Episode 159: Nuclear Ship Savannah

We're going to Cuba.

Yes.

Yeah.

We're going to.

I the way I always feel about it is take this dad to Cuba because my dad really wants to go to Cuba.

Yeah.

I mean, we've

one of our guests, friend of the show, Noah, has been to Cuba.

So clearly, the answer is very envious.

You have to get your dad to stop calling them all

like shitlibs and get them to join DSA

long enough that they send him to Cuba on like a fact-finding mission.

Oh, there you go.

Yeah.

I do love that.

You know, for people, like,

I, you know what?

I'm not going to speak ill of Philly DSA.

I don't need those mentions in my, I don't need those mentions on Twitter.

We have a lot of DSA people who like follow us and like us.

Yes, I, by and large, appreciate what DSA is doing.

And now to air my personal grievances with Philly DSA.

Yeah, which will now take the rest of the episode.

The episode lasts for six hours.

It's already going to be a long one.

No, you said it's going to be short, you motherfucker.

Yeah, no, I was like, oh, this will be, I was like, this will be a nice and easy one.

Two weeks later.

We are starting at 11 p.m.

my time.

I have been working for, by my count, six hours, and I have a train at 11.30 tomorrow morning.

So

let's do it.

All right, let's fucking do it.

Just one thing.

I hate to plug here, but like Bridgeton season three, part two is out.

Motherfucker.

I know.

I know.

Yeah, because

really needs our help.

No, it's on Plex.

It's on Plex.

Can you bleep the.

Can you bleep?

Do it again there, please.

If you want the invite to my Plex server, DM me.

I'll Twitter.

It's funnier if you don't bleep it the second time.

Yeah,

all right.

Let's go.

Tell me our ship.

Let's go.

What do you see on the screen in front?

Oh, wait.

No, we got to introduce the podcast.

God fucking damn it, too.

Oh, my God.

Jesus Christ.

Hello, and welcome to Well, There's Your Problem.

It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides.

i'm justin rozniak i'm the person who's talking right now my pronouns are he and him okay go i'm november kelly i'm the person who's talking now my pronouns are she and her yay liam hi i'm liam mcanderson my pronouns are he him i have no jokes let's do this all right perfect boom uh what you see on the screen in front of you is a ship nothing appears to be wrong with it like all the boats going opposite directions they're going they're going with it it's kind of a flotilla situation oh i see okay i i which which end of a ship do you think a wake comes out of

Okay, so here's the thing.

I'm very stupid.

I need you to know this.

Oh, oh,

okay.

The other thing is, it's not necessary for ships to all be going the same direction, especially if they are, as this appears to be, going through the narrow channel under the Golden Gate Bridge.

I'll show you a narrow channel under the Garrow Gate Bridge.

Sure.

I like the ship, though.

It's sexy.

It's got the kind of sharp lines.

It looks like it means business

situation.

That's why I was confused.

Sure.

Today we're going to talk about the nuclear ship Savannah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

But first, we have to do the goddamn news.

I have a free hand.

God damn it.

Whoops.

With unlimited expenses.

Just leave it.

Actually, we're talking about the army, so you might as well.

Yeah, it's fine.

All right, so what we're going to do instead of just opening the land crossings into Gaza is something far more stupid and absurd, right?

And then we're going to fuck everything up.

Do I have the gist of that?

Oh, yeah.

So the aid pier that the Army Construction Brigades or whatever they're called, the Transportation Corps built,

you know, it sort of floated away and then they rebuilt it.

And then they used it to do war crimes.

Yeah, and then it floated away again.

Yeah.

Like they had two consecutive storms with an interstitial war crime.

Yeah, I was a little, I was a little bit confused here.

I actually thought I was in a minority here, I thought this would work a lot better than it did.

Uh, it's one of those things that seemed like it should have done, yeah.

Yeah, I know it was always going to be marginal in terms of the amount of aid that like was gonna get delivered through it, and like the only solution was to like force the Israelis' hand on like opening the land crossings, but like I thought it would do more than nothing and then also one war crime.

Yeah.

Yeah, that was

not my expectation.

You know, I figure, all right, ships are big.

You can deliver a lot of stuff with them.

But yeah, I mean, this floating harbor shit, they use it in Normandy.

Like,

did work to supply a whole army in D-Day on like a bigger scale.

So like you'd think, okay, well, they're not going to like half-ass this and it's not going to like get blown away and they're not going to let the fucking IDF use it to launch like hostage rescue missions that they killed 200 civilians in 400 odd civilians just you know and then they get four four guys back and one of them complains oh my god family i was placed

made me a birthday cake sarcastic

they made me they made me do the dishes

oh my god it's it's real isis stuff isn't it you know like yeah

not to say that it's not also a war crime on a technical basis but like come on dude yeah meanwhile the palestinians who make it out of the israeli torture camps are like yeah, they shove the metal rod up my anus.

Yep.

You know?

Yeah, I think disrepancy here.

If the IDF limited itself and its mistreatment of captives to sarcastic birthday cake, I would have probably way fewer criticisms, but they don't.

So I do.

Sarcastic birthday cake is going to stick in my head for a minute.

But yeah, so once again, Joe Biden is the most craven motherfucker in the world.

Good word for it.

He should be protested against every day of his life.

This thing's an embarrassment to everyone involved.

Yeah, I feel like I want to take this peers' fucking badge, you know?

It's an embarrassment to the force.

Yeah.

I mean, the Army Transportation Corps should be disbanded at this point.

Bring back to the CVs.

What the fuck's going on?

I don't know.

I'm already exhausted.

Yeah.

So

obviously, horrible genocide continuing in Palestine.

You know, if

they keep protesting,

November, you and Devin are doing like a stream for some folks trying to get out of Gaza, right?

Yeah, we were doing.

So I know Devin will have more details on this than I do, but they were in touch with a guy and his family who are in Gaza who has a GoFundMe.

And I'm sure we can put that link in.

I think we're now also trying to do some more like charity stuff, whether that's like medical medical aid for Palestinians or like the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund.

But basically the upshot of this is that our stream, which is traditional Scrunch, Scrunch, S-C-R-E, fucking hell, S-C-R-E-N dot C-H is the web link.

The Mondays we're doing fundraisers, the Thursdays we're just doing like regular streaming.

And we've raised a bunch of money already and hoping to do more so in future.

I think we should put some donation links in as well in here.

Sure.

What is it?

It costs like some absurd amount of money to get out the Rafa border crossing, which is closed.

Right now it's like closed indefinitely because the IDF has cut it off.

I don't want to like be in a position of saying that we can like pay to get people through the border because we can't.

And right now it's just a situation of like funding people's like living expenses as best we can.

And even then, that's limited in the sense that like if the IDF wants to like drop a bomb on your head, there's nothing we or anyone can do to stop them.

The only person who can is Joe Biden, who

you get an aid package airdropped on your head

several times.

Exactly.

And yeah, I would say the only other takeaway from this is to

never, ever trust the actions of the federal government or the United States more generally, because even the humanitarian stuff is like always has an ulterior motive attached to it and is also often terribly dumb just in terms of sheer incompetence.

Yeah, I'll buy that.

A A lesson that we all should have learned in the past 20 years at some point, but like just reinforced and undermined again here.

I think this particular ship may actually come up later in the

podcast.

The Roy P.

Benavidez.

Yeah,

figure out what class that is.

It won't be a U.S.

Navy.

It'll be like a naval auxiliary, like the equivalent of a Royal Fleet auxiliary.

Like USNS or something.

Yeah.

Like the hospital ships.

But

anyway, so yeah, Pier,

used for war crimes, actually.

It's a Bob Hope class roll-on, roll-off

cargo ship.

It is, it is a USNS, yeah.

Okay, that's not the one I was thinking, not the class I was thinking of then.

Um, anyway, that will come up later, though.

A similar ship.

Um, anyway, in other news,

oh, shit.

I'm loving the graphics gore happening here.

Yes, I know.

Governor Kathy Hochl has, at the very last minute, decided that the MTA congestion pricing plan in New York City, which would charge $15 to drive your car into Manhattan below 60th Street, she decided, well, fuck you.

Drop dead.

Yeah, she doesn't like it because she heard some people in a diner talking about it.

New Jersey, yes.

No, it was a diner.

It was a diner next to Grand Central Terminal.

No, it wasn't.

It was in New Jersey.

Fuck it.

It's all New Jersey.

Yeah.

I feel like.

That's what she said.

She did the weird press conference where she said New Jersey like three times in a row and then backtracked over it.

It was very strange.

Yeah.

I mean, I feel like in some ways, this is one of the few things in which the UK is better off than you guys in that like our big like political controversy in London was like we already had congestion pricing for for like a decade at this point and our big thing was like a sort of ultra low emission zone.

If you guys can't even get like congestion pricing through the door, then you know, God help us.

And fucking, like, you know what?

All right.

Once the fucking like axis of resistance or whatever

like achieves global hegemony and Xi Jinping has like control of the United States, just pedestrianize Manhattan and also like any other.

Manhattan should like not have

car access at all.

The thing here is this had been.

planned and legally mandated since 2019.

Even Governor Cuomo supported this.

Governor Cuomo.

Yeah.

But the,

you know, this was due to go in effect on June 30th.

It was that close.

And it like municipal bonds had already been sent out,

you know,

based on the revenue this would bring in.

You know, this was going to fund $15 billion of improvements.

to the subway.

This was crucial for funding expansions of the subway on Second Avenue.

And she just comes in at the last second.

It's like, I heard someone at a diner say they were annoyed by it.

So we're postponing this.

She didn't say cancel because there's some questionable, there's some questions about whether she can cancel it.

But now that all the equipment's installed, the contracts have been signed, the bonds are bonded,

she's just like, no.

It hurts New Jersey's feelings.

It's a beautiful piece of like state government rat fucking then.

Yeah, so there's a lot of there's a lot of

protests which have been going on against this.

A lot of New York Democrats are very, very mad about this.

The MTA is mad about it.

Everyone's mad.

No one likes this decision except for two or three people at the diner that she overheard, apparently.

But this is

one of the stupidest things to happen.

in New York City.

I mean, it's all sort of couched in, well, we have to, you know, protect New York businesses and whatever.

Her suggested way to compensate for this was a significant increase to the payroll tax in New York City.

So, you know, that's

stupid.

But yeah,

it looks like she may not have the legal authority to postpone it.

Because it like nominally only affects the like city of New York.

which is like municipal business, right?

Yeah, exactly.

I mean,

I understand the only legal barrier to the MTA just going through with it is one document that needs to be signed by the governor, which is possibly a clerical

matter, as opposed to like just like

quiet quitting, refusing to answer her emails.

Yeah, exactly.

Just an email that says that.

Yeah, this is this is a, I don't know, this is very stupid.

I'm going to be interested to see how this, you know,

how this continues over the next month because there's a lot, a lot of people who are very interested in getting this congestion pricing done because it is an objectively good thing.

I don't, you know, if you're one of the people who are like, this is going to hurt the two or three low-income people who drive into Manhattan every day, I'm kind of like, well, you got to break a few eggs to make an omelette.

Congestion pricing stalin.

That's what my dad says about Chairman Mouth.

So, you know,

I'm not joking.

That's a real thing.

I know.

I believe you.

Just going to hold it together to get that Cuba trip off the DSA.

Yeah, right.

So let's hope this gets reversed somehow.

I believe the lawyers are revving up for a good time on this one.

I look forward to them billing everybody involved a sort of atrocious amount of money.

