I was visiting the Polar Star when it was in the Hobart Harbour in Tasmania in 2005 or 2006. It was really awesome talking to crew and touring the ship. The twin turbines inside left a lasting impression. We also got invited to the crew reception that evening by the Australian Antarctic Division. I still remember the mountain bike and snowboards on deck of the ship :). Good times.
I always thought it'd make a lot of sense for nuclear ice breakers to be a thing. You need a lot of power and endurance, and the added weight would be a bonus.
The NS Savannah was an American attempt back in the 1960's. It was too small. In addition, oil was cheap back then; so, there was no incentive for the specialized training for the crew, a special shoreside facility, etc.
I'd imagine maintenance was also an issue. One thing people always neglect to mention with nuclear energy is how eagerly it rips its own equipment apart on the molecular level. For being the power source of the future they are surprisingly close to 19th steam boilers in that regard.
While I understand the common sense intuition of a radiation leak being dangerous, is there scientific evidence that it would kill / a lot of live beings?
I guess the letal radiations would have a very narrow range around the sinked ship.
I remember seeing a guy eating dust just around chernobyl central, and proving that it was under the letal dose.
Can someone quantify the risk?
The NS Savannah (US), Otto Hahn (German), and Mutsu (Japanese) are the only three nuclear-powered cargo ships ever built, though the Soviets/Russians have and do run a nuclear-powered icebreaker fleet, some with cargo capacity.
The three named ships all proved nonviable. Savannah, a liner-cargo combination suited neither role well, the Otto Hahn was simply uneconomical though was later converted to diesel, and the Mutsu had significant technical issues as well as political resistance. Whether or not low fossil fuel costs of the period (1962 - 1990, roughly) had a major impact isn't clear. Nuclear power requires very highly trained crew, however.
Another factor working against larger-scale marine propulsion deployment is the number of shipwrecks. Roughly 200 major vessels are lost every decade or so, which if a significant fraction were nuclear powered would be a large number of reactor cores littering highly trafficked sea lanes, many of which are shared with fishing and other uses. All told, there've been on the order of 400 or so marine propulsion nuclear powerplants deployed in total (most on submarines), whereas the commercial shipping fleet is on the order of 60-80k vessels.
Enough different to explain why it's 5.5 times more expensive? Knowing US military spending, F-35 as the most prominent example, it will surely be engineered to withstand every possible scenario there could exist. And US will have the most awesome ice breaker in the world, for sure. But is it wise spending? Who knows.
The Aegis missile system they're sticking in it kind of explains it. Anyway, the Russian nuke icebreakers are definitely more awesome and cost about the same thing:
Is it just me or does the use of the term "military industrial complex" seem pejorative in this context? It feels like the author is trying to inject an opinion in what should otherwise be objective fact based journalism.
As a Coast Guard vessel the Polar Star falls under the Department of Homeland Security, which is why the article made a pointed jab at Trump for the partial gov’t shutdown that halted the sailors’s pay (DoD was fully funded, DHS was not).
I’m all for moving money from DoD to peaceful operations such as this.
It injects historical allusion. Dwight Eisenhower coined the term in his cautionary farewell address upon leaving office, as the Cold War was ratcheting upward.
Specifically, he spoke about the challenges imposed on properly harnessing the post-WWII professional armaments industry, which he noted was functionally necessary in the modern age, to a healthy democracy.
"Crises there will continue to be. In meeting them, whether foreign or domestic, great or small, there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties. A huge increase in newer elements of our defense; development of unrealistic programs to cure every ill in agriculture; a dramatic expansion in basic and applied research -- these and many other possibilities, each possibly promising in itself, may be suggested as the only way to the road we wish to travel.
But each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs -- balance between the private and the public economy, balance between cost and hoped for advantage -- balance between the clearly necessary and the comfortably desirable; balance between our essential requirements as a nation and the duties imposed by the nation upon the individual; balance between actions of the moment and the national welfare of the future. Good judgment seeks balance and progress; lack of it eventually finds imbalance and frustration."
"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."
"Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society's future, we -- you and I, and our government -- must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow."
