Battery-Powered Ships Next Up In Battle To Tackle Emissions (bloomberg.com) 143
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Four Japanese companies have teamed up to build the world's first zero-emission tanker by mid-2021 that will be powered by large-capacity batteries and will operate in Tokyo Bay, according to a statement on Tuesday. The new company e5 Lab is a venture between Asahi Tanker, Exeno Yamamizu, Mitsui O.S.K. Lines and Mitsubishi. The global maritime industry is facing an onslaught of legislation to improve its environmental performance. From next year, a majority of vessels will have to burn fuel containing less sulfur. A challenge requiring even more innovation, though, is a goal to halve shipping's carbon emissions by 2050.
While fully-electric ships have struggled to penetrate major markets, momentum is gathering. Rolls-Royce said last year that it had started offering battery-powered ship engines, while Norway's Kongsberg Gruppen ASA is developing an electric container vessel. Still, there are challenges in making the technology applicable to ships navigating thousands of miles across oceans because of the need to recharge batteries. Industries from auto to aviation are also looking to go electric. Komatsu, the world's second-biggest construction equipment, has developed its first-battery powered electric diggers. Electric-plane company Eviation Aircraft, which has signed up its first customer, predicts that in a few years it may not be able to keep up with orders.
While fully-electric ships have struggled to penetrate major markets, momentum is gathering. Rolls-Royce said last year that it had started offering battery-powered ship engines, while Norway's Kongsberg Gruppen ASA is developing an electric container vessel. Still, there are challenges in making the technology applicable to ships navigating thousands of miles across oceans because of the need to recharge batteries. Industries from auto to aviation are also looking to go electric. Komatsu, the world's second-biggest construction equipment, has developed its first-battery powered electric diggers. Electric-plane company Eviation Aircraft, which has signed up its first customer, predicts that in a few years it may not be able to keep up with orders.
What if Costco runs out of AAs (Score:4, Interesting)
That's a lot of batteries. Does anyone know what specs they are attempting to achieve?
I wouldn't be surprised if they eschewed Li-ION batteries for something else given that size might not be their constraint.
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Li-ion batteries really are the best solution in this role. Something else might eventually come out that's more suitable, but today, li-ion is it. A better question is what li-ion chemistry they'll be looking at.
And yes, global li-ion production needs to scale up dramatically. Some people scoffed during Tesla's Q2 call that they're working on a road map to 2 TWh/yr production. But even that would only be enough for about 20% of the global annual passenger car supply - and that's not counting trucks, ai
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"Li-ion batteries really are the best solution in this role." - You list no criteria to make such a claim.
"And yes, global li-ion production needs to scale up dramatically." - Since it can't, and that's not likely, and they're looking to alternatives already in the pipeline... no?
"The globe needs to be producing many terawatt hours per year, as soon as possible. Thankfully, there's no real resource limitations." - To LITHIUM ION? What?
"Cobalt is on its way out, and even today only used in very small qua
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Easy? Smart? It doesn't take much smarts to know that when an unsupported (or in this case semi-ridiculous) claim is made, asking for evidence/criteria to evaluate it is the first step.
If it were really so cheap to extract lithium and cobalt from the ocean/desert that LiON batteries had "limitless" "scaling up production" potential, don't you think they'd be doing it, lol?
It's kind of a derp question until you think about it. Also of course Rei is a little bit "close" to the LiON battery "fan appreciatio
Re:What if Costco runs out of AAs (Score:5, Informative)
By all means, suggest your alternative battery chemistry, which performs better than A) the ~$100/kWh price on li-ions, B) thousands of cycles, C) powers measured in kW/kg (both charge and discharge), and low mass (mass = displacement = drag).
You were literally just seconds ago condemning me for not listing specifics, and here you just offhand dismiss something that I laid out specifics for, without offering any counter-specifics of your own?
