The real solution though is nuclear powered shipping. There's dozens of nuclear powered ships already and they've been running safely for decades. It's just regulatory roadblocks, but if governments wanted to do it they could.

Military ships are "safe", because they can generally defend themselves. Commercial container ships would be the target of hijacking, to steal the reactor / fuel, or use them as 9/11 ship equivalents.

Regulation is not always bad.

Correct. And military nuclear vessels are also operationally safe because superpower navies are willing to spend a fortune on training and paying qualified nuclear engineers and technicians. Despite those large budgets they still struggle to maintain minimum crewing levels. Merchant lines can't afford the personnel expense.

For merchant ships we’d need completely sealed idiot-proof reactors. Those haven’t been invented just yet.

Also, we’d need to make them impossible to open and impossible to remove without cutting the ship in half.

So in other words, we'd need magic.

It has only been two years since the Baltimore bridge was destroyed by that container ship. Had known faulty maintenance, but they kept operating. Now the rest of us have to pay $5 billion to replace the bridge, plus whatever economic damage was done to surrounding industries.

We could find a way to make the reactor so integral to the ship and the fuel so integral to the reactor it’d be almost impossible to remove either. We can compound that with fuel cycles with materials less useful for making bombs.

Ships run aground and get abandoned all the time. You’d need a lot more than that.

Not a chance. Pirates hijacking a nuclear powered container ship is not something anyone wants to deal with.

> We already have an entire, scaled up industry of producing artificial fuel in a non-petrochemical route: It's where the ethanol in your gas tank comes from.

Ethanol as a fuel is mostly a subsidy for US farmers. The net energy gain is low.[1] Ethanol plants need a lot of heat energy to process corn into ethanol. They don't burn their own ethanol for heat; they use natural gas or even coal.[2] If they made their own process heat, which they could, they'd use about half their own output. They wouldn't get the subsidy on that. So they burn other fuels to make ethanol.

That doesn't include the costs of farming the corn.

[1] https://energy.sustainability-directory.com/learn/how-does-t...

[2] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Energy-use-in-each-of-th...

And?

The point is not an energy positive process. The point is a semi sustainable industry for making high density (liquid) fuels for the few systems that will need that energy density to continue functioning in an electrified future. The goal isn't "Don't burn anything ever". The goal is "Stop adding carbon to the atmosphere"

People talk about that concept like it's the future, but humans have been bulk producing a high energy liquid fuel with good stability and toxicity properties for millenia! The US produces enough ethanol to totally replace our entire commercial aviation usage right now.

Ethanol costs about $2 a gallon at that current industrial production level.

Actually that gives me pause. What stops anyone using it as a primary fuel right now if it's so cheap? I imagine the average airplane jet turbine has done a lot of testing on ethanol of course, and you always have to worry about your employees trying to drink your fuel then.

But my point is; We subsidize corn growth so that the USA will never, ever, ever experience a famine. That's the point. The corn will be grown regardless, and if there isn't a minor societal collapse that year, we should turn more of it into ethanol instead of corn syrup. Electrify agriculture and industrial process heat and you can also use that setup to essentially "Load shift" the high solar output in the summer into the winter.