Reactor ship
A reactor ship , nuclear ship , nuclear energy ship , or nuclear ship is a ship with a nuclear energy drive .
history
The development of nuclear energy as a ship propulsion system has been advanced since the early 1950s. The first nuclear- powered watercraft was the US nuclear submarine USS Nautilus , which entered service on April 22, 1955 . The Soviet Union followed this development with a gap of around two years and put the first Soviet nuclear submarine, the Leninsky Komsomol, into service in September 1958 . This was followed by a development and use of nuclear energy that has continued to this day to drive warships (e.g. aircraft carriers of the US Navy ).
The first civilian ship with nuclear propulsion was the Soviet nuclear icebreaker Lenin , which was put into service on September 15, 1959. The American Savannah (1962), the German Otto Hahn (1968) and the Japanese Mutsu (1970) followed as further ships with nuclear power propulsion in this first phase of development . The Savannah and Otto Hahn were taken out of service again after eight and eleven years of research, respectively, the Mutsu was never fully commissioned and was decommissioned in 1973. In the course of the 1970s, a number of other Soviet nuclear energy icebreakers followed, some of which are still in operation today. In the 1970s, efforts were made by various bodies to build more cargo ships with nuclear energy propulsion. In addition to the plan for a container ship to succeed Otto Hahn, there were also French plans to equip the container ship Korrigan , built in 1972, with a nuclear drive. In the spring of 1977, the British shipowner Ravi Tikkoo (Globtic Tankers) placed a preliminary order for the construction of three 600,000-tonne nuclear-powered tankers from the Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company , which was not implemented.
Despite these and other attempts to build more reactor cargo ships, the nuclear power drive has not been able to establish itself in civil shipping except as an icebreaker drive.
technology
Today, nuclear power drives for ships usually consist of one or two pressurized water reactors . Its moderator medium, pressurized water, transfers part of the heat dissipated during nuclear fission in the primary circuit via a heat exchanger to generate steam to a secondary circuit . The steam generated in this way is directed to drive steam turbines, the revolutions of which drive the propeller or propellers and generators via a gearbox .
See also
Individual evidence
- ↑ Three nuclear tankers ordered . In: Ship & Harbor / Command Bridge . Vol. 29, No. 2 , February 1977, p. 128 .
literature
- Dudszus, Alfred; Köpcke, Alfred: The big book of ship types . Licensed edition by transpress, Berlin edition. Weltbild Verlag, Augsburg 1995, ISBN 3-89350-831-7 .