Reactor fuel remains radioactive even when the reactor isn't operating.

And the proposal was a containerised nuclear reactor, so you're going to irradiate the surrounding containers in the process.

Nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers are completely different beasts. The reactor core is very heavily shielded, is built into the ship/boat, and is tended by a team of expert operators, and (at least in the case of US/UK subs) uses bomb-grade uranium as fuel.

Who is "we"? If this happens at all then it's going to take decades. There are severe constraints on the supply chain and skilled labor force.

In the end, all those battery powered ships needs to be charged. So it is their total energy consumption split between harbours over some period. And as we are talking about trickling you could pretty much average it.

It likely will depend on patterns of harbour. Like how many ships visit, what sort of distance those go. And how much of total time is spend charging some ship.

Worst case is maximum distance trips and maximum utilization that is there being ship almost always being docked. Apart from times when docked ship change.

Batteries are, as an approximation, charged at 1C, so for a 40 mWh battery you need 40 MW.

I bet these batteries would be standard container sized and they could be shipped as normal containers would be wherever cheap power is available from nuclear or solar or maybe water. Australia could be huge here, back in 2024 there were news of a six gigawatt solar farm in remote Northern Australia. Based on my very vague knowledge of the geography I presume there's plenty more desert to build solar there. Charge the battery-containers, ship them to China.

I don’t understand why Hawaii doesn’t have more solar. Gotta be a lot cheaper than imported oil, even with the the US solar premium.

I don't believe those numbers, and even if I did it is a fact that EV fires are far more dangerous than petrol fires. As for hybrid vehicles, you get the best and worst of both worlds including two separate high-energy systems that can catch fire. The average age of an EV is way lower than the average age of a petrol car, and they also tend to be toys for the wealthy who do not abuse them as much as the owners of petrol vehicles abuse theirs. EVs are often ruined by minor accidents or water ingress, and can pose a major fire/explosion risk at any shop that would dare to undertake a repair. Just the other day I heard one EV owner was quoted $12k to repair an issue caused by spilling a bottle of drinking water inside the EV.

As I said, the fact that these fires can't be extinguished is a major arson risk, as is their toxicity. Insurers will eventually have to raise their rates to cover the extreme risk posed by EVs. https://www.himarley.com/news/ev-charging-fires-are-rare-but... Storing damaged EVs safely means you need to spread them out like a hundred feet apart or something, so that one of them igniting doesn't start a whole lot of EVs on fire with toxic and inextinguishable flames. There are no solutions to these problems after having EVs on the market for several years, because it's a very hard problem to solve.

Yes lol. I should have a thousand points by now probably, but every time I get on a streak of telling people uncomfortable truths they knock me down like 50 points.

This is largely a misconception that's caused by the fact that EV fires are hard to extinguish with normal water sprays. That is because the bettery packs are designed to be water proof, so it is hard to get the fire patrol's water in. If you can immerse the pack in water, the fire is extinguished without much trouble. That's unlike petroleum fires, where the fuel is lighter than water and liquid, so water spray will boil and spread the fire instead of extinguishing it.

It doesn't need to be extinguished, it just needs to be removed from the ship. Even a second of airtime (and a healthy lateral velocity) might be enough that the ship is out of the explosive radius of the battery.

I don’t know much about the kind of giant motor that would be used in a ship, but as a general principle: the load that a motor presents to the drive electronics does not resemble your house in the slightest.

To power your house (or, more generally, supply vaguely sine-wave like output at a constant voltage), you need a converter that will convert DC at the battery voltage to AC at the desired voltage. If a buck converter is used, for example, the AC voltage can only ever be lower than the battery voltage. If you use a cheap square wave inverter, it’s possible that the output and input voltages must actually be equal.

A motor, though, is a highly inductive load, and large motors will and do operate from truly gnarly supply waveforms as long as the current waveform is approximately correct. Industrial VFDs (variable frequency drives) do unspeakable things involving switching a DC bus voltage across the motor via H bridges at tens of MHz, which is a horrible thing to do the the wiring between the drive and the motor if it’s not extremely short. (There are, recently, some guidelines that specific types of wire with twisted conductors, better than average insulation, and high quality shields should be used to improve tolerance of the fact that rather impressive standing waves can appear in the wiring if the wiring is a quarter wavelength or longer.). I can easily imagine designing a VFD that works just fine over a respectable range of DC input voltages by adjusting its duty cycle accordingly.

One way to think of this is that a VFD looks kind of like a buck converter where the inductor is free in the sense that it’s already right there in the motor. If it’s designed right, it will handle the battery’s full voltage range, and the inductor will still be free :)