The nuclear elephant

摘要

Last year, I was editing an article from a well-known shipping analyst looking at IMO's 2050 targets and how they could be achieved. Among the possible alternative fuels he'd included a section on nuclear power, but I suggested to him that it would be better to downplay this for the simple reason that in all the debate I'd never heard nuclear-powered ships seriously considered. I continue to stand by that if only because nuclear clearly has an image problem. The triple-headed spectre of the Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima reactor meltdowns (coinci-dentally referenced on p.38-39) looms large over the general consciousness, not least because these incidents might have been far worse. And these were stationary power plants - how much more vulnerable might a mobile nuclear reactor be to a lapse in safety or security? Although nuclear-powered icebreakers have operated in the Russian Arctic since the start of the 1960s, the notion of a nuclear merchant fleet has struggled from the very beginning. NS Savannah, the 182m general cargo ship built by the US Government in the 1950s to showcase the potential of atomic energy, proved so costly to operate that it was mothballed in 1972, less than a decade after it began operations.