A full response to this would be way longer than is reasonable for a Slashdot comment. I recommend reading Ullmann's Encyclopedia of Industrial Chemistry** on the topics of "Nickel" and "Cobalt and Cobalt Compounds". But in short:
* If the customer wants cobalt, you specifically don't remove it from the product stream. You simply leave it in. The work is in removing everything else - primarily iron, in the form of pyrrhotite. ;)
* The amount of cobalt in nickel ores is nothing whatsoever like the amount of gold in your eyes. It's generally found at 1-5% solid-state solution in the pentlandite fraction that is concentrated for its nickel. Ores can be specifically chosen for high cobalt content if customers want it. Specifically, it's the limonitic fractions of laterite ores that tend to be rich in cobalt. And hey, guess what the feedstock to the new HPAL processes that have been shaking up the industry are? If you guessed "limonitic laterites", you get a point
** - I strongly recommend anyone with a nerdy bone in their body to check out Ullmann's Encyclopedia on any issue related to industrial chemistry. It's pretty awesome :)
Okay, since you're A) incredulous, and B) too lazy to search for anything for yourself, I'll do it for you. And... interesting, the last time I searched was years ago, and prices then were about 3-4x, but it looks like it's nearly at parity [mdpi.com] now [rsc.org]. Doing full mineral recovery from a RO brine feedstock stream, lithium is the final recovered element; its marginal cost (modeled on a single-salt LiCl stream) is $2,18/kg LiCl, vs. $2/kg LiCl for traditional salar brine recovery.
Note that there's additional refinement steps needed regardless of your feedstock. A caveat for the seawater recovery is that this is dependent on the quantity of RO brines available, and thus the rate of global growth of desalination. Otherwise, you have to generate a brine via drying ponds, which is an added cost.
Regardless, a lazy calculation [researchgate.net] for a particular cell gives 0,0714kg Li/kWh (equivalent to 0,43kg LiCl/kWh). Lets say that battery grade LiCl can't be gotten for less than $20/kg. Then the lithium contribution to the cost is $8,60. Vs. cells that are $100/kWh total cost. What's the problem?
What part of the exponential scaleup of battery production thusfar [amazonaws.com] are you in disbelief about
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If a large ship does not have a whole lot of weight permanently fixed at the bottom of the vessel, it tends to roll right over and never come back up. So even lead acid batteries at the bottom of the ship are not a problem but a benefit. Take your pick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org].
Large displacement vessel ships just like your typical house, can have very large very heavy batteries where the design focus is long life. Cars and planes and tech gear all need lightweight compact batteries, everything els
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No battery-powered cargo ship is going to have a problem with "insufficient weight". Period.
Of all of the battery factors affecting ships, cycle life is the least important, as they go through cycles slowly.
And again, to reiterate, mass = displacement = drag. While simultaneously decreasing max cargo.
Lastly, a battery-powered cargo ship would be lucky to be able to cros
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I don't have the time to redo all the math again, but I strongly recommend that you either do it yourself or google it. Even with today's li-ion tech, battery masses just ruin cargo ships over transoceanic distances.
I did Google it, because I was curious if someone did publish the math where someone could find it, and this is what I found.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tran... [ieee.org]
Is that something like what you were thinking about?
It does appear quite clear that there will not be any battery powered cargo ships any time soon.
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Indeed, that's a rough idea. There are a couple other benefits to an electric ship's favour (including the basic fact that when you go from "lower capital cost/higher operating cost" to "higher capital cost/lower operating cost", it becomes more economically justifiable to use more expensive mass/drag saving designs in order to reduce the (even heavier, even more expensive) batteries). But the general idea is correct: it just doesn't work. It also looks even more ridiculous when you start comparing prices
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Stops would be about once per day, if you want to keep packs at an affordable, reasonably lightweight size with current tech and pricing, according to numbers that I ran previously. So I'm not sure how much delay a stop would impose. They can be charged quite quickly, so long as you can cool and supply them with power - modern EV battery packs can do as little as 80% charges in 15 minutes - although given your per-stop overhead for a large ship, there's no need to push that hard on the charging speeds.
Not
Anything that moves cares about power/weight (Score:2)
Large displacement vessel ships just like your typical house, can have very large very heavy batteries where the design focus is long life. Cars and planes and tech gear all need lightweight compact batteries, everything else does not, they need cheap long life batteries.
Not true. ANY device or vehicle that moves is going to have to care about power vs weight. Ships are heavy and they do use weight for the keel and other places but even they still have constraints on the amount of weight they can add to the vessel. More weight means the vessel travels more slowly and there are limits to how heavy you can make it and still have it float. More weight for the keel means less weight for cargo so it's a tradeoff. No ship maker is going to make the propulsion system heavier
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Flooded lead acid batteries are grossly cheaper than li-ion for the same capacity. Like, four or five times. New interstate/Costco golf cart batteries are like half the price per Wh as used Tesla packs. But li-ion doesn't require maintenance, and lasts about twice as long, so there are other advantages.
