The Clipper ships, the most advanced sailing vessels operated commercially, could rival the speed of coal-powered steamships of their time, and even of modern oil-powered cargo ships when "slow-steaming" rules are applied. Many cargo ships capable of 23 knots have been restricted to 13 out of concern over fuel consumption.
Sail offers a number of advantages over powered ships, including the freedom from requiring fuel bunkers and costs. In a post-carbon world, among the options for shipping is a return to the use of wind power for at least a significant portion of shipping (and the elimination of 1/3 of hulls and cargoes presently comprised of petroleum shipments).
John Michael Greer looked at this in a recent post on Captain Gustaf Erikson, who maintained a fleet of commercially-operating windjammers through the mid 20th century, particularly with steel hulls and wire rigging.
It's also why you'll find navies at the forefront of research on energy research and propulsion. There have been three major revolutions in marine propulsion over the past two centuries: the emergence of coal in the 1850s (much later than its use in shorter-haul shipping and railroads due to the need to establish coaling stations -- an accomplishment demonstrated by the voyage Great White Fleet in 1907-1909), oil starting just prior to WWI, when Admiral of the British Navy Winston Churchill converted its fleet, and nuclear energy following WWII under US Navy Rear Admiral Hyman Rickover, though the latter propulsion was adopted only for aircraft carriers, submarines, and icebreakers, with the exception of a very few other experimental nuclear powered vessels.
Navies are at the forefront of current research into next-generation fuel sources given the dual challenges of peak oil and global warming.
Nuclear powered shipping makes a lot of sense to me. No refuelling for 25 years, no localised pollution, powers through any type of weather conditions. No chance of oil spills (presuming they're not used as bulk oil carriers)
Usually when I mention this someone brings up safety as a concern. Sure, it is a concern - but surely it can be engineered around with some type of sealed-for-life engine unit that can't be cracked open to steal the fuel or waste, and will just sink to the bottom of the ocean as a single unit in case of a shipwreck.
It just seems made to me that navies have proven nuclear technology over the last 50 years or so, and yet it remains a military-only technology.
Sending fissibles through pirate-infested waters (or elsewhere that might be subject to either piracy or terrorism) seems like an ill-advised action.
The specialized training required for nuclear crews is another issue. US Navy Rear Admiral Hymann G. Rickover, father of the nuclear navy, spoke on the safety record he'd achieved (and which continues to this day in the US Navy: not a single reactor breach accident, despite two nuclear submarines lost at sea). The safety record isn't some single trick, but an integrated process, which can't be trivially replicated.
Putting nukes on commercial vessels is a nontrivial undertaking.
Just because something is non-trivial doesn't mean it's impossible or a bad idea. The reactor would be sealed in a way that isn't practical for submarines that have both space and serviceability constraints - so it would survive the ship sinking and remain sealed for eventual recovery. Also, putting a nuclear reactor on a submarine in the 1950s is a significantly different undertaking than putting a nuclear reactor on a transport ship in the 2020s.
The piracy concern isn't a big one, IMO. What would they do? The fissible material in a reactor isn't bomb grade, but might still be fun for a dirty bomb. However, it's incredibly difficult to get at without enjoying a quick and extremely painful death. Also, the reactor stays on the ship and the ship can't disappear into the desert, like hostages can.
All that said, obviously, there are a whole different set of issues to a nuclear commercial vessel, but I don't see that it's obviously out of the realm of the possible.
Pirates typically ransom things. A nuke is a pretty considerable thing to ransom. Sometimes they seize and sell them. A nuke is an interesting thing to sell.
Sure, it's non-trivial. So are self driving cars and building rockets. Still worth doing, though.
Piracy would be the easiest thing to defeat, I would think. It's not like the pirates are going to cut it open with a sawzall to get at the fuel. They are after ransom for the crew and cargo, not in the market of obtaining nuclear by-products.
The US Navy did run a number of nuclear powered cruisers up through the California class. Originally the idea was to keep up with the carriers whose range was limited by their fossil fueled escorts. Still the nuclear powered surface ships other than carriers fell out of favor as more efficient fossil fueled ships came about which also had much lower man power requirements.
Considering the large surface area of many cargo and passenger ships it would seem to indicate the possibility of some usage of solar power. The big issue being efficient enough panel construction in the face of the harsh conditions they would face.
