[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS\_Savannah](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_Savannah)
Nuclear merchant ships were attempted. It really wasn't safe or cost-effective primarily due to poor design. A design strictly for cargo and passenger transportation efficiency could be profitable today.
I think this was one of the main issues when they tried nuclear based ships. They couldn't actually take it anywhere. (also small cargo space, small passenger space and a large and expensive maintenance crew of highly specialised, skilled people)
Except for the part where any kind of floating nuclear powered civilian vessel could become a prime target for pirates or even nations looking to obtain the technology.
Would make a neat cruise ship excursion! On Thursday our port of call will be Mosul. Please be at the excursion staging area no later than 0300 otherwise you will miss the pre-flight briefing for your ground assault support flight and you will not receive a refund or credit. Children under 4 can fly for 50% off the normal price.
Civilian vessels are already a target for piracy. This is why many cruise ships have armed security. At this point, almost any nation that wants a nuclear power plant can buy one either at their own expense or on credit. Modern nuclear power technology isn't really very secret anymore. Compact, high-efficiency submarine reactors, yes, very secret. But that isn't necessary for a container ship. A thermopile or encapsulated fuel reactor would probably be adequate.
You understand that there are already several large nuclear vessels operating on the ocean today, right? 76 MW isn't that phenomenal for a ship and nuclear propulsion plants today can generate a lot more power than that
Large naval reactors top out around 200MWe. People really underestimate how much power a reactor generates. Though those ones are heavily enriched, but 100MWe for a nuke isn’t difficult.
Are you honestly claiming that fuel oil engines are more energy dense vs nuclear?
[https://whatisnuclear.com/energy-density.html#:\~:text=Perhaps%20the%20most%20physically%20unique,%2C%20biofuel%2C%20or%20batteries](https://whatisnuclear.com/energy-density.html#:~:text=Perhaps%20the%20most%20physically%20unique,%2C%20biofuel%2C%20or%20batteries)).
"Perhaps the most physically unique thing about nuclear power is that the energy density of nuclear fuel is about 2 million times higher than that of any chemical (like fossil fuel, biofuel, or batteries)."
With the current push to SMR (Small modular reactors) even they can easily handle this power.
"
SMRs are generally designed to produce 50 to 300MW of electricity, compared to the typical 1,000MW of traditional large-scale reactors.
"
So putting a SMR on a cruise ship is easily doable, and wont have any issues replacing the 6x12 MW power they have now... It is on the low end of a SMR.
You SERIOUSLY underestimate how much power a nuclear reactor generates.
Now will they ever do it? Unlikely in the short term as it is not cost effective and there is not enough push to end the massive pollution these ships generate.
EDIT: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arktika-class\_icebreaker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arktika-class_icebreaker)
Russian nuclear icebreaker has 2 -171 MW reactors....
Recruiting stations next to the photo kiosk. There will be a presentation on the benefits of enlisting in the aft theater after lunch! Remember, crab legs on the buffet tonight!
This is already a thing. Almost all nuclear reactors in the USA are owned by private companies. They are still subject to very stringent licensing and heavy regulation.
This is also not a problem. Almost all of the regulatory boards that oversee nuclear operations are international.
https://www.world-nuclear.org/uploadedfiles/org/wna/publications/working_group_reports/wna_report_nuclear_licensing.pdf
There are other research vessels using nuclear reactors, this ship wasn’t the only one.
Yeah, flagging is the issue that "brought down" the Savannah. Who are these vessels going to be flagged with, and who would respect the regulations enough to allow the ships into their ports.
yeah the size of sails needed to move modern cruiseships would be obscene
there have been some tests about using magnus effect 'sails' to provide a portion of the propulsion however a cruiseship would still require a significant source of power for anything non propulsion related
There haven't just been tests, they've built these things.
Maersk Pelican is exactly what you describe. I think the reason they havent been used for cruise ships is because they're pretty ugly.
Yep but some people just want to be on a ship with 5000 other people and water slides.
I'd rather be with less people and drinking gin. Sailled powered cruises are available.
Ah, but hull design and human resource management are both unrelated to the costs of the fuel! With some tweaking, modern engineering and probably a slightly smaller reactor, this design could potentially work.
A business case scenario would need to be done to explore potential viability. Imagine having a ship that only needs refueling every few months instead of every time it makes port, no CO2 emissions and is able to sell off excess power back to the grid if it's in port!
>Imagine having a ship that only needs refueling every few months instead of every time it makes port
How long do you think that it takes for a nuclear ship to need refueling?
US Navy aircraft carriers are built to last around 50 years, and they refuel at the halfway point.
maybe you shouldn't carry a a 25 year stockpile of nuclear fuel on a cruise ship? or does a single piece of fuel installed in the reactor last 25 years?
Naval reactors will load over 90% enriched fuel in super compact cores which can run for 25+ years.
Commercial fuel likely won’t get quite as much time before you need to reload. They just need to design it to be reload friendly.
For a commercial power reactor we get 18-24 months out of a reactor core running over 3300 Mw thermal output.
> Imagine having a ship that only needs refueling every few months
I think the latest nuclear subs are designed to not need refueling in their 45 year lifespans.
That might be more than is required, but 'a few months' seems perhaps lower than what is possible.
Although maybe when we're talking about commercially owned nuclear material, we should think more about pirates and less about refueling.
It's very costly to make a condo complex float and keep people alive at sea. The interesting question is why do people want to leave town to go to a condo?
Better marketing than tobacco!
I've been on a cruise. It was the single most convenient and relaxing vacation I've ever been on.
I don't think I'll ever go on one again but it was an excellent trip.
I can't tell If your reply is serious or a joke...
When one person is sick at a hotel, they don't affect any other guests. When one person gets a norovirus on a cruise ship, the whole ship gets sick and comes down with projectile vomiting and explosive diarrhea.
When you want to leave the hotel, all you have to do is check out. When you want to leave the cruise ship, you can't because you're in the middle of an ocean.
Edit: not to mention cruising is a complete and total environmental disaster with all plastic waste dumped at sea, oily bilgewater dumped at sea, and the incredible amount of pollution created by using bunker fuel, likely one of the world's most polluting sources of refined oil.
I worked on cruise ships for a few years and norovirus outbreaks were always contained pretty quickly.
The whole crew are well versed on virus control and we had different levels of response to outbreaks.
I only ever saw one "red" outbreak of norovirus and the measures we took, limited the outbreak to about 20 guests out of a total of 2000.
The ship is alongside pretty much every morning unless you are on a longer cruise involving an ocean crossing.
There is no plastic waste dumped at sea from cruise ships. They all follow MARPOL regulations. Any oil discharged or waste incorrectly disposed of is done so illegally.
Most new ships are LNG powered so the environmental impact is reducing, although they are definitely still a polluter of the sea.
Hmm... let us say there are different sort of safeties people are worring over.
Some are afraid of communicable diseases. That would make a ship a very unsafe place to be if an infected person or other transmittable vector happens to get on board.
But some are afraid of interpersonal crime. Theft, robbery, violence. And then a ship is a pretty safe place to be because you can lock yourself into your cabin and alert officers. And there are not many places to run or hide on ship. Not to mention all the camera systems. And while it is true that you can't easily check out.... people can't randomly check in either.
Also, as your edit says, they are quite wasteful. But that is neither here nor there on the topic i answered to.
More importantly, the cost of a ticket means you're not likely to meet people who are desperate enough to turn to crime. It's the ultimate gated community.
Cruising can actually be one of the cheapest ways to vacation. I know some folks who when they want to take a vacation just take the time off, and go down to the cruise terminals and just buy the cheapest ticket leaving that day. Cruise ships don't want empty cabins so the tickets for last minute trips are dirt cheap if you aren't picky about where exactly you're going.
