Here the KUN-24AP container ship would be a massive departure with its molten salt reactor. Despite this seemingly odd choice, there are a number of reasons for this, including the inherent safety of an MSR, the ability to refuel continuously without shutting down the reactor, and a high burn-up rate, which means very little waste to be filtered out of the molten salt fuel. The roots for the ship’s reactor would appear to be found in China’s TMSR-LF program, with the TMSR-LF1 reactor having received its operating permit earlier in 2023. This is a fast neutron breeder, meaning that it can breed U-233 from thorium (Th-232) via neutron capture, allowing it to primarily run on much cheaper thorium rather than uranium fuel.
An additional benefit is the fuel and waste from such reactors is useless for nuclear weapons.
Another article with interviews: https://gcaptain.com/nuclear-powered-24000-teu-containership-china/
Sailboats are hypothetical?
the best clippers were fractions of the size of the boats now, even if modern materials can make a more efficient one, we’re talking a difference of 1780 tons --> 336000 tons here. to say nothing of how much more labor is involved on a rigged ship
But what if you replaced one boat with more than one boat?
about every cargo ship has a smaller crew than an old clipper. with central planning and a disregard for profit we could multiply the number of sailors in the world by a few x100 times, but there’s no way a capitalist enterprise, or even state-run one that must compete with capitalists will do that.
That fundamentally is the core of the issue though, isn’t it? So long as profit is required we can only do completely batshit things like electric car charging stations in the middle of a 10 hectare surface parking lot and nuclear plants built into every rusty container ship. Stuff that has worked for centuries like trains and sailboats are just too radical and have too many fussy little problems.
so they’ve mounted some sails on the big cargo ships but all they do is reduce fuel use by 20-30%. if it’s even feasible for ships larger than 30% the size of a modern bulk, they gotta be newly built, no retrofitting. rigging does have a bit of automation recently so the question of how much more labor is open, though smaller ships would necessarily mean more labor for the same amount of cargo.
like i endorse it if someone got this going in an mechanized, full-wind power way. it would be dope, but ironically a much larger project than this nuclear boat. which is just changing out the engine that drives the propellor