Well There‘s Your Problem - Well There's Your Problem | Episode 159: Nuclear Ship Savannah

Episode Date: June 18, 2024

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We're going to Cuba! Yeah. We're gonna, the way I see it about it is, take this dad to Cuba, because my dad really wants to go to Cuba. Yeah, I mean, we've- Cuba, yes. One of our guests, friend of the show, Noah, has been to Cuba, so clearly the answer is, you have to get your dad to stop calling them all, like, shitlibs, and get him to join DSA,

long enough that they send him to Cuba on a fact finding mission. There you go. ALICE I love that. Yeah. I do love that, for people. I, y'know what, I'm not gonna speak ill of Philly DSA, I don't need those mentions on Twitter again.

ALICE We have a lot of DSA people who follow us, and like us, and stuff. ALICE Yes, I by and large appreciate what DSA's doing. And now to air my personal grievances with Billy DSA. Yeah, which will now take the rest of the episode, the episode lasts for six hours. It's already gonna be a long one. No, you said it was gonna be short, you motherfucker! Yeah, nah, I was like, oh, this'll be... I was like, this'll be a nice and easy one two weeks later. ALICE We are starting at 11pm 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 fucking do it. SEAN Alright, let's fucking do it. Just one thing, I hate to plug the shit here, but like, Bridgerton season three part two is out. ALICE You motherfucker. SEAN I know, I hate to plug **** here, but like, Bridgerton season 3 part 2 is out. You motherfucker. I know, I know. Yeah, because **** really needs help.

No, it's on Plex. It's on Plex. Can you bleep ****, and do it again there, please? If you want the invite to my Plex server, DM me on Twitter. It's funny if you, it's funnier if you don't bleep it the second time. Yeah, yeah. Alright, let's go. Tell me about the ship.

Let's go. What do you see on the screen in front of you? It's funny if you don't bleep it the second time. Yeah. Alright, let's go. Top of the ship. Let's go. What do you see on the screen in front- oh wait, no, we gotta introduce the podcast. God fucking damn it, dude. 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 Rosniak, I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. Okay, go. I am November Kelly, I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. Okay, go. I am November Kelly, I'm the person who's talking now, my pronouns are she and her,

yay Liam. Hi, I'm Liam McEnderson, my pronouns are he, him. I have no jokes, let's do this. Okay. Boom. What you see on the screen in front of you is a ship. Nothing appears to be wrong with it. Why are all the boats going opposite directions?

They're going with it, it's kind of a flotilla situation. Oh, I see, okay, I looked at the drone. ALICE Which end of a ship do you think Awake comes out of? Like... LIAM I... okay, so here's the thing, I'm very stupid, I need you to know this, oh, oh, okay. JUSTIN 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. ALICE I'll show you a narrow channel under the Golden Gate Bridge. LIAM Sure. Uh huh. I like this ship though, it's sexy, it's got the, like, kind of sharp lines. ALICE I like, I like, yes.

It looks like it means business. LIAM The kind of backwards, angled situation on the left. That's why I was confused! Uh huh. Sure. Today, we're gonna 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. Yes. 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 to just a bet? Oh, yeah. So the the aid period that the Army construction provides, or whatever they're called, the transportation corps built, it sort of floated away, and then they rebuilt it, and then they used it to do war crimes. ALICE Yeah, and then it floated away again.

They had two consecutive storms with an interstitial war crime. JUSTIN Yeah, 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. It's one of those things that seemed like it should have done. I know it was always gonna be marginal in terms of the amount of aid that was gonna get delivered through it, and the only solution was to force the Israelis' hand on opening the land crossings, but I thought it would do more than nothing and then also one war crime. JUSTIN Yeah.

Yeah, that was... This is not my expectation. You know, I figure, alright, ships are big, you can deliver a lot of stuff with them, but... ALICE Yeah, I mean, this floating harbor shit, they used it in Normandy, like, uh, they worked to supply a whole army in D-Day on a bigger scale so like, you'd think, okay, well they're not gonna half-ass this and it's not gonna get blown away and they're not gonna let the fucking IDF use it to launch hostage rescue

missions that they killed 200 civilians in. JUSTIN 400 odd civilians, just, you know, and they get four guys back, and one of them complains, oh my god, family I was placed with... That's made me a birthday cake, sarcastically. They made me do the dishes. Oh my god. It's real ISIS stuff, isn't it. 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 shoved 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 gonna stick in my head for a minute. But yeah, so once again Joe Biden is the most craven motherfucker in the world. And he should be protested against every day of his life. JUSTIN This thing's an embarrassment to everyone involved. Yeah, I feel like I wanna take this Piers fucking badge, you know? Yeah, exactly.

An embarrassment to the force. Yeah. I mean, the Army Transportation Corps should be disbanded at this point. Bring back the CBs! What the fuck's going on? I don't know. I'm already exhausted. Uh, yeah.

So, um, obviously, horrible genocide continuing in Palestine. Um, y'know, if, uh, keep protesting, um, November, you and Devon are doing like a stream for some folks trying to get out of Gaza, right? Yeah, yeah, we were doing. So, I know Devon 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 charity stuff, whether that's like 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, the SCR... Fucking hell. SCREN.CH is the web link. The Mondays we're doing, Fundraisers, the Thursdays we're just doing 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.

JUSTIN What is it, it costs like, some absurd amount of money to get out the Rafa border crossing, which is closed. ALICE Right now it's like closed indefinitely, because the IDF has cut it off. I don't wanna be in a position of saying that we can pay to get people through the border because we can't. And right now it's just a situation of funding people's living expenses as best we can. And even then that's limited in the sense that if the IDF wants to 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. JUSTIN Or you get an aid package airdropped on your head. BecauseICE Exactly. SEAN That is true. ALICE Several times now. SEAN 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 done, just in terms of sheer incompetence. JUSTIN Yeah. I'll buy that. ALICE A lesson that we all should've learned in the past twenty years at some point, but just reinforced and underlined again here.

JUSTIN I think this particular ship may actually come up later in the podcast. ALICE What, the Roy P. Benavidez? JUSTIN Yeah, figure out what class that is. It may come up later. ALICE It won't be a US Navy, it'll be like a naval auxiliary. Like the equivalent of a Royal Fleet Auxiliary.

Like USNS or something. Like the hospital ships. JUSTIN But, anyway, so yeah, Pier, used for war crimes, actually. Oops. ALICE It's a Bob Hope class roll on roll off- JUSTIN You're joking. ALICE... cargo ship. It is a war crimes, actually. Oops. It's a Bob Hope class, roll on roll off, cargo ship. It is a USNS, yeah. Okay, that's not the one I was thinking of, not the class I was thinking of then.

Anyway, that will come up later, though, a similar ship. Anyway, in other news... Oh, shit. UGH. I'm loving the graphics gore happening here. JUSTIN Yes, I know. Governor Kathy Hochul has, at the very last minute, decided that the MTA congestion pricing plan in New York City, which would charge fifteen dollars 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. 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, it's all the Jersey. Yeah. I feel like she said she like, 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 feel- Cause 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 our big political controversy in London was like, we already had congestion pricing 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 congestion pricing through the door, then, y'know, god help us. Fucking, like, you know what? Once the fucking axis of resistance or whatever achieves global hegemony, and Xi Jinping has control of the United States, just pedestrianize Manhattan, and also anywhere else. JUSTIN Yeah, but most of Manhattan should not have car access at all.