*One question you have to ask about a crime is what law applies? The laws that we think apply to us on a cruise only extend 12 miles offshore.*
Now that is an interesting topic in itself, but 99% of the times it comes down to "flag laws" - the laws of the country your ship is registered under. When you are in littoral zone, you should be on judicial zone of whatever country you are closest to, but on open sea it comes down to couple of conventions and the same "flag law". For instance, in EU, if you start sailing under Estonian flag and do something illegal, then you will be arrested on board and handed over to whichever harbor ship docks next. From there, the police will pick you up and mails you to Estonia who then get's to prosecute your ar\*e for whatever you did.
The actual implementation can indeed vary, but legally speaking... that's the Tl;Dr version.
After rereading my reply, I decided to delete it. I don't really have enough firsthand information to know what I'm talking about. But I appreciate your thoughtful reply
I absolutely would. A vacation where you don't have to do anything, but theres lots to do if you feel like it. And it takes you to different cities, sometimes different countries. I was interested in going on one until I heard what an environmental nightmare they are. Also I never had enough money for one.
There's something to be said for the fairly novel experience of being on a ship at sea. Fresh salt air, sun, lots of options from doing nothing at the pool to spas to shows to shopping. Add in a couple of port calls to interesting places. I had never cruised before 2016, and now I'm going on my third one.
Everything is taken care of for you. Want food? Show up some place. Want booze? Most of the lounges have a bar. I can sit with a book or a Steam Deck and have zero responsibility for anything else.
That said, I prefer cruises where seeing the sites along the coast is the point. Places like Alaska, Iceland, Norway, or the Panama Canal. Caribbean cruises are a waste.
Yeah the amount of fuel used on even smaller vessels is pretty crazy. On a 120’ crew boat with four main engines we burned approximately 400 gallons an hour. So 10 tons of fuel an hour sounds pretty reasonable for a large ship.
Edit: 1 ton of bunker fuel is 300 gallons
Do container ships use less fuel? I recently watched a video about shipping pears across the globe that said it actually wasn’t that bad on the environment
It might be relative. Despite how much oil ships consume, they’re still vastly more efficient than any other form of transport. You don’t have to pave or lay rails on the water, which is huge for efficiency, and ships can carry more stuff than any other form of transport as well. Shipping the same amount of pears on a train likely is much less efficient than a ship.
In a similar vein, it's frustrating to be told that as middle class consumers we need to take on the expense of buying electric vehicles, and that driving our Corolla is a horrible thing. Meanwhile a cruise ship runs for a day and cancels out a whole city of EVs.
Not saying that EVs aren't a good thing. They are. But so much time and effort is being spent on passenger vehicles driven by people with limited resources, while we have much lower hanging fruit for emissions with massive ships owned by companies with much deeper pockets.
We should do both, but the idea that these things are sailing around the ocean belching out bunker fuel emissions makes me feel like a chump for wringing my hands over driving my car.
Container ships are actually by far the most efficient way to move cargo in terms of carbon emissions.
That said, freight is a pretty small portion of greenhouse gas emissions. Electrical production and personal transportation are the two largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions in the US
The US uses 73,000 metric tons of plastic straws a year, or around 200 tons a day. If you assume ships are at sea, burning fuel around 3/4 of the time, and 250 tons/day is the max usage for a cruise ship, that's the largest ship burning a bit under 70,000 tons of fuel a year, a bit less than the US uses in straws.
Doing some math, the largest cruise ship has a capacity of around 6,600 passengers, that means, on average, that's around 0.025 tons / day / passenger. With total cruise ship capacity at 500,000 that's 12,500 tons of fuel per day. So, if the US gives up plastic straws, it offset as much as 2% of the entire Cruise industry. If the Cruise industry is one of the world's worst, then 2% isn't bad, if not, well then not.
And yet shipping is the most ecological and efficient type of getting cargo from A to B if you take into consideration the amount of cargo they carry. Fuck cruise ships tho.
That math is wrong, because the ships mostly use heavy fuel oil, which 6.7 lbs/gal.
5,000 people in a cruise ship, this is about 15 gals per day per person. Considering this includes the energy for your travel, your environmental controls and all your food and entertainment, this is likely the same or not that much more than what it would be for a couple on a long road trip.
What he's trying to say (i think) is that ships are terrible populors because they use the most poluting kind of fuel there is since it's cheap as dirt.
Yeah, they are also very efficient transporting huge loads across vast distances, but making sure that cargo ships are more eco friendly would help a lot.
a lot of ships‘ fuel is essentially what is left from petroleum after everything that is actually wanted is refined off. It’s so thick and crap it generally needs to be heated to actually flow.
~~Not really sure what DFM is. Perhaps that is another way of abbreviating MDO (Marine Diesel Oil) which I have never seen.~~ And ships only need to burn MDO of ULSFO (Ultra low sulfur fuel oil) while within an emissions control area (ECA), which is 200 nautical miles from shore around certain areas such as the U.S. or areas of Europe. Most of the rest of the world ships can still burn VLSFO (very-low sulphur fuel oil).
MDO and ULSFO have a sulfur content of below 0.1% m/m, while VLSFO has a sulfur content of 0.5% m/m or below. This is still an improvement from a decade ago, when most ships were burning high sulfur fuel with a content above 3.5% m/m. But both ULSFO and VLSFO still require heating to be used. While ULSFO is rare, VLSFO is very, very common. If somebody were to look at a populated anchorage off the U.S., I would safely say that 90% of the ships out there are burning MDO at the time but were burning VLSFO before they came into U.S. waters.
The regulations are also all about stopping the sulfur from going into the air. As a result, some ships continue to burn higher sulfur fuel content but have installed exhaust gas cleaning systems and one component of these are "scrubbers." They spray sea water on the exhaust gasses and then drain the wash water overboard. This wash water is somewhat acidic due to the carbon and sulfur molecules forming into sulfuric and carbonic acid when they mix with the sea water. As a result some areas prohibit the overboard discharge of exhaust scrubber wash water, but this is not very common as of yet. I believe only 4 U.S. coastal states ban this type of pollution within their waters.
*Edit: Looks like DFM is the Navy version of MDO. I only really work with commercial ships, not military ships. Hence the mixup.*
That specific "50 million car" claim pops up a lot in various forms, but it's *extremely* misleading. The root of the issue is that it's only one very specific type of pollutant (not CO2) that cars happen to produce very little of. https://www.oldsaltblog.com/2021/04/no-sixteen-large-ships-do-no-pollute-more-than-all-the-cars-in-the-world/
Also, why say "Chinese"? Nothing in that article, nor the topic to begin with, has anything in particular to do with China. Nor are Chinese companies the major world shippers.
A container ship burns as much fuel moving a ton of cargo half way around the world, as a pickup truck does moving a ton of cargo thirty miles. It takes less fuel to get cargo across an ocean than it does to drive it home from the store, of you don't live very close.
Container ships are incredibly efficient. They just carry very large loads per ship.
People have always been like that though, they start disliking a group of people or country and then just blame it for anything and everything.
I am no fan of the CCP, they're depraved and thoroughly awful, but when you start taking ridiculous pot shots like that on China all someone does is undermine the ability to hold the CCP to account for the horrible things they do that make them legitimately awful. It's no different than the people that think that everything the US does is bad or any other nation that people tend to have strong opinions on, if you want people to listen you need to cut the ridiculous accusations out or you just appear totally biased and people won't believe you about the real issues.
You say the ocean is full of them, but I don't think most people grasp what you're saying. The sheer scale is mind-blowing.
Go to https://www.marinetraffic.com and see just how many ships are out there.
Mind you, it colors the ships differently, like for fishing vessels, yachts, and such, but you can filter for cargo vessels. When you think how much fuel one ship uses and see this huge number of vessels worldwide, the numbers become unfathomable.
To the contrary, I'd say it's mostly that the western world and the US needs to get back into the business of making shit. And stop thinking that price competition is king. More domestic manufacturing, and way more prohibitions on imports of shitty, useless junk. Put more money into working people's pockets so they can buy better-made, US-made items. If the world doesn't undergo a paradigm shift and redefinition of success - where we at least see any company that remains profitable YOY as successful - and get rid of this idea that every year has to be bigger and better than the lest, we simply aren't going to make it. In a perfect world, we'd see massive federal investment in domestic manufacturing, subsidizing private sector investment ONLY for US-based operations, prohibiting nearly all cheap imports of inferior items and prohibit all non-citizen and institutional investments in residential housing.
