Going nuclear

Mikal Bøe has a storied career in shipping as his LinkedIn bio attests; chief risk officer to well-known shipowners in the past decade, developing what he claims was the first internet venture for the shipping industry back in the 1990s and establishing Cleartrade Exchange in Singapore 10 years ago. Still, it is with his latest venture, CORE-POWER, that he faces potentially his greatest challenge in persuading the industry that nuclear power is the safe and sound obvious future fuel of shipping. When Bøe penned an article for Splash at the end of August, arguing his atomic batteries (pictured) make the most sense for shipping to slash its carbon footprint, his thoughts elicited a remarkable reader riposte with thousands of words written in comments demanding to know more. “The reality is that the only viable technology which can deliver a durable combination of close-to-zero emissions, marine-level reliability, walk-away safety and competitive economics, is atomic energy,” Bøe wrote, going on to explain that what he was promoting was not “old nuclear”, like the technology that is used on naval submarines, aircraft carriers and ice breakers which he reckons is totally unsuited to commercial shipping, but new advanced atomic battery technology which would not need refuelling for up to 30 years. The units are based on marine molten salt reactors (m-MSRs), a technology using thorium that dates back to the 1960s and is capable of powering the largest ships afloat today. Bøe is set to announce in the coming weeks the backing for his venture by one of the richest men in the world, a major name in software development who has latterly become interested in developing thorium power. In the m-MSR atomic battery, the fuel is the coolant and the coolant is the fuel, so coolant cannot be lost. Thorium is a weakly radioactive metallic chemical element found most commonly in India. We have to embrace the possible, and leave our preconceived biases behind Admitting the technology would not be cheap to install, Bøe has proposed a leasing model for his batteries, similar to those deployed for aircraft engines. Spent fuel and proliferation concerns As mentioned, the Bøe article saw a significant reader response, with the most amount of questions centring on what happens to the waste or spent fuel, and what would happen to the atomic batteries and their fuel in the case of a catastrophic accident, and the issue of proliferation. Memories of nuclear incidents - Fukushima, Chernobyl, Long Island, etc - are hard to banish. In the case of catastrophic accidents, the passive safety aspects of the m-MSR kick in fast with the safety cut off immediately draining the fuel from the battery, stopping any reactivity and thereby allowing the fuel to cool. This would happen quickly whether the battery is upright, on its side or even upside down. The fail-safe is not a matter of operator activation, but a natural fail-safe of the system. When the fuel cools below 400 degrees Celsius, it freezes into a solid rock-like substance and entombs the battery, stopping all energy production. Spent fuel and proliferation are two sides of the same issue, Bøe argues. The fuel cycle of his batteries is calibrated to the expected life of a ship (20-30 years), and only at the point of decommissioning would the company recycle the fuel for use in new atomic batteries. Final-cycle spent fuel - i.e. after more than 150 years of use on six or seven ships into the 22nd century - can be chemically separated so that ultra-rare isotopes can be entered into supply chains for medical treatments, imaging and space programs. Remote controls and further fail safes would either render the ship unsteerable, or the batteries unusable in the event of an atomic-powered ship being hijacked, according to the CORE-POWER boss. “As we are now,” Bøe argued in replying to reader concerns, “we generate over a billion tons of greenhouse gases from shipping and transport which decays slowly in the atmosphere and heats up the world. Some of those emissions will stay with us for hundreds of thousands of years. We have to stop it. With solar and wind, we create more mining, more energy intensive manufacturing and potentially billions of tons of un-recyclable waste in the form of old panels and broken blades with little in the way of actual energy to show for it. The quantity of spent fuel from the m-MSR, even if widely adopted across transport and industry, would be tiny.” Edmund Hughes, a keen Splash reader and until last year the IMO’s point man on emissions, commented on the Splash site, “It is very easy to be dismissive of nuclear energy. However, the alternatives if we are to achieve decarbonisation of shipping such as hydrogen and ammonia are also not simple, easy or cheap options.” Indeed, the Global Maritime Forum has produced a cost estimate to achieve IMO’s 2050 decarbonisation goal of between $1trn and $1.4trn based on ammonia. “We should keep all options on the table if we are sincere about addressing climate change,” Hughes maintained. Atomic options Bøe’s atomic battery vision is not the only nuclear option gaining traction. The Russians, who have long used nuclear to power icebreakers and military vessels, as well as the Chinese are pouring significant sums into developing their own propulsion concepts for merchant ships. Over the past 10 years, a small number of companies have developed small-scale nuclear reactors with output comparable to large commercial ships. Toshiba has developed an installation of 10 MW output, Hyperion has focused on developing an installation of 25 MW and NuScale has developed an installation of 60 MW. Realistic timelines Vince Jenkins, global head of technology at UK class society Lloyd’s Register (LR), predicts