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Look at any large wet-cell lead-acid, and you'll see the real drawback: ACID. Those things outgas highly corrosive sulfuric acid. It's just small amounts, but it is in a steel ship that is already in a highly corrosive environment.
Re: What if Costco runs out of AAs (Score:2)
Since it can't, and that's not likely...
Hey, Genius; you "listed no criteria to make such a claim."
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In a ship? Lithium isn't the best thing for those, you probably want lead-acid or less obtainable types. The larger container and tanker ships currently have between 40 and 80MW engines. A Tesla battery pack in comparison gives what, 50kW. So you only need ~1,600 Tesla battery packs (and they are HUGE) just to be able to drive the damn thing. Then you have to get that to an electrical motor of sorts. I think the Navy created a 40MW electrical engine once, at $100M or about the cost of an entire tanker just
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Ship electric motors are absolutely common. Many ships - the largest passenger ship is among them - have diesel-electric propulsion.
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Looks like you are the dumbass here who doesn't realise that in diesel-electric propulsion the diesel engine is only used as a generator. The electric part of it doesn't give a shit about its source of electricity.
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Take out the heavy diesel engines and the fuel tanks and replace them with batteries. If the electrical engine in the diesel-electric setup is powerful enough to move the ship, it's still powerful enough to move the ship when the power comes from a battery rather than a diesel generator... Range will ofc suffer, but there are ways around that. But not for the terminally stupid.
No, the person that's the moron is yourself. You did a bang-up job just with that reply.
You take everything out, and you have a ship with the range of 600km. There's a legitimate reason why diesel engines are the choice for power in ships, and trains, and non-nuclear subs. Not only is it a plentiful fuel, but it's something that's left over from the absolute bottom of fuel refining with almost zero market. That's bunker fuel if you're wondering, on top of that trans-pacific trips don't work with only ha
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Overhead catenary is the choice for power in trains. Diesel is only widely used in countries that skimp on their infrastructure.
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Overhead catenary is the choice for power in trains. Diesel is only widely used in countries that skimp on their infrastructure.
Nope. Overhead catenary is the choice where the climate isn't so bad that replacing the lines every year is a worse option. That's pretty much North America, where you can get a flash heat wave, 18cm of rain, 1m of snow, 4cm of freezing rain all on the same weekend, followed by a cold snap two days later and it being -25C. Doubly so up here in Canada, where trains are often used in an emergency capacity for cities when critical lines are knocked out.
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That's great, maybe you could go join NBC and help them reinvigorate their lineup.
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Most big ships already have electric engines. It is easier to have a combined diesel/electric drive than have drive shafts coming from the diesel engines or gas turbines on the propeller.
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Some small-medium size ships have them. Most of the really big ones are still pure fuel oil because the engines are too large to have electric ones.
And as you said, diesel-electric is easy, batteries are ~100x less fuel dense so you need to pack 100x the amount of batteries just to provide the power (and the batteries are also much heavier which increases the amount of batteries necessary).
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And as you said, diesel-electric is easy, batteries are ~100x less fuel dense so you need to pack 100x the amount of batteries just to provide the power (and the batteries are also much heavier which increases the amount of batteries necessary).
That was not the point. The point was that the parent was of the opinion that electric engines were impractical. The article is about three ships in a particular bay. I guess when they switch to batteries they did the math.
For coastal traffic, especially ferries, ful
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They are most likely using flow batteries or other 'big' batteries, or stuff similar to zinc-air or aluminium-air.
Best available option (Score:2)
I wouldn't be surprised if they eschewed Li-ION batteries for something else given that size might not be their constraint.
Li-Ion batteries are the best available option right now for anything that needs to move, even if it doesn't move terribly fast. Cars, cell phones, ships, whatever. If it moves Li-Ion batteries currently have the best power/weight ratio for an economically reasonable price. That could change in the future of course (and hopefully will) but until then Li-Ion batteries are going to be the go-to technology for anything mobile and (for a while) a lot of things that don't move too because they simply cost les
Nuclear transport shipd (Score:1)
Nuclear transport ships would be a great option. Of course, they may need a military escort to make sure they stay safe.
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Fuel cells are the way to go, especially on ships. Easy and fast to refuel. If you think recharging a Tesla takes a long time, do you have ANY IDEA how long it will take to recharge a container ship? Without a massive upgrade to the electric grid, we're talking weeks to recharge a battery pack that size. Refuelling a FC however would take about the same time as it takes to refuel a ship now.