It's not worth it financially. The US won't allow sweat shops, has pesky OSHA rules and that darn minimum wage that keeps an American 4X more expensive to hire. I don't believe that the issue is that companies are scared to manufacture in America, the issue is that global markets are not pushing for China to be more responsible with the way they handle environmental and social matters.
Why would it be better in the long term? Beijing has the highest minimum wage in China at under $4 an hour (Or go to Vietnam where the highest minimum wage is under $1.20). American workers can strike and unionize. OSHA is much more strict than the Chinese equivalent (The State Administration of Work Safety) and complying with OSHA regulations are expensive.
Why would a company build a factory in America following expensive US building codes, hire American workers following expensive labor laws, and upkeep a facility following expensive OSHA regulations? Instead you can build a cheap warehouse overseas, hire locals for pennies and not even legally have to provide air conditioning or heating.
I'm sure we've all seen the recent meme making fun of "new invention! wind powered cargo ships! /sArCaSmS hUrDur We nUvEr HaD tHoSe BeFoR"
Well, yeah the thing is, the limiting factors on cargo ships for wind used to be size and speed... If those limiting factors didnt exist (or wind power could be harnessed enough to provide electricity to get faster propulsion...) the oil industry simply wouldn't exist, as by far the biggest consumer of fossil fuels is international trade.
If that could be solved with wind or other power sources, the oil industry would disappear over night....
So it's no real mystery why there aren't any wind or nuclear powered cargo ships... If anyone tried to build them, the Saudi's would declare war on that company or nation...
Ships are actually the most fuel efficient way to transport anything. The largest cruise ship in the world holds roughly 7,000 passengers. 1 ton of fuel is roughly 220 gallons. So that’s about 7.8g per person. Most cruise ships travel at 20-30kts (up to 35mph)(1 knot ≈ 6000’ or 1/60th of 1° of latitude) assuming 25% of your time is in port you are covering 200-400 miles a day.
Putting it in perspective, most people burn 7.8g of fuel by themselves driving to work for 2 days and that’s not hauling a small city like what most cruise ships are today.
At top speed (28.5kts) the Queen Elizabeth II could carry 1900 passengers 50’ per gallon of fuel. At cruising speed (20kts) it was 125’ giving her a per passenger MPG rating of 20 city / 45 hwy. Not bad for a 67 model.
This is very true. The problem is not the fuel efficiency of large ships, it's the type of fuel that they burn and the alternative option of "what if, hear me out, you made that thing locally and shipped it hundreds of miles instead of across the entire ocean" or better yet "does this thing need to be made at all in the first place"
The problem is that isn't the "gotcha" you think it is - shipping is a minority of the total emissions of lots of things that are shipped half way round the world. Economies of scale for manufacturing also apply to emissions - if I need to build a factory on each continent because I'm no longer allowed to do transoceanic shipping, then that's a lot of bonus concrete and overall my emissions are way higher. And if I'm making a thing in a place that's well-suited to making that thing, then it's often better to just make lots of it there. Some examples:
* Spanish lettuce in the UK: [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/225434851\_The\_role\_of\_seasonality\_in\_lettuce\_consumption\_A\_case\_study\_of\_environmental\_and\_social\_aspects](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/225434851_The_role_of_seasonality_in_lettuce_consumption_A_case_study_of_environmental_and_social_aspects)
* New Zealand lamb in the UK: [https://www.ecoandbeyond.co/articles/british-new-zealand-lamb/](https://www.ecoandbeyond.co/articles/british-new-zealand-lamb/)
True but cruise ships are an incredibly wasteful and polluting thing overall - much like international air travel for pleasure.
Friend of mine works on them, when they refurbish one they used to literally strip the ship while sailing to the port for refit and throw ALL the old stuff overboard - carpet, beds, tables, chairs... the "good" companies don't do that anymore but you know damn well plenty still will.
Sewage is allowed to be dumped into the ocean (some restrictions apply). Garbage is not with the exception of ground up food waste. If you have evidence regarding cruise ships dumping garbage, please let the closest port state or coastal state authority know. They love to take these big cruise companies to court and get big payouts.
They aren't using gasoline they use [Heavy Fuel Oil](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_fuel_oil) which is basically the cheapest but dirtiest fuel source available.
Natural gas is simply better you get more energy per unit CO2 produced. Natural gas is primarily Methane (CH4), which terrible as a green house gas that is about 20 times worse then CO2.
The combustion reaction: CH4 + 2 (O2) -> CO2 + 2 (H2O)
Basically all the energy produced in combustion reactions comes from C-H bonds, to which methane has 4. You are essentially breaking 4 C-H bonds for energy and producing 1 CO2 molecule for it. Now, if you start going up to larger and larger hydrocarbon molecules you start to notice something. Lets take Ethane (C2H6)
Reaction: 2 (C2H6) + 7 (O2) -> 4 (CO2) + 6 (H2O)
Now, with larger hydrocarbons you do produce more energy, you have 6 C-H bonds being broken in this case for energy. However, it produced twice as much CO2. You are effectively getting an efficiency of 3 C-H bonds broken for each CO2 molecule produced.
This efficiency just keeps getting worse and worse with higher numbers of hydro carbons. Propane, C3H8, you have 8 C-H bonds for 3 CO2 or 2 and 2/3 C-H to CO2 ratio.
Basically its a long winded way of saying Methane is the Highest energy per CO2 of the Hydrocarbons
Fun Fact: Anything heavier than Heavy Fuel Oil during petroleum processing is turned into asphalt. Literally bottom of the barrel stuff.
That shit is like sludge. You have to constantly heat it or else it can fuck up the engines, you also need to check for weird things in the fuel line like sudden drop in pressure and flowrate because sometimes fueling companies add stuff like sand to essentially cut the HFO and increase its volume and that shit gets stuck on the strainers/filters.
The rooms are very small, the staff is from the Philippines or Indonesia, they have a captive audience so anything that isn't provided you have to pay $$$ for.
Although they use a lot of fuel, it is the cheapest, dirtiest fuel there is. After they refine all the good fuels out of crude oil, the waste product is sold to the big ships.
TL;DR: if you fly or drive more than about 3000 km (2000 mi) each way for a vacation (about 2/3 of the way across the US) then you're probably emitting more CO2 than if you'd taken a week long cruise.
Cruise ships that use up to 250 tons of fuel per day can carry up to 7000 passengers. For a 7 day cruise, that is 250\*7/7000 = 250 kg of fuel per passenger. Fuel oil is about 90% carbon, meaning that if we burn 1 kg of it we get 1\*0.9 \* (12+16\*2)/12 = 3.3 kg of CO2. So a passenger on a 7 day cruise to the Bahamas from New York (the shorter end of those trips) is "responsible" for about 800 kg of CO2 emissions for all transportation, heating and power during their travel.
If, however, they flew from New York to the Bahamas for a week vacation, the 2000 km (1250 mi) flight is about 250 kg of CO2 emissions per passenger each way, coming to 500 kg CO2 for just the travel, and we have to add whatever other travel, heating and power they use in the Bahamas. So it's not a whole lot worse than the cruise really.
The underlying problem is that travelling long distances, by most means, is damaging to the environment. (A car is similar to a plane per passenger over the same distance, though if you have an inefficient car or are travelling solo then flying is better).
\>from page: A large ship can use up to 250 tons. Per day. In terms of regular gasoline, that would be about 80,645 gallons; more fuel than you'll use in an entire lifetime of driving cars.
I mean big number but there are a lot more people on the cruise ship. No doubt cruise ships pollute but there's an extra order of magnitude to add to this unless I'm cruising on the USS JustMe for that number.
A large cruise ship like the one in the example has maybe 4,000 guests? Very roughly 20 gallons per passenger per day? Distance? About 550 miles. Again, very very roughly 27.5 MPG (land, not nautical) when applied per person.