I just want to take a

quick break and talk about Kathy Hochl's dead, soulless eyes.

Look at that.

Government makes you have these.

Yeah, yeah.

Oh,

I've not usually, as a fat man, one to comment on people's appearance, but I'm going to comment on her eyes that I feel draining my life force from me.

It's not like,

fundamentally, I think it's a kind of thing that happens to you in government, right?

Is you just get the kind of like life force sucked out of you.

That's why Obama like aged 25 years a second in office.

Yeah, we sure did.

We need Cuomo back that's the problem i know

wouldn't have done this guy

cuomo signed the bill to mandate this and then what else did he do roz uh a bunch of stuff a bunch of things he shouldn't have done yeah yeah um and then also i just added this in it doesn't deserve a slide but uh yes it does happy doc ellis day everyone coomst doc ellis pitched a no-hitter on lsd oh yes amazing allegedly but no we it's it's you know what We're keeping it.

He did it.

Yeah.

Shut up.

Yeah, he definitely.

He pitched a no-hitter against the San Diego Padres on this day 50-something years ago.

Beautiful piece of sporting history.

Beautiful piece of sporting history.

Yes.

Anyway, that was the goddamn news.

It was actually yesterday, but we didn't change the thing.

It was June 12th.

I stopped you fact-checking with the end of the news.

Okay.

All right.

Well, I'll just go fuck myself.

Okay, so the podcast.

Let's talk about ship

propulsion.

Okay.

All right.

So how do you move ship with this many sails?

This is a lot of sails, man.

Ship very heavy.

Yeah, ship very heavy.

How boat move, right?

Harness the power of the wind.

Big ass outboard motor.

Big ass.

You're sick of rowing.

I am.

You know?

Get back to it, slave boy.

No, I don't want tailboat.

Yeah, that's better for like, you you know, ramming speed.

You know, even those things had sails on them.

They didn't use all the rowers all the time.

But yeah, you know, sails are great.

They don't have any fuel that you have to worry about, but they don't work if there's no wind.

And, you know, it's irritating if the wind is going the wrong way.

You can still like fudge it, though.

I don't understand sailing at all.

So it's just like, it's fun.

I was so ready to like woman's plain to you there.

I was just like,

I assume Justin doesn't know about this.

As a woman of having read at least three Master and Commander novels experience, I understand it to be chiefly a matter of tacking, which is kind of asymptotically approaching the wind direction.

And the wind is kind of like, it does you a favor.

just out of like vibes or whatever.

Huh.

Okay.

I'm still confused.

I also don't understand sailing.

Sorry.

You want to sail like sort of off the wind a bit?

Oh, like

that.

Okay.

In the 1800s, we moved to steam power, right?

Our boy Isambard Kingdom Brunel

invented the fucking SS Great Eastern, and we never looked back.

That changed the world.

Now we did sort of look back.

There's still a lot of sales on stuff for a long time.

They're trying to look back now because of woke.

Yeah, exactly.

Specifically, the triple expansion steam engine shown here.

Your big marine steam engine can be a lot more efficient than, let's say, a locomotive steam engine because it just has more space, right?

So, you know, in this case, the triple expansion steam engine, the steam comes in the high-pressure cylinder.

They use it to do work.

It comes out slightly lower pressure.

It goes into the medium pressure cylinder.

They use it to do work.

It goes into the very big, low-pressure pressure cylinder.

They use it to do work, and then it's exhausted.

And in some cases, recirculated.

Same.

Yeah.

So

these early steam ships, they're typically coal-fired, and that's very labor-intensive, right?

There's a jobs program.

Yeah, well, that's the thing.

You have to have stokers.

You don't just have stokers.

The stokers are the guys shoveling the coal into the boiler.

You have multiple bunkers at the bottom of the ship, right?

And because they are emptied at uneven rates, you actually need guys called trimmers, and they just their job is to run around with wheelbarrows and shovel coal in and out of bunkers to keep them all level.

Huh.

That sounds pleasant.

I didn't know there were worse jobs than stoking.

Yes, this is abody has to start somewhere.

This is the kind of ship equivalent of the mail room.

I got promoted to stoker.

What a thought.

You keep using coal, but you you move from the triple expansion steam engine to the steam turbine down here.

Here's an exposed steam turbine.

It's got no casing.

This uses the high-pressure steam more efficiently by shoving it through a series of fan blades, right?

Not has,

you still have all the problems you had before, but now you have more RPMs.

You got more power, but it's much less efficient at low speeds.

This is for if you got to go fast.

These start to show up in like the very early 1900s.

I want to say, I forget what

the ship's name was like Turbinia or something like that.

Cool.

They just show up.

Back when they kind of did the anime waifu thing of just like, we're going to personify and feminize this concept.

Well, I think they just showed up unannounced to like a Royal Navy review or something.

And we're just like,

yeah, catch us if you can.

Oh, so when I, when I do it, I get arrested.

But like, apparently it's fine if you have like a revolutionary steam engine.

Yeah, exactly.

Eventually, we replace coal as the fuel by fuel oil, right?

Typically what we call bunker oil.

This is the worst and nastiest residue that comes out of the oil refinery.

But it's got like essential sulfur in it that the earth needs to keep you cool.

Oh, yeah.

That has been an issue.

I don't want to talk about that now.

That's going to be too much.

No, go back and listen to the geoengineering episode.

If we ever do the fossil fuels episode, listen to that.

Oh my God, why are ocean temperatures so hot?

Because you were artificially cooling it with high sulfur fuel.

Anyway,

although I think getting the sulfur out of the fuel is a net benefit.

You don't want like uncontrolled release like that.

If you're going to do geoengineering, you want a controlled release that's predictable.

Anyway, so bunker oil is very cheap.

It's very dirty.

It's full of sulfur dioxides, nitrogen oxides, all the criteria pollutants.

You got the new low-sulfur blends that are introduced now.

Yeah, the oceans are heating up because of that.

Sorry about that.

But yeah, fuel oils remove your stoking and trimming problem and can be used in existing steam engines and turbines with only a few modifications.

But ultimately for general service, eventually the internal combustion engine, the marine diesel engine, won out, right?

It's much more fuel efficient at all speeds.

It's easier to maintain.

And everyone loves a three-story tall engine block, right?

Oh, yeah.

These are cool.

Yeah, they're fucking cool.

Every surface getting sort of lightly coated in oil.

Yes.

That being said, okay, there's still a lot of room in the ship being taken up by things like the huge engine, the exhaust stack, the fuel bunkers, and so on and so forth.

What if you could somehow get rid of all that, right?

Yeah, I mean, I like the sound of that.

I don't want to go back to sales, though.

Nah, sales are.

We're going to do something far more foolish.

Sales are pretty slow, generally speaking, unless you're one of those competitive sailing guys, and that's not good if you're trying to ship a lot of stuff.

Yeah, just

one insanely dehydrated guy on a sort of micro-catamaran with one of my Amazon packages.

Yeah, which is.

I'm so tired.

Just a man drinking his own piss in the middle of the Pacific Ocean to try and bring me a USB cable.

Okay, so World War II.

Have you guys ever seen Castoy?

Oh, that's good.

How would we do that?

That package was like one USB-A to USB-C cable that I immediately like forgot I needed after ordering and like tossed into the corner of the room the second I got it.

Yeah, but there.

All right, so World War II ended.

Who won?

That would be us.

We.

Who's us, Ross?

Yeah, just us.

Please ignore that.

The only country in the world.

Yes.

So we talked about the Adams for Peace program to some extent on the Project Plowshare episode.

You know, if we remember Harry Truman, he dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and he felt good about it afterwards.

He was like, yeah, that was the right decision, right?

Fuck this, fuck this Oppenheimer.

He peeped it Oppenheimer's face, yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

Dwight Eisenhower thought a little bit differently about it.

You know, owing to the fact that now he's president,

there's increasing power of atomic bombs.

There's a potential for this new hydrogen bomb that is becoming like increasingly realistic.

The genie's out of the bottle with atomic energy.

The question became how to control these new unprecedented forces, right?

He made a speech to the

UN in 1953 called Atoms for Peace.

He spoke of the sort of moral imperative.

Not to be confused with the Tom York side project.

Yeah.

Spoke of sort of a moral imperative to offset some of the deadly military aspects of atomic energy with peaceful applications, right?

For excavating.

That didn't go well.

Well, that's another episode we've done.

Just obliterated a bunch of land in Alaska, poisoned a bunch of people.

Food irradiation.

No, they didn't.

I don't.

Did they go through with this one?

I forget.

Nuclear Tupperware.

Yeah.

Uranium glass.

Yeah.

None of these things are irrelevant.

Yeah.

So

nuclear power plants.

Here's the reactor for the shipping port plant, the demonstration plant.

Is this next to a steam locomotive?

Yes.

Two pressure vessels.

That's a Pennsylvania Railroad steam locomotive.

That That is there.

What a cool picture.

Yeah, it's just two pressure vessels looking at each other.

I'm just like you.

Um, we're in love.

You but different.

Yeah, this too is Yuri, actually.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Uh, medical uses for radiation.

Wait, hold on, I have a drop for this.

Uh, let me scroll all the way back up in my thing to the letter B.

Um,

yeah, a big titty anime girl.

There you go,

very nice.

nice.

It's the only drop of you I have.

Devin edited that out from episode and sent it to me.

And I'm like, thank you.

I don't even know what the context for that does.

No, this was months and months ago, but just now I have a drop of you saying, big titty anime girl.

You know?

It's a little more enthusiastic than I feel comfortable with.

If you want to give me a more dua line read of it,

I'm sure you can grab it.

Let me talk about my sexual proclivities for two and a half hours.

Somebody will get the charts, please.

Read that unenthusiastically.

A big titty anime girl.

Well, I hope you look forward to hearing that in like a subsequent episode.

Anyway, so

G jackets and glasses, as we've established.

Yes, go on.

Food irradiation and preservation, et cetera.

That's why I got my Cobalt 60 source down here, drop and run.

Oh, you're not supposed to eat that?

No, well, no, you don't eat it, but the food goes underneath it, and then it gets disinfected.

You ever see those like food irradiation setups where it's like in order for the...

in order to do maintenance,

in order to prevent people from doing things stupid, whenever the source is exposed, it's like in order to access the area, you have to go through like a Super Mario level

to prevent people from doing idiotic things.

We'll do an episode on one of those eventually.

So, but also international cooperation to control the distribution of fissile material in order to avoid nuclear proliferation, which is the situation that arises when everyone and their mother has access to the bomb.

Yeah, for more on this, you can see the documentary Metal Gear Solid V.

Yes.

Great game.

Kind of one of the like civilizational success stories.

Like, with a few edge cases, by and large, we stopped a lot of bad people from getting the bomb, you know.

Thanks, Don Proliferation Trudy.

Yeah, one project that Eisenhower suggested was an atomic ship, a peace ship that would travel the globe with exhibits and demonstrations of new atomic technology.

And this was a sick ass idea.

Should have

again, weirdly Hideokojima-coded, but like, um, I also think a lot about the idea of like putting the UN headquarters on the like extraterritorial island between the US and Canada and just making it like a kind of UN island.

Yeah, or you put it on the nuclear ship.

Yeah.

Put it on Mars.

Fuck you, Elon.

Yeah.

Should have put the UN on a nuclear ship.

Yeah.

So this was

the seed for the NS Savannah.

In fact, it was only the following year that Congress authorized the construction of the ship.

All right.

Let's go to an old slide I had to pull out of an old episode.