Musk and his fetish for lithium and cobalt is fucking up the whole way industries think about engines. Expensive, shor
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Re:Nuclear transport shipd (Score:4, Informative)
These are short haul tankers that will load cargo, cross Tokyo Bay, and unload cargo. They'll probably spend more time at dock than they do under way. This is a situation tailor made for electric propulsion -- diesel electric, or in this *particular* case battery electric may be even better.
Also, fuel cells have their disadvantages too. Many types require expensive catalysts like platinum, and are fabulously expensive to scale up to the size of a ship engine. Designs that use hydrogen have poor volumetric energy density, which means you take up hull space that could be used for cargo.
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I'm sure you know that ships don't come back to shore on a daily basis. The ship would have to be self-supplying. And solar panels aren't going to cut it unless you pull a barge with a solar farm onto it (and I don't even want to know the shape they'll be in after some salt water got to them)
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Fuel cells are the way to go, especially on ships.
If you think recharging a Tesla takes a long time, do you have ANY IDEA how long it will take to recharge a container ship?
Apparently not as long as you are suggesting [electrek.co]. China apparently built a ship with a 50MWh battery pack that they are able to recharge in about the amount of time it takes to unload the cargo from it. More of a proof of concept ship than a practical endeavor to be sure but it's not unreasonable to park a power plant next to a loading dock should battery electric ships ever become a prac
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Fuel cells are still less energy dense - about 14x less dense than gasoline. Still about 10x better than batteries but not a panacea for places where space is already at a premium.
Re: Nuclear transport shipd (Score:2)
Neither of those vehicles uses liquid hydrogen, so you clearly have no clue what you're talking about. They both use compressed hydrogen.
Hydrogen can be "easily" produced from water sure, but conversion efficiencies are shit, and fuel cell efficiencies are also pretty shit, which drives up cost and makes it more wasteful than batteries.
Even with all of that said, though, I'd wager that hydrogen would be better for powering ships than batteries. Not because hydrogen is great (it's not) but because at those
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It's been done. The NS Savannah was in operation from 1962 to 1972, with construction funding provided by the US Government as part of its Atoms for Peace PR initiative. When I was in elementary school we still had the propaganda materials in our school library.
In many ways the Savannah was a technical success; she had an excellent safety record, and had unlimited cruise range. Built to convince the world that US atomic might was the harbinger of a wonderful new world, she was also beautiful, luxuriously
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And of course the Russians have had nuclear powered ice-breakers for ages now. They're recently commissioned a new one, the 33500 ton Arktika [popularmechanics.com]
I imagine nuclear powered ships are simply not as cost effective as diesel ones, and that's the problem - so until diesel becomes more expensive (globally-imposed green taxes?) and nuclear cheaper (more research and scale efficienes of making more of them) nothing will change. Shipping is already a practically loss-making enterprise due to the extreme competition.
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Nuclear transport ships would be a great option. Of course, they may need a military escort to make sure they stay safe.
Every ship should be able to carry whatever weapons they see fit to keep themselves safe, nuclear powered or not. I'm sure some idiot will ask, "What's to keep some ships from putting a fucking 16 inch cannon on the deck?!?!?" That's easy to answer, no company will want to carry anything more than they need to keep the ship defended from piracy because they are in the business of carrying cargo, not waging a war.
If I were king no ship large enough to carry such would leave port without a 30mm autocannon b
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That core may not be much use for a nuke, but it'd be just about perfect for making a dirty bomb. All you need is access, and a bomb-maker willing to give their life for the cause.
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That core may not be much use for a nuke, but it'd be just about perfect for making a dirty bomb. All you need is access, and a bomb-maker willing to give their life for the cause.
Not even close.
http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2... [blogspot.com]
The hurdles for making a dirty bomb are also significant for a terrorist organization. For starters, amassing the radioactive material without killing themselves before they can make the device is an insurmountable challenge for the terrorists. While the radiation from the dirty bomb after it has been explodedâ"and the radioactive materials dispersedâ"poses only a small risk to the large population, in a concentrated form, as would be necessary for the bomb, the radiation levels will be high enough to cause illness and death. The terrorists could decide to make dirty bomb from ï-emitters, because they can protect themselves against this non-penetrating radiation. For this type of dirty bombs the radioactive materials can be obtained from a variety of medical and other devices that have nothing to do with nuclear energy, and so this threat is not reduced by turning off nuclear power plants.