The thing here is this had been planned and legally mandated since 2019, even Governor Cuomo supported this plan. ALICE Governor Cuomo! JUSTIN Yeah. But, uh, the, uh, you uh, this was due to go in effect on June 30th. Um, it was that close. And it, like, municipal bonds had already been sent out, uh, you know, uh, based on the revenue this would bring in, you know, um, this was going to fund fifteen billion dollars 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 seconds, 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 like all the equipment's installed, the contracts have been signed, the bonds are bonded, uh, she's just like, no. We're not doing it. ALICE It hurts New Jerseyans' feelings.

Fuck you, Phil Murphy. ALICE It's a beautiful piece of state government ratfucking, then. JUSTIN Yeah. So 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 this. 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... Oh, okay. That's stupid. Um, but yeah.

It looks like she may not have the legal authority to postpone it. ALICE Because it nominally only affects the city of New York, which is municipal business, right? JUSTIN 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, a political one. ALICE Just like, quiet-quitting, refusing to answer her emails. LIAM Yeah, just, nah.

Just sending her emails to say, nah. Yeah, this is, uh, this is a... I don't know, this is very stupid. I'm gonna be interested to see how this, you know, uh, 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 kinda like, well, you gotta break a few eggs to make an omelette. ALICE.

Congestion pricing Stalin. SEAN. That's what my dad says about Chairman Mouth, so, you know, good enough. I'm not joking, that's a real thing he says! ALICE. I know, I believe you. Just gotta hold it together to get that Cuba trip off the DSA. SEAN Yeah, right?

JUSTIN So, let's hope this gets reversed somehow, I believe the lawyers are revvin' up for a good time on this one. ALICE I look forward to them billing everybody involved with a sort of atrocious amount of money. SEAN I just want to take a quick break and talk about Kathy Hochul's dead soulless eyes. Look at those. Government makes you have these. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh. I've not usually, as a fat man, wanted to comment on people's appearance, but I'm gonna comment on her eyes that I feel draining my life force from me? ALICE It's not, like, fundamentally I think it's a kind of thing that happens to you in government, right, as you just get the life force sucked out of you. That's why Obama aged 25 years a second in office. LIAM Yeah, we sure did.

JUSTIN We need Cuomo back, that's the problem. I mean, Cuomo wouldn't have done this. Cuomo signed the bill to mandate this. And then what else did he do, Roz? A bunch of stuff, don't worry about it. A bunch of things he shouldn't have done. And then also, I just added this in, it doesn't deserve a slide, but happy Doc Ellis Day, everyone.

Poomst? Doc Ellis pushed a no-hitter on LSD. Oh, fuck yes. Amazing. Allegedly, but no, it's, you know what, we're keeping it. He did it. 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. Um, anyway, that was the goddamn news. SEAN It was actually yesterday, but we didn't change the thing. It was June 12th. ALICE I stop you fact checking with the end of the news drop.

SEAN Okay, alright, well I'll just go fuck myself. ALICE Okay, so, the podcast. Let's talk about ship-proof propulsion. SEAN Okay. Alright, so... ALICE. Let's talk about ship personal propulsion. Okay, alright, 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 outboard motor. You're sick of rowing. I am. You know? Get back to it, slave boy!

No, I don't want to. Yeah, that's better for, like, you know, ramming speed. You know, even those things add sails on, and 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 it's irritating if the wind is going the wrong way.

You can still fudge it, though. I don't understand sailing at all, so... ALICE & LIAM LAUGH. ALICE & LIAM LAUGH. ALICE & LIAM I was so ready to, like, woman-splain 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 master 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. JUSTIN Okay. I'm still confused. ALICE I also don't understand sailing. Sorry. ALICE You wanna sail, like, sort of off the wind,

a bit. I think. ALICE Oh, like at an angle, basically? Okay. Okay. JUSTIN In 1800, we moved to steam power, right? ALICE Mm. Boy, Isambard Kingdom Brunel invented the fucking SS Great Easton, and we never looked

back. That changed the world. And we did sorta 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 cylinder, they use it to do work, and then it's exhausted. And in some cases, recirculated. ALICE. Same. JUSTIN.

Yeah. So, these early steam ships, they're typically coal-fired, and that's very labor-intensive, right? SEAN. Yeah, it's a jobs program. SEAN Yeah, well, that's the thing, you have to have stokers. ALICE Yep. SEAN 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 their job is to

run around with wheelbarrows and shovel coal in and out of bunkers to keep them all level. ALICE Huh. That sounds like... I didn't know there were worse jobs than stoking. JUSTIN Yes. ALICE I guess everybody has to start somewhere, this is the ship equivalent of the mail room. JUSTIN I got promoted to stoker.

LIAM Ugh, what a thought. JUSTIN Now, you keep using coal, but 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? 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 gotta go fast. These start to show up in, like, the very early 1900s. I wanna say, I forget what the ship's name was, like, Turbinia or something like that. ALICE They just show up. ALICE That's back when they kind of did the anime waifu thing of just like, we're gonna personify and feminize this concept. RILEY Well, I think they just showed up unannounced

to like a Royal Navy review or something, and we're just like, haha, catch it. Yeah, catch us if you can. ALICE Oh, so when I do it, I get arrested, but like, apparently it's fine if you have a revolutionary steam engine. JUSTIN Yeah, exactly. Eventually 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, save for-

ALICE It's got like, essential sulphur in it that the earth needs to keep you cool. JUSTIN Oh yeah. That is, that has been a niche- I don't wanna talk about that now, that's gonna be too much. ALICE No, go back and listen to the geoengineering episode, if we ever do the fossil fuels episode, listen to that. JUSTIN Oh my god, why are ocean temperatures so hot? Cause you're 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 dioxide, nitrogen oxides, all the criteria pollutants. You got the new

low-sulfur blends that are introduced now. Ah yeah, the oceans are heating up because of that. ALICE But we're about that. JUSTIN But, uh, yeah. Fuel oil is to 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 to look at. SEAN Yeah, they're cool. ALICE Every surface getting sort of lightly coated in oil. SEAN 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? ALICE Yeah, I mean, I like the sound of that. I don't wanna go back to sails though. SEAN Nah, sails aren't very good. ALICE No, I mean, I like the sound of that. I don't wanna go back to sales, though. JUSTIN Nah, sales aren't very good. ALICE Nah, we're gonna do something far more foolish! JUSTIN Mhmm. 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.

ALICE Yeah, just one insanely dehydrated guy on a sort of micro catamaran with one of my Amazon packages. Yeah, what is that? 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 ended. You guys ever seen Castaway?

Oh, that's good, how we do that? That package was like one USB-A to USB-C cable that I immediately forgot I needed after ordering, and tossed into the corner of the room the second I got it. ALICE Alright, so, World War II ended. ALICE Who won? JUSTIN That would be us. We. AARON Who's us, Roz?

Yeah, just us. Please ignore it. ALICE The only country in the world. AARON Yes. JUSTIN So we talked about the Addams for Peace program to some extent on the Project Plowshare episode. 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 Oppenheimer pitch.

Yeah, he pooped an Oppenheimer's face, yes. Yeah, exactly. But 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 Adams for Peace. He spoke of the sort of moral imperative to offset- Not to be confused with the Tom York side project. Yeah. He spoke of sort of a moral imperative to offset some of the deadly military aspects of atomic energy with peaceful applications. For excavating, that didn't go well, that's another episode we've done. ALICE Just obliterated a bunch of land in Alaska, poisoned a bunch of people.

SEAN Food irradiation! JUSTIN Did they go through with this one? I forget. SEAN Nuclear Tupperware. ALICE Mmm. Uranium glass. Yeah. Which is fine. So, uh, nuclear power plants, here's the reactor for the shipping port plant, the demonstration

plant. Is this next to a steam locomotive? Yes, that is a- Two pressure vessels. That's a Pennsylvania Railroad steam locomotive right there. What a cool picture. It's just two pressure vessels looking at each other. I'm just like you. Word of love.