Let's review how do nuclear reactors work?

It's a steam engine again.

Yes.

But it's a steam engine that instead of coal or wood, you put rocks in, but the rocks are a special rock.

You have spicy rocks, and the spicy rocks get hot in a tank of water, and they produce bubbles.

And then the bubbles turn a fan, and that produces energy, right?

That's the real simple version, at least.

you can go to school for like six or seven years about this if you want, or you could just read the slide and do a PhD dissertation on it.

It's fine.

It's all about generating heat.

Everything ultimately that's generating this sort of power is a steam engine, uh, in some form or another, you know, except for like a hydroelectric dam.

But I don't think anyone's figured out how to make that power ship.

Um,

really long wire.

Um, I

there have been uh trolley boats on canals, actually.

Wow, that's that's really cool.

Yes, it was not very cool.

One of those limiting factors that is like ultimately one of the best ways of generating electricity we've discovered is things spin.

Yeah, yeah,

things spin.

Yes.

Now, with that in mind, there were some early attempts, successful attempts at nuclear marine propulsion, right?

By 1955 or so, nuclear marine propulsion is, if not fully proven, certainly well on its way to be.

This is the USS Nautilus.

Liam and I have been here.

Yep.

Shout out to Admiral Hyman Rickover.

Hell of a name.

Yeah, they don't let you be called Hyman anymore

because of Woke.

Exactly.

The man who was the father of the nuclear navy.

And also, you have to become an admiral when you're named that because then people have to stop laughing at you.

This is a good point, yeah.

Or because you could just send a

peacekeeper missile through their doorbell.

Yeah, this is the thing.

Like boy named Sue doctrine, give your kids embarrassing names.

It will make them unspeakably powerful.

Make them into admirals.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So the USS Nautilus was built by the Electric Boat Company of New London, Connecticut.

Hey, we've been there.

Yes.

Electric Boat was originally they made like small pleasure vessels that were powered by batteries.

And then one day they stepped up their game.

So, what if one of these was underwater and had a bunch of like missiles on it?

And was powered by a nuclear reactor.

So, this was the first nuclear-powered submarine and the first nuclear-powered vessel of any kind.

You can still go see it in Groton, Connecticut.

Nuclear surface vessels soon follow.

You've got up here the USS Bainbridge.

This is a cruiser, right?

The USS Long Beach, which has a big cube on it.

Yeah, incredible cube.

I love this cube.

Yeah.

I forget.

I think the cube was meant for one thing, and then they wound up putting missiles in it instead.

I don't know the purpose of the cube, or I don't remember.

I read it on the internet, and then I forgot.

Nice.

The cube is not the subject of this episode, so I forgot it.

Here we have, of course, the USS Enterprise,

big-ass aircraft carrier.

Host to at least one race riot, if I'm remembering my carriers correctly.

Also, John McCain set it on fire one time, I'm pretty certain.

I believe you're correct.

Prank gone wrong.

It might have been the USS Forest or I don't remember.

I don't remember my carriers.

But yeah, no, I mean, it's like you said, it's a proven technology.

It's also very helpful that one of the things that you need for a nuclear power is a continued supply of water to cool the thing.

Hard to run out of that in a boat.

Yes, exactly.

I mean, you can if you lose power and the

distillation thing, I forget the naval term for it, stops working.

But the thing about nuclear power is it's very reliable.

Yeah, and it was forest troll.

I just looked.

And especially with submarines, too, you're like, again, you're dealing with like pressure vessels.

And if you have a lot of expertise dealing in like the engineering and maintenance of like pressurized vessels, then you can kind of tack on some like nuclear stuff to that pretty easily.

Oh, yeah.

It's just a heavy-duty pressure vessel inside another heavy-duty pressure vessel.

Yeah.

It's like a ban marie, technically.

Yeah.

Probably.

So now these, these are the first three ships of the nuclear navy.

They carry out this demonstration mission in 1964 called Operation Sea Orbit.

They circumnavigate the globe with several lengthy detours in 65 days without refueling.

I don't think this had been done before.

Certainly not.

It has been done before.

Well, you probably could have done it if you had like an entire like bulker full of coal.

Yeah, the Pacific Pacific would have been unforgiving, I would think.

Just start consuming the cargo.

Just single-handedly changing the terrain of like imperialism everywhere because you don't need coaling stations anymore.

Exactly.

Naval reactors proved to be practical, reliable, very powerful, and even economical.

These ships would almost never require refueling, though those rare refuelings would be a lengthy and complicated process.

But those refuelings were years apart, right?

Right.

It's every 10 years, right?

I could be wrong on that.

I believe something like that.

Yeah.

I mean,

the only issue was that they use this expensive, highly enriched, weapons-grade uranium to save space, right?

Oh, Jesus.

Yeah.

Even back then, it was known that this stuff really shouldn't be in civilian hands, but you know, there must be ways around that, right?

Welcome to the lock.

Welcome to the General Dynamics Electric Boat DIY nuclear.

This Boy Scout built a carrier carrier air group and a shed.

I mean, clearly the only answer to this is to federalize, nationalize, and militarize the entire civilian shipping fleet of the world.

All of

Connecticut, right?

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, the United States Merchant Marine was basically a Navy auxiliary force as a whole at this point in time.

I do think that we should send in the National Guard to Connecticut if for no other reason than to make New London more exciting.

Just liven things up a bit.

Yeah.

I do like, by the way, on the on the Nautilus, you see that it has a couple of decorations like for the ship.

It has a couple of efficiency E's,

which is a thing that started in, I think, the Second World War,

where it's like, yeah, the most efficient ship in its like squadron or class or whatever gets to paint a big E for efficiency on the like, in this case, the sail.

And I just think every time that I see it, especially a ship that's got a few of them, I just think, E, E, E.

I actually, yep, I knew that drop was coming.

I was, I was kind of like, why hasn't she done it yet?

I was scrolling.

I had to scroll for these things.

I had to scroll away from big titty anime girl for that.

Yeah, you gotta, you gotta, you gotta, you gotta, you know, kill some time.

Well, you know, you get find the drop.

Yeah, that's right.

I, uh, so

this looks like a vessel ripe for a gigantic nuclear reactor, right?

Take out the smokestacks.

Yeah.

Two beautiful nuclear reactors.

Make this thing basically a giant speedboat.

Probably still need at least one smokestack, right?

That's a cooling tower.

This is the SS United States, of course.

Currently, rotting in South Philly.

Yeah, currently rotting in South Philly, involved in a major lawsuit because

whoever Steve Vedor and company wants to kick it out.

You know, in which case it would probably be scrapped.

But anyway, so this was, this still holds the blue ribbon for One Direction fastest

Atlantic crossing.

BTS fastest Atlantic crossing.

Yeah.

I should be killed probably.

So in the early 50s, ocean liners like this, they're still competitive for transoceanic travel, but need more power to go more faster, right?

They also have the problem of lengthy refueling times, which means they can't sail nearly as often as owners might like them to.

Meanwhile, all of these guys are getting their lunches eaten by airlines.

Not quite yet, but they will soon.

Cargo ships are less affected by refueling times because loading and unloading was so labor-intensive, but they could be more efficient and spend less time refueling if, let's say, they were nuclear, right?

They could also be bigger, though the economics of very large ships didn't make much sense in 1955 because, again, loading and unloading is so slow and labor-intensive.

The first modern container ship, the SS Ideal X, only launched that year, 1955, and the truly modern global standardized shipping container was still decades away.

Read more on that later.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But otherwise, everything has to be like break bulk and it has to be handled through whatever your country's kind of organized, crime-controlled longshoreman's union is.

Yes.

Not guys you want getting their hands on the like uranium, also.

Super weapons grade, yeah.

Suitcase nukes coming to a business disagreement near you.

Nice neighborhood you got here.

Be a shame of someone irradiating that.

Oh, the nuclear mob.

That's a.

Yeah.

Nevertheless, the Department of Energy, the Department of Commerce, and the Maritime Administration were going to have a go at it.

Excuse me, not Department of Energy, the Atomic Energy Commission.

Sure.

So they start designing the first nuclear ship, the NS Savannah, right?

So Savannah is the demonstrator, right?

It's the peace ship.

And as such, was not built for economy.

it was built to show the world the practicalities of naval nuclear power so it was built to these sort of strange almost obsolete specifications right savannah was half a passenger ship half a cargo ship right weird okay yeah so you have uh in the fore you have these four big holds right uh in the aft you have two right uh and then the reactor which we'll get to in a moment goes here right And then the main superstructure with the amenities and the passenger accommodations is here,

right?

Other than the reactor and associated propulsion system, the ship was actually built with some surprisingly old-fashioned equipment for the day.

The idea being that as a demonstrator, only the most tried and true equipment should be used since they didn't want any newfangled problems with newfangled equipment on top of whatever problem

the reactor was going to have.

Yeah, it's bad news of the president's like peaceful Atom ship, just like, you know.

Breaks into like the Titanic, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Um, now this proved to be a bad idea, as we'll get to later.

Um, the one, the one very modern thing it did have, other than the reactor, was somewhere up here it had big, new, fancy fin stabilizers.

I'm sorry, did you say big titty anime girl?

No, oh, I thought you said big titty anime girl.

Hold on.

Hold on.

Hold on.

These did, in fact,

break on the first voyage.

A big titty anime girl.

It's a maiden voyage, you dweeb.

This ship was designed by George G.

Sharp, Incorporated, a firm which actually only went under just recently, having completed some of the newer Staten Island ferries.

And this ship was going to be built at New York Shipbuilding in Camden, Camden, New Jersey.

Oh, of course.

Which is maybe the source of Governor Hochul's confusion about where our constituency is.

New York Shipbuilding is not in New York.

It's in New Jersey, in Camden, which is not even near New York.

It's aspirational, you know,

for people who want to live in New York or ships, I guess.

So if we look at a look here, there's a veranda, which is cool.

We'll get some pictures of that in a bit.

Oh, hell yeah.

One thing to note here with the plan, you can see here's the reactor, and then just across the hallway, hey, staterooms.

I mean, why not?

Listen, depends on how thick and lead-based that wall is, but very.

Oh, that's that's

hope.

Yeah, here we go.

Oh, yes.

Yeah, let's talk about the power plant here.

This reactor was built by Babcock and Wilcox.

They're boilermakers.

I thought they were based in the UK.

They're not.

They're actually...

They had a UK division, but they were based in Providence, Rhode Island.

Really?

I always thought they were British.

I was a little proud of that.

It sounds like such a British thing, like Babcock and Wilcox.

Very, very good.

It sounds like that's two men in a shed in West Yorkshire.

And, you know, being kind of like, you know, boilermakers to the Queen.

And you're telling me this whole time they're just like Italians or whatever from Rhode Island.

Oh, God.

Because they did

the TMI reactor too from Three Mile Island as well.

Babcock and Wilcox are both like anglicized Italian names.

I don't care to speculate on the originals.

Babcocki and Wilcoxo.

Oh, Wilcoxo, of course.

I think those guys were like wrongly executed for like anarchist terrorism.

Here's to you, Nicola and Bart.

Originally, the plan had been to use a nearly identical reactor to that of the USS Nautilus, but aspects of that design were still classified.

So a whole new commercial marine nuclear reactor was designed.

Now, NS Savannah's nuclear reactor managed to make use of 4.5% U-235 enriched uranium, which also meant it had to be relatively large compared to the military nuclear reactors because those ran on weapons-grade uranium, which was 50% U-235.

