[BabyPeanut]

link

...two years after Norfolk got its first radiation detectors, Hampton Roads is still the only seaport in the country testing nearly all imported containers for radioactivity.
While most ports inspect about 6 percent of such boxes for radiation, in Hampton Roads the figure is 93 percent.
...
For $3,000 or less, someone in a factory or warehouse almost anywhere in the world can load a container and ship it off to the United States.
...
"Unlike other cargo ships, whose loading process occurs at the port and whose cargo is often owned by a single company, container ships carry cargo from hundreds of companies," Frittelli wrote.
...
THAT AFFORDS TERRORISTS UNIMPEDED ACCESS TO PLACE A BOMB OR WEAPON INSIDE. ALONG THE WAY, EXPORTERS, IMPORTERS, FREIGHT FORWARDERS, CUSTOMS BROKERS, CUSTOMS INSPECTORS, TRUCKERS, PORT OPERATORS AND OCEAN CARRIERS HAVE ACCESS TO THE BOX.
...
In some cases, experts caution, lead wrapped around the radioactive material can block the detector's effectiveness, rendering the machine unable to notice hardly any radiation at all.

[ONASIS]

I think that Marine Transport will be a big winner, especially Oil Tanker Owners, as there freight rates will rise as fuel costs rise.

Saudi Arabia, Iran, Opec, etc., need to ship to China, India, US, and Europe - all by Ocean Freight. But oil tankers (and all other dry cargo tonnage) are in short supply

Oil tankers are large capital investment + all shipyards (especially China) are now filled to capacity building them due to the phasing out of single hull tankers this decade. The high price of scrap iron + steel plate make new buildings 2x higher now than early 2000's -

Thus, the oil producing nations are going to be very cash rich + then be able to buy commodities, consumer goods, etc., which will then stimulate the demand for dry cargo vessels (like container + bulk carriers) -

Only losers will be non - oil producers ! Perhaps we are looking at Stagflation in "Western" economies very soon -

Best wishes,
ONASIS - The Gloden Greek -

[Berkeley]

I stumbled across this link to a civilian nuclear powered ship built 45 years ago. The conclusion - that this type of commercial operation was done in chiefly by cheap oil at the time - is remarkable.

[Tanada]

I stumbled across this link to a civilian nuclear powered ship built 45 years ago. The conclusion - that this type of commercial operation was done in chiefly by cheap oil at the time - is remarkable.

I don't know whats remarkable about it, the USA was moving to an all nuclear fleet in being but because of cheap oil in the mid 1980's they stopped building Nuclear surface warefare ships. Today only Carriers and Submarines are built nuclear, how long until high fuel costs reverse that trend?

[Berkeley]

Exactly.

[MicroHydro]

There is no way that this will happen. Once you get all industrial nations building more nuclear plants, it is only a short time to "Peak Uranium".

Wind and coal work fine for ships, and there is enough coal to last a long time.

[pilferage]

There is no way that this will happen. Once you get all industrial nations building more nuclear plants, it is only a short time to "Peak Uranium".

Wind and coal work fine for ships, and there is enough coal to last a long time.

There's been plenty of discussion regarding this
http://www.peakoil.com/fortopic4049-0-asc-30.html
Supposedly, EPR reactors use 94% of their waste as fuel.

[gg3]

NS Savannah was built as a proof of concept, and the article says it was an engineering success but not economical to operate at the time.

The closing paragraph basically concludes that with present oil prices, nuclear surface ships would be commercially viable today.

Seems to me that the choices for shipping come down to nuclear, wind, coal, and wind/coal hybrid, and that we need to be exploring all of these options to learn their comparative advantages and disadvantages.

This isn't going to be a case of "one size fits all." In the long run we'll probably have all of them operating in specific niches.

[Starvid]

There is no way that this will happen. Once you get all industrial nations building more nuclear plants, it is only a short time to "Peak Uranium".

Wind and coal work fine for ships, and there is enough coal to last a long time.

"Short" is relative.

Finity of nuclear fuel: In theory nuclear fuel is finite. So is solar power, since solar power is the radiation from the big fusion plant in the sky. In practice they are both sustainable.

Let's do some counting. Let's say all primary energy is changed to nuclear. Let's also say energy use increases 50 %. Today nuclear energy is 6-7 % of all primary energy. That means we need a 15-fold increase, and then 50 % on top of that. Today the reserves of nuclear fuel are enough for about 200 years.

200/15=13,33 years

13,33/1,5=8,9 years

Spooky huh? Well, no, because we can get breeder reactors. That means we get 60 times as much energy from the fuel.

8,9*60= 533 years

Ergo= If we get breeders up and working we are set for quite a long time.