You but different. Yeah, this too is Yuri, actually. Yeah, exactly. Medical uses for radiation. Wait, hold on, I have a drop for this. Like, scroll all the way back up in my things, the letter B. Um, yeah. A big titty anime girl.

There you go. Very nice. It's the only drop of you I have. Devon edited that out of episode and sent it to me, and I'm like, thank you. I don't even know what the context for that is. I don't know! This was months and months ago, but now I have a drop of you saying- Big titty anime, girl.

Which... You know. It's a little more enthusiastic than I feel comfortable with. If you wanna give me like a more DUR line read of it, I'm sure we can grab that. Let me talk about my sexual proclivities for two and a half hours, somebody will get the charts please. Lose that unenthusiastically. A big titty anime girl.

Well, I hope you look forward to hearing that in a subsequent episode. Anyway, so. Phew. 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 food irradiation setups, where it's like, 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 a Super Mario level, to prevent people from doing idiotic things. We'll do an episode on one of those eventually. 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. ALICE Yeah, for more on this you can see the documentary Metal Gear Solid V. Um. JUSTIN Yes. Great game. ALICE Kinda 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, y'know? LIAM Thanks, Tom, for the inspiration, Trudy. JUSTIN 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 the seed- SICK ASS IDEA.

Should've done it. Oh yeah. Again, weirdly Hideo Kojima coded, but like, um, I also think a lot about the idea of putting the UN headquarters on the, like, extraterritorial island between the US and Canada, and just making it like a kind of UN island. JUSTIN Yeah, or you put it on the nuclear ship. ALICE Yeah. Put it on Mars, fuck you, Elon.

ALICE Should've put the UN on a nuclear ship. SEAN Yeah. Set about to drift. ALICE This was the seed for the NS Savannah. In fact, it was only the following year that Congress authorized the construction of the ship. Alright, let's go to an old slide I had to pull out of an old episode. Let's review how do nuclear reactors work.

ALICE It's a steam engine, again. JUSTIN Yes. ALICE 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 to. Or you can 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. 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. ALICE & LIAM LAUGH. ALICE Really long wire. I... JUSTIN There have been trolleyboats on canals, actually.

SEAN Wow, that's really cool. JUSTIN Yes. I was not very calm. SEAN Sincerely, that's very cool. ALICE One of those limiting facts is that it's ultimately one of the best ways of generating electricity we've discovered is thing spin. JUSTIN Yeah. SEAN Yeah, and everything leaks. JUSTIN Yeah, you can discovered is things spin. Yeah. And everything leaks.

Yeah. And everything spins. 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. ALICE Yep. Nice. Shoutout to Admiral Hyman Rickover. SEAN Hell of a name. ALICE Yeah, they don't let you be called Hyman anymore, because of woke, but, 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.

JUSTIN This is a good point, yeah. SEAN Or, cause you could just send a peacekeeper missile through their door. ALICE Yeah, this is the thing, give you, like, boy named Sue doctrine, give your kids embarrassing names, it will make them unspeakably powerful. JUSTIN It will make them unspeakably powerful. JUSTIN Make them into admirals. ALICE Yeah. JUSTIN So, the USS Nautilus was built by the Electric Boat Company of New London, Connecticut. JUSTIN We've been there.

JUSTIN Yes. Electric Boat was, originally they made small pleasure vessels that were powered by batteries, and then one day, they stepped up their game. ALICE So, what if one of these was underwater and had a bunch of missiles on it? JUSTIN 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. Um, I don't know the purpose of the cube, or I don't remember, I read it on the internet and then I forgot.

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. ALICE 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. SEAN I believe you're correct. JUSTIN Wow, it's prank gone wrong. ALICE Imagine the USS Forrestal, I don't remember, I don't remember my carriers. But yeah, no, I mean, like you said, it's a proven technology.

It's also very helpful that, like, one of the things that you need for, like, a nuclear power is like a continued supply of water, a cooled thing, hard to run out of that in a boat. JUSTIN 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. ALICE Yeah.

And- LIAM It was for a stroll, I just looked. ALICE And especially with submarines too, you're like, again, you're dealing with pressure vessels, and if you have a lot of expertise dealing with the engineering and maintenance of pressurized vessels, then you can kind of tack on some nuclear stuff to that pretty easily. JUSTIN Yeah, it's just a heavy duty pressure vessel inside another heavy duty pressure vessel. ALICE Yeah.

It's like a Ban Marie, technically. Probably. JUSTIN So, now 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. I think it could have been done before. Well, you probably could have done it if you had an entire, like, bulker full of coal. Yeah, the Pacific would have been unforgiving, I would think.

Just start consuming the cargo. Just single-handedly changing the terrain of 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 ten years, right? I could be wrong on that, I believe it is.

Something like that, yeah. I mean, 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? 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 Dynamics electric boat DIY nuclear enrichment facility. ALICE This boy scout built a 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 under American and Soviet control. SEAN 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. I do like, by the way, 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 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, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E,

E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, E, You gotta kill some time while you get by in the drop. ALICE So this looks like a vessel ripe for a gigantic nuclear reactor. Take out the smokestacks. Two beautiful nuclear reactors. Make this thing basically a giant speedboat. ALICE Probably still need at least one smokestack,

right? Like a cooling tower. JUSTIN This is the SS United States, of course, still in Berkeley. LIAM Currently rotting in South Philly. JUSTIN Yeah, currently rotting in South Philly, involved in a major lawsuit, because the, uh, whoever Steve Adorin 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. ALICE It can't be more about the BTS fastest Atlantic crossing. I should be killed, probably. JUSTIN So, in the early 50s ocean liners like this, they're still competitive for trans-oceanic 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. ALICE Meanwhile all of these guys are getting their lunches eaten by airlines. JUSTIN Not quite yet, but they will soon. Cargo ships are less affected by refueling times because loading and unloading was so labour intensive, but they could be more efficient and spend less time refueling if let's say they were nuclear, right? They can 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. More on that later. ALICE 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. JUSTIN Yes. ALICE Not guys you want getting their hands on the Longshoremen's Union is. Yes. Not guys you want getting their hands on the uranium, also.

The super weapons grade, uh, yeah. Suitcase nukes, coming to a business disagreement near you. Nice neighborhood you got here, be a shame if someone irradiated it. Nuked it. Yeah. Oh, the nuclear mob, that's, uh, mmm. JUSTIN Yeah. Nevertheless, the Department of Energy, the Department of Commerce, and the Maritime Administration

were gonna have a go at it. Excuse me, not Department of Energy, the Atomic Energy Commission. ALICE Sure. JUSTIN So, they start designing this 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? Oh, weird. Okay. Yeah. So you have, in the four, you have these four big holds, right? In the aft you have two, right? 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 problems the reactor was gonna have. ALICE Yeah, it's bad news if the president's, like, peaceful atom ship just like, y'know. SEAN Breaks into, like, the Titanic, yeah. ALICE Yeah.

Now, this proved to be a bad idea, as we'll get to later. 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. They get riced.

