The United States and the Queen Mary II are not cruise ships, they are ocean liners. Ocean liners were made to get people from one side of an ocean to the other. They had to be reasonably luxurious, because even the fastest crossing was expensive and took a few days, but first and foremost they were a means of transportation. Shaving a few hours off the trip was worth the effort. There was a challenge for the fastest crossing, records were kept, and there was a trophy.
When transatlantic air travel started becoming comfortable and safe enough in the late-'50s, people who wanted to get someplace had an alternative that ocean liners couldn’t hope to match. That market all but dried up, except for Cunard keeping the Queen Elizabeth II in business, and building the Queen Mary II to replace her. The United States held the record until it was broken a few times in the '90s just for shits and giggles.
As others have said, cruise ships aren’t fast because cruise ships don’t need to be fast. They’re marketed to people who want to spend time on the ship.
Putting a reactor on a ship will not make it faster. A ship is designed according to the size of the engine and speed the line wants to make. It might take 90,000 Hp to make a cruise ship go 24 knotts. If that is its designed top speed then it will take much more to get it to go 26 knotts, maybe as much as 200,000 Hp.
The NS Savannah was not a success.
The Princess line developed the Grand Princess diesel electric. She has 6 main engines that can be brought on line at once. They seldom run on 6 engines. In fact on the other ships of the same class they only have 5 main engines.
Also note that due to costs caused by various regulations like the Jones Act and the Passenger Vessel Services Act only one US flagged cruise ship has been produced in the past 50 years. The NS Savannah was highly subsidized by the US government to even help it struggle along.
Even if the costs of propulsion wouldn’t make it cost prohibitive the US wouldn’t fund a vessel under Flag of convenience and the costs of being US registered would be cost prohibitive.
Cows fly from Hawaii due to the costs of shipping cargo and the Jones Act. If you remember the ban had to be lifted to help out Puerto Rico last year.
Operating income on a per passenger basis is just 8% and an oil-fired cruise ship costs at least 1.0 billion. To see whether or not going nuclear could improve this small margin and long pay back, look at the cost profile. From the same sources Financial Breakdown of Typical Cruiser | Cruise Market Watch fuel and operating costs take up only 25% of total costs. Let’s assume going nuclear will remove the fuel component and reduce operating costs, just how much will the purchase price of a nuclear cruise ship be compared with an oil-fired one?
Cruise operators are certainly under pressure to reduce pollution and gas (LNG/H) is one alternative. I wonder whether the public will be happy to cruise on top of tanks full of such volatile fuel. Fires on these ships are not uncommon but usually restricted to a small area as they have high-quality detection and suppression, but Joe Public is not always rational and the recent crash and explosion in Bologna would certainly not inspire confidence.
That pretty much leaves electric and since the engines these days are really generators, that would not need a huge rethink. Silent and clean running would be a major sales point too.
The Jones act does not keep ships from being built in the US. The purpose of the Jones act is to try and save the US merchant marine (which has been called the 4th arm of defense). Over the years the Jones Act has been weakened and ways around it has meant decreasing the US merchant marine.
Most of that is due to emptying, dismantling and storing the reactors.
It had 4 reactors and a cruise ship would need only one. So some savings there. But just sending it to one of those Asian scrapyards just isn’t going to work. (They are now starting to refuse some of the more problematic non-nuclear ships.)
OTOH, when a conventional cruise ship is no longer wanted, there’s always someone willing to take it in exchange for a small amount of money.
The Jones act is cargo, but the only and the *Passenger Vessel Services Act * the only US flagged, thus semi-US built cruise ship went bankrupt despite heavy federal subsidies and was dragged to Germany as a bare hull to be lengthened and outfitted.
Due to the* Passenger Vessel Services Act* and other regulations. But that is the only cruise ship in the world that can currently legally go from US port to US port. This is why you have to go to Mexico to catch a ship to Hawaii and why Alaska cruise ships have to start in or at least stop in Canada when going to Alaska.
The entire industry has been dead for well over 50 years in the US due to costs and companies using flags of convenience to reduce those costs.
and do this without exposing themselves to dangerous levels of radiation, or having the fuel assemblies melt down in the interim? those fuel rods stay pretty damn hot for a long time after shutting the reactor down. I think they’d realize pretty quick they ain’t going to have much luck getting any of the uranium or plutonium out there while the fission products (Cs-137, Sr-90) are bombarding them.