But this is not all ( I sound like a TV-Shop guy), you also have thorium! There is 3 times as much thorium in the ground as there is uranium [...] [and thorium can also be bred]. But there is more! There is also insane amounts of uranium solved in the sea! We are not really sure how to get this uranium into the reactors, but when (if) we do, we are just as home free as if we manage to harness fusion.

Nuclear ships will come back when bunker oil gets expensive enough. I can't wait.

[lorenzo]

I know that a St.Petersburg Design Bureau (“Malakhit”), has been in the process of building nuclear cargo submarines that would cut shipping times between Europe/EasternUS to China by half, by going straight under the Arctic packice, skipping the Panama Canal.




This conceptmay hold some future, even though I think not many European or American civilian ports would accept such nuke cargosubs.

[Dezakin]

There is no way that this will happen. Once you get all industrial nations building more nuclear plants, it is only a short time to "Peak Uranium".

This is so obviously wrong to anyone that runs the numbers, but it seems I have to do this for people every couple of weeks. For constant energy demand there's enough nuclear fuel to last about 1-2 billion years. (We can get that number by calculating the average density of uranium and thorium in the earths crust, about 10-15 ppm overall, very recoverable given that a pound of earth has about ten times the energy density in nuclear fuel as a pound of coal burned.) The limiting factor for energy production vial nuclear fuel on earth isn't the fuel supply but waste heat. If we try to burn all the recoverable nuclear fuel faster than ten thousand years we'll bake in our own waste heat.

This conceptmay hold some future, even though I think not many European or American civilian ports would accept such nuke cargosubs.

Just a matter of politics. If it becomes the only cost competive trade mechanism, people will welcome them. (Or regect them on grounds of protectionism)

[Tanada]

I know that a St.Petersburg Design Bureau (“Malakhit”), has been in the process of building nuclear cargo submarines that would cut shipping times between Europe/EasternUS to China by half, by going straight under the Arctic packice, skipping the Panama Canal.




This conceptmay hold some future, even though I think not many European or American civilian ports would accept such nuke cargosubs.

That will only work about 4 months out of the year because the Bearing Strait is very shallow in spots. When the ice pack freezes to its deepest extent it is too dangerouse for the subs to traverse the strait.

On the other hand a submarine is more efficient in its use of energy than a surface ship, when it is deeply submerged the energy which would go into creating a wake on the surface is surpressed and reflects back against the hull accellerating the submarine for no net increase in energy expenditure.

On the gripping hand, if you are shipping from Archangelesk to Brazil or Nigeria then a nuke sub will be faster/cheaper than a surface ship because it can go deep and more directly.

[Paradox]

There is no way that this will happen. Once you get all industrial nations building more nuclear plants, it is only a short time to "Peak Uranium".

An excellent article by a nuclear engineer explaining why there will virtually never be a peak uranium issue .....


World Uranium Reserves
By James Hopf
Nuclear Engineer
October 2004

http://www.americanenergyindependence.com/uranium.html


..... Paradox

[clv101]

http://www.americanenergyindependence.com/uranium.html

This argument is fundamentally flawed since it doesn't take into account EROEI of uranium extraction. Whilst there is a vast amount of uranium ore on the planet only a very small amount of it can be recovered in an energetically favourably manner... thinking about sea water for example, how mush energy do you think it would take to 'process' the billions of tons of water needed to recover a few KG of uranium compared to how much energy those few KG could deliver?

[ubercrap]

There is no way that this will happen. Once you get all industrial nations building more nuclear plants, it is only a short time to "Peak Uranium".

This is so obviously wrong to anyone that runs the numbers, but it seems I have to do this for people every couple of weeks. For constant energy demand there's enough nuclear fuel to last about 1-2 billion years. (We can get that number by calculating the average density of uranium and thorium in the earths crust, about 10-15 ppm overall, very recoverable given that a pound of earth has about ten times the energy density in nuclear fuel as a pound of coal burned.) The limiting factor for energy production vial nuclear fuel on earth isn't the fuel supply but waste heat. If we try to burn all the recoverable nuclear fuel faster than ten thousand years we'll bake in our own waste heat.

This conceptmay hold some future, even though I think not many European or American civilian ports would accept such nuke cargosubs.

Just a matter of politics. If it becomes the only cost competive trade mechanism, people will welcome them. (Or regect them on grounds of protectionism)

Great idea, we'll just process every single cubic foot of dirt in the earth's crust!

[Tanada]

http://www.americanenergyindependence.com/uranium.html

This argument is fundamentally flawed since it doesn't take into account EROEI of uranium extraction. Whilst there is a vast amount of uranium ore on the planet only a very small amount of it can be recovered in an energetically favourably manner... thinking about sea water for example, how mush energy do you think it would take to 'process' the billions of tons of water needed to recover a few KG of uranium compared to how much energy those few KG could deliver?