Ah yes. I'd forgotten about those. I was thinking mostly of the ocean liner Savannah, and a few other nuclear-powered ships, one of which was built and operated by the Germans (the Otto Hahn, later retrofitted with conventional powerplant), and another by the Japanese, Mutsu. All three have been decommissioned.
The Soviets built, and Russia continues to operate a fleet of nuclear-powered icebreakers.
The US nuclear cruisers were the Long Beach (CGN-9), Bainbridge (CGN-25), California (CGN-36), South Carolina (CGN-37), Truxtun (CGN-35), the Virgian-class ships: Arkansas (CGN-41), Mississippi (CGN-40), Texas (CGN-39), and Virginia (CGN-38). All were decommissioned in the 1990s.
As for solar power: the power requirements for marine propulsion are simply too great. You're much better off with wind (or a wind + powered) design.
The Tûranor PlanetSolar is a 100% solar-powered ship. Virtually its entire topside surface is covered with solar panels, with portions of the deck cantelevering out when at sea to increase surface area. Despite a very high-efficiency hull design, the ship's cruising speed is 8 knots (it can double that for short periods). Its solar output is 90 kW, or roughly 120 horsepower. You'll often find rather larger motors as outboard engines.
The Maltese Falcon yacht discussed above has two 1,800 HP diesel engines -- that's 1,300 kW. The freighter Emma Maersk has an 80 MW (109,000 HP) powerplant. The engine and specs themselves are impressive. You could stand inside an engine cylinder:
The Emma'selectrical capacity alone is 29 MW. Note that for a containership you've got the added complication that you're stacking containers on the deck itself -- solar cells would be covere, unless they could be unfurled above the containers, which would be complicated and likely not particularly robust in a marine and port environment. And at 60W/m^2 net solar PV potential, the 22,232 m^2 surface area of the Emma is nearly 22 times too small to provide adequate electrical power alone to the ship.
As for fuel consumption, at a cruise speed of 25.5 kt and 3,600 gallons of fuel per hour, she gets about 0.008 mpg, or 43 feet per gallon. Or 122 gallons per mile.
The freighter Emma Maersk has an 80 MW (109,000 HP) powerplant. The engine and specs themselves are impressive. You could stand inside an engine cylinder:
I visited Lars Maersk when she/he (I never know what to do with male-named ships) came back from sea trials. That was my second thought(1) when entering the engineroom. The cylinders were open for inspection and I suddenly realized "that piston is actually big enough for me to stand on."
I haven't been in a modern liner's engine room, though I've seen some smaller and older ship's machinery, and it's impressive stuff.
My thought when encountering a steamship's works (the design was late 19th century), all covered in grease an gunk and pipes and stuff all over the place was "y'know, I write and work on software systems, and if you could physically instantiate them, this is probably what they'd look like".
The tour guide, also the engine wiper, turned out to be a DBA in her day job, and absolutely loved the image.
First off: fossil fuels are going away. They're going to be too costly to extract, to rare to utilize, and/or too harmful to the environment. Take your pick. It's not as if there's a choice.
Secondly: the question isn't "how much fossil fuels", but "how much energy" EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) is what makes the economy tick, and it's almost certainly the most significant factor in the economic growth and expansion of the past 250 years or so.
Absent the energy surpluses provided by fossil fuels, yeah, we'll likely be doing less.
As for what it takes to make ships -- electrical energy (from renewable sources) can substitute for much fossil fuel use. Coking for steel is an exception, though that can come from where it did initially: charcoal. Or synthesized coke. Mind that exhaustion of forests for both lumber and fuel was among the key reasons England turned to, first seacoal, shortly after mined coal, as its energy needs grew.
And there's no guarantee that the Universe is going to provide humans with the energy we've become accustomed to.
The Emma Maersk, a monster among cargo ships at 11,000 TEU. During the Panamax era, 3,000 - 5,000 TEU was more common. Max weight for a 20 foot container is 14 tons. This gives the Emma a capacity of 154,000 tons, or 38.5x the capacity of the Red Jacket.
The largest cargo ships are the Maersk's Triple E class class, such as the Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller, with a capacity of 18,270 TEU, or nearly 64x the Red Jacket.
The more common Panamax hull would be 10-17.5 clipper cargoes.
I'm not sufficiently versed in shipbuilding research to know what size ships are being considered for sail (or sail-hybrid) propulsion, but it seems likely that designs larger than the best clipper technologies of 1853 might be possible some 160+ years later.