That paragraph is concerning the threat posed from the fuel stolen from a gigawatt scale nuclear power plant. A bit of looking at what nuclear powered surface ships used in the past they might have something about the size of a 50 megawatt power plant. Even a large aircraft carrier or icebreaker would have something like a 200 megawatt power plant.
Dirty bombs are mostly just movie plot devices, not anything of any real threat. Also, if someone had the know
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I actually imagined the bomb-maker(s) dying. Handling dangerous radioactive materials is a lot easier if you are willing to just ignore all safety measures, and plenty of would-be terrorists are happy to die for their cause.
If I were one, I'd probably look for a good industrial source too. Still, it would be necessary to secure any ship reactor - which means you can't just have them sitting in cargo ships, those are already subject to piracy and hijacking. The required security measures - secure compartment
Why cargo ships aren't armed (Score:2)
Every ship should be able to carry whatever weapons they see fit to keep themselves safe, nuclear powered or not.
Umm, no. There are VERY good reasons why cargo ships are typically unarmed, at least while in port. A lot of countries have very clear restrictions on who is allowed to possess weapons. In international waters it's fairly common for merchant ships to carry some sort of security contingent (piracy is a real thing) but things get more complicated when they want to pull into port to unload cargo. The people with guns often have to disembark before pulling in to port. Obviously deck mounted weapon systems
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We put a 30mm autocannon on the front of the ship. ha!
Pirates: ok, we'll come at you from behind.
Most ships have water cannons to repel boarders, the problem is that they don't really want to put their crew in danger of being fired on.
The nuclear reactors used for ships aren't good enough to make bombs out of, terrorist-pirates could do more damage with the diesel, or by ramming the ship into a heavily-built up coastline.
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We put a 30mm autocannon on the front of the ship. ha!
Pirates: ok, we'll come at you from behind.
Here's an idea, put the cannon on the rear deck. That way there's less of a chance of this ship being mistaken for being some kind of offensive threat. If a pirate boat approaches then turn away to run and prepare to open fire if they keep gaining on the ship. If they start shooting then return fire. If they don't answer calls on the radio to change course then open fire. There will be a point where there is little doubt that they intend to board so, OPEN FIRE!
Also, I'm not saying that the weapon on th
Been tried (Score:2)
Nuclear transport ships would be a great option.
Nuclear powered cargo ships have been tried [wikipedia.org] and they don't make economic sense unless fuel costs for traditional ships are relatively high.
Of course, they may need a military escort to make sure they stay safe.
In some parts of the world that's true whether or not they are nuclear powered.
Not that big a stretch (Score:2)
Also, perhaps flow batteries would be a good option for large ships? They scale up well, or so I hear.
Also don't submarines use electric drive motors? A submarine isn't on the scale of a giant cargo or tanker ship, but I see no reason why that particular technology wouldn't scale up nicely either.
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Ballast is water that is taken on and dumped depending on how much cargo is on board, so battery packs won't work for that.
Submarines do use electric motors, which are powered by nuclear reactors.
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Submarines used diesel power (on the surface) to recharge batteries (for use submerged) for 6 decades or so (including the two world wars) before being replaced by nuclear power.. Of course a nuclear boat has a big advantage in thar it can stay submerged for the whole mission, which is why the modern US Navy only has nuke boats (for combat anyway)
AFAIK there have only been two nuclear powered cargo ships - the Savannah (US made) and the Mutsu (Japan) They cost too much to be a commercial success, plus a nu
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a number of ports banned nuclear powered ships
Then they will get diesel ships, because battery powered ships are impractical. If they want clean air and still get cargo then they need to rethink their policies.
Just because we saw past instances of nuclear powered commercial ships fail does not mean they will fail again. I seem to recall many failures on the way to powered flight. And flight with jet engines. Space flight, too. We've now had many decades of experience in military ships powered by nuclear power. We also see Russia operating commerc
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a number of ports banned nuclear powered ships
Then they will get diesel ships, because battery powered ships are impractical. If they want clean air and still get cargo then they need to rethink their policies.
Just because we saw past instances of nuclear powered commercial ships fail does not mean they will fail again. I seem to recall many failures on the way to powered flight. And flight with jet engines. Space flight, too. We've now had many decades of experience in military ships powered by nuclear power. We also see Russia operating commercial icebreakers that are nuclear powered. Those are considered successful.
Again, it's nuclear power or diesel. That's because electric ships are not practical now, and are not likely to be practical any time soon. We'd have better luck bringing back sails on ships before we get ships powered by batteries.