Yeah, but the fucking Eisenhower is like, we cannot have the like five families get access to weapons-grade uranium.

Yeah, no, we can't, we can't do that.

Um, we're only going to lend nuclear technology to our trusted allies, like Pakistan.

Oh, okay.

Don't worry, they won't figure out how to make a bomb with this.

Who else did we get?

We gave it to the Israelis at the same time, I believe.

Don't worry about it.

It was the French who gave it to the Israelis.

I thought it was the French, too.

Maybe it was the French.

Oh, the Israelis gave it to South Africa, right?

Yeah, allegedly, yeah.

It was like a venereal disease.

I got it from Agnes.

Yeah, exactly.

So this is a pressurized water reactor, right?

So there's coolant water in a continuous cycle.

It's kept under very high pressure at all times.

It flows through the reactor to where it's heated to many times its boiling point, but because it's under such high pressure, it doesn't boil, right?

Within the containment chip vessel.

This superheated pressurized water then flows into a heat exchanger where it heats water for the main steam loop, right?

And that now cool pressurized water is cycled back into the reactor and, you know, that goes all the way around.

The steam flows out of the heat exchanger, out of the pressure vessel, into the turbines, right?

Thus, all the nasty radioactive stuff stays in the containment vessel and the steam loop stays uncontaminated.

You're really putting that water in a situation.

Yeah,

the water is very angry.

The water in a high a pressurized water reactor is not happy.

It does not enjoy this.

So a big issue with nuclear reactors, which is that they're radioactive,

and we haven't developed any kind of lightweight radiation shielding.

And if they get banged up,

if they get banged up, bad things happen, which is a big concern on a moving vessel.

Yeah, superheated frigginess.

Yeah.

Superheated pressurized water is very angry, so a pipeline rupture, anything like that would be very bad.

So NS Savannah needed a pretty hefty containment vessel.

I just pulled this straight out of the National Register listing here.

The vessel is made up of a 35-foot diameter cylindrical section with

hemispherical ends.

It has an overall length of 50 feet.

The wall thickness, varying from about two and a half inches to almost four inches of carbon steel, was designed to withstand a pressure of 186 PSIG.

PSIG is gauge pressure.

That means you're

measuring it from one atmosphere as opposed to PSIA, which is measured from vacuum.

So, this PSIG is the pressure that results from the rupture of a primary coolant pipe and the instantaneous release and expansion of the

contents of the primary coolant system.

Does take out all of those staterooms with it, though.

Yeah.

No, no, that stays entirely in the containment vessel.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

It would just now be a horrible 100 and something PSI,

you know,

if something was in there, it would be vaporized.

but probably no one would be in there when it's running.

Yeah, don't worry about that.

Yeah.

Well, they would be dead from radiation already if they were in there.

So

two 24-inch by 18-inch manholes in the lower portion of the vessel and two 42-inch diameter manholes in the upper portion of the vessel provide access to the containment vessel.

If the ship sank, the two lower manholes were designed to open inwardly under an external head pressure of 100 foot of water.

This allowed flooding and prevented the collapse of the containment vessel in the event that the ship sunk.

So it was designed to remain safe, even if the thing sank.

Now,

except when entry was necessary, the containment vessel remained sealed.

If entry was required, it could be done 30 minutes after the reactor was shut down, once the radiation level within the vessel was below 200 millirem per hour.

I got to be honest with you, I don't want to get in the containment vessel.

No, please don't.

I don't like that.

People tended to avoid it.

Yeah, that tracks.

All right.

I got some stuff about it that's actually stupider later in the presentation.

Oh, boy.

Oh, jeez.

The bottom half of the containment vessel rests in a cradle of steel surrounded by a wall of reinforced concrete four feet thick.

The top half of the containment vessel is encased in a six-inch layer of lead plus a six-inch layer of polyethylene.

In addition, both sides of the containment vessel are protected by a 24-inch thick collision mat constructed of alternate layers of one-inch steel and three-inch redwood lumber.

Oh, unsustainable.

According to design, they killed like a thousand-year-old tree for this.

Yeah.

Hey, you're not building too many reactors, though.

Go to the boat.

Yeah.

We plant another one.

According to design estimates, in the event of a broadside collision opposite the reactor space, the ramming ship would have to penetrate 17 feet of stiffened ship structure.

That's your stateroom.

Oh, okay.

The heavy collision won't get pooled.

What if everyone were a Ford expedition?

Yeah.

The heavy collision bulkhead, two feet of collision mat, one and a half feet of reinforced concrete shielding, and the reactor containment vessel before the reactor plant could be damaged.

So, God will, you have to take like a direct missile strike as opposed to just some asshole at a boat.

This was designed to get Andrea Doriad and win.

It's a beautiful, hubristic moment of this thing being designed to fight the sea.

It was designed to fight the Stockholm because that had happened like just before they started designing this.

I don't like that my, I'll tell you what, I don't like that my stateroom is

the first line of defeat that you don't like to get another boat.

No, you're in the strengthened staterooms.

That's the thing.

Ah, yeah.

All right, I feel very safe now.

Let's do like rabbit attack perfectly donks off my window.

Yeah.

All right, guys.

Now, the actual steam turbines have these sort of weird features to accommodate the wetter steam that you got from this sort of reactor than a land-based power.

I don't like the phrase.

Yeah, you have, it's so when you when you have a land-based reactor, it heats things to a much higher temperature than this does.

You get what's called dry steam.

This is producing saturated steam because it's not getting to the same temperatures.

Ah, okay.

So it's less efficient.

I'm going to it is less efficient, but it doesn't need to be that efficient.

Okay, because

we're powering a boat, not like a town.

Not like a town.

Yeah, I don't need a gigawatt of power.

I need, I think this is rated for 74 megawatts of heat.

So power was sent to the propellers by means of a big ass shaft.

Just a big rotating shaft.

Yeah.

They had two big

Fairbanks Morse diesel generators on standby in case of a loss of nuclear power.

This thing was designed for 20,000 horsepower, but actually put out 22,000 horsepower in testing for a maximum speed of 24 knots.

It's pretty fast.

Yeah.

Yeah, it went fast.

Here's some pictures of the thing under construction in the fucking massive New York building dry dock.

Yeah.

Here's it being launched.

It was christened by Mamie Eisenhower on July 21st, 1959, but it took another two years to finish the ship and fire up the reactor.

They finally delivered it to the operator, States Marine Lines, on May 1st, 1962 for sea trials, which I said it goes extremely well in the notes, but there were some problems.

But, you know, we'll get to those in a bit.

But the ship was very

fast.

It was very powerful.

It was actually very reliable.

Other than, again, some issues we'll get to in a bit.

So anyway,

let's look at the brochure.

I do love this kind of like futurist like design, color scheme, lettering even.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Big fan.

Like very Thunderbirds, actually.

From gracefully flared bow to modified cruiser stern, the streamlined NS Savannah measures 595 and a half feet overall.

Her beam is 78 feet.

Her draft 29 and a half feet.

Capable of cruising at 21 knots.

The 22,000-ton ship carries 60 passengers and 9,400 tons of cargo.

Should we address why it's called the NS Savannah?

That NS stands for nuclear ship.

Nuclear ship.

Yes.

All of the stuff that prefixes civilian ships is mostly these days, like propulsive methods.

Like SS was like steam ship, and then it was MV for motor vessel.

And so this needed a new one.

So nuclear ship, NS.

Nuclear ship, yes.

So it carries 60 passengers.

It has a crew of 124.

I mean, that's luxury.

That's real like personalized personalized service, you know?

It's a demonstrator.

Me in my extremely luxury, bulletproof cabin with two dudes just looking after me all the time.

Look at some of the interiors.

So onboard a man of diet.

I take back everything I said about liking the way it looks.

Oh, I love this.

Oh, feed me the orange weird, whatever the hell this is.

This is just a couch?

The 1960s.

I enjoy the sort of tracking world map on the back behind the ship model post.

This is a ship model of the SS Savannah, which was the first steam ship to cross the Atlantic, although it did it mostly under sail.

Everything else I despise.

Oh, I love this.

A lot of this, a lot of this.

I'll have some nicer pictures later.

These are just what I found early on.

This is better picture.

This is terrific.

What are you talking about?

The middle one is the stateroom that you're in.

You're watching the ramming attack get effortlessly deflected.

There's two crew members there with you.

With MP5s ready to turn fire on some civilian coal vessel.

Yes.

This is a pretty good-sized stateroom, to be honest.

Yeah, we've been in much worse staterooms.

Not staterooms.

We've just been in much worse rooms.

Yeah, exactly.

Okay, so this is the amenities section.

Equipped with 30 air-conditioned staterooms, each with an individual bathroom, a dining facility for 100 passengers, a lounge that could double as a movie theater, a veranda, a swimming pool, and a library.

They also had a shuffleboard court.

Ultimate boomer luxury.

Yeah.

Here's the promenade deck.

See the main lounge back here.

The veranda here.

That's where the bar was.

Swimming pool back here.

So you can look out from the bar.

Trying to think.

This should be the girls.

Weird how quiet it must have been.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Like, no, no engine noise, no sale noise either.

Yeah, no engine noise, no sale noise.

Just the knowledge that you are safe in your stateroom and there's a nuclear reactor 10 feet away.

Is it Coleridge, the quote that, you know, the sailor lives like a plank away from eternity?

Well, you live like a plank away from radioactivity, I guess.

Yes.

Maybe it'll kill you fast.

Maybe it'll kill you slow.

Who knows?

Here are the nicer pictures from the brochure.

Oh,

the fucking carpet.

Horrible.

Oh, yes.

You got the luxurious lounge, can double as a movie theater.

You see the main lobby with the weird couch next to the purser's desk.

I do like the couch, actually.

Yeah, the couch is cool.

Bar stools.

The bar stools are cool.

Bottom line.

We'll talk about the sculpture here in a second.

You have

this big curved relief back here is called Fission.

It's by Pierre Bordell, who's son of French sculptor Antoine Bordel.

And the guy also did a bunch of art in Cincinnati Union Terminal.

This is the veranda.

It's got the dance floor.

You can look over at the pool.

You know, you can see the sexy 1960s women.

And then, okay, over here.

You can hear 1960s women dysphoria and radiation sickness at the same time.

You never want both.

This sculpture back here is actually a wine rack,

and it's based on a trilinear chart of the nucleides.

Oh, fucking dweebs.

Yeah.

I love to go to nerd prom.

I love the

whatever the what I can only assume are the boost gauges over here on the right.

Oh, that I'm sure that.

Well, I think this one's a clock.

This one's a clock.

Who knows what this one is?

They have a lot of time.

I think that's local time.

Those are two of those are 24-hour clocks.

Because of the future.

yeah yeah

these tables here note uh ashtray in the middle of course but also these were electro-luminescent you know they light up green like it's radioactive oh to remind you of the cancer that you're getting

the the the rubber made trash can is not original oh okay

yeah uh you have this uh

i believe bronze brass sculpture of the original ns savannah uh right there in the lounge.

Or excuse me, this is the main dining room.

Here's what it would have looked like in a contemporary time.

The thing that's like overwhelming me about this is how blocky all the rooms are by necessity.

So you get a bunch of like interesting 60s design with curves and shapes and stuff.

And then it's so obviously the most

overbuilt, like riveted, like...

concrete looking like room situation like you are in a room

i know this is a strange thing to say, but like you gotta do, you gotta compromise because you know it's half cargo, half passenger ship.

Jack of all trades, master of none.

