Imagination
Going Nuclear. In a good way.
Annual Emissions:
940MM tonnes of CO2
Downtime:
3 months per vessel
Current State
Each year, cargo ships emit enough CO2 to account for over 3% of all GHG emissions; to transport the millions of containers, over 500 million tonnes of fuel is consumed each year.
Aside from emissions, cargo ships are responsible for a myriad of pollutants: ballast water, biocides, waste, and occasional oil spills.
A new generation of vessels is necessary to ensure the possibility of a clean environment in our near future.
1 billion tonnes of CO2 removed.
Atomic Cargo is a new class of Ultra Large Container Ship (ULCS) equipped with a S4W reactor.
During research, it became increasingly obvious one of the main challenges would be fuel storage. Due to their respective fuel density, I ruled out both lithium ion and hydrogen as viable fuel substitutes due to their impact on carrying capacity.
Analyzing the Nimitz class ships currently in use by the US Navy, it is possible to adapt an A4W nuclear reactor for energy generation and propulsion. The output from the A4W delivers 194 MW of power to the ships four shafts – a 2.4X improvement on the best diesel engines used on E class Maersk ships. Currently, this technology is being used on aircraft carriers, submarines, and icebreakers.
Future State
For initial brainstorming, I used a combination of Dall-E-2, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney to ideate potential designs. From there, I went into detail by analyzing current vessel designs and building prototypes in AutoCAD.
Looking at the solution from a business context, I did some back of the napkin math.
Applying an Atomic Cargo design to a company like Maersk shows an average savings of $6.4M/ship; across their fleet nets out $9B in savings per annum from fuel, maintenance and labor.