Can building commercial nuclear powered merchant ships revitalize the U.S. maritime industry? Mikal Bøe, chairman and CEO of CORE POWER thinks so and makes a compelling argument that a nuclear-powered U.S. flagged merchant fleet is not only viable but vitally essential to the nation’s economic future.
The idea of a U.S. flagged nuclear merchant fleet may at first blush seem farfetched, as the United States is many decades removed from being a major commercial shipbuilding power. But Bøe’s company CORE POWER has already taken critical steps to lay the groundwork for a nuclear merchant ship reality.
CORE POWER and the LIBERTY program
In a nutshell, CORE POWER’s mission is to build nuclear powered commercial ships and floating nuclear power plant platforms. The privately held company is now just over six years old, although as Bøe has pointed out, it has been more than a decade in the making. London-based CORE POWER is supported by over 65 shareholders worldwide that include among their ranks, global shipping companies, some of the world’s largest shipowners, major shipyards, shipping banks and multinational trading houses, illustrating the size, scope and commitment of the collaboration.
What brings this collaboration of people and industries together is the desire to see and be a part of what will be the next stage of the shipping industry. Containerization is now into its seventh decade and is a mature industry and other sectors of the business, such as tankers and bulk carriers are similarly placed. So, the question is ‘what’s next’?
For Bøe and CORE POWER the answer to ‘what’s next’ is the “LIBERTY program” — a maritime civil nuclear program. And as Bøe explained, “…We named it the LIBERTY program. Not because it’s sycophantically trying to position itself inside politics or anything like that, but on the basis that there is a fundamental difference within freedom and liberty, where freedom is your right to do what you want, but liberty is that right coupled with the obligation to make sure that you consider the effect of your actions on others.”
CORE POWER has taken a very pragmatic and measured approach to the LIBERTY program. “This is not just about the technology, it’s about how we earn the public’s trust to operate and create the conditions for that technology to function inside a complete program built on a solid quality and safety culture,” Bøe said at a February presentation in Houston. This holistic approach tackles everything from construction and deployment to retirement including the social and shipping marketplace dictates. According to Bøe the program will come in three phases, the “first phase of this program is technology development, product development, and bringing it to market through licensing.”
Convergence and Opportunity
At its core the ‘LIBERTY’ initiative is “a maritime civil program” designed to build large U.S. flagged nuclear-powered merchant ships along with floating nuclear-power plants. This entails abiding by the complex regulatory approvals, technical requirements and personnel demands that come with a U.S. flag program. And all this must work within the commercial world of shipping and global supply chains.
In most of the preceding half century such an ambitious program with its obstacles would seem to be insurmountable. For starters, the only nuclear ships currently being built are naval. Secondly, up until very recently, what incentive was there for a shipowner to switch away from the existing power plants? And finally, when it comes to building a large merchant ship in the U.S., where and how could it be done?
However, there is a convergence of technological shifts in the shipping industry and political trends that have opened an opportunity for which a U.S. flagged nuclear powered merchant ship is the logical solution.
Bøe sees that the shipping industry is facing two major challenges that will open the door to nuclear powered ships, “The way we see it is that the global shipping industry has got two big challenges…one of them is this international push to decarbonize, which, it’s not going to go away, despite of the volatility in politics.”
And the other challenge facing the shipping industry and to the supply chain itself is velocity. As Bøe says of the liner ships plying the world’s main trade routes, “The other one is that the global fleet is sailing at the lowest speed [slow speeding] that it has sailed since we introduced the diesel engine in 1911….” With ‘slow speeding’ the larger containerships barely hit 20 knots while tankers, and bulk carriers move even slower. “That’s a massive, massive [speed] deficit” in comparison to the available ship speeds of modern vessels. But for shipowners ‘slow speeding’ (often called ‘slow steaming’ in a nod to the industry’s past) is an essential tool in management’s toolbox to offset growing environmental charges [many containerships are already being built with dual fuel options] along with rising fuel costs.
But for shipowners to change the way ships are built and operated they need a compelling reason and Bøe believes nuclear power offers one. “To compete with China, we need a better product. I think the reason to do this [is] instead of having ships that are getting slower and carrying less cargo and costing more, you now have the potential for ships that are sailing at their optimum designed service speed, carrying more cargo because on a nuclear ship you don’t need fuel tanks, and then doing this without any emissions whatsoever at a very reasonable cost. There is an enormous competitive advantage in that, forming the basis for a revitalized US maritime sector.”
With mega-containerships costing around $270 million apiece and newbuilding prices rising to keep pace with efforts to conform to environmental regulations —there is a dollars and sense reason for shipowners to look for alternatives. And a ship that doesn’t need to refuel and could even ‘sell’ shore power to a port rather than buying it, has a strong appeal.