Yeah, I'm not saying I'm on the kind of like, you know, 19th century, like great cavern offer, like a warship or anything, but like it's, it's, it's interesting where the kind of compromise seeps in, you know?

Hi, it's Justin.

So this is a commercial for the the podcast that you're already listening to.

People are annoyed by these, so let me get to the point.

We have this thing called Patreon, right?

The deal is you give us two bucks a month, and we give you an extra episode once a month.

Sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but you know, it's two bucks.

You get what you pay for.

It also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes.

So you can learn about exciting topics like guns, pickup trucks, or pickup trucks with guns on them.

The money we raise through Patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one.

Anyway, that's something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month.

Join at patreon.com forward slash WTYP pod.

Do it if you want, or don't.

It's your decision, and we respect that.

Back to the show.

All these plants, plants.

Fake plastic.

Plastic.

Oh, yeah.

It's brand new.

It's brand new.

You got fake plants.

It's the future.

Magnificent.

You know what else was the future?

Let's go to the galley.

No natural fibers.

No, no real plants.

I like that the notes say horse divorce.

Yeah.

This is the first commercial microwave oven.

Jesus, this really is the future.

Yeah, exactly.

So, this was mainly used for heating hors d'oeuvres for the passengers since it's the future, right?

Just coming out to you and being like, it's microwaved.

And because it's like 1960, you're like, what the fuck?

Holy shit.

Holy shit.

Holy shit.

As opposed to now, where like this space?

Yeah, like I've, I fucking, I watch Technology Connections.

I'm a patron of technology connections.

I understand the kind of like scientific miracles at work here.

But unfortunately, microwave cooking has become the official cooking method of depression.

That's a fight that it's not winning again.

Yeah.

But it hadn't lost it yet.

And so all of these people were just like, fucking

shit.

Yeah.

These things cost like $3,000 new, which is like $34,000 today.

And that's the whole, it's like the whole sort of like fridge size unit as well.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

This is, this is, this is definitely for commercial kitchens.

It had a whole conventional galley too.

Not everything was being heated here, but you know.

But they could say, woo, your food was cooked by radiation.

Ooh.

Yeah, in a way that's safer than just like, you know, frying the eggs on like the sort of secondary water system pipes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, I,

now that I have cooked on a train, I feel sympathy for these people.

Extending a really long spatula with a fried egg on it into the fucking pressure vessel.

Yeah.

You want to see the camera control?

The rubbox box thing.

Yeah.

Oh, fuck the idea.

Oh, that's hell.

Oh, yeah.

The floor tile.

Yeah, the

base

fucking floor tile here with the

electrons orbiting a propeller.

That's fucking great.

That's great.

Oh, that probably made it awesome.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, look how many bits of boots there are to play with.

You could push all those buttons and something cool would happen.

Uh-huh.

Maybe all of those gauges would move at once over on the left.

yeah

the warning lights across the top even there's like ceiling lights everything about this is like record the future no but like how i wish i had i like i like how it's you know a nuclear reactor controller but it also has here a ship's telegram um

Just already welding these two technologies together, huh?

Yeah, it did have a traditional ship's telegram.

Of course, yeah.

I believe there's also somewhere on here is a button to scram the reactor.

And then there's a light that shows up if the bridge orders you to scram the reactor.

Because they can't do anything directly

because that's how ships work.

Yeah.

It's mostly

a delegation, you know?

Yeah, exactly.

And for those of you who aren't familiar with nuclear reactors, scramming the reactor is when you dump the control rods in as fast as possible to

stop the reaction.

That's like an emergency shutdown.

If you you only watch Chernobyl, that's AZ5.

Yeah, I was going to say, it makes things a lot safer, except when it doesn't.

Except when it doesn't.

Well,

it's designed in a way that

a situation can happen that makes it much, much worse.

Yeah.

We're actually going to briefly mention the RBMK later in the episode.

So, you know, yeah, I don't know what any of this does, but it looks cool.

The bridge is kind of normal.

Yeah, normal style bridge.

Yeah, exactly.

Because it's just like,

I'm just running a steamship.

Um, you know, where's the steam coming from?

Don't worry about it.

I don't worry about it.

It's something else, right?

You got all your classic stuff here.

You got like your telephones, uh, you got your uh microscope laundry machine combinations, you got your champagne bucket, uh, you know, everything you need.

You got uh, you have a uh, the big helm is back there.

I don't know where the ship's telegram is.

Uh, I saw some pictures on uh Flickr, but they had all rights reserved, so I didn't put them in.

Um, you know,

anyway, anyway.

Then we get to the cargo holds.

So these are scary.

This is a fucking like unreleased Steam first-person shooter.

Yeah, like one guy was developing before he got hired at like a kind of a big studio.

This looks like the fucking back rooms in

the portal games, you know, when you escape the containment chamber.

Yeah, the Stanley Parables let itself go.

Yeah, exactly.

Because the ship was so heavily streamlined, these cargo holds had a lot of problems.

They were small.

They were difficult to access.

The cranes had limited range since they were designed to look cool instead of to function.

Same.

Since this is the demonstrator ship, right?

One of the cargo holds was exceptionally hard to use because the swimming pool was on top of it.

Oh, you really need to decide if you're passenger or cargo.

Like, not to be sort of like essentialist about this, you know, but like.

But

yeah.

So they built this thing and they ran it.

We'll talk about its early career here.

So Savannah goes to Georgia directly into

Savannah.

I was going to say likely place for it.

Yeah.

And on underway, the reactor scrams due to a faulty pressure indicator and the media reports that it almost melted down, even though that didn't happen.

I love journalism.

I love the press.

Yeah, I love panic.

I believe for a while, one of the stabilizers, which is underwater here, got jammed.

The only piece of new technology on the ship other than the reactor, it jammed and it was like listing for a good amount of time.

Yeah.

I actually don't love panic.

Yeah.

So

they go to Savannah, Georgia.

Everyone's greeted like heroes.

They spend some time there.

Then they go to New York City.

for something called Nuclear Week.

The Johnny Carson Show takes a tour of the ship.

They do a big trip out to the Seattle World's Fair.

They stay there for a while.

Lots of people are touring the ship at all of these locations, right?

They go as far out as Hawaii

and they go to Los Angeles.

They come back from Hawaii, right?

And a bad thing happens.

Oh.

Did we lose Liam?

Liam.

Liam.

I was eating dinner because I didn't get a chance to.

Oh, I see.

Okay.

Anyway, so a bad thing happens.

Savannah causes a labor dispute.

Cancelled.

Scab ship.

So the engineering crew had some frustrations with the ship over its first journeys.

There were teething problems with the reactor.

The big one being the control rod mechanism leaked hydraulic fluid into the hot reactor.

This is a very stupid problem that was solved in a very stupid way.

They sent a guy in in a radiation suit with a corking gun.

What they did.

Big daddy suit from Bioshock.

They did not fix the leak.

Oh, okay.

Instead, when the reactor was under power, the atmosphere in the containment vessel was replaced by 100% nitrogen, so the hot hydraulic fluid could not catch fire.

That's an SR-71S solution.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's magnificent, actually.

That's one of the reasons why it took a long time to get in the reactor after it had been shut down.

Because then you had to replace the nitrogen with normal air.

Incidentally, you've also made it fireproof.

Yes.

And it's great fun to laugh with your friends.

Yeah.

It's helium.

It's nitrous oxide.

Oh, yeah.

I was thinking.

Notably very flammable.

No, nitrogen.

Just ignore me.

I'm sorry.

The air conditioning system was pretty unreliable.

There were a lot of issues.

Like they had installed all this very nice, expensive carpet in the staterooms, and then it just, you know, filled up with leaked out air conditioning condensation.

Oh,

getting Legionnaire's disease on the fucking nuclear ship.

We did a bonus about that.

Yeah.

Steam generator feed pumps kept breaking down.

There was insufficient space to store radioactive waste.

Radioactive waste in this point being mostly water from leaky valves.

Putting a fucking bucket under the radioactive water pipe.

Well, it's funny because different sources, based on when they were written, say different times about this.

The one, the earlier one, I read an article in Life magazine, was like, well, they built this expensive tender barge to contain the radioactive waste that would be

discharged from the ship, and then they found out they didn't need it because they could just discharge it at sea.

Hell yeah.

And then of course

the way all the most modern source is going to say,

well, rather than use the barge that was for the purpose, they just discharged at sea, and that was the problem.

Um, and you know, to make matters worse, if you were on the engineering uh uh uh department and you were going to fix something, um, because again, this ship had largely been equipped with more old-fashioned, tried-and-true equipment, the ship's machine shop had been equipped with belt-driven machinery.

Nice,

oh, the real like orphan-mangling special, yes, in In the year of our Lord 1959, someone installed a belt-driven machine shop in the first atomic merchant ship.

You would think electricity wouldn't be too hard to come by in a nuclear ship, but some shipwrights thought otherwise.

I like to think it must have been like driven directly by like a takeoff.

uh shaft from the main shaft driving the propellers extremely reliable belt drive.

The ship does not shut down.

So this resulted in engineers getting a lot of overtime pay in addition to their already very high pay due to operating a brand new nuclear nuclear reactor?

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

These are not just, you know,

licensed mariners.

They're nuclear engineers.

You are the astronauts of like sort of merchant marine like

engineers, right?

Yeah, they should should they they they should get a lot of money because they're doing a lot of overtime they're crewing the first nuclear ship you know they went through a lot of extra training so on and so forth right

um on a merchant ship there's the deck department which has the deck officers like the captain the first mate the one or more second mates one or more third mates so on and so forth right And you have the engineering department, which has the engineering officers, right?

The first through fourth engineers, the chief engineer,

you know, know, various other people all share responsibility for different aspects of the ship's engines.

Traditionally, the deck officers are paid more than engineering, but on the Savannah, this situation was reversed.

Merely for operating a nuclear reactor.

Yes.

Oh, okay.

Okay.

Kind of nuclear aristocracy.

Yes.

Sure.

On the Savannah.

As well as with other states' marine line ships, the deck officers are represented by the International Organization of Masters, Mates, and Pilots.

And the engineers were represented by the Marine Engineers Beneficial Association.

And the masters, mates, and pilots were pissed off.

Why should these engineers make more money just because they're running a nuclear reactor?

I mean, this is going to be trivial technology by 1975.

People will have one in every car.

Sure.

It should also be noted that there were three other craft unions on board as well, but they don't come into this.

It's beautiful.

It's like one for the kind of like

deck ratings.

The stewards.

One for the stewards, one for the pastry chefs.

There's one guy who's in, like, I don't know,

there's a Teamster on board for some reason.

He just has to be there.

So in November 1962, the masters, mates, and pilots managed to bitch and moan enough that the Department of Labor appointed an arbitrator who ruled in favor of the deck officers who got a raise and a guarantee that their pay would always be higher than that of the engineers.

Oh, come on.

Yeah.

Craft unions are so fucking good.

And this creates an issue for the engineers who feel very put upon.

These guys mostly had been taken up from like the highest ranks of the merchant marine.

A lot of them had taken demotions to work on this ship, which turned out to be, at least in his first two voyages, a hell of a time to work on.

There were a lot of problems that they were sort of, you know, working through like as they were doing it.

There's a lot of dangerous unknown stuff.

There's, you know, it was

that these people put in a lot of work, right?

They can no longer negotiate for higher wages without implicitly negotiating for the deck officers, too.

without any help from the deck officers union.

