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Comment by cstross | Hacker News Reader

One thing the article doesn't mention is that the Savannah was designed for an earlier age -- like the Bristol Brabazon, a large piston-powered airliner that arrived just in time for the jet age, the Savannah was a traditional break bulk cargo ship (with passenger quarters) that arrived just as the multimodal freight container revolutionized freight shipping (and the passengers who had formerly travelled by sea finally made the transition to cheap-enough jet travel).

Savannah was called for by Eisenhower in 1953 but didn't enter service until 1962 -- just too late to be an attractive proposition. Multimodal container transport really caught fire between 1955 and 1970 and the Savannah couldn't be retrofitted as a container ship (nor would it have been efficient as one: its cargo capacity of 14,000 tons is tiny by modern container freight standards).

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If the phrase "Multimodal container transport really caught fire between 1955 and 1970" ignites anyone's interest, you should check out a book called The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson. It's a somewhat dry (by nature) but fascinating history of the topic.

The Box is more than a history of container transport and its world-changing impact. It's a real lesson for entrepreneurs: Visionary takes on tradition-bound oligopoly; regulators can't cope with radical concept; international standards committees are about settling past political grievances and settling for laughable compromises, rather than setting the best course future efficiencies.

Highly recommend, as did Bill Gates, who ties it explicitly to developments in computing:

http://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/The-Box

Can't recommend this book highly enough. Among other details, HN readers will appreciate that the global continer system represents packet switching in its original form.

I'm reading through Martin Booth's biography of his life in Hong Kong, and was struck by his family's transit from England to Hong Kong by ship. His family didn't bring any cargo, just suitcases, so I had assumed that their trip was during the 30s or early 40s by the description of things.

Turns out it was during the 50s. I guess right before global jet transport became commonplace. Not long after they arrived, Martin's father flies off to Japan. But the opening month long sea voyage (now a slightly uncomfortable 12 hour flight) has colored the rest of the story for me as some kind of strictly "pre-modern" feel.

A ship like the Savannah serves as a demonstrator. It wouldn't matter if the nuclear powerplant was used to ship people, cargo or both - the point is that it could fit inside a large container ship just as well as it would fit on a passenger ship or anything in between.

As I see, the biggest reason not to have a nuclear ship is not to risk giving a fully fueled nuclear reactor to pirates.

There were also a couple of more modern nuclear cargo ships; one Japanese, one West German, and a slightly weird Soviet one which is still in operation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sevmorput

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