muriel_volestrangler made some good points about nuclear-powered ships the other day

[bananas]

In an LBN thread the other day about nuclear-powered ships:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1014168432

Iran website: Tehran should make nuclear ship fuel
Source: Associated Press

Iran should enrich uranium to new levels close to weapons-grade to produce fuel for proposed nuclear-powered oil tankers, a conservative Iranian news website said Monday.

Iran currently has no such ships. The commentary by Mashreghnews.ir, which reflects the views of some Iranian hardliners, comes after a parliamentary committee prepared a bill that would require the Islamic Republic to design nuclear-powered merchant ships and provide them with nuclear fuel.

<snip>

"To reach nuclear propulsion, the country's nuclear industry inevitably has to upgrade the level of nuclear enrichment to the average level needed for new marine reactors, and that will be 50 to 60 percent," Mashreghnews.ir said.

The website said this will be an "effective step to thwart sanctions and make them ineffective."

<snip>

Read more: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jxjBaiXFNUlXhAQQn960RomeVDVw?docId=570956340200440b95ef61fba1a3031e

muriel_volestrangler made some good points in response:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1014168432#post2

2. Which is a ridiculous excuse, that would be aimed at producing weapons grade material

No country has ever produced a nuclear-powered tanker. It's not worth it. It's more or less an oxymoron - oil tankers, by definition, go where fuel oil is easily available, and it's not as if you can say "we're stopping global warming" when you're transporting oil. Many ports might ban the ships (for instance, in Britain, there is discussion about what would be done if Scotland gained independence, and threw out the nuclear submarine base at Faslane. One geographically suitable site is Milford Haven, but people point out it's already a major tanker port and oil refinery, and they don't like the mixture of that and nuclear). The only civil ships that have kept with nuclear propulsion (as opposed to a couple of experimental ones) are Russian ice-breakers, and their role has justification - voyages of unknown duration, far from refuelling ports.

For regular ships, nuclear power isn't worth it. But they've noticed that naval propulsion typically uses highly enriched uranium. This is the kind of move that says "yea, we are developing nuclear weapons, but just need the tiny final fig leaf before we've announced we've perfected them".

As an example of the status of nuclear-powered ships, consider the only one the Russians are still running:

After entering service Sevmorput was denied entry to four major ports in the Soviet Far East. Authorities in Nakhodka, Vostochny, Magadan and Vladivostok refused to accept the two-month-old ship into their ports due to popular protests. In addition the harbour workers also refused to load or unload any cargo or provide any port services due to fears of radiation leakage. This was caused by uncertainty about the safety of the ship's nuclear propulsion system and the shadow of the Chernobyl disaster only few years earlier. The local newspapers had also reported a four-minute emergency onboard the nuclear icebreaker Rossiya only a week before the arrival of Sevmorput. The ship was finally allowed to dock at Vladivostok on 13 March 1989.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sevmorput

When popular protest kept a Soviet ship out of ports in the Soviet Union, you know that there'd be protests about any Iranian one.

[Turbineguy]

1. Tankers have relatively low power propulsion plants.

Nuclear is more effective in high power applications. Never the less, steam is often used to power cargo pumps used to discharge the ship. One thing the reactor would not produce is inert gas used to displace oxygen in the cargo tanks. So you would still need some sort of oil fired inert gas generator.

If anything using nuclear on a large high speed containership would be better.

But it's still a bad idea in my view.

The best ship's propulsion is gas turbine. High thermal efficiencies, high power density, low maintenance, easy to automate, clean burning and can use several types of fuel that pose no problem in the new Special Zones.