Wind power is also being used as a supplemental power source for cargo shipping. The first commercial shipping voyage using a computer-controlled kite saved an estimated 10-15% fuel (up to $1500 USD per day).
Right. Kites are used to access higher-elevation winds which are more constant than those at surface level, though they're pretty complicated.
Another approach is modern sails integrated into masts and computer controlled, greatly reducing crew requirements and costs. The yacht Maltese Falcon is an example of this, employing the DynaRig (sometimes also "Dynaship") sail system. The rigging is said to have cost $80 million (the yacht's total cost is given as between $150 - 300 million), and the ship has a top speed of 20 kt, though it appears that that's under power from its diesel engines. I do find sources claiming that the ship can reach "nearly 20 knots" under sail power alone: http://yachtpals.com/maltese-falcon-7053
The DynaRig system was originally envisioned for cargo ships. I'm not aware of specific comparisons between DynaRig and kite technologies, though the latter should be far more amenable to retrofitting to existing vessels.
Yes, they may be efficient but the reason it took so long to find is that they were not technically advanced, had they had clipper ship technology, the government of the time would have been able to determine exactly where it had been awashed.
The photo looks more like a pile of rubble than anything resembling a ship. Yeah, I probably shouldn't have expected it to look like the Swedish Vasa, but I was still disappointed. I guess organic materials don't last as long in the warm waters of the Caribbean as they do in the cold Baltic Sea.
Just out of curiosity, what would the conditions have to be in order for a wooden vessel to remain recognizable after being in warm water for 500 or 1000 years? Would anoxic water help?
The Vasa was in cold, brackish water. Low salinity is good for preservation.
Sinking somewhere difficult to reach is important, to prevent salvage.
The Vasa had her cannon brought up to the surface but was otherwise left alone. I went to the museum on a whim last year and was pleasantly surprised. It's not just the hull of the ship, everything onboard was preserved.
Really cool engineering project lesson, too. The Vasa had a critical engineering flaw (way too top heavy) that came about due to pressure from the king. As a result, she sank as soon as she was launched on her maiden voyage!
One of the main reasons the Vasa is so well preserved is that the Baltic isn't saltwater - it's just slightly brackish. In saltwater, shipworms will eventually eat away any exposed wood, but they don't live in brackish or fresh water.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shipworms
It sounds like much of what they found was ballast, which may have been heavier material like rocks/metal, and they identified it based on it being an anomaly compared to the surrounding seabed and journal entries made by Columbus.
As for your question, I wish I knew, though I recall from an Anthropology course I took that the older wooden artifacts tend to be found in peat bogs over a thousand years after being deposited.
If I understand correctly, the condition isn't great, but the peat bogs themselves prevent oxygen from entering the environment and decrease decay rates of organic material.
A quick search shows that peat bogs can exist under the sea so the conditions you describe might exist even under warm water.
I wonder if any of the previous salvagers of things like the cannons will be able to recognize the newly discovered significance of what they took and capitalize on it.. I imagine the original salvagers probably turned the items around quickly, but anyone who is hanging on to a cannon that came out of the water anywhere around there has got to be curious if it might be that one.
“I believe that, treated in this way, the wreck has the potential to play a major role in helping to further develop Haiti’s tourism industry in the future,” he said.
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Columbus was a genocidal maniac mis-credited generally for discovering the 'new world' that had been inhabited for thousands of years prior to his arrival:
The last part of the parent comment was rantsy, but in my opinion did not deserve to be down-voted past oblivion.
Back to your comment, yes Auschwitz outrages us, deservingly so, but this state of affairs has a lot to do with the fact that the perpetrators of Auschwitz lost. We hear a lot less outrage when the perpetrators 'won'.
Case(s) in point: Dark Tourism (visits to "dark" sites, such as battlegrounds, scenes of horrific crimes or acts of genocide), Disaster tourism (the act of traveling to a disaster area as a matter of curiosity) and, slightly related, Doom Tourism (emerging trend involving traveling to places that are environmentally or otherwise threatened). Also, Slum Tourism...
> Columbus initiated the enduring relationship between the Earth's two major landmasses and their inhabitants. "Columbus' claim to fame isn't that he got there first," explains historian Martin Dugard, "it's that he stayed."
Can't say in my neck of the woods we celebrate him or consider him an explorer since the place he "found" was already inhabited. It is basically like someone sailing from North America and saying they discovered London.