These did in fact break on the first voyage. A big titty anime girl. ALICE It's a maiden voyage, you dweeb. JUSTIN This ship was designed by George G. Sharp, Inc., 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, New Jersey, which is maybe the source of Governor Hokel'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, y'know? For people who want to live in New York. Or ships, I guess. I'm just looking at it here, there's a veranda, which is cool. Oh, we'll get some pictures of that in a bit. One thing to note here with the plan, you can see here's the reactor, and then just

across the hallway, hey, staterooms. Why not? I mean, listen, depends on how thick and lead-based that wall is, but... ALICE Very. I hope. JUSTIN Oh, that's... yeah, here we go. ALICE Oh, yes. JUSTIN 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. ALICE 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. JUSTIN It does sound very, very... ALICE It's awkward.

It's in the back. ALICE It sounds like that's two men in a shed in, like, West Yorkshire. And being kind of like, y'know, boiler makers to the Queen. And you're telling me this whole time they're just like, Italians or whatever, from Rhode Island. Oh god. Cause they did the TMI reactor too, from what I've-

Yeah, they did Three Mile Island as well, yeah. Babcock and Wilcox are both like, anglicized Italian names, I don't care to speculate on the originals. Oh yeah. Babcocky and Wilcox are both like, anglicized Italian names, I don't care to speculate on the originals. Oh yeah. About Babcocky 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, cause those ran on weapons grade uranium, which was 50% U-235. ALICE Yeah, but fucking Eisenhower is like, we cannot have the five families get access

to weapons grade uranium. JUSTIN Yeah, nah, we can't do that. 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 give it to? We gave it to the Israelis at the same time, I believe. Don't worry about that.

I thought it was the French who gave it to the Israelis. I thought it was the French too. Maybe it was both. I thought the Israelis gave it to South Africa, right? That would make sense. Yeah, allegedly, yeah. Allegedly. It's like a venereal disease.

I got it from Agnes. Yeah, exactly. So it's, uh, 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 as a boiling point, but because it's under such high pressure, it doesn't boil, right? Within the containment 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. ALICE Hmm. Really putting that water in a situation. JUSTIN Yeah, the water is... 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, bad things happen. Which is a big concern on a moving vessel. Don't hit Weisberg in this. Yeah. Superheated pressurized water is very angry so a pipeline rupture or 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. ALICE Does take out all of those staterooms with it, though. JUSTIN Yeah. ALICE No, no, that stays entirely in the containment vessel. ALICE Oh, wow.

JUSTIN Yeah. It would just now be a horrible hundred 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. ALICE Yeah, don't worry about that. JUSTIN 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 200mR per hour. I gotta 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. Alright, I got some stuff about it that's actually stupider later in the presentation. Oh boy.

Oh jeez. SEAN 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 twenty-four inch thick collision mat, constructed of alternate layers of 1 inch steel and 3 inch redwood lumber. ALICE & LIAM Aw, unsustainable.

They killed like a thousand year old tree for this. JUSTIN Hey, you're not building too many reactors, though. ALICE Go in the boat. JUSTIN Yeah. We could plant another one. Um, 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 bulkhead. You and the crumples. What if everyone were a Ford Expedition? 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 willing, you have to take like a direct missile strike as opposed to just some asshole in a boat.

This was designed to get Andrea Doriad and win. ALICE and LIAM Laugh. ALICE So, a beautiful, hubristic moment of this thing being designed to fight the sea. JUSTIN It was designed to fight the Stockholm. Because that had happened, like, just before they started designing this. LIAM Oh, okay. I don't like that my, I'll tell you what, I don't like that my stateroom is the first line of defense. You don't like it, get another boat.

No, you're in the strength in the staterooms, that's the thing. Ah. Yeah. Alright, I feel very safe now, let's do this. The ramming attack perfectly donks off my window. Yeah. Alright, guys. Um, 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 plant. I don't like the phrase wetter steam. So 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. It's less efficient, I'm gonna- It is less efficient,

but it doesn't need to be that efficient. Okay, because we're powering a boat, not like a town. Yeah, not like a town. Yeah, I don't need a gigawatt of power. 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 shuttle 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 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. ALICE I do love this kind of like, futurist design, colour scheme, lettering even. LIAM Oh yeah. ALICE Big fan. Like, very Thunderbirds, actually. JUSTIN Yes. From gracefully flared bow to modified cruiser stern, the streamlined NS Savannah measured

595.5 feet overall. Her beam is 78 feet, her draft 29.5 feet. Capable of cruising at 21 knots, the 22,000 ton ship carries 60 passengers and 9,400 tons of cargo." ALICE Should we address why it's called the NS Savannah, that NS stands for Nuclear Ship? JUSTIN Nuclear ship, yes. ALICE All of the stuff that prefixes civilian ships

is mostly these days, like, propulsive methods? Like, SS was like, Steamship and then there was MV for motor vessel, and so this is made into a new one, so, nuclear ship, NS. JUSTIN. Nuclear ship, yes. So it carries 60 passengers, as a crew of 124. ALICE. I mean, that's luxury, that's real, like, personalized service, you know?

JUSTIN. It's a demonstrator. ALICE. Me in my extremely luxury bulletproof cabin with two dudes just looking after me all the time. JUSTIN Look at some of the interiors. So onboard amenities here. ALICE I take back everything I said about liking the way it looks.

LIAM Oh, I love this. Oh, feed me the orange weird-ass, whatever the hell this is, is this just a couch? ALICE The 1960s. I enjoy the, like, sort of tracking world map on the back behind the ship model podium. JUSTIN 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. ALICE Everything else, I despise. LIAM Oh, I love this.

Oh, fuck me off daddy. JUSTIN A lot of this, I have some nicer pictures later. These are just what I found early on, and I found some better pictures. ALICE This is terrific, what are you talking about? ALICE 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. LIAM With MP5s ready to return 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.

ALICE Ultimate boomer luxury. SEAN Yeah. Um, 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. ALICE I'm trying to think, this ship must have been weird how quiet it must have been. JUSTIN Oh, yeah. JUSTIN Oh, yeah.

ALICE Like, no engine noise, no sail noise either? JUSTIN Yeah. No engine noise, no sail noise, just the knowledge that you are safe in your stateroom, and there's a nuclear reactor ten feet away. ALICE So, is it Coleridge, the quote that, y'know, the sailor lives like a plank away from eternity, or you live like a plank away from radioactivity, I guess? JUSTIN Yes.

SEAN Maybe it'll kill you fast, maybe it'll kill you slow, who knows. JUSTIN Here are the nicer pictures from the brochure. Oh, the fucking carpet. Horrible. Oh, yes! They got the, 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. Oh, the bar stools. The bar stools. Ugh. Bar stools are cool. Bottom left. 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 Bordel, who's son of French sculptor Antoine Bordel,

and the guy also did a bunch of art in Cincinnati Union Terminal. ALICE This is the veranda, it's got the dance floor, you can look over at the pool, you can see the sexy 1960s women, y'know. And then... okay, over here... ALICE Getting over here, 1960s women dysphoria AND radiation sickness at the same time. ALICE You never want both. JUSTIN This sculpture back here is actually a wine rack, and it's based on a trilinear

chart of the nucleiids. ALICE Oh, fucking dweebs. JUSTIN Yeah. ALICE I love to go to nerd prom. ALICE I love the, oh, I love the, whatever,, I can only assume are the boost gauges over here on the right? Oh, I'm sure that, well, I think this one's a clock. This one's a clock.

Oh no, it's what this one is. I think that's local time. Those are, two of those are 24 hour clocks. Ooh. Cause of the future. Yeah. Yeah. Fuckin' I guess so.