I always find this argument amusing when I see it. You don't process the sea water at 3 ppb, you dump the sea water into evaporation pools and process the salt that remains after all the water has been solar extracted. The cost of eliminating the megatons of sea water per unit of Uranium is the cost of pumping the water out of the sea and into a basin, which can be natural or artificial. If you use an area like the Dead Sea basin or the Quatar Depression the cost is in digging the canal and operating the gates to shut off the flow. You biggest investment is time, waiting for the sun to evaporate the water so you can haul the salt out of the depression. Once the salt is removed you reopen the flood gates, with a hydroelectric generator included and get the benefit of filling the depression while generating electricity.

In the early industrial era there were mobile water powered mills, basically they look like a paddle wheel boat at anchor. The water flowing past the paddlewheel turns it and thus oprerated these primative mills. This concept can be used to extract energy from any flowing water source, including a canal leading into a natural depression in a sunny location. Better yet, with a deep depression like the Dead Sea basin or the Quattra depression you can lead the canal directly into penstocks for a hydroelectric project similer to the Aswan High Dam or the Niagra River electric projects.

Either way, wheather the depression is natural and deep or artificial and shallow you get hydroelectric power from the solar evaporation of the sea water creating a altitude differencial. When you shut off the flow and let the water evaporate all the way to salt you can extract the salt from the depression and process it for Uranium and many other chemicals. If you are using artificial evaporation depressions you use the same canal to fill several of them in sequence, extracting salt from one while filling a second, while the third is undergoing solar evaporation. The hydropower is a constant low level supply as you switch the output from basin to basin. Depending on the depth of the basins you might need more than three for the timing to work out, but there are many places near sea coasts that this system would produce sea salt/minerals and hydropower with solar energy as the primary energy input.

[clv101]

I always find this argument amusing when I see it. You don't process the sea water at 3 ppb, you dump the sea water into evaporation pools and process the salt that remains after all the water has been solar extracted. The cost of eliminating the megatons of sea water per unit of Uranium is the cost of pumping the water out of the sea and into a basin, which can be natural or artificial. If you use an area like the Dead Sea basin or the Quatar Depression the cost is in digging the canal and operating the gates to shut off the flow. You biggest investment is time, waiting for the sun to evaporate the water so you can haul the salt out of the depression. Once the salt is removed you reopen the flood gates, with a hydroelectric generator included and get the benefit of filling the depression while generating electricity.

Lets apply some numbers then. A 1GW reactor needs about 100 tons of uranium per year. Uranium concentrations in seawater are about 1 part in a billion. So we need to process 100 billion tons of water per year.

Lets assume we can get the water to flow in to our evaporation pool under gravity (it would be a non-starter if it had to be pumped!). We need to evaporate 100 billion tons of water per year.

Under ideal conditions (temperature, humidity, wind speed etc) evaporation rates can be 2m per year. So we need a pool that holds 100 billion tons of water to a depth of 2m. Water is about 1 ton per cubic meter so our pool must have a surface area of 50 billion square meters, 1,235,526.91 acres. So that’s 1.2 million acres per 1GW reactor per year.

We also need to look at the uranium concentration in the salt left over. 100 billion tons of sea water contains 100 tons of uranium but it also contains 35 grams/kilogram of salt, 35kg/ton = 3.5 billion tons from our evaporated seawater.

We are left with 3.5 billion tons of salt with 100 tons of uranium in it. That's only 0.029 parts per million concentration, well below what we can extract with positive energy!

So before you say you find an argument amusing how about you run the numbers and see how feasible what it is you're proposing is. Extracting uranium from sea water in an energy positive way is totally unfeasible.

[MarkR]

As far as I'm aware the only practical method proposed for extracting uranium from seawater is a process of ion-exchange.

A synthetic polymer fibre is woven into fabric, and then rolled into large swiss-roll type structures. The chemical structure of the fibre is such that it can bind uranium ions extremely strongly.

These drums of fibre and then placed in the sea in areas with moderate currents. They are then left in place for several months.

Over several months, the ocean current forces water to flow through the fabric and the uranium sticks to the fabric like a magnet. Some of the fibres tested could hold up to 40% of their weight in uranium. Other tests on seawater have suggested collection rates of about 3-4kg of uranium per ton of fibre per week are not unreasonable.

Once the fabric is saturated, it's picked up, rinsed with acid, causing the uranium to be released. Then, once clean it's replaced in the sea. Although the work is extremely preliminary, some researchers have suggested that the material may last as long as 30 years, before needing replacement.

So potentially, if the materials are as good as they say - 1 ton of fibre could capture several tons of uranium over its life. In this situation, it's hard to imagine how this could be an energy loser.

