A nuclear disruptor? The KUN-24AP design concept – discuss

The KUN-24AP

Clearly, many are unhappy with China’s dominance in manufacturing, with firms investing elsewhere in the hope of diversifying from the industrial powerhouse. This behaviour has been roundly criticised in recent Beijing talks.

If there is one thing shipping likes, it is economy of scale. The adjustment to a more diversified supply chain, then, will be a difficult one.

Lines that clambered over one another to become titans of east-west trade are now suffering from that same exposure, freight rates are tumbling. The likes of Cosco and Maersk are falling into the red, surpassing the doldrums of pre-pandemic. This year, the Ningbo Composite Index showed a 30.46% year-on-year drop, to 706 – not terribly surprising, given the boom of the Covid years, but only a marginal improvement over the 690 seen in November 2019.

Atop this faltering foundation, we are expected to believe shipping will build itself, learning to burn new fuels (which barely exist), or fight with aviation over the few that do; replacing or retrofitting vessels like-for-like, in history’s biggest fleet renewal programme, with a fraction of the shipyards required to do it.

The time has come, I’m afraid, to reconsider nuclear-powered ships.

We don’t know very much about the CSSC 24,000 teu nuclear boxship concept, the KUN-24AP. From what I can gather, there seems only to be one image of the thing; a promise that it will have a molten-salt nuclear reactor on board, with all-electric propulsion; and apparently, early certification by DNV.

We can infer certain things from the design, however. It appears to be a twin-skeg, like the 18,000 teu Maersk Triple-E class unveiled in the early 2010s. On Emma Maersk, this two-propeller design was suboptimal, requiring two big engines instead of one really big one – always a compromise on fuel economy.

Vessels which would later surpass the Triple-Es in capacity would explore the limits of beam on a single skeg, usually by getting longer. But the nuclear-powered KUN-24AP would have no such limitations. With a nuclear reactor, it would need no engines or driveshafts, meaning it could have as many electric motors as its designers wish. These could be azimuth pods, making rudders unnecessary too.

The two bow thrusters suggest that the ship will be capable of dynamic positioning, and why not? After all, instead of running auxiliary generators and burning additional fuel to get the necessary power, KUN-24AP has a decades-long power supply on board.

One of the most notable design choices is the bow-mounted superstructure and axe-shaped bow. Container vessels generally situate their bridge and accommodation amidships, closer to the vessel’s centre of gravity, where pitching in rough seas is less noticeable; Maersk’s new methanol vessel design came in for criticism, from a crew perspective, for its forward-situated superstructure.

But from the KUN-24AP’s bow shape, we can see that this is not a concern for its designers. Rather, we can infer something else about the vessel’s proposed operating profile: forget slow-steaming and just-in-time arrival, because this thing is designed to go fast.

With no bulbous bow to glide elegantly under the waves, it will ram through them like a warship; no wonder its designers are not worried about pitching. The streamlined shape of its accommodation block, only slight in Maersk’s design, suggests that the KUN-24AP will be moving at speeds where aerodynamics start to become a concern.

The Loadstar offices are not equipped with the kind of CFD-modelling technology needed to determine how fast, exactly, but the history of naval nuclear-powered vessels like the US’s Gerald-Ford and Nimitz-class carriers – admittedly, at less than half the weight of a ship like KUN-24AP laden down to its marks – could reach speeds of 30 knots, or 56 kph, effectively double the slow-steaming speed of today’s box ships.

With zero incentive to slow-steam, nuclear-powered container shipping would revive a previous paradigm, in which there was everything to gain from designing vessels to go faster than the competition. The last time this happened was in the first half of the 20th century, when liners battled to make the speediest transatlantic voyages. At the height of this, the SS United States set records of 38 knots or 70.97 kph (allegedly, it could reach 43kn, although this is unproven). It is vanishingly unlikely that a vessel four times the weight of SS United States could get anywhere near its speed. But yielding the possibility of reducing transit times by a third or even as much as half, the existing shipping fleet would be woefully unprepared for the arrival of nuclear-powered competition.

All of this, however, will be entirely contingent on an as-yet unproven technology, the thorium molten-salt reactor.

What we do know of nuclear-powered shipping is that it is not cheap. In place of one or two engineers on a conventional vessel, it requires a staff of a dozen or more highly-qualified nuclear engineers just to manage the reactor. Though it will be a trivial investment for the CCP, the capital and operating costs of a nuclear reactor are thought by many experts to be insurmountable for the private sector.

On top of that, in the one case of a nuclear-powered cargo vessel which can act as reference, NS Savannah, many ports simply refused to harbour the vessel, for fear of nuclear repercussions. As recent geopolitical bickering has shown, there is little reason to suspect that ports in Europe and the US will open their arms to indulge and welcome China’s nuclear experiments.

But if ever there was going to be a nuclear-powered, ultra-large containership, China is the only country, besides the US or Russia (until recently), that could make it happen. After all, as the home of world’s largest factories, the world’s largest shipyards, the world’s largest ports and one of its largest shipping lines, if China decides it is time for nuclear-powered ships, who is going to argue?