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this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2023
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chapotraphouse
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I don't think these kinds of reactors are capable of producing huge safety concerns. MSR tanks are designed to deliberately flood themselves if they ever operate above a certain temperature.
And since it's on a boat, if these safety features ever fail there is one option available that you do not have on land to prevent it from reacting uncontrollably, sink it. I can't see any scenario where you wouldn't be able to cool it down because of the unique access to water that exists. It's only on land where your piping and other things can become irreparably damaged preventing you from getting the necessary cooling into the reactor.
If things get really bad in some way we couldn't possibly predict any explosion on the ship will sink it anyway.
That still all depends on responsible people properly maintaining failsafes and being willing to scuttle the ship if necessary. Corporations cannot be trusted to do any of that.
I don't think you need to rely on people to scuttle, if things get bad enough it will sink itself because it will melt a hole straight through the ship.
Potentially melting down in the middle of a shallow city harbour as an overworked skeleton crew is worried about their families back home getting evicted for not paying the rent all while the parent company does more layoffs and posts record profits in their quarterly reports.
As opposed to the mass extinctions caused by global warming going on right now??
What is your point that you are unwilling to hear safety concerns bc it's worse right now? That's why there is a mass extinction. We have to move away and address safety at the same time. If that means removing private companies from shipping, so be it.
Classic "letting perfect be the enemy of good" energy.
Which is an excellent argument for going back to wind powered ships. Who cares if the treats come a bit more slowly?
I'd love some engineers to do that, I think it'd be totally awesome. However, that hasn't been done and we can only compare proposed solutions to existing ones, not hypothetical ones.
Sailboats are hypothetical?
the best clippers were fractions of the size of the boats now, even if modern materials can make a more efficient one, we're talking a difference of 1780 tons --> 336000 tons here. to say nothing of how much more labor is involved on a rigged ship
But what if you replaced one boat with more than one boat?
about every cargo ship has a smaller crew than an old clipper. with central planning and a disregard for profit we could multiply the number of sailors in the world by a few x100 times, but there's no way a capitalist enterprise, or even state-run one that must compete with capitalists will do that.
That fundamentally is the core of the issue though, isn’t it? So long as profit is required we can only do completely batshit things like electric car charging stations in the middle of a 10 hectare surface parking lot and nuclear plants built into every rusty container ship. Stuff that has worked for centuries like trains and sailboats are just too radical and have too many fussy little problems.
so they've mounted some sails on the big cargo ships but all they do is reduce fuel use by 20-30%. if it's even feasible for ships larger than 30% the size of a modern bulk, they gotta be newly built, no retrofitting. rigging does have a bit of automation recently so the question of how much more labor is open, though smaller ships would necessarily mean more labor for the same amount of cargo.
like i endorse it if someone got this going in an mechanized, full-wind power way. it would be dope, but ironically a much larger project than this nuclear boat. which is just changing out the engine that drives the propellor
It's much better to just reduce shipping volume than dive into the unknown without considering safe guards. Your making dangerous arguments that are following the same reckless ideas that got us here.
Which would require a global revolution to accomplish, vs a solution that reduces real harms right now. I thought communists weren't supposed to be utopian?
Utopian is thinking that you just hope it all works out and roll forward ignoring risk again.
The thread is absolutely filled with people telling you there is little to fear. Nuclear isn't profitable, that is why capitalists have brainwashed you into believing it is dangerous. Even with the noted disasters, nuclear has still killed a fraction of the people coal has, per kilowatt hour created. Hell, coal plants are even more radioactive than nuclear ones. And this ship is safer still, because it quite literally can't catastrophically meltdown, as it is in the FUCKING OCEAN.
Such is true, and yet, it would be safer without the commercialization of shipping. What point do you make? None. Only suggesting that we just blindly accept. Not shipping is the best step today until we understand the risks of a new system. Think beyond tomorrow and go slow. We need not rush, only not be complacent. To rush to gain is the disease of the capitalist.
So wait until the oceans are dead already from global warming and acidification and the grand magical global socialist revolution that is coming "any day I swear guys any day" for the last 150 years to do anything about it?
I don't think capitalist globalism is good, I don't think the planet's resources should be being drained so that the treats keep flowing, but there will be megaships carrying goods globally for the foreseeable future, and this could actually, meaningfully reduce our harm done to the precious earth.
The question kind of is what's the other options. The organizational and economic pressure still applies to ICE ships. Not sure I'd be much happier about a normal tanker dumping a few thousand liters of crude oil on the coast.
That was a problem with the reactor designs of the 1950s to 1990s. Over the past half century a lot of smart people have put a lot of thought into idiot proofing nuclear reactors to prevent another three mile, chernobyl, or fukushima. Reactor designers no longer make optimistic assumptions about the operator and assume they are a shortsighted idiot that cannot be trusted to do the right thing.
In modern reactors temperature coefficients tuned to automatically prevent meltdowns is something regulators care a lot about when approving designs. Rather than focusing on building safety mechanisms that the operator can trigger (ie control rods), a natural safety mechanism is built into the formulation of the fuel so if it gets too hot it is no longer capable of nuclear fission.
This is especially the case in small modular reactor (smr) designs meant to be used in commercial applications where no one actually trusts the operator to be responsible. The fuel is formulated to sacrifice some efficiency in exchange for the reactor automatically SCRAMing even if the operator does everything in their power to keep it running.
There is also a push for SMRs to use things like the thorium fuel cycle because it makes the reactor pointless for terrorists or other bad actors to target. The thorium fuel isn't useful for radiological attacks or bomb making, the only reason it even works as a fuel is because it can produce small amounts of uranium that are immediately reacted upon forming. This was the entire reason governments ignored these fuel cycles for decades, they didn't create waste that could be used for weapons making. As a result terrorists are better off getting a shovel and collecting natural uranium off the side of highways in the deserts of North Africa or North America.
https://nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/resources/news-room/feature-articles/positive-void-coefficient-of-reactivity-CANDUs.cfm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Void_coefficient
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_temperature_coefficient_of_reactivity
When will this human-centered design philosophy spread to other disciplines?
When it is too late
idk, are you homer simpson
molten salt reactors are a different beast altogether, its a very safe design and the fuel used is pretty much everywhere. The fuel is a really big bonus, recall an interview where a nuclear scientist asked a mining outfit how much thorium they threw away in a normal dig and the amount was enough to power America for an entire year if we made use of it. And that's just some random dig