Despite the inexorable rise of the oil engine, enthusiasm for steam has never gone away. You can see it in the huge numbers willing to volunteer on heritage steam railways around the world. There was terrible disappointment in the UK this summer when the drought and fire risks meant that they could not fire up their engines and had to get the diesels out of their sheds.
It is interesting to see that US President Donald Trump has become identified as a steam enthusiast, demanding that the US Navy’s carrier fleet be retrofitted with the old-fashioned steam catapults. This has caused some consternation as the newer ships are already being equipped, at eye-watering cost, with electrical devices that will apparently fire off the jets more efficiently. Changes at this stage will see the costs hugely magnified, if they now have to be equipped with several miles of steam lines.
It was said that the President had been speaking to some low-ranking naval aviators who had convinced him that the old ways were best. There is surely a lesson there.
I never sailed on a steam ship, but our company had a sister outfit that operated steamships that we used to occasionally carry their engineer officers, who were getting the “motor time” in for their chief’s certificates. They were always softly spoken and found our machinery spaces excessively noisy, compared with their whispering turbines. Our engineers, by comparison, tended to be people accustomed to shouting at the tops of their voices, possibly because in the days before widespread use of ear defenders, they were partly deaf.
In his paean for steam catapults, the President noted that the steam on these ships was always in plentiful supply, on account of their beautiful batteries of nuclear reactors. He was probably correctly informed in this respect, although one cannot imagine that the designers of the new ships have failed to such an extent that the choice is between catapulting combat jets off and keeping the lights on.
But he is clearly very keen on nuclear power, possibly because of his latent steam enthusiasm. The new Trump “battleships”, now in the design phase and perhaps unlikely to progress much further than the next election, will predictably be nuclear propelled.
There is increasingly vocal enthusiasm in several places for the use of small nuclear reactors for merchant ships. It is said that Chinese shipbuilders are well advanced with their plans for a nuclear-powered large container ship and a number of different commercial groups, some including major classification societies, are now regarding SMR propulsion as a real medium-term possibility.
Despite this enthusiasm and the demonstrable fact that there are no technical obstacles to the development of nuclear merchant ships, plenty of the old problems that have always dogged them remain. Public acceptability, which probably waxes and wanes over the years, is always going to be highly problematical and in the current climate of heightened environmental activism, one can imagine the “just stop oil” brigades switching smoothly into a new cause for their frightful protests.
But even rational and reasonable people with memories of nuclear accidents will need to be convinced that these ships will be safe. It is interesting to see a proposal for a nuclear ship route between a few nuclear-enthusiastic ports on both sides of the Atlantic, although one suspects that the locals have yet to be asked about their opinions on such callers at their quays.
Capital costs will remain a serious obstacle to all other than the giants, although there are interesting ideas about leasing the nuclear plants, or even the ships themselves. The prize of being fuelled for life, or even a “half-life”, is attractive, if the ship can be afforded in the first place.
There is also no escaping the manpower problem and the need for specialist nuclear engineers willing and able to make a career aboard merchant ships. It is worth noting that these specialists will need a lot of special training, far beyond some sort of endorsement of a statutory engineer’s qualification. Also, not without significance is the current shortage of nuclear engineers being suffered by some of the world’s nuclear navies.
Finally, one matter that tends to be rather glossed over by the proponents of nuclear power is the long and costly matter of ultimate disposal, after the ships have reached the ends of their lives. The nuclear navies sadly do not provide an acceptable example, with old nuclear submarines mouldering away in dockyards for decades, after they were retired. The budget for their disposal never seems to be forthcoming, with governments finding better things to spend their money on, as they invariably will.