I took a cruise ship out of SF made 3 stops in Alaska, one 4 hour stop in Canada then returned to SF. Last year I took the same ship from SF 4 stops in Hawaii one 4 hour stop in Mexico then back to SF.
At one time a foreign flag ship could not go from a US port to a US port. But not any more, just one foreign port on a cruise is necessary.
Per your cited article and my days aboard, the Enterprise had 8 reactors. Subsequent Nimitz-class carriers have 2 reactors.
A never-tested hypothesis I heard in a bar was that the Enterprise would be faster off the line than a 2-reactor carrier because she would be faster building up steam (I’m pretty sure I was the one in the bar who said that
@dba Fred: Just keep in mind that the Nimitz class used more powerful reactors. Thus the reduction to 2. The Big “E” used A2W while the Nimitz used A4W
A4W: rated at 550 MWth each. These generate enough steam to produce approximately 100 MW of electricity, plus 140,000 shaft horsepower (104 MW) for each of the ship’s four shafts – two per propulsion plant.
A couple things that haven’t been mentioned above.
Ship speed has as much to do with hull form as installed power. Almost all modern cruise ships are optimised for capacity rather than speed, simply installing a more powerful engine may only result in a modest increase in speed. The giants are recreational cruise ships which aren’t generally in a great hurry to get anywhere, stopping at multiple ports. This is different from the historical cruise liners crossing the Atlantic, primarily passenger ships where speed was both of practical value and seen as prestigious. The SS United States mentioned above has a length-to-beam ratio of 10-1, whereas for the largest cruise ships it’s more like 7-1. Symphony of the Seas is only a hundred feet longer than United States but can carry three times the number of passengers.
Nor are nuclear power plants necessarily more powerful than other types of engines. A Nimitz class carrier with 2 reactors has 280,000hp on tap while the much smaller steam-powered United States has 240,000hp when fresh out of the showroom. Because of the hull-form issues mentioned above there is simply little point in putting more power in a Nimitz hull, they are actually a little slower than the older USS Enterprise was on the same power.
Your SD moniker is very appropriate for an advocate of nuclear power. Nuclear contamination is potentially more deadly than fossil fuel pollution; the incidents so far were not as severe as they could have been, but it was a close call in each case. And the death toll from nuclear pollution, while debatable, is far higher than the figure of 48 that you airily quote.
You just ignore the facts and figures, all of them, from the pricing to the hazards. Nuclear power is expensive, it is not carbon-friendly, due to the costs of production, processing and disposal of the fuel, and also the costs of building and demolishing nuclear power stations. The simple fact is that nuclear power is very expensive, even if there are no accidents. The cost of nuclear remediation is far more than for chemical or oil spills, far more complex, and far more long term.
With any form of energy generation there is a carbon footprint, but at least it can usually be calculated. Solar panels are cheap to run, but expensive and not every environmentally friendly to make. With nuclear power the calculated costs for setting up, operation and decommissioning are bad enough, but remediation after a nuke incident is just something else. Look at the estimated figures for cleaning up after Chernobyl or Fukushima; I am sure that the figures are highly controversial, depending on what is included and how they are calculated. But, at the end of the day, nuclear remediation simply means that the radiation is moved elsewhere to a dump or can’t blow around any more. Need I point out that large areas (again, depending on the criteria applied) around Chernobyl and Fukushima are off limits for human habitation and will be so long beyond our lifetimes.
Half a mo’: couple of response (negative reason) on speed not being required.
Since when has speed been a factor in equipping nuclear power in the Navy?
Mission time is the reason, not turning the power up to 11, right?
In fact, barring James Bond into-rocket blasts, the power produced by fossil-fuel turbines can already push the ships to their max design envelope speed. Also right?
*IN THE wake of the nuclear crisis in Japan, Germany has temporarily shut down seven of its reactors and China, which is building more nuclear power plants than the rest of the world combined, has suspended approval for all new facilities. But this reaction may be more motivated by politics than by fear of a catastrophic death toll. It may be little consolation to those living around Fukushima, but nuclear power kills far fewer people than other energy sources, according to a review by the International Energy Agency (IAE).
“There is no question,” says Joseph Romm, an energy expert at the Center for American Progress in Washington DC. “Nothing is worse than fossil fuels for killing people.”