[Tanada]

I always find this argument amusing when I see it. You don't process the sea water at 3 ppb, you dump the sea water into evaporation pools and process the salt that remains after all the water has been solar extracted. The cost of eliminating the megatons of sea water per unit of Uranium is the cost of pumping the water out of the sea and into a basin, which can be natural or artificial. If you use an area like the Dead Sea basin or the Quatar Depression the cost is in digging the canal and operating the gates to shut off the flow. You biggest investment is time, waiting for the sun to evaporate the water so you can haul the salt out of the depression. Once the salt is removed you reopen the flood gates, with a hydroelectric generator included and get the benefit of filling the depression while generating electricity.

Lets apply some numbers then. A 1GW reactor needs about 100 tons of uranium per year. Uranium concentrations in seawater are about 1 part in a billion. So we need to process 100 billion tons of water per year.

Lets assume we can get the water to flow in to our evaporation pool under gravity (it would be a non-starter if it had to be pumped!). We need to evaporate 100 billion tons of water per year.

Under ideal conditions (temperature, humidity, wind speed etc) evaporation rates can be 2m per year. So we need a pool that holds 100 billion tons of water to a depth of 2m. Water is about 1 ton per cubic meter so our pool must have a surface area of 50 billion square meters, 1,235,526.91 acres. So that’s 1.2 million acres per 1GW reactor per year.

We also need to look at the uranium concentration in the salt left over. 100 billion tons of sea water contains 100 tons of uranium but it also contains 35 grams/kilogram of salt, 35kg/ton = 3.5 billion tons from our evaporated seawater.

We are left with 3.5 billion tons of salt with 100 tons of uranium in it. That's only 0.029 parts per million concentration, well below what we can extract with positive energy!

So before you say you find an argument amusing how about you run the numbers and see how feasible what it is you're proposing is. Extracting uranium from sea water in an energy positive way is totally unfeasible.

Just because I am bored I will go to the trouble to try and make a rational response to this post.

Point 1, several searches on google returned a result of 3 ppb of Uranium in sea water so you are off by a factor of 300% in the first case.

Point 2, without getting into the whole breeder reactor portion of the argument that 100 tons of 'waste' you are discarding is actually about 35 tons per year/ 50 tons per 18 month cycle of 1/3rd of the core.

Point 3, that 50 tons of 'waste' is 95% Uranium with a fuel assay of more than .8% U-235, it is in other words richer ore than the raw material mined from any natural source. Recycling that 47.5 tons of Uranium back through enrichment gives you 10 tons of fresh fuel

Point 4, you need another 40 tons of fresh fuel, which takes 200 tons of natural uranium, not 100.

Point 5, you don't want your evaporation pans to be 2 meters deep, you want to be able to cycle them rapidly so no matter what the depth you only let the water in at a rate not to much greater than evaporation so that the brine quickly increases in concentration. That way when you switch from pan 1 to pan two the brine is very rich, and by the time you switch to pan 3 the brine in pan 1 is dry salt.

Point 6, when you start processing the salt you begin by seperating it into Potasium and Sodium salts. You sell the Sodium salt at market prices for road salt/other consumer end products to make up most of your income.

Point 7, the vast majority of the Uranium will transfer with the Potasium, which along with other elements makes up 2% of the total salt. Your 3.5 billion tons of salt is reduced to 70 million tons of mineral salts containing 300 tons of Uranium salts. That is 4.2 ppm unless I screwed up my math somewhere. Keep in mind the 98% of the Sodium Chloride removed in the first step pays for itself, that is the process used every day to make table salt from mineral sea salt.

Point 8, having just looked it up the world consumes on average 225 Mt of salt per year, so it appears you will not be able to sell all 3.5 billion tons. This increases the cost of extraction by a considerable margin unless you can sell all 70 million tons of mineral salts at a profit after extraction, which is unlikely.

Point 9, it appears that the alternative method posted about fiber filters designed to attract Uranium is a much more profitible method of extraction. I would need industry costs for seperating the sodium chloride from sea salt to be able to argue a cost/benefit do to the excess of sodium chloride over world wide demand of 225 Mt/y

[clv101]

In my defence I would say my calculations are order of magnitude at best... the odd factor 3 in concentration or a fraction of recovered uranium from spent fuel here or there is immaterial in light of the remaining uranium concentration being far too low.

Regarding the evaporation pools - I realise that you wouldn't build a singe 2m deep pool however to evaporate 100 billion tons of water in a year I still believe you need a surface area of 1.2 million acres however the process is arranged.

World salts consumption is a interesting point... also remember this is only for one reactor - there are around 430 today (providing 16% global electricity) and if nuclear is going to be a significant contributor in a post peak world this number would need to increase significantly.