This. If you could make ship-sized nuclear reactors easy and affordable, the US navy would be knocking down your door. There's no lack of DoD funding, no lack of operator expertise, and no nimbyism from dolphins, so the fact that the USN doesn't have a reactor in every single Arleigh Burke is purely because it's not economical.

They could put out a big production line of cheaper reactors, but the problem is that their navy boats are a target for missiles, which means larger risks of bad incidents. So they pick carefully

Cargo generally isnt a target in the same way

As much as I'd love to see nuclear powered cargo ships, they do still have to give consideration to the possibility of getting damaged.

Even putting aside exceptional situations like with the Houthis, we tend to get one or two highly public ship accidents per year. It would not be nice to have an incident like that involving a nuke ship every few years.

I feel like the solution for decarbonizing shipping would be carbon capture. Have the ships store the combustion products rather than exhaust them out, then reprocess them back into fuel on land using some other energy source (say, nuclear).

one of the things being looked into is syngas from the carbon in the air, to produce net-zero hydrocarbons.

if it worked out, it would at least be relatively easy since pretty much all our infrastructure is designed around hydrocarbons.

That’s not why they don’t do it, it’s because it’s way too expensive. That fact alone precludes it from being used on cargo ships.

Now ask yourself this: do I want vessels flagged in the countries with the least regulations and the most corruption to be run by a for profit maritime shipping company that skimps on maintenance budgets and crew costs to be running nuclear reactors with highly enriched uranium (weapons grade) anywhere they want around the world, even through pirate territory?

Fuck No I don’t. I barely trust the nukes running them in the USN!

> I’ll eat my hat if cargo ships go nuclear.

Would you like some ketchup or ranch sauce?

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

Go nuclear means the future. Past experiments failing is why I said that ships won’t GO nuclear, implying the future. I was a navy nuke, I know a bit about shipboard nuclear reactors.

Does that count as "going nuclear"? Four have been built, and as of now they've all been decommissioned.

And submarines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_submarine#United_State...

Submarines are boats.