These tables here, note 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 Rubbermaid trash can is not original. Oh, okay. Yeah. You have this, I believe, bronze brass sculpture of the original NS Savannah, right there in

the lounge. Or, excuse me, this is the main dining room, here's what it would've looked like in a contemporary time. ALICE The thing that's overwhelming me about this is how blocky all the rooms are by necessity, so you get a bunch of interesting 60s designs with curves and shapes and stuff, and then it's so obviously the most overbuilt, riveted, concrete looking room situation, like you are in a room. I know this is a strange thing to say, but like... JUSTIN You gotta do, you gotta compromise, because,

you know, it's half cargo, half passenger ship, at the jack of all trades, master of none. ALICE Yeah. I'm not saying I'm on the kind of like, you know, 19th century great cavern of a warship or anything, but like, it's interesting where the kind of compromise seeps in, you know? Justin's give us two bucks a month and we give you an extra episode once a month. 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...

Uh... ALICE Fake plastic. Plastic. JUSTIN Oh yeah, it's brand new. It's brand new, you got fake plants. It's the future. Ah. You know what else was the future?

Let's go to the galley. ALICE No natural fibers, no real plants. SEAN I like that the notes say, horse divorce. Yeah. This is the first commercial microwave oven. Oh my god. 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? ALICE 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. Holy crap. ALICE As opposed to now where like-

JUSTIN Is this space? ALICE Yeah, like, 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. But it hadn't lost it yet, and so all of these people were just like, fucking sick. ALICE Oh, it shows it's the future. JUSTIN These things cost like, $3000 new, which is like $34,000 today.

ALICE And that's the whole, it's like the whole sort of like, fridge size unit as well. JUSTIN Yeah, exactly, exactly. This is definitely for commercial kitchens. It had a whole conventional galley, too. Not everything was being heated here, but, y'know. But they could say, whoa, your food was cooked by radiation. Ooh! ALICE Yeah, in a way that's safer than just, y'know,

frying the eggs on the secondary water system pipes. JUSTIN Yeah. Yeah, I mean, now that I have cooked on a train, I feel sympathy for these people. ALICE Extending a really long spatula with a fried egg on it into the fucking pressure vessel. Yeah. Um, you wanna see the reactor control- The kind of glove box thing.

Oh, look at this! Oh, that's beautiful. Oh yeah. That is great. The floor tile! The way it's got big! Fucking floor tile, here, with the electrons orbiting a propeller, that's fucking great. That's great. Oh, look at fuckin' great. That's great.

Oh, look at all the sh- oh yeah. Oh, look how many bits of boots there are to play with. I could go nuts in here. Yeah, 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. The warning lights across the top, even the ceiling lights, everything about this is like...

JUSTIN Remember the future? ALICE No, but like, how I wish I had. JUSTIN I like how it's, y'know, a nuclear reactor controller, but it also has here a ship's telegram. ALICE Just already welding these two technologies together, huh? JUSTIN 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, it's delegation, you know? JUSTIN Yeah, exactly. And for those of you who aren't familiar with nuclear reactors, scramming the reactors when you dump the control rods in as fast as possible to stop the reaction, that's like an emergency shutdown.

If you only watch Chernobyl, that's AZ-5. ALICE Yeah, I was gonna say, it makes things a lot safer except when it doesn't. JUSTIN Except when it doesn't, well... Usually it works. ALICE It was designed in a way that, like, a situation can happen that makes it much much worse, yeah. JUSTIN We're actually gonna briefly mention the RBMK later in the episode.

So, y'know, yeah, I don't know what any of this does, but it looks cool. The bridge is kinda normal. Yeah, normal style bridge. Yeah, exactly, cause it's just like, I'm just running a steamship. You know. Where's the steam coming from? Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it, it's something else, right?

You got all your classic stuff here, you got like your telephones, you got your microscope laundry machine combinations, you got your champagne bucket, everything you need. JUSTIN You got a, you have the big helmets back there, I don't know where the ship's telegram is, I saw some pictures on Flickr, but they had all rights reserved so I didn't put them in. Anyway. Then we get to the cargo holds.

So these are- ALICE Ooh, these look scary. This is a fuckin' like, unreleased Steam first person shooter. That one guy was developing before he got hired, like a big studio. You know? JUSTIN This looks like the fuckin' back rooms in, like, the Portal games, you know, when you escape the containment chamber. ALICE Yeah, the Stanley Parables let itself go. JUSTIN 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. 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. ALICE LAUGHS. ALICE Oh, you really need to decide if you're passenger or cargo. Like, not to be sort of essentialist about this.

You know, the vert, like... JUSTIN But, uh, yeah. So they built this thing. And they ran it. We'll talk about its early career here. So Savannah goes to Georgia, directly to the city of Savannah. ALICE I was gonna say, likely place ran it. We'll talk about its early career here. So Savannah goes to Georgia, directly to the city of Savannah. I was gonna 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. Did we lose Liam? 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. Canceled. 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. ALICE They sent a guy in in a radiation suit with a corking gun. JUSTIN What they did- ALICE Big daddy suit from Bioshock. JUSTIN They did not fix the leak. ALICE Oh, okay. JUSTIN 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. Oh my god.

So just, 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, my, uh, no, I was thinking of helium. Notably very flammable.

No, nitrogen... Ugh. 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, y'know, filled up with leaked out air conditioning condensation. Ewww. Getting Legionnaires disease on the fucking nuclear ship. Yeah, we did a bodice about that.

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. JUSTIN Well, it's funny, cause 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.

ALICE Hell yeah. It's a safe and legal thrill. It's the Wales problem now. JUSTIN A more modern source is going to say, well, rather than use the barge that was for the purpose, they just discharged it at sea, and that was a problem. And y'know, to make matters worse, if you were on the engineering department, and you were going to fix something, 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. ALICE Nice! Oh, the real, like, orphan-mangling special. JUSTIN Yes. 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 on a nuclear ship, but some shipwrights thought otherwise.

I like to think it must have been driven directly by a takeoff shaft from the main shaft driving the propellers. ALICE Extremely reliable belt drive. The ship does not shut down. JUSTIN 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 ship. ALICE Nuclear reactor? Yeah!

RILEY Yeah, exactly. These are not just, y'know, uh... ALICE Dickheads. RILEY Licensed mariners, they're nuclear engineers. ALICE You are the astronauts of, uh, like, sort of merchant marine, like, sort of merchant marine engineers, right? Yeah, they should get a lot of money, because they're doing a lot of overtime, they're crewing the first nuclear ship, y'know, they went through a lot of extra training, so on and so forth, right? 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, uh, you 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. ALICE merely for operating a nuclear reactor. JUSTIN Yes. LIAM Oh, okay.

I... okay. ALICE Yeah, kind of nuclear aristocracy. JUSTIN Yes. LIAM Sure. JUSTIN On the Savannah, as well as with other states' marine line ships, the deck officers the Why should these engineers make more money just because they're running a nuclear reactor? I mean, this is gonna be trivial technology by 1975, people have one in every car. It should also be noted that there were three other craft unions on board as well, but they don't come into this.

ALICE Oh, that's beautiful. Yeah. So it's like, one for the kind of like, um, uh, like, deck ratings. The stewards. One for the stewards, one for the pastry chefs. Mmhm. Yeah. There's one guy who's in, like, um, 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.

God damn it. 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 was a lot of dangerous, unknown stuff, there's, you know, it was, uh, that these people put in a lot of work, right?

They can no longer negotiate for higher wagers 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 gonna do some mechanical upgrades, to fix some of the problems, they shut down the reactor and walked off the ship. ALICE Hell yeah. ALICE Pretty effective action if you're the nuclear

engineers. Since you don't intend to have a lot of scab nuclear engineers sitting around. JUSTIN I was about to say, y'know, I take one look at that control room, like, I don't know what's going on. SEAN Fuck it, break it with a hammer. JUSTIN 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 US 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. ALICE I was joking about the scab nuclear engineers. JUSTIN They spent a year training a brand new crew.

