Because I _love_ cruising, and the climate impact is among the major reasons I don’t go as often as I’d like. (Yeah yeah, people who go on cruises get a lot of ridicule, but I don’t care. Something about a cruise just fits me lot more than “real” vacations. I don’t want to be challenged, or go to a place where I don’t speak the language, etc. I just want to be utterly hedonistic for a week or so and then get back to my real life. Insult away.)
I think we can all agree that anyone who judges Royal Caribbean or Carnival Cruise Line to not be as competent and responsible in nuclear engineering matters as the US Navy is quite obviously paranoid.
Wouldn't a resort hotel do just as well for that?
I know it’s not super rational, and it’s not for everyone, but I always massively enjoy my time on cruise ships. Best vacations I’ve ever had.
Sails, solar, and renewable hydrogen is much more appetizing.
No amount of sails and solar panels is going to move a fucking cruise ship. We need to make incremental progress or there will be no progress at all.
These companies don't take care of their employees, constantly dump trash and waste in international waters, inundate their ports of call with pollution and hordes of unruly tourists, and we're supposed to believe that they could somehow handle the security and disposal of extremely dangerous materials? They can barely handle keeping their guests from catching dysentery.
Energy abundance was a luxury we had for a few decades, it's time to wean us off it and start conserving energy and resources, not find new ways of living above our means for a couple of generations before the next bill needs to be payed.
Similarly most of the "waste" isn't really waste if we choose to burn it. We have a couple centuries of fuel for our grand children sitting in "waste" caskets at the existing plants. Similarly to how we basically burned the "waste" from the soviet nuke programs in our reactors for 20 years.
So, sail might be cool, but its not going to happen for these huge mega cruise ships. There is a reason the navy uses nukes on their larger ships.
Solar which doesn't work half the time, produces an oversupply during summer and doesn't work during winter, requiring extensive and expensive storage setups while providing a laughable output.
Wind turbines which only work in specific places with stable wind speeds, with blades that last 20 years and can't be cost effectively recycled and produce a larger waste storage issue than nuclear. Not to mention the constant loud whine sound that drives people living close to them absolutely nuts.
Geothermal which works only in places with magma near the surface, otherwise you need to drill down so deep that you destabilize the ground and cause towns to start collapsing into themselves.
Hydrogen storage may be practical in some cases, but with 30% round trip efficiency it's probably not worth it when pumped hydro can do up to 85% and you also get what's basically a huge bomb waiting to level the city block.
Sails, or their more efficient version, Flettner rotors, are a good starting point for significant cargo ship fuel reductions but you aren't gonna be powering them by wind alone.
I think what Rolls Royce is doing right now with SMRs is probably the best way forward, depending on how small they can really make them.
Nobody needs huge mega cruise ships. Rather than continue to burn fossil fuel or wasting the resources and trust on them by making them nuclear, there's a simpler solution: ban them. You want a ship holiday, there's plenty of sail ships available. You want to lie in the sun, go to movie theaters, pools, restaurants? Go to a hotel. None of these huge companies are paying the external cost of their wastefulness, and it needs to stop, not be enabled by tech pipe dreams.
I'm not sure I really understand your point. Breeders were victims of the fact that light water reactors were considered dirt cheap to build/fuel/operate (and were until greenpeace/etc got involved) and countries like the USA have very large supplies of uranium (in fact there tours you can take in NM where you wander around in the desert with a geiger counter and pick up hot rocks).
OTOH, if your going to spend 10's of billions building a reactor one might as well go full bore (particularly with modern computer control systems) and just build something that burns the entire fuel load. Breeder's problems are political same as conventional light water.
And the "waste" we have is 95% or so unburned uranium that could be reprocessed and by itself last the US nearly a century. Oh, and all this waste? By mass, its somewhere in the ballpark of a single rail car for carrying coal (course then it would fission and release energy) so its kept spaced apart in small quantities.
The more one learns about nukes the more the current energy environment becomes unbelievable. I mean the US and Russia dumped more radioactive material into the atmosphere, and created huge downwind radioactive plumes that make the civilian accidents a joke in comparison. Chernobyl was nothing compared to some of these tests, and we are still talking about it 3 decades later despite the fact no one has built a commercial reactor like that in 50+ years.
To many people conflated weapons programs with the safest, most abundant and reliable energy source we have humans have ever discovered.
Every single day, cruise ships worldwide emit the same particular matter as a million cars. A single large cruise ship will emit over five tonnes of NOX emissions, and 450kg of ultrafine particles a day. To give you an idea, it emits about the same amount of sulfur dioxide as 3,6 MILLION cars.
If anybody thinks we're going to "solve" climate change by a couple oldsters staying off cruise ships (or honestly through any reasonable means), then I think they're deluded. The solution is going to come in the form of a world and way of life that's essentially unimaginable today.
For those of us alive right now, may as well do whatever we want at this point.
The point is to engage in a public display of virtue by lecturing others on their shortcomings. This gives one the smug (and illusory) satisfaction of being a Good Person without requiring any actual personal sacrifice.
You're right. These particular retirees aren't even a rounding error of a rounding error of a rounding error. However, they are Climate Sinners, and must therefore be denounced.
This stuff matters, it matters today and it matters incrementally. A 10% decrease in carbon emissions today means millions of acres less wildfire destruction in this decade. It means preventing billions of dollars in destruction from severe hurricanes. It means hundreds of thousands of lives saved from becoming famine refugees from drought-stricken areas.
Pretending that it's an all-or-nothing, we need magical technological revolution is just enabling people to continue to cause harm more rapidly and severely. But the difference between 2.0 and 2.1 degrees of warming is huge, the difference of giving humanity another decade to replace fossil fuels for grid power is huge.
No one change, no one technology, no one law or policy is going to solve climate change. That doesn't mean we shouldn't pursue any given improvement, quite the opposite, it means we should be pursuing them all.
Very few people are willing to make microscopic changes in their lifestyle. How do I know? Just look around.
It's clear to me societal change won't come when we're staring down the barrel of the gun. It's going to happen when we have a gaping exit wound in the back of our heads.
Fortunately I'll be dead well before the shot rings out.
"Research shows that cruising emits up to four times more CO2 per passenger than flying. While air travel costs between 0,11 and 0,16 kg per passenger per kilometer – a significant amount -, taking a cruise ship adds up to a staggering 0,40 kilograms per kilometer."[1]
[1] https://www.geekyexplorer.com/cruise-ship-pollution/#:~:text....