Ever since the end of the windjammers around about 1950 there's only been two sources of energy in common use for transoceanic ship travel, uranium and fuel oil. Without some huge leap in technology I don't see this changing any time soon.
And nuclear powered ships are practical? There are a few of them in circulation, run by strict guidelines by highly trained crews, usually military crews. So what happens when 20.000 nuclear powered ships are sailing in the worlds merchant fleet of 50.000 something vessels? We could reasonably expect to lose at least five to ten nuclear powered ships each year with some of them hitting reefs or something and spilling their fuel into the ocean. Then there would be accidents associated with leaks and improper
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And nuclear powered ships are practical?
Without a doubt.
As for diesel, there is no real reason why we should not seek to reduce diesel consumption by any meany possible that just makes good business sense and if putting electric ships into use wherever practical then that is a good thing.
Electric battery ships are not practical and if we should reduce fuel oil use "by any means necessary" then this, by definition, includes nuclear power.
Hell, if the simple act of retrofitting your merchant ship fleet with Flettner sails is enough to cut diesel consumption and there by CO2 emissions by 8-10% per annum then that alone is worth doing since it is kind of a win-win situation for everybody including the shipping company and their customers.
If it's that simple then why hasn't it been done? I know the same question applies to nuclear powered ships and I have an answer, politics. There is no technical reason why we cannot have commercial shipping by nuclear powered ships. What we have though is an irrational fear of nuclear power that is preventing their use.
As I pointed out be
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The only thing holding up civilian nuclear powered shipping now is that the governments of the world are not taking global warming seriously just yet. Which proves to me one of two things, these people are suicidal or that they know global warming is bullshit.
Or how about this third thing: The people in power are shortsighted, and know that the majority of the problems caused by global warming will be someone else's problem to solve.
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Or how about this third thing: The people in power are shortsighted, and know that the majority of the problems caused by global warming will be someone else's problem to solve.
How does that work? Even after they leave office then they still have to live in this world. This still leaves them as suicidal or not taking the problem seriously. I suppose this might not qualify for someone that's aged and childless, they don't care if the problem is solved. But that still leaves them in a less than angelic light, they must then be somehow not concerned about the long term well being of the human race, or they know that catastrophic global warming from CO2 is bullshit.
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Because they don't see the problem as affecting them so they don't worry about it. Humans are remarkably short sighted species. Some times I wonder if it was a good thing we ever left the trees.
Well anyway, to a point they are correct. Most of the current ruling class will be dead before climate change becomes a critical problem. Plus there will always be a place the super rich and powerful can flee too if something becomes too bad. It may be a hole in the ground but it will be a comfortable hole i
Economics (Score:2)
Then there would be accidents associated with leaks and improper handling of the highly reactive fuel since inevitably in the everlasting quest to maximise profits, shipping companies would crew their nuclear powered vessels with people whose training level is well below that demanded by he US Navy.
It's a valid concern, but the end of your post contains parts of an answer:
Hell, if the simple act of retrofitting your merchant ship fleet with Flettner sails is enough to cut diesel consumption and there by CO2 emissions by 8-10% per annum then that alone is worth doing since it is kind of a win-win situation for everybody including the shipping company and their customers.
Trained people cost more, but if that training costs less then the cuts to diesels consumption, it's still profitable enough.
If laws are passed that make mandatory to only exclusively use highly trained ex-military nuclear marine personnel (e.g.: the company manufacturing the reactor provides the technical crew as part of their support contract to the ship owning company), as long as those highly paid personnel are still cheaper than
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Or we can try a really novel idea - big pieces of cloth arranged to catch the wind - we can call them, I don't know, sails?
Seriously, if people are concerned about CO2 emissions for ships, modern sailing ships ought to serve admirably. We won't be able to schedule them as precisely as we can with steam or diesel (or nuclear), but it's not like 95% of the tonnage moved by sea really needs precise timing.
And for things that do,
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before being replaced by nuclear power
Only a few nations replaced all their diesel submarines with nuclear: the US, UK and France. Everyone else still runs diesels (the Russians have a mixed fleet).
Russia (Score:2)
Of course a nuclear boat has a big advantage in thar it can stay submerged for the whole mission,
Which is (or "used to be", thank you global warming) also the situation for boats when sailing accross the northern ice sheets. Not many ports where to stop for refueling, thus...
