Will China go nuclear?
Posted on | June 1, 2010 | No Comments
It might seem strange that in 2010 we have seen a sudden interest in the concept of a nuclear powered merchant ship.
But there again, with an environmentally conscious public that has been educated to believe that the emissions of CO2 are more threatening than radioactivity, perhaps such a viewpoint is at least understandable. A nuclear powered vessel would be the greenest practical solution to the demand for emission-free sustainability, and the possibilities of nuclear propulsion less improbable than they might have been even a few years ago.
It is a sobering thought that it is more than half a century since a nuclear reactor was first taken to sea, installed in the submarine USS Nautilus some 55 years ago. Although merchant ship experience has been severely limited, and mainly focussed on the Russian icebreaking fleet, nuclear propulsion at sea, in both submarines and surface craft, has been largely trouble-free, with a good safety record.
But it has been the twin spurs of environmental pressures on the shipping industry and the anticipated increase in the costs of whatever fuels future merchant ships are forced to use that has prompted a flurry of research into the feasibility of commercial nuclear power.
Both Lloyd’s Register and Germanischer Lloyd are known to have been undertaking research into the practicability of this form of propulsion, in a world where a squeeze on the use of fossil fuels seems inevitable, and green pressure seems likely only to increase.
And while there will always be “hard-core” objections to nuclear, it appears that the public perception might be altering, not least in the need for more nuclear power stations as one of the more sustainable methods of delivering electricity in advanced economies. It is argued that this more positive view might prove transferable to nuclear merchant shipping.
A thoughtful paper from LR suggests that a good analogy over public acceptance might be with the carriage of LNG by sea, where despite a perception of increased public risk, the employment of the highest operational standards have shown LNG transport to be exceptionally safe, and public perception might have been altered positively.
What sort of ships might be propelled in such a fashion? Lloyd’s Register research has focussed upon large tankers, container vessels and cruise ships as possibilities for extending nuclear power beyond the severely specialised units like icebreakers and other government-controlled ships. The research has looked at the power requirements and the type of nuclear plant that will be required to deliver this.
But it is absolutely clear that while the technical questions might be relatively easy to answer, it is the political and public doubts which will have to be assuaged before such a project can progress beyond the drawing board. Commercial questions intrude, of course, with the practicability of the operational patterns for each ship type.
With a large tanker, for instance, this might appear very attractive from the point of fuel cost savings during the lifetime of the ship, but VLCCs tend to operate in the tramp market, and a nuclear ship could be that much harder to employ. It might, of course be possible to engage in a very long-term charter (such as is found in the LNG market), but commercially it might appear to be a more risky proposition. Similarly a large cruise ship, although nuclear power might prove attractive to the passengers (as has been found with the passenger-carrying icebreakers), may well encounter trouble in trying to devise an itinerary that does not involve the passengers having to break through cordons of angry anti-nuclear protesters.
It is perhaps the large containership which would prove the best prospect for a nuclear power plant. Engaged long term between a very limited rotation of ports on either side of an oceanic voyage, the large nuclear containership could offer the high speed that is no longer fashionable in the present environmental and fuel saving regime.
As a truly “green” ship it could also prove attractive to big shippers which are sprucing up their own environmental credentials with sustainable corporate social responsibility policies.
Capital costs would be substantial, and the whole safety regime would have to be upgraded from that on a conventional merchant ship, but against this could be set the substantial savings from having to refuel the ship only every five to seven years. It has been suggested that refuelling could be operationally coincided with each Special Survey.
But who would take on the pioneering challenge of being the first to commission a nuclear powered container liner? Early efforts in the US, West Germany and Japan closely involved government agencies in the design, building and commissioning of the technically successful Savannah and Otto Hahn and the more troubled Japanese vessel Mutsu. Perhaps a more realistic pattern to replicate would be that of the Russian icebreaking nuclear barge carrier Sevmorput, which was built by the Russian government in 1988 and operated commercially in the north-western Pacific and Siberian trades with apparent success.
Looking around the world at possible combinations which might produce a commercially viable nuclear merchant ship, the smart money must be upon China, where there are exceedingly large shipping companies, close political connections and a shipbuilding industry looking for high status projects that will offer the chance of a truly spectacular technical leap forward. The world’s greenest container ship, nuclear propelled, could well prove an attractive step in this direction.
Comments
Leave a Reply