I used to do oceanographic research and for a time the group I was part of supported some science operations on the Healy — smaller coastguard icebreaker for use in the arctic that is also based in Seattle. Man I hated sailing on that ship compared to the smaller oceanographic vessels I was used to ... and only ever did short week long sea trials for testing on that ship ...
The polar star tho — that thing barely looked like it floated — mad respect to the people who keep that working and the amount of suffering that must involve ...
One of the things that was strange to me about the Healy was the crew rotation schedule — there was very little continuity of personnel with military design of all people must be on temporary assignments and therefore easily replaceable ... seems like they can’t possibly do that with a ship like the polar star where the deep ship specific knowledge _has_ to be on board ...?
Not a sailor myself but a machine builder, however, I've worked with enough rustbuckets to imagine the pain.
On a new ship or machine, bearings are smooth. Fasteners are clean and crisply torqued, you break them free once with equal torque and subsequently can turn them out with your fingers. Hoses and wires are flexible and strong. Everything is at the beginning of its service life, and after a break-in period, likely has many years of trouble-free operation ahead.
The process for, say, installing a new gasket? 1. Turn the bolts loose with a ratchet and socket. 2. Remove old gasket. 3. Install new gasket. 4. Reinstall bolts, torquing to spec. Estimated time: 20 minutes.
Not so on an old girl.
Step 1. Wipe off the congealed grease and oil from leak above. Wire brush the paint and rust underneath so you can get the socket over the bolt head. Attempt to turn bolt loose. Get extension pipe for ratchet. Get impact driver. Apply heat with propane torch. Apply heat with oxyacetylene torch. Repeat escalation for each bolt, except #6 which breaks off in the blind hole, that will need to be drilled out and have a thread insert installed. 2. Maintenance used RTV silicone last time instead of gasket. Brush, scrape, and stone that silicone-covered, corrosion pitted surface to clean, flat metal. The more time you take here, the better the repair will be, but you're on your back in the dark instead of in the machine shop working on new metal. 3. Gasket not available commercially this time this time either, re-apply RTV silicone for the next guy to deal with (probably you). 4. Bolts are stretched from heat and corroded so don't thread in smoothly, heads rounded over, (and one broke), so buy new bolts, which still don't thread in because threaded holes are likewise corroded. Run tap into threaded holes, avoiding contamination of interior with metal chips. Reinstall bolts. Torque to spec, as if that would keep this thing from coming loose and leaking again in a couple months. Elapsed time: 4 hours.
And it needs service like,this all the time, because everything is at the end of its useful life.
It's a lot like working with a buggy and brittle legacy codebase instead of doing green-field development.
OT, but a good place to ask: are there any good sources (online or off) for a "0-60 farm repair primer"?
I feel one of the great holes in my education is as a mechanic, and while I've picked up a bit along the way, I still stumble across things (like making gaskets) that are well-known, just not by me.
Ideally, I'm looking for breadth-not-depth, with an emphasis on practical applications and tips / tricks.
Maybe try field repair or emergency fix bibles. I always find I’m learning interesting, slick new techniques to solve mechanical problems by survival methods.
Fair warning: he does veer into politics from time to time, but while I don’t agree with his political viewpoints, this guy knows his way around a welder.
Ok, so it's like any other decades old piece of machinery. That doesn't mean it's impossible to run. I get that it's no 5-star hotel but it seems perfectly serviceable to me. The entire world is mostly like this. New and simple parts that go together easily are luxuries of trades school and high margin industries.
Busted mower in your suburban backyard 15 minutes from the big box and a failed main prop seal or incinerator fire 13,000 miles from home port in heavy pack ice are not directly comparable.
Some endeavours warrant high capitalisation and well-within-service-life equipment.
I'm talking industrial machinery, like stuff in paper mills and manufacturing facilities where downtime is highly uneconomical.
