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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

I think your timeline is at best optimistic. I would personally like to see fixed land based fusion power work before we start trying to build them into moving vessels.

Your claim that the shipping industry is "desperate to decarbonize" also needs a citation. From what I've seen shippers top three concerns are "how to minimize costs", "how to reduce costs", and "how to save money". Can you make this system cheaper to operate than heavy fuel oil? If not it is unlikely to gain traction.

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> Your claim that the shipping industry is "desperate to decarbonize" also needs a citation.

If anything, I think the shipping industry will be the last to de-carbonize, in the same way it's been the refuge of burning dirty fuels and NOx emissions.

Nearly 40% of shipping volume worldwide is moving fossil fuels (coal, oil, gaz). The easiest way to reduce drastically shipping emission is reducing usage of fossil fuels...

https://www.ics-shipping.org/resource/shippings-role-in-the-...

That's... not what's being discussed, though?

We're talking about whether the shipping industry will choose to improve how their ships operate, but you're talking about new powerplants on land would remove the need to even have those/as-many ships at all.

> before we start trying to build them into moving vessels

Why wait, though? I agree that the timeline - the whole project! - seems extraordinarily optimistic, but I don't see why development of potential maritime applications should create any obstacle to the simultaneous development of grid power applications.

Lots of potential complications when building something on a vessel and failure is more likely to be deadly, if for example it fails because the ship is being battered too much by a storm. Plus there is the complicating factors with needing to miniaturize the equipment enough to fit in the available space.

To be fair, a small fusion reactor actually producing power day in, day out - would be a ridiculously huge success. Before worrying about reliability in a storm or miniaturizing (to the point of that being irrelevant). There will THEN be this challenge of reliability and size but achieving the first step would release a sea of additional funding.

That all sounds reasonable. Sometimes the economic problems are harder to solve than the technical ones, though, and that's what interests me about this proposal. I have had a bearish outlook on fusion power in recent years, because utility-scale grid power is the most competitive market there is, and the cost of solar & batteries have been dropping so fast that it's not clear there would be any economic justification for a fusion power plant even if we knew how to build one. An intermediate market, willing to pay much more money for far less power, where renewables cannot compete, seems like it might be just the thing fusion needs to transition out of research and into practical use - even if it does take more engineering to cope with the rigors of the sea.

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