So in protest, once the ship made port in Galveston, Texas, where they were going to do some mechanical upgrades to fix some of the problems, they shut down the reactor and walked off the ship.

Hell yeah.

Pretty effective action if you're the nuclear engineers.

Since you don't tend to have a lot of scab nuclear engineers sitting around.

I was about to say, you know, I take one look at that control room.

Like, I don't know what's going on.

Fuck it.

Break it with a hammer.

Yeah.

In the four years, she had made exactly one trip to the West Coast and then to Hawaii and then back to Galveston.

Now, without half her crew, she was trapped, well, due in for a European tour in only a month.

And the Maritime Administration, rather than solve this dispute, which would surely be mirrored on any future nuclear-powered U.S.

flagship, they simply decided to kick the can down the road.

They terminated the contract with States Marine Lines and handed the ship over to American Export Is Branson Lines, which was non-union.

I was joking about the scab nuclear engineers.

They spent a year training a brand new crew.

They have the plant, but we have the power, ass.

Anyway, back underway.

Look, Ma, no smokestack.

It's still a really good looking ship.

To the tune of No Hands, but I walk a flock of flame, of course.

Yeah, of course.

After system upgrades that

really helped the ship a lot, and servicing in Galveston, the new non-union crew sails for New York, then Bremer Haven, Hamburg, Dublin, Southampton.

They subsequently made several transatlantic journeys in 1964 as a passenger-carrying ship.

They reached as far as Athens.

There was a Pacific trip planned, but canceled when the Japanese, the Australians, and the New Zealanders wouldn't let them dock at their ports.

Nuclear-free zones.

Yeah, well, I believe we eventually fixed that, and they now let our aircraft carriers go there.

Oh, American Hedge Road, it never fails.

Exactly, exactly.

By 1965, after 90,000 miles and 848 passenger trips,

or

848 passengers carried total, NS Savannah's staterooms and passenger areas were closed.

The crew was reduced to 65 compared to 45 for a comparable oil-fired steamship.

And American Export is Branson Lines decided to operate the thing solely as a cargo vessel.

Since, you know, by this time, the the airlines really were going to eat the passenger line's lunch.

Pan Am had 747s on order.

This was over, right?

And nobody's like expressing any interest in building any other nuclear ships, right?

Well, we'll get to the reasons for that in the next slide, but yes.

Now, this is the sort of phase of the career of the vessel where there's a lot of criticism of it, which I think is not very well-founded.

The economics of operating Savannah as a cargo vessel were not good because that's not what she was designed for.

Even despite the Atomic Energy Commission providing free fuel, the ship only grossed $2.6 million in revenue in 1967.

She was awkward to load and unload and did not carry very much cargo for her size.

In 1968, after six years at sea, she was refueled for the first time.

A new bundle of 32 fuel rods was ready and waiting to go in Galveston.

But when the ship made port and the reactor was cracked open, they found they only really needed to replace four rods and rearrange the rest of them.

Once the bugs had been worked out, this ship was a stellar performer, extremely reliable, and only expensive inso much as the reactor was an unrefined design and the ship was just not built for the purpose it was now being used for.

Sure.

Future reactors could be made to be less labor-intensive.

They could be smaller.

They could be lighter.

They could be more efficient.

This was not to be.

No.

It's not perfect.

It's not perfect.

As soon as you get containerization in, you iterase on the reactor design a few times.

Pretty soon you have a whole fleet of like, you know,

very safe, very efficient, very, very powerful, fast, like nuclear cargo ships.

Oh, yeah.

And we don't accidentally geoengineer our way out of and then into some severe climate change.

Yes.

Well,

fucking 60 years of like the internal combustion engine at sea that we could have just been doing this instead.

I mean, granted, it it could have led to like Turbo 911, but like, I don't know.

Yeah.

So, anyway, here's this is Malcolm McLean.

Um, he didn't come up with the container, but he perfected it.

Uh, his company, Sea Land,

operated, uh, they introduced this 35-foot standard container that could fit on trucks, it could fit on trains, and it could fit on specially made ships.

Here's a uh, uh, here is the SS Ideal X down here, which was a former World War II tanker.

Yeah,

It was built to carry Malcolm McLean's containers, right?

Of course.

Or is rebuilt to carry those containers.

It could also carry oil at the same time it was carrying containers.

He was also instrumental in the International Standards Organization adopting international container standards, though to his chagrin, they approved only 20 and 40-foot containers, leaving his huge fleet of 35-foot containers useless except in domestic domestic American service.

Brilliant when somebody lights up.

Yeah, exactly.

When Freddie Fields, who was a top official of the International Longshoremen's Association, was asked what he thought of the newly fitted container ship, the SS Ideal X, Field replied, I'd like to sink that son of a bitch.

Good thing we didn't give the guy access to like uranium, maybe.

Yeah.

So these containers seriously reduced the greatest expenses in shipping, namely Steve Adoring, right?

Yeah, we turned a sort of like highly employed industry into like one with way fewer.

Three guys, yes.

Three guys, yeah, one guy in a crane.

It takes a long time to load and unload ships.

It was cumbersome, frequently resulted in damage to cargo.

A lot of high-valued cargo tended to walk away, right?

We solved that problem.

Port theft never happens now.

I'm reliably informed.

Oh, yeah.

This made shipping expensive in general.

It was one of the motivations for new propulsion systems to reduce costs where it was thought possible.

Sea Land turns this on his head, as evidenced by up here, this is the SL7,

a very fast container carrier.

This is built in 1972.

With loading so fast and economical, suddenly it was also economical to just jam the biggest power plant possible into the thing and haul ass at 33 knots all the damn way across the ocean, rolling coal the entire time.

This will not cause us any problems.

This thing kills like 50 whales a second and also dumps like a sort of rock full of sulfur worth into the atmosphere every time.

These ships are actually still around.

They operate for the Navy as the Algol class fast sea lift ships.

Sometimes you're just condemned to still be useful, you know?

Yes.

They go really, really, really, really, really fast.

Please let me

be too useful to die.

And speaking of the Navy, the other downfall of the Savannah was, of course, the Navy.

We didn't have the globalized economy that we have today in the 1960s.

The largest customer by far for the U.S.

Merchant Marine Fleet was the U.S.

Navy and the Department of Defense.

They had a lot of say into what kind of ships were needed.

And internal, Department of Defense studies conducted in the mid-1960s said that barring any future fluctuations in the price of oil,

conventional oil-fired ships would be more economical than nuclear power indefinitely.

I sense the presence of Robert McNamara.

Yeah.

You know, and with this, the Atomic Energy Commission and Maritime Administration began to cut back funding for civilian nuclear maritime propulsion, halting efforts to build these more efficient reactors that would be needed for a nuclear civilian fleet.

You stupid assholes.

Yeah.

One source I read said that

during the oil crisis,

even with the larger crew,

Savannah would have been more economical to operate than a comparable steamship.

So, what happens to the ship, right?

Despite a pretty stellar service record where even American Export and Branson lines said it was the most reliable ship in their fleet, the numbers just didn't add up for Savannah, and she was retired and defueled in 1971.

Cowards.

She had traveled 450,000 miles, visited 32 domestic ports.

There are vans driving around with more miles on the clock than that.

Yeah, I can sell you one, actually.

45 foreign ports in 26 countries, consuming a grand total of 163 pounds of uranium fuel.

Oh, gee, that's wow.

Yeah, that's far less than I would have thought.

Yes.

Very, very efficient.

I want to say that that would, you know, if it were oil fueled, it'd be 29 million million gallons.

Jesus.

Yeah.

This left a problem.

Just because she was defueled didn't mean that the ship wasn't radioactive as all hell in that containment structure, right?

So they can't scrap it.

You can't have guys like climbing over it with like cussing torches.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You can't just, you know, well, you probably could ditch it in a laying.

They do, you know, that just a bunch of people would get cancer.

One plan was to send her to Savannah, Georgia as part of an Eisenhower peace memorial.

And NS Savannah was, in fact, sent to Savannah.

The memorial never materialized.

Congress never released funding for it.

Just like, fuck this guy.

Yeah, fuck him.

Yeah.

She floated around several ports over the next few decades as either a museum ship or for some period of time, just sitting in the James River Merchant Marine Reserve Fleet.

What?

Yeah.

And despite requiring periodic and extremely expensive maintenance to keep the containment vessel safe, the Maritime Administration never seemed too interested in actually decommissioning the reactor properly.

Too much work.

Too expensive.

Easiest to understand.

They're harvesting

very skilled labors overtime.

Yeah.

Eventually, it wound up at Pier 13 in the Canton Marine Terminal in Baltimore, Maryland, opposite one of the very few remaining Liberty ships, the John W.

Brown.

That's a different John Brown.

Yeah.

And you can now go visit on certain days, which are announced well in advance on the NS Savannah Association website.

There's one this Saturday, which will have been last Saturday when this episode comes out.

Not if we can help it.

Damn it, let's go.

I would recommend going sooner rather than later, though, since the Maritime Administration finally got off its ass and started properly decommissioning the reactor in 2019.

As of

2023, it has started showing the ship to interested parties, hopefully for permanent preservation.

But the fate of the ship is not certain at this point.

One of the things about museum ships is they're very, very expensive to maintain.

Even if a ship is currently a museum ship, that does not guarantee its future preservation, as anyone who's familiar with the USS Barry in Washington, D.C.

would know.

I mean, if anyone is like a supervillain out there looking for a lair, this would be a great, you know, great option.

You have to supply your own reactor, but, you know.

Well, you can do that.

Braz has one in his basement.

No, that's not mine.

I like the big isotope on the outside.

Yeah, the big, I should have featured this more prominently in earlier slides, but yeah, it's so cool to look at.

I haven't been.

I still want, I got to go at some point.

It also bugs me that fewer than a thousand people got to be on it while it was underway as well.

It's crazy.

Several hundred thousand people visited it, though.

I believe it is the most visited nuclear facility ever.

Wow.

Yeah.

But yeah, it's still there.

You can go see it.

At least for the hi from me if you do.

Yeah.

Taylor, but it's a a good ship, yes.

We'll pan it for you, yeah.

Do exactly that, like a horse, you know.

Yeah, would be remiss, though, if we didn't finish this by mentioning the other nuclear merchant ships.

Yeah, why aren't like all of these, like, why aren't there hundreds of or thousands of these kicking around?

Yeah, so the Germans built one.

This is the Auto Hard.

Don't let them do that.

It is the Auto Hard.

Yeah.

Um, less impressive, more practical, more Prussian.

This was uh ore carrier, right?

right?

Far more of the ship was devoted to cargo.

It did have some passenger accommodation for like the research teams, but that was about it.

It's much less well-appointed.

You know, they're not like commissioning art for this thing.

The captain was from a Nazi U-boat, of course.

Yeah, naturally.

Despite being more practical for its primary purpose of carrying stuff, it kept being denied access to ports.

In fairness,

in fairness, the guy, you know, fucking

Oso Fortun to war crimin showing up outside your port, being like, let us in, we are normal and can be trusted around your port facilities with our uranium ship.

You would perhaps be like, no.

No, no.

I don't want no.

I don't trust this guy.

He's got an eye patch and not in a cool way.

It is kind of a cool way, but it's the evil.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm not sure why his arm keeps doing that either.

He's like something like a Twitch or something.

I don't like that.

I don't like that I'd just be called a Nudenschweide and led into a basement.

God.

I hate this.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find too much information in English.

I should have sank it.

Oh, yeah, I bet it was all from, I don't know, Dirstormer, whoever the fuck.

