China building new 24,000 TEU MSR nuclear powered ship

[dyqik]

In this case, with the ship's maintenance being based in China, and presumably most of the ship's journeys starting/ending in China (essentially the Chinese government betting on China remaining a major manufacturing center), there's a better chance of the maintenance costs being controlled.

[Holylol]

Even though quite a few nations have nuclear subs, only the US successfully built nuclear surface ships.

I had to check because I wasn't sure, but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_ai ... _de_Gaulle

[dyqik]

Even though quite a few nations have nuclear subs, only the US successfully built nuclear surface ships.

I had to check because I wasn't sure, but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_ai ... _de_Gaulle

Also
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear ... icebreaker

And
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sevmorput

[Al Capone Junior]

I do understand that there is no functional MSR technology in existence at the moment.

And given that a functional MSR must be kept at quite high temperature constantly while operating, I'm not even sure you'd want one on a ship that's being used to move stuff around. Now parking it just offshore, perhaps a different story. IANANE so I'm relying on other ppl with the relevant expertise to work that out.

However, I think the Chinese are the only ones actually making any real attempts to build one of these things at all. I'd love to be wrong about that btw.

Bc the idealized msr has lots of cool properties. Some of which will prove true, some of which will not work out in reality. Just like idealized small modular reactors, or large PWRs or BWRs or CANDU reactors or RBMK reactors . Wait, maybe not that last one.

But you get my drift, things need to actually get built to find out how close to ideal reality actually is. We have taken the idealized ' too cheap to meter' large conventional reactors and developed them sufficiently to find out which aspects of the idealized concepts were real and which ones were not so much.

Not that further development in existing technology is unwarranted, just that there's a large potential benefit from development of new ones. If MSRs are even half as good as Kirk Sorenson says they will be, someone should be working on the prototypes now.

It's a shame that the US is too busy arguing over which bathrooms ppl should use, and whether a 'clean coal' promoting, 98 times felony indicted, piss flavored cotton candy for hair total jackass, and would be coup power seized, hitler praising, wanna be dictator is really the "best" person to run the country. When we could instead use some of the useful assets we have left to work on things of actual real importance in the actual, real world.

Bottom line is I find the concept of MSRs to be very appealing and I wanna find out if they really work! Somebody needs to get on it! Now!

[IvanV]

I think we know MSRs work. There was even a small experimental MSR as far back as the 50s or something.

The difficult question is what will one cost when we have made one that is acceptably safe, and of useful size - for sizing up is so often the killer problem - and what will be the R&D cost of developing that technology. Because although they have some useful properties in terms of nuclear safety, you are still have the problems of more conventional chemistry, which doesn't mean it is easy. Handling molten salt, which will be very corrosive and of high thermal capacity. And then the problems of what are the properties of the things to contain all the things we need to contain, remembering that some of them will be getting irradiated and so changing their properties. And there are a bunch of complexities, like thorium fission not being self-starting and needing some other nuclear "starter" reaction to get it going. In practice, is it actually going to be something better than a PWR, given the cost of building one, and all the stuff that can go wrong.

People do study R&D cycles, and some such person wrote a paper and reckoned that the R&D cost was likely to be of the order of $30bn. This is a lot of money, and we can understand the reluctance of people to get into that kind of cost. When all we get out of it is a thermal fission reactor, and we have working designs for those already. Well, kind of.

So you are asking someone to put up an awful lot of money, for something that doesn't very clearly present a particularly large benefit. And that's kind of why it hasn't happened. I think Bill Gates has some kind of enthusiasm for them, but I think he sees that even for his funding capability it's a problem.

I agree, it would be really cool. But I can't help wondering if it's a bit like, back in the days of video cassettes, wishing that betamax had won.

[Al Capone Junior]

Well the cost of developing under today's regulations... 30B probably a reasonable guess. But eliminate a bunch of regulatory nonsense, as one might be able to do in an authoritarian strongarm country as, say, China . . Could suddenly get a lot more cost effective.

Plus one of the supposed benefits of these is low cost to build.

But If you're forced to put up tens of billions up the butts of regulators armed with unnecessarily complex regulations, backed up by an unreasonably fearful public with atomic grade nimby syndrome and simultaneously with universe level entitlement syndrome...

Wait, what if we...

Remove the heaping shitpiles of unnecessary fear on the part of almost everyone who lacks a rudimentary understanding of the subject ...

