We spent a lot of time on this show talking about energy-related education. It is important for people to have a better understanding of how they get energy, how humans use energy to enable better living, and how difficult life can be when there is no reliable, convenient source of delivered energy. We tipped our…
One of the more frequent inquiries I have received during my years operating Atomic Insights is “What happened to the NS (nuclear ship) Savannah?”. I just learned about a recently completed documentary film by Thomas Michael Conner, a former member of the ship’s crew, that is designed to answer that question in detail using sea…
William Pentland at Forbes Clean Beta has an interesting take on a recently released Congressional Budget Office report titled The Cost-Effectiveness of Nuclear Power for Navy Surface Ships. Though he makes it clear that the CBO’s report only supports an economic argument for nuclear powered ships under certain oil price scenarios, he points out that…
(Post was originally published on July 1, 1995. It was updated on April 2, 2011 to include information and videos that were not available in when it was first written. The title has also been revised to open up a new discussion – was the NS Savannah a failure or a successful demonstration of a…
These are not the comments of people with a vested interest in nuclear power. They are the words of professional mariners and historians who understand the importance of propulsion machinery in ocean commerce. The following is a sampling of comments on nuclear merchant ships from before 1973. Here are the observations of retired ship captain…
The Japanese nuclear ship Mutsu is designed not for show, but for research. She is currently being used by the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute (JAERI) as a test bed to validate computer models of the behavior of pressurized water reactors in an ocean environment. The Mutsu has a 10,000 shaft horsepower nuclear engine. The…
Many observers deny that the success of nuclear propulsion for warships has any relationship to the possibility of success in a commercial endeavor. They claim that the costs are far too high, that merchant ships do not obtain much benefit from high speed endurance, or that the public will not accept nuclear powered shipping. There,…