ALICE They have the plant, but we have the power, ass. JUSTIN Um, anyway. Back underway. Look ma, no smokestack. ALICE It's still a really good looking ship. SEAN To the tune of no hands if I walk a flock of flame, of course.

ALICE Yeah, of course. JUSTIN 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 cancelled 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, they they now let our aircraft carriers go there Ah, American Hedge Road never fails. Exactly. Exactly by 1965 after 90,000 miles and 848 passenger trips or 880 848 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, y'know, by this time, the airlines really were going to eat the passenger lines lunch, Pan Am had 747s on order, this was over. Right? ALICE And nobody's like, expressing any interest

in building any other nuclear ships, right? JUSTIN Oh, 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 in so much as the reactor was an unrefined design, and the ship was just not built for the purpose it was now being used for.

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. ALICE Oh, it's not perfect. SEAN It's not perfect. ALICE As soon as you get containerization in, you iterate 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 nuclear cargo ships. SEAN Oh yeah.

ALICE And, and we don't accidentally geoengineer our way out of and then into some severe climate change. Yeah. Just like, fucking 60 years of the internal combustion engine at sea, that we could've just been doing this instead. I mean, granted, it could've led to like, turbo 9-11, but like, I don't know. Yeah. So anyway, here's, this is Malcolm McLean.

He didn't come up with the container, but he perfected it. 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, here is the SS Ideal X down here, which was a former World War II tank. Yeah. It was built to carry Malcolm McLean's containers, right? Of course.

Um, 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 American service. Really, once someone lays 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.'" ALICE Good thing we didn't give the guy access to, like, uranium, maybe. JUSTIN Yeah. So, uh, these containers seriously reduce the greatest expenses in shipping, namely stevedoring, right? ALICE Yeah, we turn a sort of highly employed industry into one with way fewer people.

SEAN Three guys, yeah. JUSTIN 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-value cargo tended to walk away, right? ALICE We solved that problem. Port theft never happens now. I've reliably informed.

JUSTIN Oh yeah. This made shipping expensive in general, and was one of the motivations for new propulsion systems to reduce costs where it was thought possible. Sea Land turns this on its head, as evidenced by, up here, this is the SL-7, a very fast container carrier, 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. ALICE This will not cause us any problems. This thing kills like 50 whales a second, and dumps a rock full of sulfur worth into

the atmosphere every time. JUSTIN Yeah. These ships are actually still around, they operate for the navy as the Al-Ghul class fast sea-lift ships. ALICE Sometimes you're just condemned to still be useful, y'know? JUSTIN Yes. Well, they go really really really really really fast. ALICE Please let me die!

ALICE Too useful to die. JUSTIN And, speaking of the navy, the other downfall of the savanna 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 US merchant marine today in the 1960s, the largest customer by far for the US merchant marine fleet was the US 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." ALICE I sense the presence of Robert McNamara. JUSTIN Yeah, I, uh, y'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 in 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 defuelled in 1971. She had travelled 450,000 miles, visited 32 domestic ports, 45-

ALICE There are vans driving around with more miles on the clock than that. LIAM Yeah, I can sell you one, actually. ALICE Forty-five 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 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. ALICE You can't have guys climbing over it like,

casting torches. JUSTIN Yeah, yeah, you can't just, y'know, well, you probably could ditch it in a lane, they'd do, y'know, 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.

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. ALICE What? JUSTIN 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. ALICE Too much work.

Too expensive. Easiest to let it sit there harvesting very skilled labors over time. JUSTIN 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. And you can now go visit on certain days, which are announced well in advance on the Anna 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! Yeah. 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 DC would know. ALICE I mean, if anyone is like a supervillain out there looking for a lair, this would be a great, y'know, great option. You have to supply your own reactor, but, y'know. SEAN Well, you could do that, Ross has one in his basement.

JUSTIN No, that's not mine. ALICE I like the big isotope on the outside. Yeah, the big, I should've featured this more prominently in earlier slides, but yeah. It's so cool to look at, I haven't been, I still want, I gotta go at some point. It also bugs me that like, fewer than a thousand people got to be on it while it was underway as well. It's crazy. Well, several hundred thousand people visited it, though, I believe it is the most visited

nuclear facility ever. Huh. Wow. Yeah. But yeah, it's still there, you can go see it. At least for the moment. Say hi from me if you do. Tell them it's a good ship.

Yes. We'll pat it for ya. 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 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... Don't let him do that. Don't let him do that. That is the Auto-Hunt. Yeah.

Less impressive, more practical, more Prussian. Don't let him do that. ALICE Yeah, better than is the auto-hunt. JUSTIN Yeah. Less impressive, more practical, more Prussian. This was an ore carrier, right? Far more of the ship was devoted to cargo. It did have some passenger accommodation for 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.

Yeah, naturally. Despite being more practical for its primary purpose of carrying stuff, it kept being denied access to ports. ALICE In fairness. In fairness. The guy, you know, fucking, also, four unsued war crime, showing up outside your port, being like, let us in, we are normal and can be trusted around your port facilities, this is our uranium ship. You would perhaps be like, no. LIAM No. ALICE No. I don be like, no. JUSTIN No. ALICE No.

ALICE I don't want, no. JUSTIN I don't trust this guy, he's got an eyepatch and not in a cool way. That is kind of a cool way, but it's evil cool. ALICE Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not sure why his arm keeps doing that either, it's really, like, like, twitch or something. SEAN I don't like that. I don't like that I've just been called a mutant shwine and led into a basement. ALICE God.

I hate mozies. This guy, unfortunately I couldn't find too much information in English. We should have sank it. Oh yeah, I bet it was all from, I don't know, Der Stormer or whatever the fuck. I'm gonna get 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 2009. Yeah, we actually realized we could do more evils this way. We actually ran the numbers and 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 the Japanese research ships do.

I was about to say, I was trying to work out the whaling joke here. Extensive investigation into what whales taste like. But, uh, yeah, the Mutsu has a lot of issues with protests. You know, there was- Just force of habit, you see a Japanese shit with research painted down the side, you're like, alright, I'm getting on the green page, but I'm going- Not again, man, I don't wanna be 731 to know this. In this case, they had a minor radiation incident when they powered up the reactor, either the

first time or very early in the ship's career, 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. 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 Smetborput. I see the Rosatomflot across the 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.

Neat. The Russians don't like decommissioning ships. You know who likes decommissioning Russian ships? The Ukrainian Navy. No one else. Yeah, no, this is, 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, like, I forget what it was called,

but it was like, launched in 1917. I was like a fleet auxiliary, I was started out as a cola and oiler, and the Ukrainians sank it with a drone. Like, this year. LIAM Wow. You don't need to be doing all this, Russia. You can just go home. RUSSELL You can just probably just go home, yeah.

So this is what's called a lash carrier that's lighter aboard ship, right, as 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. SEAN What? And just like flick them out there? RUSSELL 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 Mermance to Vladivostok, and ports refused 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.

ALICE That's right, baby! ALICE 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 aircraft carrier, right? No, because we weren't welcome. Oh, I'm sorry, does that say port closed?

Ah, let me introduce you to the F-22, now. Oh, I'm gonna 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. ALICE Yeah, all of that fissile material was being extracted for like... SEAN Set to the nuclear mafia, yes. SEAN Yeah, that's going to my cousin Boris.