Oh. f.ck. sh.t. Yeah, I agree. Can't be done. In the age of social media, beyond impossible

Well like I said, 50 to 100 years. But that's probably a very optimistic figure. This sh.t ain't getting done.

If you need me, I'll be at the bar.

Maybe China.

[Grumble]

When one of your problems is corrosion, leaks become more likely. MSRs have some work to do there.

[Al Capone Junior]

When one of your problems is corrosion, leaks become more likely. MSRs have some work to do there.

Yes this is one of the most interesting problems I'd like to see the engineering on.

It can be done tho. And unless fusion actually happens someday, which is really kind iffy. these reactors will become more relevant as uranium supplies deplete* and the world's politicians start talking about limiting glow-ball warming to just 10.5 degrees.

*I don't know if that'll be 30 years, 100 years, 1000 years or longer. Obviously the timeline is affected by this parameter tho

[Grumble]

When one of your problems is corrosion, leaks become more likely. MSRs have some work to do there.

Yes this is one of the most interesting problems I'd like to see the engineering on.

It can be done tho. And unless fusion actually happens someday, which is really kind iffy. these reactors will become more relevant as uranium supplies deplete* and the world's politicians start talking about limiting glow-ball warming to just 10.5 degrees.

*I don't know if that'll be 30 years, 100 years, 1000 years or longer. Obviously the timeline is affected by this parameter tho

The need for nuclear in a world of renewables is less than clear. Cases like massive ships are interesting though.

[IvanV]

The need for nuclear in a world of renewables is less than clear. Cases like massive ships are interesting though.

They are certainly very useful in a world of renewables, where those renewables have very variable supply. If you have a low-carbon baseload supply, that greatly reduces the amount of energy storage you need to carry out to get you over the peaks and troughs of supply of the renewables.

I saw an analysis which contrasts the history of rapid roll-out of nuclear stations in the 70s-90s with the large increase in construction costs that has occurred more recently, at least in western markets. As the analyst said, if we decide we are going to build a large run of nuclear stations, and do it at sensible cost, then we can, in principle, put in place the conditions to achieve that. But in practice, it is very hard to step back from decisions made in the interim, that present that problem.

The obstacle to that is social-institutional, just the same problem that occurred in the railway industry, which had a large increase in construction costs over the same time-scale, without anything quite as awful as Fukushima to motivate it. The EC identified that the underlying obstacle to a unified railway construction market, which might therefore reduce costs through greater scale and standardisation, was the widely differing approach to safety assessment and safety acceptability from country to country. So it tried to start a process of creating a common understanding of that. But it failed, because it couldn't get anyone to step back from its established approach. So the only approach it could apply was one that achieved what every individual nation already tried to achieve in its approach. And even when it devised a standard, because in practice those did not visibly include everyone's existing standards, countries refused to step back from the standards they already had. So new implementations had to follow both the new EU standard and the existing national standards.

Because ultimately, if you step back from anything, you have to prove that you aren't importing safety risk, even when the safety risk that is currently protected against is a belt and braces approach to a very small risk. And people whose job it is to analyse safety risks will always focus on any safety risk they can easily see and devise a mitigation for, even when it is ridiculously over-specification to do so. When they should have been focusing on the bigger risks instead.

The Chinese are much more immune to this problem, because they hate transparency, there's high enforcement of keep-your-mouth-shut to the whole population about potentially national embarrassments, and the individual welfare of the population is a relatively minor concern. When eventually their cheap high speed trains started to exhibit an undeniable trend of a high accident rate, they did go back and fix a bit of stuff, and started to build them a bit more carefully going forward. So they are not totally immune to safety considerations and public opinion - it doesn't seem to be RMBK bad, where the known operating issues were concealed even from the people in charge of operating the Chernobyl plant - but it's a lesser concern to them.

So maybe the Chinese will develop MSRs and soon have a batch of them operating, to more, er, flexible safety standards than would apply in the west. And if they achieve that, and they are a step forward from PWRs in the local context, then since they are something like a third of the world's carbon emissions, that can be pretty good for the planet.

Whether the rest of the world will look at them only with a sharp intake of breath, for their failure to meet our standards, or will become keen to see how that can be implemented elsewhere, we wait to see. I'm reminded of the mixed oxide fuel plant in France and the attempt to replicate it in the USA. Mixed oxide plant, it's only a bit of chemical processing, it's not even a reactor, how hard can that be? Well, when the plant that cost less than €1bn to build in France met US administration and bureaucracy, it took a very long time and over $7bn to complete - (working from memory, figures maybe rather approximate.)