A lot of times that stuff gets run long beyond its useful life because new machinery cannot be rationalized for a variety of reasons beyond the scope of this comment. You can do it and still have an overall reliable operation. You just can't make assumptions about your equipment running perfectly all the time when you plan out the policies and procedures for the rest of your operation. Sure, you'll have people like the author, the person I'm replying to and you who will be complaining their butts off about clapped out equipment every step of the way but if your operation is designed to roll with the punches then at the end of the day you'll be 99% as capable as the people with new equipment who rely on that instead of being able to roll with it and fix things fast.
Take your assumptions and gate-keeping and shove them somewhere unpleasant.
>Sure, you'll have people like the author, the person I'm replying to and you who will be complaining their butts off about clapped out equipment every step of the way but if your operation is designed to roll with the punches then at the end of the day you'll be 99% as capable as the people with new equipment who rely on that instead of being able to roll with it and fix things fast.
Must like in software, the people doing the work and the people who choose what work is done and with what budget are almost separate circles on a Venn diagram.
Please, as a wise man once said, take your assumptions and gate-keeping and shove them somewhere unpleasant.
I have been told that Ice Breakers make for uncomfortable ocean voyages because of the design compromises need to break ice.
They don't so much smash ice with the bow of the vessel but instead use their powerful engines to push the ship onto the ice, which then breaks under the weight of the ship.
This means they require a relatively flat bottomed hull, which doesn't make for a nice ride in blue water with swell.
Newer designs travel through the ice in reverse so that more suitable bows for oceans voyages can be used.
Lot of people ignore this, but NATO ally and a bigger Arctic stakeholder of the western world, Canada has a bigger and pretty capable Arctic Icebreaking fleet: http://www.ccg-gcc.gc.ca/icebreaking/home
While, most of us would want to see US get bigger toys, we should collaborate with allies on some of the Polar logistics.
46 comments
[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 167 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear-powered_icebreaker#Rus...
It's one thing to sail a carrier group around the world.
It's very different to have a reactor sitting on a cargo ship, hundreds of miles from anyone, alone in the middle of the ocean.
The three named ships all proved nonviable. Savannah, a liner-cargo combination suited neither role well, the Otto Hahn was simply uneconomical though was later converted to diesel, and the Mutsu had significant technical issues as well as political resistance. Whether or not low fossil fuel costs of the period (1962 - 1990, roughly) had a major impact isn't clear. Nuclear power requires very highly trained crew, however.
Another factor working against larger-scale marine propulsion deployment is the number of shipwrecks. Roughly 200 major vessels are lost every decade or so, which if a significant fraction were nuclear powered would be a large number of reactor cores littering highly trafficked sea lanes, many of which are shared with fishing and other uses. All told, there've been on the order of 400 or so marine propulsion nuclear powerplants deployed in total (most on submarines), whereas the commercial shipping fleet is on the order of 60-80k vessels.
That is very expensive considering that our newest heavy ice breaker costs "only" 123 million Euros.
https://www.talouselama.fi/uutiset/uusi-jaanmurtaja-polaris-...
The US ships are going to go to Antarctica, patrol the Northwest Passage, etc. It'll also have an Aegis integrated combat system.
It's not the slightest bit shocking they're 5.5x the price. They're totally different ships.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_22220_icebreaker
And unlike the US ones, they appear to be icebreakers of peace.
I’m all for moving money from DoD to peaceful operations such as this.
Specifically, he spoke about the challenges imposed on properly harnessing the post-WWII professional armaments industry, which he noted was functionally necessary in the modern age, to a healthy democracy.
"Crises there will continue to be. In meeting them, whether foreign or domestic, great or small, there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties. A huge increase in newer elements of our defense; development of unrealistic programs to cure every ill in agriculture; a dramatic expansion in basic and applied research -- these and many other possibilities, each possibly promising in itself, may be suggested as the only way to the road we wish to travel.
But each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs -- balance between the private and the public economy, balance between cost and hoped for advantage -- balance between the clearly necessary and the comfortably desirable; balance between our essential requirements as a nation and the duties imposed by the nation upon the individual; balance between actions of the moment and the national welfare of the future. Good judgment seeks balance and progress; lack of it eventually finds imbalance and frustration."
"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."
"Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society's future, we -- you and I, and our government -- must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow."