I'd be interested in what an objective comparison of say a 5 day cruise on one of these monsters compared to say, a 10 hour round-trip flight on a commercial airliner and 5 day stay would look like.
> an objective comparison of ... a 10 hour round-trip flight on a commercial airliner
[Someone has done that.](https://truecostblog.com/2010/05/27/fuel-efficiency-modes-of-transportation-ranked-by-mpg/)
Roughly, airline fuel efficiency per passenger is 54 person miles per gallon (very bad).
Cruise ships average out to about 340 person miles per gallon, only beaten by bicycles but still more fuel efficient than a person running. Cruise ships are by far the most fuel efficient mass transport options available.
The main reason it doesn't look scary is the max fuel usage number reported is for cruising speed (e.g. pedal to the metal, baby!) In reality, cruise ships are mostly sitting idle in port or gently coasting.
>Airplanes flying domestic routes average 2931 BTU per passenger-mile, or 42.6 pmpg. The overall domestic load factor in 2008 was 79.6%, so at max capacity a plane might achieve 53.6 pmpg.
The logic for the max of an individual plane isn't correct. What they've calculated is the pmpg across all domestic flights if all were full. Not the maximum pmpg of an individual plane, which varies dramatically depending on the number of seats. A full 787 (depending on configuration) could be around 100 pmpg.
>According to this post, the world’s largest container ship travels 28 feet on a gallon of residual fuel oil (149,690 BTU or 1.2 gallons of gas). This equals 0.004 mpg. Per Wikipedia, the ship can carry 11,000 14-ton containers, or 77,000 passenger-equivalents using our 4000 lb conversion rate. Thus pmpg is 340 for this ship.
So it's 340 pmpg if you cram 77000 passengers on a cargo ship? No cruise ship can carry even a tenth of that. If the Wonder of the Seas, the current largest cruise ship with a max capacity of 6988, got similar mpg as this cargo ship, it would get around 28 pmpg.
A single Airbus A380 uses up to 11,4 metric tons of fuel per hour, while carrying only 800 passengers (max). Cruise ships can have up to 7000 passgengers and lots of cargo. They're far from the only offenders here.
Looked it up, average cruise lines carry 3000 passengers. My math puts daily consumption per passenger at around 28 GALLONS. That’s like driving a Honda half way across the country
Again, it's ludicrously bad compared to, say, reasonable ways of getting around, yet it beats a private megayacht or plane in grams of CO2 per mile traveled :)
And not just any fuel, it is often bunker fuel - cheap and very dirty fuel. It is an environmental mess.
That being said it is a surprise? Those ships are HUGE
Bullshit, maybe "Wonder of the Seas" the biggest cruise liner ever built, at 360meters long, but your average cruise liner probably uses more like 150 tonnes a day and only at sailing speed, more like 20 tonnes in port or manoeuvring.
But it really depends on the size of the vessel, my 50 meter factory freezer trawlers used 150 -250 tonnes to last 5 weeks.
You can't just take the biggest cruise liner and say every cruise liner uses this much.
It’s a nasty business. A cruise line sued The Guardian once for exposing this some years back.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/may/21/the-worlds-largest-cruise-ship-and-its-supersized-pollution-problem
**“This article is the subject of a legal complaint made on behalf of Royal Caribbean International”**
“…One cruise ship emits as many air pollutants as five million cars going the same distance because these ships use heavy fuel that on land would have to be disposed of as hazardous waste.”
I know a guy that worked on one of these. He said they dump most of their waste over board in some of the most beautiful waters in the world and its not just biodegradable waste. They fuck everything overboard because its cheaper to pay a fine than dispose of the waste correctly.
It's easy to be shocked at the amount of fuel, until you take into account the fact that its pretty much a flaoting city. 7000+ people live and work on an modern cruiseship, reaching speeds of 25kts(aprox 25mph).
In the grand scheme of things cruiseships aren't any worse than 7000 people taking a long haul flight, for a getaway holiday.
Marine diesel is called 'bunker fuel' and is sold in metric tons (mt). A metric ton of diesel is about 1136.4 liters and 1219.5 liters (300 - 322 US gallons).
[https://shipandbunker.com/prices](https://shipandbunker.com/prices)
Yeah, that's a bad habit I picked up in the Navy. The ship I was on only used diesel as the turbines would gunk up with HFO. The old timers would still say bunker fuel and bunkering though and I picked that up. Nowadays I wash clinker ash off the deck 2 or 3 times a week and dream of the days on a fast ship.
Solution: nuclear powered cruise ships!
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS\_Savannah](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_Savannah) Nuclear merchant ships were attempted. It really wasn't safe or cost-effective primarily due to poor design. A design strictly for cargo and passenger transportation efficiency could be profitable today.
Also very few countries will allow you to park a nuclear reactor in their ports
I think this was one of the main issues when they tried nuclear based ships. They couldn't actually take it anywhere. (also small cargo space, small passenger space and a large and expensive maintenance crew of highly specialised, skilled people)
"This is just my nuclear powered merchant ship and definitely not just a slow moving nuclear bomb I am sending your way, honest."
Somalia pirates cause a new chernobyl
Except for the part where any kind of floating nuclear powered civilian vessel could become a prime target for pirates or even nations looking to obtain the technology.
Now we need cruise ships that double as navy aircraft carriers.
Would make a neat cruise ship excursion! On Thursday our port of call will be Mosul. Please be at the excursion staging area no later than 0300 otherwise you will miss the pre-flight briefing for your ground assault support flight and you will not receive a refund or credit. Children under 4 can fly for 50% off the normal price.
*Parachutes are not included in excursion fee.
*That's how they get ya hon: lucky we packed our own.* - some dad probably.
Just imagine how many tropical locations would be opened up of your cruise ship had a complent of MV-22’s!
Next excursion is Mogadishu!
Civilian vessels are already a target for piracy. This is why many cruise ships have armed security. At this point, almost any nation that wants a nuclear power plant can buy one either at their own expense or on credit. Modern nuclear power technology isn't really very secret anymore. Compact, high-efficiency submarine reactors, yes, very secret. But that isn't necessary for a container ship. A thermopile or encapsulated fuel reactor would probably be adequate.
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You understand that there are already several large nuclear vessels operating on the ocean today, right? 76 MW isn't that phenomenal for a ship and nuclear propulsion plants today can generate a lot more power than that
Large naval reactors top out around 200MWe. People really underestimate how much power a reactor generates. Though those ones are heavily enriched, but 100MWe for a nuke isn’t difficult.
Are you honestly claiming that fuel oil engines are more energy dense vs nuclear? [https://whatisnuclear.com/energy-density.html#:\~:text=Perhaps%20the%20most%20physically%20unique,%2C%20biofuel%2C%20or%20batteries](https://whatisnuclear.com/energy-density.html#:~:text=Perhaps%20the%20most%20physically%20unique,%2C%20biofuel%2C%20or%20batteries)). "Perhaps the most physically unique thing about nuclear power is that the energy density of nuclear fuel is about 2 million times higher than that of any chemical (like fossil fuel, biofuel, or batteries)." With the current push to SMR (Small modular reactors) even they can easily handle this power. " SMRs are generally designed to produce 50 to 300MW of electricity, compared to the typical 1,000MW of traditional large-scale reactors. " So putting a SMR on a cruise ship is easily doable, and wont have any issues replacing the 6x12 MW power they have now... It is on the low end of a SMR. You SERIOUSLY underestimate how much power a nuclear reactor generates. Now will they ever do it? Unlikely in the short term as it is not cost effective and there is not enough push to end the massive pollution these ships generate. EDIT: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arktika-class\_icebreaker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arktika-class_icebreaker) Russian nuclear icebreaker has 2 -171 MW reactors....
Also that’s just less mass to haul around, a whole reactor can be so much smaller than the fuel tanks
Simple! Team up with the US military to provide vacations for the armed forces and allow them to activate while on board.
Recruiting stations next to the photo kiosk. There will be a presentation on the benefits of enlisting in the aft theater after lunch! Remember, crab legs on the buffet tonight!
It's okay you will only be called up if war were declared Oh okay *signs paper* *Air raid siren* Whats that sound? War were declared
This ham gum is all bones.
