I wonder if we're over-reacting with anti proliferation.

It takes 3 very difficult achievements to build a nuclear bomb. Access to reactor grade uranium is only one of them.

I'm not sure the dangers of potential proliferation outweigh the tangible deaths per year that result from large ship pollution.

Reactor-grade uranium isn't sufficient either. It's enriched to a maximum of 20% U235. A bomb requires over 90%, and getting to that requires the same kind of enrichment facilities you'd need if you started from uranium ore.

But fission reactors also produce plutonium. Using that is another possibility, but you need very pure Pu239. Once the reactor has been running for over three months you start getting a lot of Pu240, which is a serious contaminant for bomb fuel. Separating those is not currently feasible.

So one expedient for nuclear ships would be to run the reactors a few months in secure conditions before putting them to sea. Reactor-grade plutonium is still rigorously controlled, because it might be possible to make it explode, but nobody has ever done it.

https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fu...

> Reactor-grade plutonium is still rigorously controlled, because it might be possible to make it explode, but nobody has ever done it.

The US tested a bomb made from reactor grade Pu in 1962.

From my source above:

> a 1962 US test using UK plutonium from its Magnox reactors had a relatively a high level of Pu-240 but evidently less than ‘reactor grade’ as subsequently defined

Fair enough. Though to be pedantic, at the time of the test, it was considered reactor grade. The subsequent split of the definition of reactor grade into fuel grade (8-20% Pu240) and reactor grade (>20% Pu-240) occurred in the 1970'ies.

That being said, there seems to be "evidence" (maybe more like conclusions that can be drawn from published articles by people with weapons experience etc.) that Pu with almost any isotopic composition can be used to make a usable (as in, very low probability of pre-detonation, low enough radioactivity to not pose a threat to personnel handling it) weapon.

Now, I don't think that terrorist capturing a nuclear powered cargo ship and then making a Pu bomb is a particularly big worry. Making a Pu bomb from spent fuel (whether with weapons grade Pu or reactor grade) requires reprocessing technology (e.g. PUREX) as well as the engineering to create an implosion device, and is probably out of reach for non-state actors.

The worry AFAICS with reactor grade Pu is that an advanced non-weapon state sitting on a big pile of separated reactor grade Pu (cough Japan cough) could relatively quickly (e.g. weeks/months) create a bomb if they so wanted, compared with building weapons grade Pu producing reactors and running them, which would be a several years long project.

Building a dirty bomb isn't difficult, if raw materials is readily available.

Dirty bombs are cold war FUD. You could build a dirty bomb out of some smoke detectors. You could build a dirty bomb from the countless orphan sources scattered around the world with far less fuss than attacking a ship and causing an international incident. You could also build much more potent terror weapons without using any nuclear materials.

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

The biggest threat a dirty bomb poses is fear. Meanwhile shipping pollution is estimated to be responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths every year which we just take as a fact of life.

That makes a lot of sense; probably why we only see nuclear reactors on military vessels.

Not true. The fleet of Russian icebreakers relies mostly on nuclear propulsion. Wikipedia lists four different cargo ships equipped with a nuclear reactor at some point of time. The regulations and infrastructure are lacking but the interest is there.

Burning oil to move goods around the world is not a sustainable long term solution. Nuclear propulsion might be.

I've thought about this somewhat. We only trust the military to run nuclear reactors; ok, can we work with that? The US military is already a grift and jobs program; maybe we can turn the Navy into a grift and jobs program that is also an electricity utility.

Make them power all the shipping, oceanic towboats.