And the ‘opportunity’ to soon build ships in the United States just presented itself. The SHIPS for America Act currently in Congress is written to make U.S.-flagged vessels commercially competitive and sow the seeds of a rebuilding of commercial U.S. shipbuilding. And what better way to relaunch commercial American shipbuilding than with an innovative nuclear-powered merchant ship?
Blueprint for a Nuclear Ship
Even with the favorable convergence, building the infrastructure to launch a shipbuilding infrastructure to build nuclear-powered ships is a tall task as Bøe readily acknowledges. “But of course we’ve got all sorts of things that need to happen in order for civil maritime propulsion to become a [reality]. The great thing is that these are starting to happen now.”
The blueprint for CORE POWER is to initially have the hulls for the ships built abroad in either South Korea or Japan — both allies of the U.S. and major shipbuilding nations. The hulls then would be towed to a U.S. shipyard for outfitting and the insertion of a nuclear reactor and corresponding propulsion system. Ultimately, as U.S. shipyards and infrastructure are built up the entire process could be shifted to U.S. The construction would be modular both saving time and allowing sections to be built in different locations and moved into position for assembly.
Perhaps the biggest challenge facing the building of a nuclear-powered ship is what kind of nuclear reactor will work in a commercial vessel? Although the U.S. has 94 active nuclear facilities and there are many nuclear-powered naval ships, finding the proper reactor for a merchant ship that will sail for thousands of miles and call in foreign ports requires an entirely different approach.
As Bøe explained, there were potentially five types of nuclear reactors available including light water reactors, the kind used in naval vessels, lead-cooled fast reactors, high temperature gas reactors, and molten salt reactors. And the latter, the molten salt fast reactor (MSFR), is the technology that best fits the criteria for a nuclear-powered merchant ship. Although no to scale MSFR has yet been built, the MSRF is coming fast. “No one’s ever built one of these before. It is the world’s first development of the fast spectrum molten salt reactor (FS-MSFR), and it’s happening now here in the United States. The Idaho National Laboratory, the first small scale machine is in the process of being installed and built so that we can demonstrate. It’s going to happen…and happen in the next four years,” Bøe said of the reactor development.
Ensuring Insurability
From a deployment perspective, the big difference between naval vessels and commercial ships is commercial ships need to be insurable. And a commercial ship equipped with a light-water reactor, like those in a nuclear-powered submarine, wouldn’t meet that criterion. However, as Bøe points out, “The safety case for a [FS-MSFR] reactor is that it can’t melt down. It’s operating in a meltdown state. You can’t have a loss of coolant accident in this, because you can’t lose the coolants.”
And as a bonus the FS-MSFR reactors have “efficiency in the burn up of the energy inside that fuel, and you’re moving the needle from fairly low efficiency in current conventional reactors to the other end of the spectrum…as a result, a very long fuel cycle,” Bøe related. The efficiency means that a FS-MSFR ship might be able to run at their designed speed for over 20-years without re-fueling and with very little waste. This would quite literally be a game-changer for the containership business as velocity would again be an important metric.
Because the FS-MSFR reactor is an inherently safer design, the ship becomes more insurable. The insurability of the nuclear-powered ships comes down to the size of the emergency planning zone (EPZ). If the zone is very large, as would be the case if naval vessels were commercially insured, then the insurance is also large — large to the point of being uninsurable. However, CORE POWER is banking on the reliability of the FS–MSFR system — a system with few moving parts and operating at low pressure. Bøe believes that with the low-pressure system, the EPZ might eventually shrink to the size of the hull itself making it comparable to other commercial ships now in service — although the EPZ’s size for a FS-MSFR system hasn’t yet been defined.
But part of the challenge for CORE POWER is there is no precedent for insuring or even regulating a mobile commercial nuclear-power plant. “There is currently no liability regime that allows you to move a reactor in and out of different jurisdictions, but efforts are now underway to solve this with the insurance industry and member states of IMO and the IAEA,” Bøe said of the situation.
Making LIBERTY a Reality
There are numerous regulatory hurdles for CORE POWER to overcome for the LIBERTY program to become a reality. In particular, export control restrictions for nuclear propulsion are essentially built around the Department of Defense (DOD). For a civil nuclear propulsion program to be launched, the lines of demarcation between civil authorities like the Department of Commerce (DOC) and the DOD for nuclear power must be redefined.
Still there are compelling reasons for the U.S. to take the necessary steps. China has an immense lead in shipbuilding and if the U.S. wants to get back in the race, what better way than to shift the paradigm? And a civil nuclear-powered shipbuilding program would do just that.
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