ALICE Yeah. SEXON Several different Tom Clancy books are happening at once. SEAN Yeah, exactly. Eventually, laid up in 2007, and they were almost gonna scrap it, but they returned it to service in 2016. Now it mostly does nefarious Russian military transport, as opposed to, y'know, our good and wholesome American military transport.

ALICE Our humanitarian peer versus their nefarious military transport. JUSTIN Exactly. ALICE If the Ukrainians sink this, is that gonna, like, fuck anybody over? How's their pressure vessel looking? JUSTIN They don't send this thing anywhere near Ukraine. I know.

I've learned, if there's one thing I've learned about Ukraine lately, is 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. ALICE. Meanwhile there's a, like, Ukrainian remote controlled glider full of C4, just like, one

of the fuckin' ultra light, like, solar aircrafts, just like, circling above, just like, fucking get him, get his ass. JUSTIN And then it's like, nah, nah, 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 a sort of limp home. ALICE Jesus. JUSTIN This is like, gonna be a big, one of the big, uh, prestige missions for this ship, and it's like, nah.

Nah, uh,, Russian navy... The Russian navy going around in the Horn of Africa has historically been a bad idea. ALICE. Core incompetency. JUSTIN. This continues to be an issue. ALICE. Don't the Russians also have a couple of nuclear icebreakers?

I don't know if they're nuclear or not, but like, I think about the Yamal, the sort of most god- looking ship. ALICE I believe you could take a cruise on one of these things. Suckin' right down about these today. RILEY They have a bunch of them, and they're actually building even more of them. And these aren't like, cargo ships, I mean, these are used for opening navigation channels

for, y'know, whatever the Russians are doing up there. Decreasingly likely to be needed, given the whole, y'know, sulfuric thing. Yeah, call it some Call of Duty plot point shit, who knows. Northern Sea Route open all year, uh, mmm. You gotta find some ice and break it. Hunting down the last iceberg in fucking 911. Like I was about to say. You gotta earn that shark mouth painted on the bow, y'know. Fencing down the last iceberg in fucking 9-11. I was about to say, but... Like a passenger... Yeah, passenger engine.

You gotta 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 gonna make itself fit. Oh yeah, it's gone from icebreaker to seaway enlarger. Yeah. The one they had to do for the SO Northumbria, but just all the time.

The canal dilator. Oh, I watched the Gynecologist the other day, what's up? So what's in the future for nuclear ships? I don't know, but people on Tumblr are kind of josting down Liam Trans? Question mark in their notebooks. No, no, my wife had to go to the Guy in the Colleges yesterday and I had to hear about it. Absolutely. Yeah.

So, right now, as evidenced by the Francis Scott Key Bridge 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 is 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. ALICE You should really get on that, fucking kick us off onto the Fallout Universe timeline.

JUSTIN Yeah, well, apparently. I mentioned New York Shipbuilding earlier in Camden, New Jersey. That land is currently occupied by a company that wants to build small modular reactors. ALICE Ooh, interesting. JUSTIN Yeah. I don't know if they're gonna build them right there. It'd be very funny that you're like, yeah we're gonna build nuclear reactors in one of most built-up areas of the of the East Coast. Oh good luck. Yeah, good luck to you.

I hope you don't fuck up. Yeah, please don't. I like living in Philly. Exactly. I live across the river, come on. So if you couple this with the difficulty of coming up with climate-friendly propulsion ship systems for very large, very heavy ships, it may So, if you couple this with the difficulty of coming up with climate friendly propulsion systems for very large, very heavy ships, it may just be time to reconsider the economics of the nuclear powered cargo ship. ALICE Well, it's that or sails, and people have tried, you know, like... SEAN SILVERSIDE Sails are just not enough for something this big.

ALICE Sure. ALICE You can see sort of sail assisted, like a plug-in hybrid, effectively. JUSTIN Yeah, you get sail assisted, you get the weird things, like the two big rotating cylinders, I forget what that's called. They help, but they're not enough to just move the thing on its own. At least not very fast. So this is a rendering- ALICE We need our treats urgently, so. JUSTIN This is a rendering from ALICE Yeah, we need our treats urgently, so. JUSTIN Yeah.

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. ALICE 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 that does a bunch of the same fucked up shit that America does. But like, some of the research and development and industry stuff that's happening in China

is like, man, really impressive, really interesting, like... It's just 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 it's still impressive, the stuff that's happening, and like, clearly there is some effort to make this, like, greener, even in one of the world's largest polluters, right? But it's not gonna be thrilling watching all of this, and also your ability to get, like, new computer chips destroyed in a sort of futile and pointless war between the superpowers.

SEAN Well, November, we don't have to do research and development here, because in five years AI will do it for us. ALICE Shut up. Shut the hell up. SEAN We just watch Finance Capital just slash through every physical industry in the entire west. Private equity's coming for college football and I'm so fucking mad about that. There's gonna be only two places which are capable of doing basic manufacturing, and

they're gonna 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 like, some Taiwanese guy has to hit the big detonate the fabs button. Yeah. 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 meltup. Yeah, exactly. That would be... And if they cool down, then they're not reacting anymore, you know, if they solidify, right? There's some companies in Norway and South Korea, I believe, which are proposing to convert

existing ships to nuclear power using small modular reactors. 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. You know, reactors are gonna last 50, even 80 years. 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. 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? ALICE To be fair, we haven't really figured out 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.

JUSTIN 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 issue is of course the regulation and nuclear proliferation. The modern shipping ecosystem is just not necessarily conducive to nuclear power.

Right? Because ultimately even if, you know, a China shipbuilding company builds this thing, it's gonna wind up registered in Liberia or Panama or in the Marshall Islands, and they'll be in charge of regulating and inspecting, y'know, all these big nuclear ships, and it's kinda like this... ALICE I'm the, like, Liberian government nuclear reactor inspector. LIAM Oh, yeah! JUSTIN Exactly, exactly.

It's like, yeah, y'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, y'know. ALICE 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. JUSTIN Yes, exactly, exactly. You gotta run a tighter ship. ALICE 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. And it only works with training a lot of your like, your own people to be, like, uh, mariners. Which might be nice in a time of, like, extreme unemployment, y'know? But, who am I to say? JUSTIN We did fix one thing, in that most of the marine unions have now consolidated. Um. ALICE Yeah, well, we're ticking boxes off, y'know?

JUSTIN Yeah, exactly. Uh, you got the issue of proliferation, like, I don't know, China's 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. Now- ALICE Sorry, was there a downside coming? JUSTIN 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 gonna have to run on low enriched uranium, unless they're gonna be relatively large, I mean that's not a- ALICE Still though, shout out to the first Somali pirate to become a nuclear power. ALICE Yeah. Yeah. Good luck to you.

JUSTIN Yeah. Some progress has been made on miniaturizing the Kandu reactor, that's the Canada deuterium uranium reactor, that runs on straight unenriched uranium. Another reactor which can do this is the RBMK. But I don't... Yes! Mobile Chernobyl!

I don't know that you wanna put that on a ship. These reactors being relatively large is not so much of a problem anymore, cause the ships are so damn big, but, y'know, you can't just take a nuclear reactor out of an aircraft carrier where they're using, y'know, the weapons grade stuff and plop it in one of these. ALICE You got to develop something new, cause otherwise, I don't know, y'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. ALICE They're limiting the number of Tom Clancy novels that happen in real life. JUSTIN Yes. ALICE Aww, they nuked Baltimore! ALICE That was the Nazis who nuked Baltimore, I'll have you know, and they killed President Morgan Freeman. JUSTIN Wow.

