[ninkendo]

I wish we lived in an alternate universe where paranoia about nuclear reactors wasn’t so much of a thing, and that we could have nuclear powered cruise ships just like the Navy has nuclear aircraft carriers and subs.

Because I _love_ cruising, and the climate impact is among the major reasons I don’t go as often as I’d like. (Yeah yeah, people who go on cruises get a lot of ridicule, but I don’t care. Something about a cruise just fits me lot more than “real” vacations. I don’t want to be challenged, or go to a place where I don’t speak the language, etc. I just want to be utterly hedonistic for a week or so and then get back to my real life. Insult away.)

[justin66]

> I wish we lived in an alternate universe where paranoia about nuclear reactors wasn’t so much of a thing, and that we could have nuclear powered cruise ships just like the Navy has nuclear aircraft carriers and subs.

I think we can all agree that anyone who judges Royal Caribbean or Carnival Cruise Line to not be as competent and responsible in nuclear engineering matters as the US Navy is quite obviously paranoid.

[mymythisisthis]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_Savannah

[StillBored]

Probably would be completely worthwhile to convert a cruise ship too, if it only cost the $270 million (inflation adjusted, was only 28M) it cost in 1959 to do this. It would pay for itself in fuel charges on a big ship in less than a year. Assuming it could provide sufficient power vs the $2 million/day in fuel costs of the big ships.

[moffkalast]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Hahn_(ship)

[rsynnott]

> I just want to be utterly hedonistic for a week or so and then get back to my real life.

Wouldn't a resort hotel do just as well for that?

[ninkendo]

Yeah, but I love boats too. Like, really love boats. Even though it’s so huge you can barely tell you’re on one, I like going out on the deck of my room and just staring at the vast ocean. Or laying out by the pool on deck and seeing the ocean around and knowing “hey, I’m on a huge boat! This is great!”… for some reason it hasn’t gotten old and I’ve cruised a bunch.

I know it’s not super rational, and it’s not for everyone, but I always massively enjoy my time on cruise ships. Best vacations I’ve ever had.

[sorenjan]

Uranium is a finite resource, and nuclear energy does leave a very long term waste problem. Using that for leisure cruises seems very wasteful and a bad idea.

Sails, solar, and renewable hydrogen is much more appetizing.

[pc86]

I hate this argument so much. These ships spend $2 million a day on burning dinosaur juice and pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. Nuclear is better than that, full stop. It's this perfect-being-the-enemy-of-better nonsense that keeps oil a trillion dollar industry decade after decade.

No amount of sails and solar panels is going to move a fucking cruise ship. We need to make incremental progress or there will be no progress at all.

[ryandvm]

I agree with the sarcastic sentiment from another poster on this.

These companies don't take care of their employees, constantly dump trash and waste in international waters, inundate their ports of call with pollution and hordes of unruly tourists, and we're supposed to believe that they could somehow handle the security and disposal of extremely dangerous materials? They can barely handle keeping their guests from catching dysentery.

[sorenjan]

Sails worked great to move ships for a long time. If you can't make sustainable cruise ships then you shouldn't make them at all. This idea that we need to keep every single excess we're used to is ridiculous, if you're gonna use nuclear power you can use it to make something useful like energy for steel or aluminum production instead of driving lazy tourists between ports that doesn't want them.

Energy abundance was a luxury we had for a few decades, it's time to wean us off it and start conserving energy and resources, not find new ways of living above our means for a couple of generations before the next bill needs to be payed.

[pc86]

Ah so it isn't as much "there are better ways to complete this objective," it's "this objective is stupid and I don't like the people that like it." That makes more sense given your general attitude in this thread.

[VyperCard]

https://climateer.substack.com/p/better-than-fossil?s=r

[StillBored]

True uranium is finite in the environment, but its hardly the only fuel source, combined with breeders/etc the fuel supplies are effectively infinite (aka we have thousands of years with just the current known reserves).

Similarly most of the "waste" isn't really waste if we choose to burn it. We have a couple centuries of fuel for our grand children sitting in "waste" caskets at the existing plants. Similarly to how we basically burned the "waste" from the soviet nuke programs in our reactors for 20 years.

So, sail might be cool, but its not going to happen for these huge mega cruise ships. There is a reason the navy uses nukes on their larger ships.

[moffkalast]

And the alternative renewables are pretty bad when considered in practical terms.

Solar which doesn't work half the time, produces an oversupply during summer and doesn't work during winter, requiring extensive and expensive storage setups while providing a laughable output.

Wind turbines which only work in specific places with stable wind speeds, with blades that last 20 years and can't be cost effectively recycled and produce a larger waste storage issue than nuclear. Not to mention the constant loud whine sound that drives people living close to them absolutely nuts.

Geothermal which works only in places with magma near the surface, otherwise you need to drill down so deep that you destabilize the ground and cause towns to start collapsing into themselves.

Hydrogen storage may be practical in some cases, but with 30% round trip efficiency it's probably not worth it when pumped hydro can do up to 85% and you also get what's basically a huge bomb waiting to level the city block.

Sails, or their more efficient version, Flettner rotors, are a good starting point for significant cargo ship fuel reductions but you aren't gonna be powering them by wind alone.

I think what Rolls Royce is doing right now with SMRs is probably the best way forward, depending on how small they can really make them.

[sorenjan]

Where are the breeder reactors in current use? This has been "just around the corner" for decades now, and if it finally materializes I would hope they would be put to better use than power floating resorts.

Nobody needs huge mega cruise ships. Rather than continue to burn fossil fuel or wasting the resources and trust on them by making them nuclear, there's a simpler solution: ban them. You want a ship holiday, there's plenty of sail ships available. You want to lie in the sun, go to movie theaters, pools, restaurants? Go to a hotel. None of these huge companies are paying the external cost of their wastefulness, and it needs to stop, not be enabled by tech pipe dreams.

[StillBored]

In Asia?

I'm not sure I really understand your point. Breeders were victims of the fact that light water reactors were considered dirt cheap to build/fuel/operate (and were until greenpeace/etc got involved) and countries like the USA have very large supplies of uranium (in fact there tours you can take in NM where you wander around in the desert with a geiger counter and pick up hot rocks).

OTOH, if your going to spend 10's of billions building a reactor one might as well go full bore (particularly with modern computer control systems) and just build something that burns the entire fuel load. Breeder's problems are political same as conventional light water.

And the "waste" we have is 95% or so unburned uranium that could be reprocessed and by itself last the US nearly a century. Oh, and all this waste? By mass, its somewhere in the ballpark of a single rail car for carrying coal (course then it would fission and release energy) so its kept spaced apart in small quantities.

The more one learns about nukes the more the current energy environment becomes unbelievable. I mean the US and Russia dumped more radioactive material into the atmosphere, and created huge downwind radioactive plumes that make the civilian accidents a joke in comparison. Chernobyl was nothing compared to some of these tests, and we are still talking about it 3 decades later despite the fact no one has built a commercial reactor like that in 50+ years.

To many people conflated weapons programs with the safest, most abundant and reliable energy source we have humans have ever discovered.