Nuclear-powered commercial ships are moving closer to deployment after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) launched a global initiative to tackle the regulatory barriers facing the technology.
Global shipping is already responsible for around 3% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, but with global trade predicted to quadruple by 2050, these emissions will increase rapidly without urgent action.
The shipping sector is considered hard to decarbonise, as electrifying ships is considerably more challenging than electrifying cars or other vehicles from both a technical and a market perspective.
Significant resource and investment is currently being channelled into the development of small modular reactors (SMRs), mini versions of power stations made in factories and capable of powering up to a million homes each. Parts of this technology could be repurposed to allow large cargo ships to run on nuclear energy, effectively making them low-emission vessels.
The IAEA’s ATLAS initiative...