A 2002 review by the IAE put together existing studies to compare fatalities per unit of power produced for several leading energy sources. The agency examined the life cycle of each fuel from extraction to post-use and included deaths from accidents as well as long-term exposure to emissions or radiation. Nuclear came out best, and coal was the deadliest energy source.*
https://cen.acs.org/articles/91/web/2013/04/Nuclear-Power-Prevents-Deaths-
Causes.html
*Using nuclear power in place of fossil-fuel energy sources, such as coal, has prevented some 1.8 million air pollution-related deaths globally and could save millions of more lives in coming decades, concludes a study. The researchers also find that nuclear energy prevents emissions of huge quantities of greenhouse gases. *
So sure higher. But not in the millions upon millions caused by fossil fuels.
Nuke is VERY carbon freindly, from my second cite:
*Finally the pair compared carbon emissions from nuclear power to fossil fuel sources. They calculated that if coal or natural gas power had replaced nuclear energy from 1971 to 2009, the equivalent of an additional 64 gigatons of carbon would have reached the atmosphere. Looking forward, switching out nuclear for coal or natural gas power would lead to the release of 80 to 240 gigatons of additional carbon by 2050.
By comparison, previous climate studies suggest that the total allowable emissions between now and 2050 are about 500 gigatons of carbon. This level of emissions would keep atmospheric CO2 concentrations around 350 ppm, which would avoid detrimental warming.*
http://www.world-nuclear.org/nuclear-basics/greenhouse-gas-emissions-avoided.aspx The World Nuclear Association carried out a review of over twenty studies assessing the greenhouse gas emissions produced by different forms of electricity generation. The results summarised in the chart below show that generating electricity from fossil fuels results in greenhouse gas emissions far higher than when using nuclear or renewable generation.
In both 2 and 3 carbon footprint and cost seem to be mixed together or confused. Nuclear generation of course isn’t really zero carbon because of the diesel fuel and electricity (assuming it’s not zero carbon) consumed mining and processing fuel mainly, though also building and taking down the plants. But it’s much less than nat gas let alone coal.
That’s the dilemma, that it doesn’t all line up one way. Or potential dilemma. The reality is there is not going to be a huge push toward nuclear, a subset of the general reality there isn’t going to be a huge push to radically reduce carbon emissions in general, not if the impact on living standards is significant (nuclear is less liable than renewables/storage to tech breakthroughs that suddenly lower the economic pain of low carbon). Adaptation and direct climate engineering are highly likely mainstays in the solution to climate change IMO, if there is a solution.
Anyway nuclear is basically dead in the US besides countries whose politics have more explicitly rejected it, mainly in other rich countries. It will be a fairly modest part of new generation in developing countries, with Russia the main supplier of plants, somewhat worryingly on the safety front (see article last week’s Economist) with China the main likely rival. The French, Korean and US/Japanese (ie bankrupt but still operating Westinghouse) providers are increasingly undercut by the poor prospects in rich country markets which would accept their higher costs to get their higher safety pedigree, and lack of their govt’s willingness to fully underwrite the downside risks.
In land power plants that is. Nuclear powered merchant ships are again an absolute non-starter. There will continue to be a niche for nuclear in warship propulsion for submarines (for pretty good reasons) and carriers (for more debatable reasons but likely to continue in any case).
The real upside to the idea of a nuclear-powered cruise ship is that it provides the makings of a classic disaster movie.
Let’s see:
Festival Cruises triumphantly announces its new unsinkable super-cruise ship, the Sybarite Seeker. With 10,000 staterooms, 50 restaurants, 10 casinos and a 25,000 seat IMAX theater, it’s the biggest, fastest, most luxurious cruise ship ever built, powered by a state-of-the-art nuclear reactor guaranteed to resist breakdowns, intruders and storms. The maiden voyage between London and Miami begins well, but then troubling signs begin to appear. An ancient Egyptian sarcophagus is being transported aboard ship, and the archaeologists traveling along with it (and later, other passengers) begin to act strangely. Suspicious characters in Arab headdresses are seen playing shuffleboard on the poop deck. An attack of norovirus breaks out in Third Class. An unexpected breakup of the Antarctic ice shelf sends giant icebergs careening northward. As the struggling vessel nears entry into the Bermuda Triangle, a Category 5 hurricane slams into the island of Martinique, reactivating the dormant volcano Mount Pelee, with a massive eruption sending rogue waves straight for the ship. Crewmen responsible for the reactor hide disturbingly high radiation readings, and it’s discovered there are no radiation hazard suits for the team trying to prevent a catastrophic meltdown, just plastic raincoats.
Too bad Ernest Borgnine isn’t around to star in the film, but I hear Pee-wee Herman and Roseanne Barr are available.
