I'm a nuclear fission power plant designer. I write a lot about nuclear reactor development history and nuclear economics. One of the most interesting ways to decarbonize with nuclear fission at the scale and pace necessary is to use shipyards to serial construct GW-scale nuclear power plants on offshore floating platforms. This allows us to do Henry Ford serialization while capturing economies of scale. This method was very seriously considered in the 1970s and 1000 people built the production facility in Jacksonville, FL. It was called Offshore Power Systems (a joint venture between Westinghouse and the Newport News Shipyards) and there's a wonderful writeup about it in a 1975 New Yorker [1], plus my summary of it from earlier this year [2].
This form of nuclear production got an actual construction license from the NRC after incredible amounts of environmental study.
It may raise eyebrows, but consider that in deep water tsunamis are a few feet tall, earthquakes are non-existent, and huge ships like the Prelude are designed to handle category-5 cyclones. You also have infinite access to cooling water and can design in a sink-safe worst-case scenario with a engineered recovery operation.
If we were serious about decarbonizing right now and I were in charge, I think I would march over to S. Korea and try to get their world-class nuclear construction people (KEPCO) hooked up with their world-class shipyard people and just start hammering them out.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1975/05/12/the-atlantic-g...
[2] https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-01-26-offshore-power-sys...
This form of nuclear production got an actual construction license from the NRC after incredible amounts of environmental study.
It may raise eyebrows, but consider that in deep water tsunamis are a few feet tall, earthquakes are non-existent, and huge ships like the Prelude are designed to handle category-5 cyclones. You also have infinite access to cooling water and can design in a sink-safe worst-case scenario with a engineered recovery operation.
If we were serious about decarbonizing right now and I were in charge, I think I would march over to S. Korea and try to get their world-class nuclear construction people (KEPCO) hooked up with their world-class shipyard people and just start hammering them out.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1975/05/12/the-atlantic-g...
[2] https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-01-26-offshore-power-sys...