Putting almost anything on a boat makes it more maintenance intensive and expensive. Why would we want nuclear power plants on boats instead of land? Maybe to be close to coastal cities?
Several reasons:
1. You can mass manufacture the whole units in the controlled environments of shipyards, directly tackling the construction and project delivery issues that have plagued nuclear.
2. Water is decoupled from Earth, which will reduce accelerations significantly in large seismic events that challenge nuclear plants. Obviously the downside is that you have to deal with rogue waves and ship collisions.
3. The fundamental safety challenge in modern nuclear is assuring cooling of afterglow/decay heat after shutdown. In water, you have no shortage of this.
4. There are a lot more sites offshore
5. You can park 5-10km offshore and have 0 people in your typical emergency planning zone
6. If demand or policy shifts in your area, you can hoist anchor and operate elsewhere
7. You can leave common maintenance equipment for refueling and repairs at a few central shipyards and go home every 2 years to be cleaned up. The fleet can fill in with a spare so there is only a day of downtime rather than a few weeks.
Honestly it's a great idea. We very seriously considered it in the 1970s via Offshore Power Systems, built a facility to manufacture them, got a license to do so from the NRC. But we bailed: https://whatisnuclear.com/offshore-nuclear-plants.html
Mostly because nobody wants to have a nuclear power plant in their backyard. Putting it on a boat avoids having to deal with local opposition to the plant.
Easier to scuttle in the case of a Fukushima-style nuclear accident: haul it out to sea and sink it. Then bring a new one in.
Also easier to avoid such accidents in the first place, since the plant is sitting on top of a planet-wide heatsink.
3 eyed Simpsons fish here we come!
Blinky.
PS: We used character names from The Simpsons' for computer hostnames at a nuclear engineering consultancy I worked at in the 90's.
Consider a Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs applied to an AGI.
I predict weird nuclear and space proposals in the next few years.
Russia did that [1] But it was more to deal with the remoteness of the region and the challenges/costs to build a npp on permafrost.
[1]https://www.revistanuclear.es/en/tecnologia-e-innovacion/the...
I always thought a submerged nuclear plant with torpedo nets would be a good idea Protected from storms and air attacks One reason Land based plants are so expensive is to protect them from air attacks
> Core Power plans to open its order books in 2028, with commercial deliveries beginning in the 2030s.
Yeah right!
floating nuclear: check
CCS: check
e-fuels/ammonia as fuel: check
Can't tell if it's just vapourware or if it's also a grift, but it's somewhere between the two.