AFAIK there have only been two nuclear powered cargo ships - the Savannah (US made) and the Mutsu (Japan) They cost too much to be a commercial success, plus a number of ports banned nuclear powered ships
...Russia (and formerly the USSR) is also using nuclear power on ships, mostly ice-breakers, plus a cargo-ship with ice-breaking capabilities.
(Also, IMHO, propulsion on ships and submarines is probably going to be one of the interesting use of smaller fusion reactor like polywell, if they are successfully made into a viable product
new tech all around (Score:1)
new vertical single wing sails to source most motive power, batteries charged at port and via solar cells with sacrificial plates using the sea as electrolyte to create more backup power to run the controls for the wing.
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"What kind of ship are they going to propel with sails? "
A sailing ship of course.
How do you think the Europeans colonized the rest of the world, (and the Polynesians colonized the Pacific islands) before the invention of the steam emgine.
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How do you think the Europeans colonized the rest of the world, (and the Polynesians colonized the Pacific islands) before the invention of the steam emgine.
There's no doubt that sailing ships are functional, the question is if they can be competitive. Given that sailing ships for paid cargo died out in the 1950s, and even then with limitations on routes traveled and cargo carried, there doesn't appear to be much interest in returning to sails for shipping.
Some kind of hybrid with solar collectors, batteries, electric propulsion, or whatever else you can think of, only makes the ship more complicated and will most certainly add to the costs to build, maintain,
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There plenty of cargo shipping companies that only have sailing ships.
In Germany we have minimum two and I know a Dutch one.
They are competitive because the trade in low amount luxury goods like Caribbean Rum etc.
No worries, sailing on large ships will be competitive again when polluting ones are banned from the harbour s and coast lines.
Hard. (Score:1)
Rolls-Royce said last year that it had started offering battery-powered ship engines
It's fuckin' hard to say electric motor... when you're a fucking moron.
Better editing, Beau??
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Lots of ships have electric motors, but they're powered by generators driven by diesel, gas turbine, or nuclear reactors. RR is specifically saying they're providing a battery-electric rather than diesel-electric or nuclear-electric system.
now we need to tackle the noise... (Score:5, Interesting)
Even as far back as the late 70s, Carl Sagan in Cosmos was warning us that the noise levels from all the ships we have today were "silencing" the oceans of whale song. The ships vibrate at a frequency right in their primary hearing range and was stopping their songs that used to travel across oceans.
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Battery powered ships should be a lot quieter. I'm no expert but submarines use batteries when they want to be stealthy. Electric cars are certainly a lot quieter than diesel ones.
from the shellac-me-with-skepticism dept. (Score:2)
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Ships are better suited than airplanes for battery power because they don't have such tight weight limits - their fuel is a much smaller fraction of their total weigh so relatively low energy density of batteries isn't such a big problem.
The charging plug will be pretty impressive though...
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Battery powered oil tankers are a contradiction in terms.
They would be if tankers only carried oil.
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It's not difficult to imagine mid-ocean solar farm platforms that exist for the primary purpose of charging container ships mid-voyage.
I find that difficult to imagine.
What kind of government would allow a ship to sail that did not carry enough fuel on board to get to its destination? "But the destination is the floating solar charging station!" You mean a station that is floating out in the middle of a vast nothing? Where it is vulnerable to storms, tsunami, piracy, or simply floating off course? That kind of charging station?
It's real easy for even the most experienced sailors to go off course when the destination is a port that does
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Does that coal mine lake have rogue waves?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Not a primary energy source (Score:2)
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Not only battery power (Score:5, Interesting)
Battery power is one way to cut emissions on large ships. They currently use bunker oil, which is literally the bottom of the barrel, because it's the cheapest feasible fuel available. It's also the most polluting. That's what alternatives are competing with: Nuclear powered ships are waaay more expensive to operate than this. The only nuclear merchant ship in service is a Russian ice-breaker container ship: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org].
Another approach is to reduce overall fuel consumption by deploying sails whenever conditions are favourable, which is most of the time, e.g. Maersk has proposed putting wind turbines on its oil tankers: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/1... [cnbc.com] Direct mechanical wind power would be more efficient than charging any on-board batteries.
Solar panels may also be feasible to provide some extra charge to any on-board batteries, further lightening the load, i.e. charging during the journey = smaller battery capacity & therefore less weight & more fuel efficiency.
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What about skipping the batteries and using the solar directly to supplement fuel? When the sun is out the solar energy is directed directly to the motors which connect in parallel with the engine, so fuel consumption is reduced. The ship still needs fuel to travel, just a bit less of it.