This is off topic but it’s a very good book.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Erebus-Story-Ship-Michael-Palin/dp/...
The polar star tho — that thing barely looked like it floated — mad respect to the people who keep that working and the amount of suffering that must involve ...
One of the things that was strange to me about the Healy was the crew rotation schedule — there was very little continuity of personnel with military design of all people must be on temporary assignments and therefore easily replaceable ... seems like they can’t possibly do that with a ship like the polar star where the deep ship specific knowledge _has_ to be on board ...?
On a new ship or machine, bearings are smooth. Fasteners are clean and crisply torqued, you break them free once with equal torque and subsequently can turn them out with your fingers. Hoses and wires are flexible and strong. Everything is at the beginning of its service life, and after a break-in period, likely has many years of trouble-free operation ahead.
The process for, say, installing a new gasket? 1. Turn the bolts loose with a ratchet and socket. 2. Remove old gasket. 3. Install new gasket. 4. Reinstall bolts, torquing to spec. Estimated time: 20 minutes.
Not so on an old girl.
Step 1. Wipe off the congealed grease and oil from leak above. Wire brush the paint and rust underneath so you can get the socket over the bolt head. Attempt to turn bolt loose. Get extension pipe for ratchet. Get impact driver. Apply heat with propane torch. Apply heat with oxyacetylene torch. Repeat escalation for each bolt, except #6 which breaks off in the blind hole, that will need to be drilled out and have a thread insert installed. 2. Maintenance used RTV silicone last time instead of gasket. Brush, scrape, and stone that silicone-covered, corrosion pitted surface to clean, flat metal. The more time you take here, the better the repair will be, but you're on your back in the dark instead of in the machine shop working on new metal. 3. Gasket not available commercially this time this time either, re-apply RTV silicone for the next guy to deal with (probably you). 4. Bolts are stretched from heat and corroded so don't thread in smoothly, heads rounded over, (and one broke), so buy new bolts, which still don't thread in because threaded holes are likewise corroded. Run tap into threaded holes, avoiding contamination of interior with metal chips. Reinstall bolts. Torque to spec, as if that would keep this thing from coming loose and leaking again in a couple months. Elapsed time: 4 hours.
And it needs service like,this all the time, because everything is at the end of its useful life.
It's a lot like working with a buggy and brittle legacy codebase instead of doing green-field development.
I feel one of the great holes in my education is as a mechanic, and while I've picked up a bit along the way, I still stumble across things (like making gaskets) that are well-known, just not by me.
Ideally, I'm looking for breadth-not-depth, with an emphasis on practical applications and tips / tricks.
Fair warning: he does veer into politics from time to time, but while I don’t agree with his political viewpoints, this guy knows his way around a welder.
Some endeavours warrant high capitalisation and well-within-service-life equipment.
A lot of times that stuff gets run long beyond its useful life because new machinery cannot be rationalized for a variety of reasons beyond the scope of this comment. You can do it and still have an overall reliable operation. You just can't make assumptions about your equipment running perfectly all the time when you plan out the policies and procedures for the rest of your operation. Sure, you'll have people like the author, the person I'm replying to and you who will be complaining their butts off about clapped out equipment every step of the way but if your operation is designed to roll with the punches then at the end of the day you'll be 99% as capable as the people with new equipment who rely on that instead of being able to roll with it and fix things fast.
Take your assumptions and gate-keeping and shove them somewhere unpleasant.
Must like in software, the people doing the work and the people who choose what work is done and with what budget are almost separate circles on a Venn diagram.
Please, as a wise man once said, take your assumptions and gate-keeping and shove them somewhere unpleasant.
They don't so much smash ice with the bow of the vessel but instead use their powerful engines to push the ship onto the ice, which then breaks under the weight of the ship.
This means they require a relatively flat bottomed hull, which doesn't make for a nice ride in blue water with swell.
Newer designs travel through the ice in reverse so that more suitable bows for oceans voyages can be used.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_acting_ship
While, most of us would want to see US get bigger toys, we should collaborate with allies on some of the Polar logistics.