[1] https://www.amazon.com/Technological-Revolutions-Financial-C...
Hell, I'm currently renting an apartment and I don't own shit now, let alone 20 years down the line.
Japanese homes have a lifespan of 30 years.
But in the UK people routinely buy houses/apartments on leasehold which means you only "own" it for e.g. 99 years (sometimes less). Crazy if you ask me, "normal" if you ask them.
Plastics, shipping fuels, many manufacturing processes use oil during manufacturing but perhaps not in the final product. Vehicles are still decades away from being replaced by EVs.
The technology is all there and there are some "quick wins" coming around the corner I think. Container shipping switching to nuclear would be a quick change once regulations are in place for one example.
This comment sent me looking, and I didn't see anyone making any kind of move towards installing a regulatory environment that is conducive towards a "quick win" for nuclear-powered container ships. This Flexport article [1] was interesting, but didn't mention any such legislative moves afoot. This article [2] lays some numbers down.
One way I can see to introduce and sustain nuclear-powered container vessels is to expand US naval shipyards that currently handle nuclear carrier and submarine construction to take on the container vessels' commissioning, refueling, maintenance, and decommissioning, design vessels with much longer service lifespans than current container ships to amortize the cost over a much longer period, standardize the power plants on existing designs, and carve out specially-secured multimodal ports with preferential rates for the nuclear-powered container vessels with much faster container moving infrastructure. In the US political-economic landscape, this would spread out the current military expenditures on the power plant R&D, manufacturing capex, and opex costs, into a wider market.
It would be an interesting geopolitical power play a nation, if the nation subsidized from taxpayer funds the regulatory compliance and national flagging expenses, to make a play to dominate and control the global container shipping service market. Nearly half of container ship opex costs are fuel and port costs [3]. Subsidize away the ruinous regulatory and security compliance costs of nuclear, crater the existing bunker-fuel powered shipping market rates, and controlling global shipping could be wielded as a significant geopolitical tool. Certainly cheaper than the trillions spent on the US military, and delivers leverage at the logistical and supply chain level. I can easily see China do this too, especially with their OBOR initiative. If this came to pass by any nation, then I'm sure it would rightly alarm a lot of people and nations.
[1] https://www.flexport.com/blog/nuclear-powered-cargo-ships/
[2] https://cleantechnica.com/2017/01/28/now-time-nuclear-cargo-...
Because obviously the primary goal of the military isn't cost-saving, it's having subs & aircraft carriers that can stay sea-borne indefinitely. So they'd be using them even if they're actually (much) more expensive
Heck no. As a new tech platform without volume production, they'll be wildly more expensive until the vessel fabricators and ship operators hit that growth knee where experience and volume combine to deliver innovations and cost scaling of their sourcing where the savings stack up. Except in this case the savings have to come from automating the regulatory compliance and operational security of the power plants, both challenging problem spaces.
This is why I specifically pointed out subsidization of those areas to even out the playing field, like the tax subsidies for renewable power. It is a decades-long play for power if someone makes it a national priority. The US has possibly the most advanced ocean-going nuclear vessel tech base, has a best-in-world operational excellence in rail freight, and arguably one of the best freight logistics industries and infrastructure in the world. The US could have dominated the world through its own OBOR on a global scale in a similar way China is trying to dominate as a mercantilist superpower, through effectively owning commercial sector logistical network effects. But trying to convince the DoD and Congress the trillions that would take over decades means convincing them that is effectively what one part of soft power projection-oriented next generation war in the information age looks like. There are any number of other competing theories about next-gen war with much better-funded research and adherents out there, so it's a non-starter.
The US let a significant fraction of its manufacturing and shipping infrastructure comparatively atrophy over the past few decades, so as long as it has to retool with more automation and physical infrastructure to catch up with the leaders, it might as well implement leaps of efficiency over the current state of the art like using gantry cranes to mass-lift entire multiple layers of containers [1] in a single lift cycle. The load/unload/downtime/travel-time components all need lots more operational automation and innovation for nuclear commercial ships for automated regulatory compliance to be feasible, but many developed nations (especially US and China) have the tech base to combine in novel ways to deliver.
[1] https://supplychaingamechanger.com/is-there-a-faster-way-to-...
This is one of those things that will not take off without government initiative - risky, expensive to invest and develop, regulatorily difficult. The payoff is potentially massove though
Mind you the culture nees to change too, we've had quite a few ships seized by pirates or capsized because the crew was drunk