I don't have my shots where I can get them, you know?

Launched 1964, refueled once in 1972.

Reactor was decommissioned in 1979, converted to a diesel container ship in 1982.

Cowards, yeah.

Scrapped the Lang in 1965.

We actually realized we could do more evils this way.

We ran into numerous things.

It does more damage to the environment.

Yes.

This is a Japanese ship, the Mutsu, right?

This was nominally a cargo ship, but it was really used for research.

Not the usual kind of research that Japanese research ships.

I was about to say, I was trying to work out the whaling.

Extensive investigation into what whales taste like.

But

yeah, the Mutsu has a lot of issues with protests.

You know, there was...

It's force of habit.

You see a Japanese ship with research painted down the side.

You're like, all right, I'm getting a lot of money.

i don't want to be 731 to know in this case they had they had a

they had a minor radiation incident when they powered up the reactor uh either the first time or very early in the ship's career um and when they tried to return to the port they were blockaded by local fishermen they're like get this radioactive bullshit out of here right

um

And eventually they just were like, okay, it can return to port only if you immediately find a new home part, which they did.

This thing never carried cargo.

It covered 82,000 miles, converted to diesel in 1996.

Now they use it for research still and

whatever that is.

Monument to ignorance.

Once again, I refer back to the old poster: like radiation does not demand your fear, only your respect.

And then, of course, the smetboorput.

Oh, boy.

I see Ross atonfloot across this thing, which means we have an even split on nuclear ships between winning side and losing side of the Second World War.

Yes.

So this is the Russian one.

It is still operating.

The Russians don't like decommissioning ships.

You know who likes decommissioning Russian ships?

The Ukrainian Navy.

No one else.

Yeah, no,

this is a...

No, they just keep them like barely afloat.

Forever.

You see, the Ukrainians sank the oldest operating warship in the world a couple of months ago.

I forget what it was called, but like it was like launched in 1917.

Jesus, like a

fleet auxiliary, like I started out as like a cola and oiler, and the Ukrainians sank it with like a drone

this year.

You don't need to be doing all this, Russia.

You could just go home.

You could probably just go home, yeah.

So this is what's called a lash carrier.

That's lighter aboard ship, right?

Has a bunch of what's called lighters on board.

They're like tiny barges.

They just sort of stack them up on top of each other.

I just like fling them out there.

Yeah, if they're near a port too small to handle the ship, these are just dumped into the water and then a tugboat comes and brings them into port.

Right.

If it's not carrying that, it can also carry shipping containers.

It had the misfortune of launching only two years after the incident at Chernobyl in 1988.

The ship was launched in 1988.

Chernobyl was in 1986.

Anyway, so it experienced lots of protests on its first voyage from Murmance to Vladivostok, and ports refused entry entry to the ship.

International routes for which the ship were intended to run were limited.

No one trusted a nuclear ship

unless it had been built by the Americans.

That's right, Favor.

You guys were the only people in the world who could have done this, and you like fucked it up.

Yeah,

that sounds like us.

No one refuses entry to port for an American air.

No, because we won't land.

Oh,

I'm sorry.

Does that say port closed?

Ah, let me let me introduce you to the F-22 now.

Oh, I'm going to make Commodore Perry look like a pussy.

So it wound up running around on Arctic Circle routes.

Had a lot of difficulty refueling in the 1990s because of reasons.

Yeah,

all of that fissile material was being extracted

to the nuclear.

Yes.

Yeah,

that's going to my cousin Boris.

Yeah.

Several different Tom Clancy books are happening at once.

Yeah, exactly.

Eventually laid up in 2007, and they were almost going to scrap it, but they returned it to service in 2016.

Now it mostly does nefarious Russian military transport as opposed to, you know, our...

a good and wholesome American military transport.

Our humanitarian peer versus their nefarious military transport.

Exactly.

Also, if the Ukrainians sink this, is that going to to like fuck anybody over?

How's the Prussian missile looking?

They don't send this thing anywhere near Ukraine.

I've learned, if there's one thing I've learned about Ukraine lately, it's that that's not a disqualification from being bombed by Ukraine.

Sometimes it carries civilian cargo, but one of the most infamous incidents was relatively recently on the way down to deliver

prefab building panels to Vostok station in Antarctica, it got about as far as the equator and the propeller fell off.

Meanwhile, there's a like Ukrainian remote-controlled glider full of C4, just like one of the fucking ultra-light solar aircraft, just like circling above, just like fucking get him, get his ass.

And then it's like, no, no, I can't get his ass.

It's already, it's wounded.

They actually had to send divers down to remove another propeller to balance the ship.

And it had to sort of limp home.

Jesus.

This is like going to be a big, one of the big prestige missions for this ship.

And it's like, nah, nah, the Russian Navy, the Russian Navy going around the Horn of Africa has historically been a bad idea.

Core

incompetency.

This continues to be an issue.

Don't the Russians also have a couple of nuclear icebreakers?

I don't know if they're nuclear or not, but

I think about the Yamal, the sort of most

ship.

I believe you can take a cruise on one of these things.

They have a bunch of them, and they are actually building even more of them.

And these aren't like cargo ships.

I mean, these are used for opening navigation channels for

whatever the Russians are doing up there.

Decreasingly likely to be needed, given the whole Solar Project,

some Call of Duty plot point ship.

Northern Sea route open all year.

They got to find some ice and break it.

Hunting down the last iceberg and fucking 9-11.

Like I was like a passenger.

Yeah, a passenger.

You got to earn that shark mouth painted on the bow, you know.

Gonna have to sell it to Port of Montreal.

Open up Duluth for year-round shipping.

I don't know if it can fit in the seaway.

I guess we'll find out.

It's an icebreaker.

It's going to make itself fit.

Oh, yeah.

It's gone from icebreaker to Seaway and larger.

Yeah.

What they had to do for the

SO Northumbria, but just all the time.

Yeah.

Canal dilator.

Oh, I yeah, I watched the Gaide College the other day.

What's up?

So, what's in the future for nuclear ships?

Nor did C-Rebel.

I just talked about the Tumblr kind of jossing down Liam Trans question mark in their notebooks.

No, no.

My wife had to go to the Gaide Colleges yesterday, and I had to hear about it.

Saluting.

Yeah.

So, right now, as evidenced by the Francis Scott Keybridge being annihilated,

the ships just keep getting bigger and heavier, right?

These large container ships and bulkers, they're getting bigger.

They're bigger than the biggest aircraft carriers and have been for decades now.

Nuclear technology has improved with more inherently safe reactors, small modular reactors, things of that nature.

I don't think anyone's actually built a small modular reactor.

I might be wrong about that.

You should really get on that, fucking kick us off onto the Fallout Universe timeline.

Yeah, well, apparently, I mentioned New York shipbuilding earlier in Camden, New Jersey.

That's currently, that land is currently occupied by a company that wants to build small modular reactors.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah.

I don't know if they're going to build them right there.

It'd be very funny that you're like, yeah, we're going to build nuclear reactors in one of the most built-up areas of

the East Coast.

Well, good luck.

Yeah.

Good luck to you.

I hope you don't fuck up.

Yeah, please don't.

I like living in Philly.

Yeah, exactly.

I live across the river.

Come on.

so if you couple this with the difficulty of coming up with climate friendly propulsion ship the systems for very large very heavy ships it may just be time to reconsider the economics of the nuclear-powered cargo ship well it's that or sails and people have tried you know like sails are just not enough for something this big sure you can you can see sort of sail assisted kind of like like a plug-in hybrid effectively yeah it's like you got sail assisted you got like the weird things, like the two, the two big rotating cylinders.

I forget what that's called.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

They help, but they're not enough to like just move the thing on its own, at least not very fast.

So this is a rendering.

We need our treats urgently.

So this is a rendering from the China State Shipbuilding Corporation.

This would be a demonstration project for a 24,000 TEU, that's 20-foot equivalent unit,

ultra-large nuclear-powered container ship.

This isn't like an endorsement of everything the Chinese state does because it's a state and it's a superpower and it acts like one and it does a bunch of the same fucked up shit that America does.

But like some of the like, you know, research and development and like industry stuff that's happening in China is like, man, really impressive, really interesting.

Like,

this is what happens when you try.

Yeah, being channeled into stuff like electric cars, which is still like, you know, not a solution in a lot of ways, but like, it's still impressive, the stuff that's happening.

And like, clearly, there is some effort to make this

greener, even in one of the world's largest polluters, right?

But

it's not going to be thrilling watching all of this and also your ability to get new computer chips destroyed in a sort of futile and pointless war between the superpowers.

Well, November, we don't have to do research and development here because in five years, AI will do it for us.

Shut up.

Shut the hell up.

You just watch finance capital just slash through every physical industry in the entire West.

Private equity is coming for college football, and I'm so fucking.

There's going to be only two places which are capable of doing basic manufacturing, and they're going to be China and Russia.

I don't like the future very much.

Would you say that it's a trash future, Nova?

I think we're on the cusp of a trash future, and the trash future will begin at the moment that

some Taiwanese guy has to hit the big detonate the fabs button.

Yeah.

So the power plant on this thing would be a high temperature but low pressure molten salt reactor, which minimizes the danger from things like a meltdown, right?

Because the thing about molten salt reactors is they're molten.

They can't melt down because they're supposed to be like that.

It's a meltdown.

Yeah, exactly.

And if they cool down, then they're not reacting anymore, you know, if they solidify, right?

Um, there's some companies in Norway and South Korea, I believe, which are proposed, they're proposing to convert existing ships to nuclear power using small modular reactors.

Um, there's still some unresolved issues, though.

One of the big ones, at least engineering-wise, is that the reactors last longer than the ships do.

Um, you know, reactors are going to last 50, even 80 years.

Um,

ships, big, heavy cargo ships, a lot of times they're done in like 20 years.

Unless they're on the Great Lakes, then they last forever.

So, you know, likely the future we're looking at here in terms of nuclear-powered ship is going to be like small modular reactors that can be swapped in and out of ships, right?

And then there's big legal challenges, right?

Like who's to blame if there's some kind of catastrophic radiation release in a port.

To be fair, like we, we haven't really figured out like satisfactorily who's to blame if there's a catastrophic fertilizer release in a port.

It's not to say that the current shipping industry is a sort of model of health when it comes to legal attributability.

There was actually a treaty proposed about this in 1962 when the Savannah was

about to not circumnavigate the globe.

But no one signed it because there was some kind of dispute over whether warships were involved too.

I didn't look into that too hard.

But apparently Lloyd's Register is working on the legal issues right now of nuclear ships.

So at least on the

private side, this may be coming to something.

Your other issues, of course, are regulation and nuclear proliferation.

The modern shipping ecosystem is just not necessarily conducive to nuclear power, right?

Because ultimately, even if a China shipbuilding company builds this thing, it's going to wind up registered in Liberia or Panama or in the Marshall Islands, and they'll be in charge of regulating and inspecting, you know, all these big nuclear ships.

I'm the like Liberian government nuclear reactor inspector.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

It's like, yeah, you know, I have to inspect the nuclear reactor that's owned by a company that you have no idea.

And then it's chartered out to a weird Greek guy.

It's kind of funny that, like, in order to make this work, you have to fix all the major issues in the commercial shipping industry.

Yes, exactly, exactly.

You gotta run a tighter ship.

Yeah, I mean, basically to make this work, I was joking about like federalizing everything, but you kind of, it only works with a merchant marine.

Yes.