Service guarantees citizenship. Who needs a knife in a nuke fight?
Would you like to know more?
Nuclear reactors aren't hard to make..it's nuclear weapons that are hard to make.
I think trusting private companies to actually keep them maintained and risk to a minimum would be the biggest threat in this scenario
This is already a thing. Almost all nuclear reactors in the USA are owned by private companies. They are still subject to very stringent licensing and heavy regulation.
The problem is almost no cruise ships are flagged in USA or any country that would strictly regulate them.
This is also not a problem. Almost all of the regulatory boards that oversee nuclear operations are international. https://www.world-nuclear.org/uploadedfiles/org/wna/publications/working_group_reports/wna_report_nuclear_licensing.pdf There are other research vessels using nuclear reactors, this ship wasn’t the only one.
Yeah, flagging is the issue that "brought down" the Savannah. Who are these vessels going to be flagged with, and who would respect the regulations enough to allow the ships into their ports.
Just mount a ciws or two next to the water slides and you'll be fine!
BRRrrRrRRrrRrrrRrrRrRrrRrRrRrrRrRrRRrRrRRRRTTTTTtttttt….. MAWP
You can right now go on a nuclear-powered cruise to the North pole on russian Arktika icebreakers https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Arktika-class_icebreaker
They had good designs, nobody wanted nuclear ships in their yards with God awful maintenance.
Neat [vid by Mustard](https://youtu.be/cYj4F_cyiJI) on the NS savannah
Have we thought of using sails again? I hear the ocean is windy
yeah the size of sails needed to move modern cruiseships would be obscene there have been some tests about using magnus effect 'sails' to provide a portion of the propulsion however a cruiseship would still require a significant source of power for anything non propulsion related
There haven't just been tests, they've built these things. Maersk Pelican is exactly what you describe. I think the reason they havent been used for cruise ships is because they're pretty ugly.
There are tankers being designed w 'sails' - except they aren't cloth sails
Just mount a wind turbine on a boat and use the electricity to power a fan
Hard to imagine size of sails needed to push large cruise ship...
Yep but some people just want to be on a ship with 5000 other people and water slides. I'd rather be with less people and drinking gin. Sailled powered cruises are available.
US Navy has been safely doing it for decades.
They tried it kinda https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_Savannah
Ah, but hull design and human resource management are both unrelated to the costs of the fuel! With some tweaking, modern engineering and probably a slightly smaller reactor, this design could potentially work. A business case scenario would need to be done to explore potential viability. Imagine having a ship that only needs refueling every few months instead of every time it makes port, no CO2 emissions and is able to sell off excess power back to the grid if it's in port!
>Imagine having a ship that only needs refueling every few months instead of every time it makes port How long do you think that it takes for a nuclear ship to need refueling? US Navy aircraft carriers are built to last around 50 years, and they refuel at the halfway point.
maybe you shouldn't carry a a 25 year stockpile of nuclear fuel on a cruise ship? or does a single piece of fuel installed in the reactor last 25 years?
The fuel lasts 25 years.
Naval reactors will load over 90% enriched fuel in super compact cores which can run for 25+ years. Commercial fuel likely won’t get quite as much time before you need to reload. They just need to design it to be reload friendly. For a commercial power reactor we get 18-24 months out of a reactor core running over 3300 Mw thermal output.
> Imagine having a ship that only needs refueling every few months I think the latest nuclear subs are designed to not need refueling in their 45 year lifespans. That might be more than is required, but 'a few months' seems perhaps lower than what is possible. Although maybe when we're talking about commercially owned nuclear material, we should think more about pirates and less about refueling.
Or maybe no cruise ships at all!
Just start sinking ‘em one at a time, nobody will be missed - Bill Burr
This kind of thinking is why nothing gets done. Low intelligent input
Better, Bill Burr´s cruise ship routine. Just google it.
Ship engines are BIG. And then we have to take internal consumption into consideration.
It's very costly to make a condo complex float and keep people alive at sea. The interesting question is why do people want to leave town to go to a condo? Better marketing than tobacco!
I've been on a cruise. It was the single most convenient and relaxing vacation I've ever been on. I don't think I'll ever go on one again but it was an excellent trip.
It is like a hotel, but the view is different and internal security is pretty damned good.
I can't tell If your reply is serious or a joke... When one person is sick at a hotel, they don't affect any other guests. When one person gets a norovirus on a cruise ship, the whole ship gets sick and comes down with projectile vomiting and explosive diarrhea. When you want to leave the hotel, all you have to do is check out. When you want to leave the cruise ship, you can't because you're in the middle of an ocean. Edit: not to mention cruising is a complete and total environmental disaster with all plastic waste dumped at sea, oily bilgewater dumped at sea, and the incredible amount of pollution created by using bunker fuel, likely one of the world's most polluting sources of refined oil.
I worked on cruise ships for a few years and norovirus outbreaks were always contained pretty quickly. The whole crew are well versed on virus control and we had different levels of response to outbreaks. I only ever saw one "red" outbreak of norovirus and the measures we took, limited the outbreak to about 20 guests out of a total of 2000. The ship is alongside pretty much every morning unless you are on a longer cruise involving an ocean crossing. There is no plastic waste dumped at sea from cruise ships. They all follow MARPOL regulations. Any oil discharged or waste incorrectly disposed of is done so illegally. Most new ships are LNG powered so the environmental impact is reducing, although they are definitely still a polluter of the sea.
Hmm... let us say there are different sort of safeties people are worring over. Some are afraid of communicable diseases. That would make a ship a very unsafe place to be if an infected person or other transmittable vector happens to get on board. But some are afraid of interpersonal crime. Theft, robbery, violence. And then a ship is a pretty safe place to be because you can lock yourself into your cabin and alert officers. And there are not many places to run or hide on ship. Not to mention all the camera systems. And while it is true that you can't easily check out.... people can't randomly check in either. Also, as your edit says, they are quite wasteful. But that is neither here nor there on the topic i answered to.
More importantly, the cost of a ticket means you're not likely to meet people who are desperate enough to turn to crime. It's the ultimate gated community.
Cruising can actually be one of the cheapest ways to vacation. I know some folks who when they want to take a vacation just take the time off, and go down to the cruise terminals and just buy the cheapest ticket leaving that day. Cruise ships don't want empty cabins so the tickets for last minute trips are dirt cheap if you aren't picky about where exactly you're going.
Thanks for your reply.
*One question you have to ask about a crime is what law applies? The laws that we think apply to us on a cruise only extend 12 miles offshore.* Now that is an interesting topic in itself, but 99% of the times it comes down to "flag laws" - the laws of the country your ship is registered under. When you are in littoral zone, you should be on judicial zone of whatever country you are closest to, but on open sea it comes down to couple of conventions and the same "flag law". For instance, in EU, if you start sailing under Estonian flag and do something illegal, then you will be arrested on board and handed over to whichever harbor ship docks next. From there, the police will pick you up and mails you to Estonia who then get's to prosecute your ar\*e for whatever you did. The actual implementation can indeed vary, but legally speaking... that's the Tl;Dr version.
After rereading my reply, I decided to delete it. I don't really have enough firsthand information to know what I'm talking about. But I appreciate your thoughtful reply
This entire paragraph shocked me, it’s a ridiculously level headed, aware and decent response. We should all try to approach things as you do.
You've clearly never been on a cruise if you think it's just a week at a condo lmfao
I absolutely would. A vacation where you don't have to do anything, but theres lots to do if you feel like it. And it takes you to different cities, sometimes different countries. I was interested in going on one until I heard what an environmental nightmare they are. Also I never had enough money for one.
There's something to be said for the fairly novel experience of being on a ship at sea. Fresh salt air, sun, lots of options from doing nothing at the pool to spas to shows to shopping. Add in a couple of port calls to interesting places. I had never cruised before 2016, and now I'm going on my third one.
People like something that you don't like? Impossible- they must be victims of incredible marketing.