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Expense is potentially still a problem, but not manpower. You can eliminate most crewmen even on traditionally designed sailing vessels by replacing them with motorized winches. And these days there are giant parachute style kite sails that can do the job. They're more useful than normal sails because you can adjust their height, and because you can use them with container ships. Solar on container ships would require attaching panels to the tops of container stacks and then running cables to them, that wou
Civilian Nuclear Shipping (Score:3, Informative)
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Thanks.
Can anyone shed some light on the construction cost and operation cost (the latter in both capital and work force) for ships of equal cargo capacity driven by:
* Nuclear heat
* Traditional "oil"
* Sail
?
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Even if the cost became reasonable, we need to replace a lot of ships run by a lot of companies in a lot of different countries. Probably don't want Iran to have nuclear power tankers. I wouldn't trust most of those people to run one anyway, they can't even keep the oil on the inside.
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It's interesting to note that NS Savannah was retired just a few years before oil prices jumped. After that point, the Savannah's operating costs would have broke even with that of a similarly sized oil fired cargo ship. It's also interesting to note that one of the major impediments to Savannah's operation was a labor dispute over the pay differences between the deck officers and nuclear engineering officers (the latter being more highly paid than oil fired engine room crews).
Today, the ideal application
Electric excavators already available (Score:2)
Electrically-powered diggers and earth moving equipment are already available. Most larger earth movers can be bought in an electrically-powered version, intended for use in relatively static situations like mining or major construction earthworks where the digger moves only slowly.
Your electricity should come from a non-carbon source, but that's a separate problem. Most construction takes place near enough to a grid that electrical connections can be arranged for your construction gear.
Batteries might be n
keeping up... (Score:2)
"Electric-plane company Eviation Aircraft Ltd., which has signed up its first customer, predicts that in a few years it may not be able to keep up with orders."
i predict that in a few years our power network may not be able to keep up with demand.
you'd expect them to be heavily investing in upgrading the network to handle the load that will be coming. no way around it, with everything going electric it's going to put a huge burden on demand. i see no such investments going on at all.
what ever happened to sails (Score:2)
I recall at one point there was a fad, maybe in the late 2000s, early 2010s, that the usage of sails on big tankers and such was coming back as an engine assistant? What ever happened with that?
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Still testing them to see how well they work.
The selected 109,647 dwt product tanker, Maersk Pelican, is planned to test the technology throughout 2019 [worldmaritimenews.com]
Though what surprises me most is that they're designed to help power the ship directly, not charge a battery to help push it. I'm sure electric ships will have them to charge batteries instead.
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One of the biggest issues with large overhead deployments on ships is their configuration requirements. Oil Tankers are optimal because they don't have things sitting on the deck. Container ships move much more cargo worldwide though, and with much more total weight. Problem is the containers are stacked vertically below and above deck, and are also discharged from overhead. Any device like a sail or solar panel would have to be both extremely robust and highly mechanized for storage. These ships dock
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It's not really the sitting on deck issue (being washed overboard), it's the ballast issue. Tankers carry their cargo below the waterline, which makes them much less likely to roll. Modern sail configurations are designed to sweep to the sides, opening up the deck once in port. Tugs are what professional ports use to move ships in constricted waterways. Having a ship under it's own power is frequently inadvisable. You have to onboard a port-based operator to dock, even so. Solar panels are mostly used
History (Score:1)
There are actually new sail/biodiesel ships (Score:2)
Actually, a lot of the new cargo ships being developed have a combination of wind (using sails) and biodiesel (which is GHG neutral).
(caveat: I made a lot of money investing in new cargo ships, and it's the way you drive down costs while meeting emissions standards on short and medium haul routes)
Old news (Score:2)
Even tiny Luxemburg has a battery-powered ferry.
https://luxtimes.lu/archives/3... [luxtimes.lu]
Electric tanker, that carries... gas? (Score:2)
Electric tanker, that carries... gas?
Am I the only one seeing the hypocrisy?
Charging Stations (Score:2)
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Total power requirements isn't the issue here, it's the distance per mile. You've got your list backwards in this matter. Energy consumed per mile per ton of cargo is lowest on the water then decreases in efficiency in order of train, then truck, then airplane.
Yes, there are some advances in battery tech needed to maintain the requirements of the engines that power large container ships (around 150,000 horsepower), but the size would be replacing the tanks mostly so the size of the battery isn't a major c