LETTERS TO THE EDITOR


Nuclear Confission Sir,


It is good to see that January’s Editorial Comment has triggered a debate on Nuclear Power for Commercial Ships as a means of reducing shipping’s contribution to global carbon emissions. Firstly I would like to clarify a point


in Vaughan Pomery’s objection to that Editorial - he consistently refers “nuclear fusion”. Currently there are no viable nuclear fusion power systems ashore or at sea. Te technology has been “forty years” away for the past fiſty years and continues to be so. However, once achieved it has the potential to address most of the green lobby’s objections to current nuclear fission plants. It is this technology that I assume is under discussion. Nuclear fission technology plants are


used successfully but very selectively in the marine sector where the capability advantage is fundamental to the vessel’s concept of operations and thus offsets the appreciable costs of ownership through life. In addition there are all the “soft” issues attached to nuclear that the Editorial correctly refers to. Te totality of this equation led the UK MoD to opt for a non-nuclear propulsion solution to its requirement for the Queen Elizabeth Aircraſt Carrier even though the Royal Navy clearly has in place much of the investment in design required to design, build, operate and de-commission a nuclear powered design.


Treasure Ships Sir


I note with interest the letter by Colin Mudie printed in the February 2011 issue of The Naval Architect concerning watertight bulkheads in ship construc- tion in Ming Dynasty China. I would draw his attention to the paper by Prof. Xi and myself published in the 2004 Transaction (Vol 146 Part A2, page 59) reviewing the construction of the “Treasure Ships” of that period and the exploits of Zheng He. There is also some correspondence in The Mariner’s Mirror of 2004/5 in which doubt was cast on the possibility of such huge vessels


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In this instance the risks would have been under-written by the UK Government and been implicit whereas the owner of a truly commercial vessel would need to obtain insurance cover from the market and such costs would be explicit. Land based plants have gone down


a different development path from the Marine nuclear power systems. Te trend is to increase plant (or site) capacity from the current 0.5-2GW to 10+GW. Tis provides


“The technology has been “forty years” away for the past fifty years and continues to be so”


the benefits of scale without a proportional increase in regulatory and other fixed costs. This trend is constrained for commercial shipping. Low power land-based plants may be a


more attractive starting point for commercial ships than either future land-based plants or the current specialised marine plants but the additional technical challenges and non-recurring costs of “Marinising” plants


need to be fully understood. In the meantime we should note the


advances in more conventional approaches to the challenge. Maersk and others are showing the way in significantly reducing Shipping’s carbon emissions in rather more prosaic ways. With the right research & technology investment there is a lot more that will be achieved through innovation in Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering. In addition the Marine sector is able to tailor a lot of innovation from other transport sectors – not just in terms of Design but also new Fuels (including synthetic from renewable energy sources), Operations, Regulation and new Business Models. Over the next forty years I am sure that


large capacity land-based nuclear fission power will form a key part of global carbon emissions reduction. Commercial shipping will make a proportionate saving to carbon emissions – whether or not this includes a nuclear power component is a complex subject which highlights the need to harness those with experience of both Nuclear and Marine matters so as to get the full picture. Nuclear fusion will still be just over the horizon.


Professor Paul Wrobel (Fellow) University College London Chair of the “Low Carbon Shipping” consortium


being constructed in wood, and where I demonstrated that large hull structures


“doubt was cast on the possibility of such huge vessels being constructed in wood”


were indeed technically possible, though of course it does not


follow


that they existed in reality. Following from that debate I made a proposal to Southampton University, in association with the Society for Nautical Archaeol- ogy, to support a post-graduate project to “reverse engineer” what we believe the hull structure might have been using modern analysis techniques to establish what the likely scantlings could have been and where the critical parts of the structures were. Unfortunately no student was forthcoming who had the time or commitment to undertake the task so it remains on the table.


Dr David Chalmers (Fellow) The Naval Architect April 2011


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