WVEC brings us news of the world’s first commercial nuclear ship, N/S Savannah.
The Savannah, a historic landmark and the world’s first nuclear-powered cargo and passenger ship, is leaving Virginia waters after 14 years.
Its government caretaker, the U.S. Maritime Administration, announced a contract Tuesday worth at least $588,380 to relocate the famous dinosaur from Norfolk to Canton Marine Terminals in Baltimore.
The sleek, white, 596-foot-long vessel was to leave local waters Wednesday on its way up the Chesapeake Bay.
The full story including video can be found HERE.
Tags: · nuclear ship
The Picture Blog, Dark Roasted Blend is featuring a series on Russian Nuclear Icebreakers.
Here’s a sample: The balance of the pics are here.
Paired up for the voyage
The Voyage Plan
Sunrise
The Reactor Control Room
The Reactor
Here’s the video version via Sea Fever.
Nuclear Icebreaker
for more Nuclear Goodness CLICK HERE or take our nuclear cargo quiz HERE.
Photos by Svetlana Bogdanova; seamen of the Murmansk Sea Shipping Company via Dark Roasted Blend. Blog post by gCaptain and Bitterend’s chief blogger Richard Rodriguez
Tags: · Icebreaker, Nuclear, nuclear ship, russia
What is it??
A free gCaptain t-shirt goes out to the first person who can correctly identify this cargo.
UPDATE:
We have a winner. Charlie of Sea Wolf Engineering correctly identified the cargo as nuclear fuel casks. The owner of the ship, Pacific Nuclear Transport Ltd tells us:
The special packages in which PNTL transports nuclear material are called “flasks” or “casks”. They are typically made from 25 cm thick forged steel and weigh around 100 tonnes. They can hold up to five tonnes of nuclear material.
The casks facilitate the movement of nuclear material by different modes of transport, protect workers from radiation, dissipate heat efficiently and are designed to withstand severe accidents.
BNFL Cask Maintenance Facility
Casks are monitored for radiation prior to loading onto PNTL ships and during transportation. They are thoroughly cleaned and inspected in maintenance facilities after each shipment.
Cask lids can only be attached and removed using specialist equipment at nuclear facilities.
The casks transported by PNTL belong to customers. Each cask design has to meet safety requirements established by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in order to be licensed by national regulatory bodies.
Click HERE to find out more and HERE for video of these interesting nuvlear transport ships.
Tags: · cargo, Nuclear, nuclear ship, nuclear transport, pntl, quiz
Costing millions of dollars in 1969 America’s first and only Nuclear powered merchant ship was designed in hopes of finding peaceful uses for Nuclear energy. She was the pride of the fleet and designed with looks as powerful as her reactor. With a savings of over 29 million gallons of fuel oil during her short 5 year service life (1965-1970) she might have been a solution to present environmental and self-sufficiency problems. Her high maintenance cost however, led to her downfall. Since 1975 she has been sitting idle, left to rust, but this year post 9/11 security concerns have led the U.S. Government to budget 4.5 million for her restoration and conversion. Her new mission? She will be brought back to her cold war glory and re-activated as a museum ship offering future Americans a glimpse into the atomic age.
Our iPhone Contestant Capt.Billy submitted this article on the restoration of the famed nuclear ship N/S Savannah. Here is a brief look at her story:
The U.S. Maritime Administration said Friday that it has awarded BAE Systems Norfolk Ship Repair a $4.1 million contract to put the weathered ship into dry dock for a long-awaited blasting and repainting.
It is the next step in the agency’s plan to eventually donate the famous maritime relic as a museum or public attraction.
“We’re thrilled to death,” said Erhard Koehler, the maritime agency’s senior technical adviser for the Savannah project. “We’re moving forward.”
Designed with the sleek lines of an oceangoing yacht, the 596-foot-long vessel was launched in 1959 as the world’s first nuclear-powered cargo ship. President Eisenhower had the ship built to promote the peaceful use of atomic power. Read More…
Some photos of the beautifully designed ship:
N/S Savannah Underway
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Tags: · History, Nuclear, nuclear ship