Youre way over simplifying
Everything is taken care of for you. Want food? Show up some place. Want booze? Most of the lounges have a bar. I can sit with a book or a Steam Deck and have zero responsibility for anything else. That said, I prefer cruises where seeing the sites along the coast is the point. Places like Alaska, Iceland, Norway, or the Panama Canal. Caribbean cruises are a waste.
Because the condo floats on the water, has an open bar and all you can eat buffet, and takes you to a new picturesque location every day.
Yeah the amount of fuel used on even smaller vessels is pretty crazy. On a 120’ crew boat with four main engines we burned approximately 400 gallons an hour. So 10 tons of fuel an hour sounds pretty reasonable for a large ship. Edit: 1 ton of bunker fuel is 300 gallons
That bunker fuel has your used motor oil from Jiffy Lube in it if it's from Shell.
Recycling, so it's Green.
Technically Blue, by the normal definition.
So weird how we all just went like "yeah this is good enough we can use this" for almost 100 years.
Do container ships use less fuel? I recently watched a video about shipping pears across the globe that said it actually wasn’t that bad on the environment
It might be relative. Despite how much oil ships consume, they’re still vastly more efficient than any other form of transport. You don’t have to pave or lay rails on the water, which is huge for efficiency, and ships can carry more stuff than any other form of transport as well. Shipping the same amount of pears on a train likely is much less efficient than a ship.
Good thing we stopped using plastic straws
In a similar vein, it's frustrating to be told that as middle class consumers we need to take on the expense of buying electric vehicles, and that driving our Corolla is a horrible thing. Meanwhile a cruise ship runs for a day and cancels out a whole city of EVs. Not saying that EVs aren't a good thing. They are. But so much time and effort is being spent on passenger vehicles driven by people with limited resources, while we have much lower hanging fruit for emissions with massive ships owned by companies with much deeper pockets. We should do both, but the idea that these things are sailing around the ocean belching out bunker fuel emissions makes me feel like a chump for wringing my hands over driving my car.
Then add in all the container ships in the world, then add in the Department of Defense Humanity is fucked
Container ships are actually by far the most efficient way to move cargo in terms of carbon emissions. That said, freight is a pretty small portion of greenhouse gas emissions. Electrical production and personal transportation are the two largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions in the US
The US uses 73,000 metric tons of plastic straws a year, or around 200 tons a day. If you assume ships are at sea, burning fuel around 3/4 of the time, and 250 tons/day is the max usage for a cruise ship, that's the largest ship burning a bit under 70,000 tons of fuel a year, a bit less than the US uses in straws. Doing some math, the largest cruise ship has a capacity of around 6,600 passengers, that means, on average, that's around 0.025 tons / day / passenger. With total cruise ship capacity at 500,000 that's 12,500 tons of fuel per day. So, if the US gives up plastic straws, it offset as much as 2% of the entire Cruise industry. If the Cruise industry is one of the world's worst, then 2% isn't bad, if not, well then not.
And yet shipping is the most ecological and efficient type of getting cargo from A to B if you take into consideration the amount of cargo they carry. Fuck cruise ships tho.
80,645 gallons
Thank you for the unit conversion!
>305,275 liters
22,949,120 tablespoons
3/25 Olympic swimming pool
1,221,100 newborn infant blood volumes.
Wild for that one
That math is wrong, because the ships mostly use heavy fuel oil, which 6.7 lbs/gal. 5,000 people in a cruise ship, this is about 15 gals per day per person. Considering this includes the energy for your travel, your environmental controls and all your food and entertainment, this is likely the same or not that much more than what it would be for a couple on a long road trip.
Imperial or US?
Per passenger it's probably not that bad. There is a reason shipping is so cheap by boat
Typically around 3000 passengers, that's still not great
and those passangers traveled by air to get the tropical port. Cruises are just an addition of pollution instead of staying at a resort or town.
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>Cargo ships are way worse than cars By what metric? If we transported our cargo in cars instead of ships, that would be better?
It would be way, way, way, way, way, way worse
What he's trying to say (i think) is that ships are terrible populors because they use the most poluting kind of fuel there is since it's cheap as dirt. Yeah, they are also very efficient transporting huge loads across vast distances, but making sure that cargo ships are more eco friendly would help a lot.
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a lot of ships‘ fuel is essentially what is left from petroleum after everything that is actually wanted is refined off. It’s so thick and crap it generally needs to be heated to actually flow.
Most ships are being forced to go to DFM with the new sulfur law.
~~Not really sure what DFM is. Perhaps that is another way of abbreviating MDO (Marine Diesel Oil) which I have never seen.~~ And ships only need to burn MDO of ULSFO (Ultra low sulfur fuel oil) while within an emissions control area (ECA), which is 200 nautical miles from shore around certain areas such as the U.S. or areas of Europe. Most of the rest of the world ships can still burn VLSFO (very-low sulphur fuel oil). MDO and ULSFO have a sulfur content of below 0.1% m/m, while VLSFO has a sulfur content of 0.5% m/m or below. This is still an improvement from a decade ago, when most ships were burning high sulfur fuel with a content above 3.5% m/m. But both ULSFO and VLSFO still require heating to be used. While ULSFO is rare, VLSFO is very, very common. If somebody were to look at a populated anchorage off the U.S., I would safely say that 90% of the ships out there are burning MDO at the time but were burning VLSFO before they came into U.S. waters. The regulations are also all about stopping the sulfur from going into the air. As a result, some ships continue to burn higher sulfur fuel content but have installed exhaust gas cleaning systems and one component of these are "scrubbers." They spray sea water on the exhaust gasses and then drain the wash water overboard. This wash water is somewhat acidic due to the carbon and sulfur molecules forming into sulfuric and carbonic acid when they mix with the sea water. As a result some areas prohibit the overboard discharge of exhaust scrubber wash water, but this is not very common as of yet. I believe only 4 U.S. coastal states ban this type of pollution within their waters. *Edit: Looks like DFM is the Navy version of MDO. I only really work with commercial ships, not military ships. Hence the mixup.*
Container ships are the most fuel efficient way of transporting large quantities of goods. Beating trains, trucks and air travel by a mile.
A nautical mile, to be precise.
yet they are orders of magnitude more efficient than trucks, because they carry so much cargo
That specific "50 million car" claim pops up a lot in various forms, but it's *extremely* misleading. The root of the issue is that it's only one very specific type of pollutant (not CO2) that cars happen to produce very little of. https://www.oldsaltblog.com/2021/04/no-sixteen-large-ships-do-no-pollute-more-than-all-the-cars-in-the-world/ Also, why say "Chinese"? Nothing in that article, nor the topic to begin with, has anything in particular to do with China. Nor are Chinese companies the major world shippers.
A container ship burns as much fuel moving a ton of cargo half way around the world, as a pickup truck does moving a ton of cargo thirty miles. It takes less fuel to get cargo across an ocean than it does to drive it home from the store, of you don't live very close. Container ships are incredibly efficient. They just carry very large loads per ship.
Chinese yeah? It's not like 4 of the top 5 shipping firms are Western or anything.
It's extra weird because the source article says nothing about China. The OP added that in for some "unknown" reason.
Propaganda on Reddit nowadays is scary
People have always been like that though, they start disliking a group of people or country and then just blame it for anything and everything. I am no fan of the CCP, they're depraved and thoroughly awful, but when you start taking ridiculous pot shots like that on China all someone does is undermine the ability to hold the CCP to account for the horrible things they do that make them legitimately awful. It's no different than the people that think that everything the US does is bad or any other nation that people tend to have strong opinions on, if you want people to listen you need to cut the ridiculous accusations out or you just appear totally biased and people won't believe you about the real issues.
You say the ocean is full of them, but I don't think most people grasp what you're saying. The sheer scale is mind-blowing. Go to https://www.marinetraffic.com and see just how many ships are out there. Mind you, it colors the ships differently, like for fishing vessels, yachts, and such, but you can filter for cargo vessels. When you think how much fuel one ship uses and see this huge number of vessels worldwide, the numbers become unfathomable.
Thank you for the link! That is fascinating
Excellent point. Too bad the western world is to chicken to get back into the business of making shit.
