Al Capone Junior wrote: Sun Jan 21, 2024 9:43 pm
I forgot to mention in the OP the obvious point that nuclear reactors that power ships already exist and work pretty darn good. So whether it's in a container ship or warship or cruise ship or some other type of
boat it don't matter much, bc if successful, it ain't gonna move a ship around much better than current ship oard reactors. So even if China thinks it's hiding the obvious, I want them to succeed on this one.
It's the new technology that interests me, MSRs, and the fact you can (in theory) put one on a ship and park it just offshore of the city you wish to power. Seems like their little project could test this in a meaningful way.
You'd think that for all the nuclear powered subs there are in the world, putting it on a surface ship instead would be a piece of cakes. Turns out to be more complicated than that, though I don't really know why. Even though quite a few nations have nuclear subs, only the US successfully built nuclear surface ships.
For all the very many nuclear powered submarines that the USSR built, its attempt at building a nuclear-powered ship,
the Kirov-class nuclear battle cruisers, (which look like something a scifi/fantasy graphic artist drew) didn't work very well. OK, they worked well enough to go into service and sail around a bit. But because they didn't work very well, they didn't sail around very much. And several of them ended mothballed well before the normal service life of a warship, around the time the Soviet Union collapsed. Some were later fixed up and reactivated in the post-Soviet period. But they eventually became a dangerous problem that had to be disposed of. I think there might be one left in service. In consequence, the Soviet Union never built the nuclear powered aircraft carriers that were supposed to follow, which the Kirov-class was supposed to be a exercise in proving the concept for. Because, in essence, the Kirov class disproved the concept.
The Chinese have a
nuclear submarine, but it's not very good. One of the main points of a nuclear sub (not the only one) is that they are supposed to be quiet, and theirs isn't. The Soviet story indicates that just because you have a nuclear power plant that's OK for a sub, doesn't mean you'll get a nuclear powered ship to work nicely.
Then you talk about the MSR. As I keep repeating, but people keep refusing to hear, there isn't a proven MSR design for commercial replication available. And that is a huge hurdle to overcome. Various people work on it from time to time, but they soon discover what a huge task they embarked on. So they tend to either quietly give up, or carry on saying they are doing it but not getting very far. There is a myth around that there is a Dutch design, but this is based on some misunderstanding, and that original mistaken article keeps on getting replicated. In a world where even designing a new car from scratch, utterly proven technology, takes many billions, creating a replicable new nuclear design costs an absolute fortune. And that's why it doesn't happen very often.
Now maybe the Chinese will develop a small MSR to a condition they consider adequate for military use. And the Chinese probably think that sailing around with something that might go off if you aren't careful with it is OK for military purposes. And at that level, that would be a much cheaper development. But is it any use as a stepping stone on the way to a good commercial MSR? As we have seen with the latest French design of PWR, just because we have a long-standing excellent design for a PWR to a lower safety standard, doesn't necessarily mean you can take it to the next level very easily or at modest cost. The Chinese have been building the "French design", or at least the general essence of it, and knocking them out quick. But they way they do it isn't actually accredited to a safety standard, so what they do there isn't replicable in countries that have explicit safety standards that are observed rather than have lip-service paid to them.