But, y'know, I think these are surmountable problems, the civilian nuclear naval propulsion should be given a second chance here. Y'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, y'know. So we gotta make the growth in some way sustainable. In which case, yeah, fuck it, give the Houthis whatever. Y'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 oceans. I also don't like that. Yeah. We gotta, like, figure something out with Taiwan, is the main thing. And the key thing is, like, I'm consistent about this, between 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 the other side of the nine dash line, less worried about it. JUSTIN Did the Chinese actually care about Taiwan? ALICE Deeply, yeah. It's sort of like if, um, ah fuck, I dunno, what's something Americans care deeply about? It's sort of like if the NFL was run by another country. JUSTIN Oh no. No.

We will invade. ALICE Like France and Algeria? ALICE Yeah, yeah, well, yeah? Sorta? Mmm. I... well, there's a lot of valences in that question, that, um, I mean, in the sense that it's sort of a... Like, it doesn't exactly map on... RILEY Yep. Oh, and the French teacher at my high school would go off if you mentioned Algeria.

ALICE Oh god. Uh, he knew ours were a fun group, man. RILEY Uh huh. Okay. Great idea, guys. ALICE I'm sorry, I'm just gonna be thinking about that for a minute. RILEY Yeah.

So. ALICE Yeah, Taiwan, China's Algeria... Uh, Taiwan... ALICE Oh, Jesus. RILEY Chinese Algeria. ALICE Chinese Algeria. LIAM I don't want to hear Chinese Algeria, it's not a phrase I wanted to hear. ALICE Been waiting ages for that Guns N' Roses album. Um.

LIAM Alright, let's release Nova from Hell. SEAN The Ratchet of the Earth brackets Taiwanese. LIAM Hurry up, I have to poop. SEAN Alright, what did we learn? ALICE We should probably nuclearize, but also drastically reform commercial shipping. SEAN Yes. We have a VLCC episode coming when I write it. JUSTIN We can walk and chew gum at the same time.

SEAN I can, can you? I can, no I can, you don't like gum. I can't text and walk and- JUSTIN I don't like gum, so I don't know. SEAN Yeah, of course you fucking don't. I can't walk and text really well, I have to stop, and then Kryn's like, what are you doing? I'm just like, I can't do both, man.

I'm 200 years old. ALICE I'm not chewing gum, I have the kind of disorder that makes your jaw fucked up. I can really freak people out with this sometimes, like when it fucks up I can unintentionally click my jaw so loud that people across the room will be like, Jesus Christ are you okay? SEAN It freaks my mom out but I keep doing it because I think it's funny to annoy my mother. ALICE I can't not do it. It's good that I have a job that involves talking, for a living.

SEAN Yeah, you could do it if you wanna annoy some people with misophenia. ALICE The thing I've always thought of as a fallback plan is, if I ever encounter a kind of, like, injury or disease or disability that impairs my ability to talk, we hook me up to the TikTok text to speech thing. SEAN Yeah, that's fine. ALICE And I just type my way through that, like, I'm kind of like the TikTok Stephen Hawking

voice. LIAM Yeah, hopefully without the pedophilia. ALICE I would like to think so, yes. LIAM Yes. Yes. Ah, eugh. People are garbage. JUSTIN We don't know what he did on the Epstein Island.

We just know he was wicked and fur, I think. I don't think it's unfair to infer. ALICE I think it's fair to say he was implicated, is the main thing. JUSTIN Yeah. You want to avoid being on the Epstein-O. ALICE You want to avoid being implicated if you can avoid it. JUSTIN Yeah. Yeah.

JUSTIN 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. ALICE You could use it to go to the Epstein island before, when he first shows up, you're there with a gun. JUSTIN Oh, that'd be funny. ALICE He sort of gets off the boat, just like, yeah, check out my cool new island, and you

like, kill Epstein. ALICE I disagree, shoot him with a crossbow. JUSTIN Yeah, I came here with my time machine to Epstein Island with my friend Che Guevara to kill Epstein. Oh shoot, coward, I am only a man. Now his shoe's on the other foot. ALICE You like LAUGH ALICE & LIAM LAUGH JUSTIN All right. I don't know why we merely thought Che Guevara other than, y'know, it's an island in the

Caribbean. Anyway. ALICE & LIAM Well, now that the delusion has set in, or the... JUSTIN Yeah, exactly. We have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. ["Shake hands with danger." Ooh, women owned. Yes. I know they are, I 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 assume 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 a safety third should be like something that's being passed down generationally. This is a family podcast. Oh god it is. WTYP is for the children. Yeah, exactly.

Years ago, well before the invasive species Advocata sat infinitive, drove the last snails into the coffin of free-range childhood, I worked at a summer camp in western Pennsylvania, somewhere between... I've never heard of this town before. It's tiny, it's in southwestern Pennsylvania, it's in Fayette County. Ohio Pile? Good enough, dude. It's like ancient Greek Okiopula.

Oho, yeah. And Johnstown. It was a rustic setup. The only actual buildings were the dining hall- It's near where Falling Water is, does that help? No. Oh, that makes sense, yeah. Yeah. I still never been there.

I'll take ya. Yeah. The dining hall... Banging your head on the ceilings. ...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 woodpile 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 shower house. Assuming the trap was empty, we'd cover it with a tarp so as to not worry the little ones. You get the idea, to the shower house. 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. Pre-lapsarian, sort of pre-risk assessment time of extreme danger. Yes. 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. LIAM Oh boy. ALICE We need to stop getting safety thirds from

people who have done First World War gas attacks on themselves. LIAM Yeah, Roz once made a low-grade chemical weapons lab in our basement, but that was an accident. ALICE That basement's seen, uh, like, two out of four of the points of the CBRN square. JUSTIN I definitely did that at the old Formula SAE lab, or I assisted in that, I didn't do that. Super Death Cleaner did work extremely well. RUSSELL 4235, you created a low-grade chemical weapons lab that made me sick.

JUSTIN Oh. Anyway. RUSSELL Moving swiftly on. 4235 you created a low-grade chemical weapons lab that made me sick. Oh anyway Victimized by Justin Ross. Yeah Needless to say progress slowed no longer simply summer staff scrubbing the deep end, we'd become soldiers in the trenches at Iprez. I-p-r-a. I-p-r-a. I don't know how things- okay. Iprez.

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 ass. Remarkably, no comment was made when we all showed up to dinner, red-eyed and sniffling. I... Mm, okay. Yeah.

Thanks for making the one podcast my kid and I both enjoy, sometimes even together. From Kimberly. You're so welcome. Thanks Kimberly, please try not to gas yourself or anyone else. Yeah. Or especially not your kid, they're less resistant to that. Yeah, like, you need, once you're in adulthood you can sort of tank a bit of chlorine gas, but like... Yeah, 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 and they actually go for a stack underflow thing. Yeah, exactly, exactly. It's kinda like, you might actually stop existing entirely. Oh fuck, yeah. Well, that was Safety Third. Our next episode is on Chernobyl, does anyone have any commercials before we go? ALICE Um, all of the, like, Palestinian charity and GoFundMe stuff that we talked about earlier.

And, yeah, listen to Lie Inside by Donkeys, listen to Kill James Bond, listen to Trash Future, subscribe to Justin's YouTube channel, you know? JUSTIN Yeah. Liam and I were on Anders Lee's podcast, The Vanquished, talking about the Prohibition Party recently. That was a pretty fun one. 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.

ALICE No. Just for fun. JUSTIN Yeah. So yeah, I think that's it. ALICE That's it. It's a podcast. JUSTIN Alright, that's a podcast. Subscribe to our Patreon, everyone.

Bye. ALICE Yeah. Bye. LIAM Bye.