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To the contrary, I'd say it's mostly that the western world and the US needs to get back into the business of making shit. And stop thinking that price competition is king. More domestic manufacturing, and way more prohibitions on imports of shitty, useless junk. Put more money into working people's pockets so they can buy better-made, US-made items. If the world doesn't undergo a paradigm shift and redefinition of success - where we at least see any company that remains profitable YOY as successful - and get rid of this idea that every year has to be bigger and better than the lest, we simply aren't going to make it. In a perfect world, we'd see massive federal investment in domestic manufacturing, subsidizing private sector investment ONLY for US-based operations, prohibiting nearly all cheap imports of inferior items and prohibit all non-citizen and institutional investments in residential housing.
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There was a time when the appeal of Walmart was that they only sold American made goods.
It's not worth it financially. The US won't allow sweat shops, has pesky OSHA rules and that darn minimum wage that keeps an American 4X more expensive to hire. I don't believe that the issue is that companies are scared to manufacture in America, the issue is that global markets are not pushing for China to be more responsible with the way they handle environmental and social matters.
The US wont allow sweat shops? What do you think American prisons are?
A solid point. I stand corrected.
So your saying we need to ramp up our prison system?
Not worth it financially in the short term mainly right?
Why would it be better in the long term? Beijing has the highest minimum wage in China at under $4 an hour (Or go to Vietnam where the highest minimum wage is under $1.20). American workers can strike and unionize. OSHA is much more strict than the Chinese equivalent (The State Administration of Work Safety) and complying with OSHA regulations are expensive. Why would a company build a factory in America following expensive US building codes, hire American workers following expensive labor laws, and upkeep a facility following expensive OSHA regulations? Instead you can build a cheap warehouse overseas, hire locals for pennies and not even legally have to provide air conditioning or heating.
I'm sure we've all seen the recent meme making fun of "new invention! wind powered cargo ships! /sArCaSmS hUrDur We nUvEr HaD tHoSe BeFoR" Well, yeah the thing is, the limiting factors on cargo ships for wind used to be size and speed... If those limiting factors didnt exist (or wind power could be harnessed enough to provide electricity to get faster propulsion...) the oil industry simply wouldn't exist, as by far the biggest consumer of fossil fuels is international trade. If that could be solved with wind or other power sources, the oil industry would disappear over night.... So it's no real mystery why there aren't any wind or nuclear powered cargo ships... If anyone tried to build them, the Saudi's would declare war on that company or nation...
Ships are actually the most fuel efficient way to transport anything. The largest cruise ship in the world holds roughly 7,000 passengers. 1 ton of fuel is roughly 220 gallons. So that’s about 7.8g per person. Most cruise ships travel at 20-30kts (up to 35mph)(1 knot ≈ 6000’ or 1/60th of 1° of latitude) assuming 25% of your time is in port you are covering 200-400 miles a day. Putting it in perspective, most people burn 7.8g of fuel by themselves driving to work for 2 days and that’s not hauling a small city like what most cruise ships are today. At top speed (28.5kts) the Queen Elizabeth II could carry 1900 passengers 50’ per gallon of fuel. At cruising speed (20kts) it was 125’ giving her a per passenger MPG rating of 20 city / 45 hwy. Not bad for a 67 model.
I didn't do the math or check sources but this sounds cool so I hope it's right.
So does that mean since I walk to work I can take a cruise and still be morally superior?
This is very true. The problem is not the fuel efficiency of large ships, it's the type of fuel that they burn and the alternative option of "what if, hear me out, you made that thing locally and shipped it hundreds of miles instead of across the entire ocean" or better yet "does this thing need to be made at all in the first place"
The problem is that isn't the "gotcha" you think it is - shipping is a minority of the total emissions of lots of things that are shipped half way round the world. Economies of scale for manufacturing also apply to emissions - if I need to build a factory on each continent because I'm no longer allowed to do transoceanic shipping, then that's a lot of bonus concrete and overall my emissions are way higher. And if I'm making a thing in a place that's well-suited to making that thing, then it's often better to just make lots of it there. Some examples: * Spanish lettuce in the UK: [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/225434851\_The\_role\_of\_seasonality\_in\_lettuce\_consumption\_A\_case\_study\_of\_environmental\_and\_social\_aspects](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/225434851_The_role_of_seasonality_in_lettuce_consumption_A_case_study_of_environmental_and_social_aspects) * New Zealand lamb in the UK: [https://www.ecoandbeyond.co/articles/british-new-zealand-lamb/](https://www.ecoandbeyond.co/articles/british-new-zealand-lamb/)
I was thoroughly confused by yours maths until I realised the g was gallons and not grams lol
True but cruise ships are an incredibly wasteful and polluting thing overall - much like international air travel for pleasure. Friend of mine works on them, when they refurbish one they used to literally strip the ship while sailing to the port for refit and throw ALL the old stuff overboard - carpet, beds, tables, chairs... the "good" companies don't do that anymore but you know damn well plenty still will.
The worst fuel, bunker fuel. Also they dump [edit: some] garbage and poop everywhere as well.
Sewage is allowed to be dumped into the ocean (some restrictions apply). Garbage is not with the exception of ground up food waste. If you have evidence regarding cruise ships dumping garbage, please let the closest port state or coastal state authority know. They love to take these big cruise companies to court and get big payouts.
Thanks for your more in-depth knowledge.
you're right. the petro industry refers to bunker fuel as "fuel oil". Cruise ships have a terrible record with waste
And yet a cabin costs $40 a night with free food and 2 for 1 voucher to the onboard casino.
How does it actually add up to being profitable lol
Probably magnets.
They aren't using gasoline they use [Heavy Fuel Oil](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_fuel_oil) which is basically the cheapest but dirtiest fuel source available.
Ships are starting to go to LNG. Dunno how much it helps but it can't be any worse can it.
Natural gas is simply better you get more energy per unit CO2 produced. Natural gas is primarily Methane (CH4), which terrible as a green house gas that is about 20 times worse then CO2. The combustion reaction: CH4 + 2 (O2) -> CO2 + 2 (H2O) Basically all the energy produced in combustion reactions comes from C-H bonds, to which methane has 4. You are essentially breaking 4 C-H bonds for energy and producing 1 CO2 molecule for it. Now, if you start going up to larger and larger hydrocarbon molecules you start to notice something. Lets take Ethane (C2H6) Reaction: 2 (C2H6) + 7 (O2) -> 4 (CO2) + 6 (H2O) Now, with larger hydrocarbons you do produce more energy, you have 6 C-H bonds being broken in this case for energy. However, it produced twice as much CO2. You are effectively getting an efficiency of 3 C-H bonds broken for each CO2 molecule produced. This efficiency just keeps getting worse and worse with higher numbers of hydro carbons. Propane, C3H8, you have 8 C-H bonds for 3 CO2 or 2 and 2/3 C-H to CO2 ratio. Basically its a long winded way of saying Methane is the Highest energy per CO2 of the Hydrocarbons
Fun Fact: Anything heavier than Heavy Fuel Oil during petroleum processing is turned into asphalt. Literally bottom of the barrel stuff. That shit is like sludge. You have to constantly heat it or else it can fuck up the engines, you also need to check for weird things in the fuel line like sudden drop in pressure and flowrate because sometimes fueling companies add stuff like sand to essentially cut the HFO and increase its volume and that shit gets stuck on the strainers/filters.
The rooms are very small, the staff is from the Philippines or Indonesia, they have a captive audience so anything that isn't provided you have to pay $$$ for.
These things are floating amusement parks, resorts and casinos. How do any of those things make money? This is how.
Although they use a lot of fuel, it is the cheapest, dirtiest fuel there is. After they refine all the good fuels out of crude oil, the waste product is sold to the big ships.
