear power ship. Russia has a really big need for this because of the massive economic value of the sea path around the north pole, that tend to get frozen half the year, where there’s no infrustructure to provide power otherwise, and their nuclear power ship doubles as a nuclear icebreaker. And China on the other hand have really big state-subsidized companies who are already heavily invested in building their own commercial nuclear products so it’s kind of like a natural extension to their product line.
If Russia and China can make civilian nuclear vessels a thing, there’s gotta be something that can be done to make a safe civilian nuclear cargo ship. Or some other very dense green fuel, or Hydrogen. That’s probably the only place on earth that hydrogen makes sense.
How did our navy manage to overcomplicate a dead-mans switch so much to make a nuclear ship significantly more complicated to operate than reactor power?
Huh? Nothing is stopping you from making a powerplant-on-a-ship, as long as you keep the civilian stuff and the military stuff separate, as they should be. A civilian nuclear powered power ship is a civilian power ship built with a civilian commercial nuclear reactor running on commercial grade reactor fuel available to everybody, a military nuclear submarine or aircraft carrier is a military vessel running on weapon grade nuclear fuel because the military need maximal possible energy density for combat capabilities.
I was explaining why it’s a bad idea to try to use a military vessel as a civilian power ship, but nothing is stopping you from building a ship that’s designed specifically for a nuclear powered civilian power ship from ground up, as China and Russia have both demonstrated already with success.
Most other country just haven’t done this for civil applications because they haven’t had a need for something like this that’s strong enough to justify the extremely high initial upfront cost of a civilian nuclear power ship. Russia has a really big need for this because of the massive economic value of the sea path around the north pole, that tend to get frozen half the year, where there’s no infrustructure to provide power otherwise, and their nuclear power ship doubles as a nuclear icebreaker. And China on the other hand have really big state-subsidized companies who are already heavily invested in building their own commercial nuclear products so it’s kind of like a natural extension to their product line.