The United Kingdom’s maritime sector is very interested in nuclear propulsion. As a result, the U.K. is going to pass a law regulating nuclear ships in November. The U.K. Maritime Coast Guard Agency (MCGA) of the U.K. Department for Transport (DfT) has recently set a target date for passing the U.K.’s Merchant Shipping (Nuclear Ships) regulations into law.
The new regulations will be based on the International Maritime Organization’s Chapter VIII in the Annex to the International Convention for Safety of Life at Sea, 1974 (SOLAS) and the UK’s Safety Code for Nuclear Ships (res. A.491.XII). The current legislative timetable in the U.K. states that the regulations will enter into force on the 22nd of November 2022.
Mikal Boe is the Core Power CEO. Core Power is a private U.K.-based maritime technology company which is currently focusing on using nuclear fission power for ocean transport. Boe said, “This is an important milestone in the regulatory progress for new nuclear in maritime.”
The U.K. MCGA of the DfT consulted with the U.K. maritime industry in August of 2021. This consultation resulted in a finding that most industry respondents agreed that no new of existing nuclear ships are likely to be flagged in the U.K. in the next ten years.
Respondents involved in the consultation included class societies American Bureau of Shipping and Bureau Veritas as well as the UK Chamber of Shipping and several nuclear technology firms. Eleven out of the fourteen companies which gave the MCGA feedback said that there is an appetite for nuclear powered ships over the next ten years. There is a growing interest nuclear propulsion for large ocean-going vessels.
There were concerns with respect to questions of additional cost considerations for the nuclear propulsion technologies as compared to other propulsion technologies. Some of the respondents pointed to training and qualifying crew, maintenance, the exclusion of nuclear-powered vessels in some regions. There is also the potential reputational jeopardy on the part of companies who utilize nuclear technology.
The consultation mentioned above noted that IMO’s SOLAS regulations covering nuclear propulsion on board vessels was developed and ratified in the early 1980s. That means that the rules are roughly forty years old. Some respondents said that a potential unintended consequence of adopting the regulations into the new law without updating them could lead to “a direct regulatory barrier being put in place to adopting new and advanced nuclear technologies”.
Recently, the maritime industry has seen increased interest in thorium and molten salt reactors (MSR) as possible propulsion technologies for vessels.
Thorium is an abundant, naturally occurring metal with low radioactivity. MSRs work by dissolving thorium in liquid salt. The chain reaction in the reactor heats the salt, producing steam to drive a turbine and create electricity. Although the development of such reactors is well documented, thorium’s potential for delivering clean maritime power has not yet been incorporated in a vessel design. Proponents of the technology say that it is much safer than traditional nuclear technologies and results in much lower levels of nuclear waste.