Like, and it only works with training a lot of like your own people to be like mariners, which might be nice in a time of like extreme unemployment, you know, but who am I to say?

We did fix one thing in that most of the marine unions have now consolidated.

Yeah, well, we're taking boxes off, you know.

Yeah, exactly.

You got the issue of proliferation.

Like, I don't know,

China Shipbuilding sells a nuclear ship to Zim, the Israeli shipping company.

They decide to load it with parts for the new child mutilator 9000 weapon system.

They run it through the Suez Canal.

All of a sudden, the Houthis find themselves in possession of a lot of fissile material.

Sorry, was there a downside coming?

Okay, that is funny, but I think that does result in some security issues.

You know, so

you want to avoid like proliferation issues here.

You want to, you know, these nuclear reactors are going to have to run on low-enriched uranium unless they're going to be relatively large.

I mean, that's.

Although, shout out to the first Somali pirate to become a nuclear power.

Yeah, that'd be pretty funny.

Good luck to you.

Some project progress has been made on like miniaturizing the CANDU reactor.

That's the Canada deuterium uranium reactor that runs on straight unenriched uranium.

Another reactor which can do this is the RBMK.

Yes.

Mobile Chernobyl.

I don't know that you want to put that on a ship.

These reactors being relatively large is not so much of a problem anymore because the ships are so damn big.

But, you know, you don't want to.

You can't just take a nuclear reactor out of an aircraft carrier where they're using, you know, the weapons grade stuff and plop it in one of these.

Stop with that.

You got to develop something new because otherwise, I don't know.

As much as, again, it would be funny if the Houthis had an atom bomb.

I think we should probably, in practice, avoid that.

They're limiting the number of Tom Clancy novels that happen in real life.

Yes.

Oh, they nuked Baltimore.

That was the Nazis who nuked Baltimore, I'll have you know, and they killed President Morgan Freeman.

Wow.

But, you know, I think these are surmountable problems.

The civilian nuclear naval propulsion should be given a second chance here.

You know, like the original Savannah, maybe the NS Savannah was just too ahead of its time.

Yeah, I mean, sure as fuck, we're not doing degrowth, you know, so we got to make the growth in some way sustainable, in which case...

Yeah, fuck it.

Give the Houthis whatever, you know?

Yeah, exactly.

Or, you know, we stick with marine diesel engines and have to design new holes to ride the boiling oceans.

Who knows?

I really don't like the phrase ride the boiling ocean.

Yeah.

We got to like figure something out with Taiwan is the main thing.

Yes.

And the key thing is, like, you know, I'm consistent about this between like Ukraine and Palestine and Taiwan.

I believe in self-determination, right?

I think the only answer, therefore, is to tow it geographically further from China.

If you put it on like the other side of the like nine-dash line, less worried about it.

Did the Chinese actually care about Taiwan?

Deeply, yeah.

Yeah.

It's sort of like if,

oh, fuck, I don't know.

What's something Americans care deeply about?

Sort of like if the NFL was like run by another country.

Oh, no.

No, no.

We will invade.

Like France and Algeria.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well,

yeah.

Sort of.

Well,

there's a lot of valences in that question that

I mean

in the sense that it's sort of a

because

like it doesn't exactly map onto the

French teacher at my high school

mentioned Algeria.

Oh, God.

He noirs are a fun group.

Okay.

I'm sorry.

No, I'm just I'm just gonna I'm just gonna be thinking about that for a minute.

Yeah.

Yeah, Taiwan, China's Algeria.

Chinese Algeria.

Chinese Algeria.

It's not a phrase I wanted to hear.

I've been waiting ages for that guns and roses out.

All right, let's release Nova from hell.

The wretched of the earth, brackets, Taiwanese.

Hurry up.

I have to poop.

All right.

What do we learn?

We should probably nuclearize, but also drastically reform commercial shipping.

Yes.

Yes.

yeah we have a vlcc episode coming when i write we could we can uh we we could walk and chew gum at the same time i can can you yeah i can't no i can i you don't like gum i can't text and like gum so i don't know i don't yeah of course you fucking don't i uh i can't walk and text really well i have to stop and then crin's like what are you doing i'm just like i can't do both man like i've 100 years old i'm not chewing gum i have the kind of disorder that makes your jaw fucked up um this also i i can really really freak people out with this sometimes.

Like when it when it fucks up, I can like unintentionally click my jaw so loud.

I can do that.

Like people across the room will be like, Jesus Christ, are you okay?

Freaks my mom out, but I keep doing it because I think it's funny to annoy my mother.

I can't not do it.

It's good that I have a job that involves talking for a living.

Yeah.

You could do it if you want to annoy some people with mesophenia.

The thing I've always thought of as a fallback plan is if if I ever encounter a kind of

injury or disease or disability that impairs my ability to talk, we hook me up to the TikTok text-to-speech thing.

Yeah, it's fine.

And I just type my way through that.

I'm kind of like the kind of TikTok Stephen Hawking voice.

Hopefully without the pedophilia.

I would like to think so.

Yes, yes.

People are.

We don't know what he did on the Epstein Island.

We just know he was We can infer, I think.

I don't think it's unfair to infer.

I think it's fair to say he was implicated is the main thing.

Yeah, you want to avoid being on the Epstein Island.

You want to avoid being implicated if you could avoid it.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, so folks, I guess that's what we learned from this episode is that if you find a time machine,

go back in time and make the oil crisis happen a little earlier so we get nuclear ships.

And also, since you have that time machine, do not use it to go to the Epstein Island afterwards.

No, and also, you can use it to go to the Epstein Island before when he first shows up, you're there with a gun.

Yeah, that'd be fun.

So if you get off the boat, just like, yeah, check out my cool new island, and you like kill Epstein.

I disagree, shoot him with a crossbow.

Yeah, no,

I came here with my time machine to Epstein Island with my friend Shaguevara to kill Epstein.

Oh, shoot, coward.

I am only a man.

Yeah.

I have no shoes on the other foot.

I am like that asshole.

All right.

I don't know why I deliberately thought Shaguvara, other than, you know, it's an island in the Caribbean.

Well, no, anyway.

Now that the delusion has said it.

Yeah, exactly.

We have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third.

Shake hands with danger.

Ooh, women-owned.

Yes.

I know if they already have a Twitter account.

Hi, Justin, November, and Liam.

I saw you change the name.

Thank you.

I'm doing a courtesy to the writer.

Thank you.

Yeah, I've seen this came in before I changed it to something ridiculous.

No, it didn't.

Oh, motherfuckers.

Anyway, my son occasionally chastises me for being too impulsive.

When he heard this story, he said, that's a safety third.

So here it goes.

I don't know that safety third should be like something that's like being passed down generationally.

Yeah.

This is a this is a family podcast.

Oh god, it is.

WTYP is for the children.

Yeah, exactly.

Years ago, well before the

invasive species

advocatus ad infinitive drove the last nails into the coffin of free-range childhood, I worked at a summer camp in western Pennsylvania, somewhere be between, I've never heard of this town before.

It's tiny.

It's in southwestern Pennsylvania.

It's in Fayette County.

Ohiopile?

Good enough, dude.

It's ancient Greek ohiopole.

Yeah.

And Johnstown.

It was a rustic setup.

The only actual buildings were the dining room.

I knew where falling water is.

Does that help?

Oh, that makes sense.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I've still never been there.

I'll take you.

Yeah.

The dining room.

Office and a winterized lodge.

All the other structures.

were three-quarter inch walled wooden cabins, some with screens and platform tents.

The eight to fifteen year old campers' chores included cleaning and filling the kerosene lanterns,

pouring powdered lime into the outhouses, checking the wood pile for snakes, and dunking plates, cups, silverware, and hands into bleach water after meals.

Staff took it in turns to check the bear trap on the trail to the showerhouse.

Assuming the trap was empty, we'd cover it with a tarp so as to not worry the little ones.

You get the idea, right?

Uh-huh.

Prelapsarian sort of pre-risk assessment time of extreme danger.

Don't look at the bear trap.

It won't hurt you if you don't look at it or step on it.

Staff arrived a week before the first campers.

For training, most of much of which involved knocking spider webs from the eaves or sweeping out a winter's worth of mouse shit.

Scrubbing the cement swimming pool was a particular rite of passage.

usually done on the hottest, sunniest day of training.

We began by raking or shoveling in wet years out all the leaves, sticks, and occasional snake.

For scrubbing, we had stiff, long-handled push brooms.

Rust spots, and algae, both accumulated around the ladders, got a healthy splash of CLR.

That's calcium, lime, and rust remover.

So this would just be acid, yes.

Yes.

And a scrub brush.

A hose kept the debris moving towards the drain at the deep end.

One year, we found ourselves scrubbing after lunch on a scorcher of a June day.

Things started off well enough, but enthusiasm soon waned.

Then someone found several five-gallon pails of pool chlorine in the pump room.

Now that'll speed things up.

So we drizzled the chlorine down the sides of the deep end, and this created quite the heady cocktail when it hit the CLR.

Oh, boy.

We need to stop

getting safety thirds from people who have done First World War like gas attacks on them.

Roz once made a low-grade chemical weapons lab in our basement, but that was an accident.

That basement's seen

like two out of four of the points of the CBRN square.

I definitely did that at the old Formula SAE lab, or I assisted in that.

I didn't do that.

No, Super Death Cleaner did work extremely well.

4235, you created a low-grade chemical weapons lab that made me sick.

Anyway, moving swiftly on.

Needless to say,

I was personally victimized by Justin Rosiak.

You may be entitled to significant financial compensation.

It wasn't me.

Go ahead, bud.

Needless to say, progress slowed.

No longer simply summer staff scrubbing the deep end.

We'd become soldiers in the trenches at Iprez.

I don't know how things are.

Okay.

IPRE.

Torn between duty and a desire to breathe.

Even the toughest scrubber only lasted about three minutes before eyes streaming and lungs burning.

They'd climb out and collapse on the deck.

I served the Soviet Union act.

Remarkably, no comment was made when we all showed up to dinner, red-eyed and sniffling.

I

okay.

Yeah.

Thanks for making one podcast my kid and I both enjoy, sometimes even together.

From Kimberly.

Thanks, Kimberly.

Please try not to

trust

yourself or anyone else.

Yeah.

Or especially not your kid.

They're

less resistant to that.

Yeah.

Like, you need, like, once you're in adulthood, you can sort of tank a bit of chlorine gas.

But, like, yeah, you know,

you can knock off a couple of months of life, no problem.

Because kids are closer to being born.

You knock a couple of months of life off them, they actually like go, like, sort of a stack underflow thing.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

It's kind of like, you know, you might actually stop existing entirely.

Oh, fuck.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, that was safety third.

Shake hands with danger.

Our next episode is on Chernobyl.

Does anyone have any commercials before we go?

All of the

Palestinian charity and GoFundMe stuff that we talked about earlier.

And yeah, listen to Lions Led by Donkeys, listen to Kill James Bond, listen to Trash Future.

Subscribe to Justin's YouTube channel, you know?

Yeah, uh, Liam and I were on Anders Lee's podcast, The Vanquished, talking about the Prohibition Party race.

That was pretty good.

That was a pretty fun one.

Uh, got to talk about how everyone prior to about 1850 in the United States was, at the very least, buzzed all the time,

and not for a lack of clean drinking water either.

No, just for fun.

Yeah.

So, yeah, I think that's it.

I think that's it.

It's a podcast.

All right, that's a podcast.

Subscribe to our Patreon, everyone.

Bye.

Yeah.

Bye.

Bye.