it’ll take 10 years or so for nuclear power to start filtering onto commercial ships. “The potential nuclear offers is huge,” he says, going on to list the advantages including zero carbon throughout total lifecycles, massive power density where no other power source comes close, and new reactor designs emerging for maritime applications that include designs, which are sealed for an initial life of 20 to 25 years. “There is no variability of bunker fuel cost or the need for a global supply chain of fuel production,” Jenkins points out, adding that figures being discussed by vendors of the new reactor designs can compete financially with diesel technology and new fuels, even before any likely carbon tax is added into the equation. We will look back at the current time and wonder why we dabbled in alternative pathways for greenhouse gas-free propulsion Among the most vocal backers of nuclear power for shipping are Marcel Liedts and Bjørn Højgaard, senior management at Hong Kong shipmanager Anglo-Eastern. Højgaard, Anglo-Eastern’s CEO, believes shipping is wasting valuable time beating around the bush in the alternative propulsion debate when the right technology with more than suitable energy density already exists. “I think that in 50 years nuclear molten-salt-reactors will be par for the course in the shipping industry, and we will look back at the current time and wonder why we dabbled in alternative pathways for greenhouse gas-free propulsion,” Højgaard, the current chairman of the Hong Kong Shipowners Association, says stridently. Højgaard is keen to point out that today’s nuclear technology is very different from the light-water reactors that caused such a global public aversion, dating back to the 1970s. “No energy generation is risk or pollution-free, but any fact-based review of atomic energy shows that all the usual concerns – waste, proliferation, safety, cost – are exaggerated,” Højgaard says, adding: “At the end of the day, energy density is key, and modern fission can generate more than 2m times as much energy per unit of weight as chemical fuels, such as diesel.” James Marshall, CEO of Berge Bulk, one of Singapore’s largest dry bulk operators in dwt terms, is an avowed fan of atomic potential to solve shipping’s decarbonisation riddle. His company is setting the pace among owners in terms of green pledges, vowing to be carbon neutral in just five years’ time and determined that nuclear gets a greater discussion in the ongoing future fuels debate. “Atomic technology is interesting but I wouldn’t say imminent,” Marshall tells Splash Extra, explaining that there is still much development and testing to be done as well as regulatory and public acceptance. “There are a number of possible solutions to zero carbon emissions and in a stressed planet atomic batteries powered by safe and new molten salt reactors are worth including in these potential solutions, whether to power production of synthetic fuels on shore or in the longer term and if proven safe as a direct power source,” Marshall reckons. Perception problems Adrian Tolson, a marine fuel expert with BLUE Insight, is not alone in pointing out that this particular form of propulsion’s greatest hurdle will be in perception - something not lost on our cartoonist, The Freaky Wave, too. “Generally I can’t see that it should not be developed in some way, I doubt it will happen in the shorter term mainly because of the association with the word nuclear,” Tolson says in conversation with Splash Extra. “Too many of us of the post-war nuclear age remember Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and future generations get reminders with events like Fukushima and the recent TV series on Chernobyl. I am guessing the negative connotations will take generations to shift.” For atomic power to succeed at sea, Tolson believes government support will be necessary to champion its cause and adoption. Quite so, agrees Rod Adams, a fellow American and the publisher of Atomic Insights. Adams, who’s been covering atomic developments since the mid-1990s, maintains nuclear energy is a well proven, reliable, clean and economic source of propulsion and auxiliary load power for ships. “If governments chose to do so, they could allow the engines - steam propulsion plants - developed for use on military vessels like aircraft carriers and submarines to be adapted for commercial use,” Adams suggests. This process would mostly entail developing new fuel cores that do not need highly enriched uranium fuel and perhaps some modifications to features designed to silence the machinery for stealthy use on submarines. With higher manufacturing throughput, military ship propulsion plants could be cost-competitive with other propulsion options for large, fast, long distance ships, Adams believes. If governments do not allow current propulsion systems to be adapted for commercial ships, the timeline will be longer, Adams says. “The adoption curve will be delayed by the naturally sceptical nature of those who purchase ship propulsion systems. They do not want to be first to use an unproven technology and do not want to buy systems whose reliability is subject to lengthy development cycles,” Adams says, echoing similar refrains for so many other novel ship propulsion concepts on the drawing board today. Concluding, Splash Extra returns to Bøe, one of shipping’s perennial tech inventors. “We need new technology solutions that can take us deep into the future,” he says. “To do so we have to embrace the possible, and leave our preconceived biases behind.”

Going nuclear

Atomic power has not had the glaring limelight of ammonia or hydrogen in shipping’s future fuels debate. Will that change anytime soon?

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