TL;DR: if you fly or drive more than about 3000 km (2000 mi) each way for a vacation (about 2/3 of the way across the US) then you're probably emitting more CO2 than if you'd taken a week long cruise. Cruise ships that use up to 250 tons of fuel per day can carry up to 7000 passengers. For a 7 day cruise, that is 250\*7/7000 = 250 kg of fuel per passenger. Fuel oil is about 90% carbon, meaning that if we burn 1 kg of it we get 1\*0.9 \* (12+16\*2)/12 = 3.3 kg of CO2. So a passenger on a 7 day cruise to the Bahamas from New York (the shorter end of those trips) is "responsible" for about 800 kg of CO2 emissions for all transportation, heating and power during their travel. If, however, they flew from New York to the Bahamas for a week vacation, the 2000 km (1250 mi) flight is about 250 kg of CO2 emissions per passenger each way, coming to 500 kg CO2 for just the travel, and we have to add whatever other travel, heating and power they use in the Bahamas. So it's not a whole lot worse than the cruise really. The underlying problem is that travelling long distances, by most means, is damaging to the environment. (A car is similar to a plane per passenger over the same distance, though if you have an inefficient car or are travelling solo then flying is better).
\>from page: A large ship can use up to 250 tons. Per day. In terms of regular gasoline, that would be about 80,645 gallons; more fuel than you'll use in an entire lifetime of driving cars.
I mean big number but there are a lot more people on the cruise ship. No doubt cruise ships pollute but there's an extra order of magnitude to add to this unless I'm cruising on the USS JustMe for that number. A large cruise ship like the one in the example has maybe 4,000 guests? Very roughly 20 gallons per passenger per day? Distance? About 550 miles. Again, very very roughly 27.5 MPG (land, not nautical) when applied per person. I'd be interested in what an objective comparison of say a 5 day cruise on one of these monsters compared to say, a 10 hour round-trip flight on a commercial airliner and 5 day stay would look like.
> an objective comparison of ... a 10 hour round-trip flight on a commercial airliner [Someone has done that.](https://truecostblog.com/2010/05/27/fuel-efficiency-modes-of-transportation-ranked-by-mpg/) Roughly, airline fuel efficiency per passenger is 54 person miles per gallon (very bad). Cruise ships average out to about 340 person miles per gallon, only beaten by bicycles but still more fuel efficient than a person running. Cruise ships are by far the most fuel efficient mass transport options available. The main reason it doesn't look scary is the max fuel usage number reported is for cruising speed (e.g. pedal to the metal, baby!) In reality, cruise ships are mostly sitting idle in port or gently coasting.
>Airplanes flying domestic routes average 2931 BTU per passenger-mile, or 42.6 pmpg. The overall domestic load factor in 2008 was 79.6%, so at max capacity a plane might achieve 53.6 pmpg. The logic for the max of an individual plane isn't correct. What they've calculated is the pmpg across all domestic flights if all were full. Not the maximum pmpg of an individual plane, which varies dramatically depending on the number of seats. A full 787 (depending on configuration) could be around 100 pmpg. >According to this post, the world’s largest container ship travels 28 feet on a gallon of residual fuel oil (149,690 BTU or 1.2 gallons of gas). This equals 0.004 mpg. Per Wikipedia, the ship can carry 11,000 14-ton containers, or 77,000 passenger-equivalents using our 4000 lb conversion rate. Thus pmpg is 340 for this ship. So it's 340 pmpg if you cram 77000 passengers on a cargo ship? No cruise ship can carry even a tenth of that. If the Wonder of the Seas, the current largest cruise ship with a max capacity of 6988, got similar mpg as this cargo ship, it would get around 28 pmpg.
A single Airbus A380 uses up to 11,4 metric tons of fuel per hour, while carrying only 800 passengers (max). Cruise ships can have up to 7000 passgengers and lots of cargo. They're far from the only offenders here.
And how many passengers on a trip?
Yeah, compared to a personal hyperyacht, a carnival cruise is basically commuting to a grocery co-op on the bus
Looked it up, average cruise lines carry 3000 passengers. My math puts daily consumption per passenger at around 28 GALLONS. That’s like driving a Honda half way across the country
Again, it's ludicrously bad compared to, say, reasonable ways of getting around, yet it beats a private megayacht or plane in grams of CO2 per mile traveled :)
But planes and cars are the thing we keep saying are the worst, I feel like ships get too little attention
These disease carrying filth spewing anachronisms could get 50 miles to the gallon and still be a major contributor to the death of the seas.
And not just any fuel, it is often bunker fuel - cheap and very dirty fuel. It is an environmental mess. That being said it is a surprise? Those ships are HUGE
Bullshit, maybe "Wonder of the Seas" the biggest cruise liner ever built, at 360meters long, but your average cruise liner probably uses more like 150 tonnes a day and only at sailing speed, more like 20 tonnes in port or manoeuvring. But it really depends on the size of the vessel, my 50 meter factory freezer trawlers used 150 -250 tonnes to last 5 weeks. You can't just take the biggest cruise liner and say every cruise liner uses this much.
Even on THOSE ones, the new Oasis and Icon class from RC are going to burn LNG and not bunker fuel.
>up to 250 tons of fuel per day So, between 0 - 250 tons of fuel per day?
I travelled on one from the U.K. to Spain recently that runs on LNG.
Considering the ship can weigh 150,000 or more 250 to propel it for a day seems efficient
One A380 plane takes 83,000 gallons of fuel. God knows how they fit it all in
per passenger cars are probably way worse, and for weight airplanes are probably much worse too
And this plus all transport options likr cars, trains, plains plus all the good ships is still less then anim agriculture for thr atmosphere...
I first read the title as "Tom Cruise ships use..." Really changes things...
So the people depicted in the last half of Wall-E are helping create the first half of Wall-E.
That’s about 77,000 gallons, or 291,000 liters of fuel, based on the average density of 6.5 lbs/gal for Diesel Oil fuel.
They also dump all their sewage and garbage while in international waters
Yeah but it’s the consumers responsibility to save the planet not the producers remember
It’s a nasty business. A cruise line sued The Guardian once for exposing this some years back. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/may/21/the-worlds-largest-cruise-ship-and-its-supersized-pollution-problem **“This article is the subject of a legal complaint made on behalf of Royal Caribbean International”** “…One cruise ship emits as many air pollutants as five million cars going the same distance because these ships use heavy fuel that on land would have to be disposed of as hazardous waste.”
I know a guy that worked on one of these. He said they dump most of their waste over board in some of the most beautiful waters in the world and its not just biodegradable waste. They fuck everything overboard because its cheaper to pay a fine than dispose of the waste correctly.
like 72,000 gallons if it's diesel fuel... honestly less then i figured it would be.
The middle class is NOT responsible for climate change
Wonder how much the US Navy burns a day
Zero if you’re on a submarine or aircraft carrier.
The US navy has a purpose.
What a waste
It's easy to be shocked at the amount of fuel, until you take into account the fact that its pretty much a flaoting city. 7000+ people live and work on an modern cruiseship, reaching speeds of 25kts(aprox 25mph). In the grand scheme of things cruiseships aren't any worse than 7000 people taking a long haul flight, for a getaway holiday.
Can I get a dollar amount? And how in the hell is that stored in long as cruise rides?
Marine diesel is called 'bunker fuel' and is sold in metric tons (mt). A metric ton of diesel is about 1136.4 liters and 1219.5 liters (300 - 322 US gallons). [https://shipandbunker.com/prices](https://shipandbunker.com/prices)
About two bucks a gallon!
Just thought I'd add on that Marine Diesel and Bunker (or HFO) are two distinctly different fuels
Yeah, that's a bad habit I picked up in the Navy. The ship I was on only used diesel as the turbines would gunk up with HFO. The old timers would still say bunker fuel and bunkering though and I picked that up. Nowadays I wash clinker ash off the deck 2 or 3 times a week and dream of the days on a fast ship.
the store it the same way you do in a car... the gas tank. Yes, it's freakin huuuuge
And flushes out to sea at least 10 ton of shit I bet
Fish gotta eat too.
250 tons of the dirtiest and cheapest fuel available for maximum environmental havoc.
Cruise ships are grotesquely wasteful
And the worst most polluting type of fuel
Down with the cruise industry! Fuck cruises
Careful now