Alongside a former grain pier in a strangely quiet corner of this cargo port, there’s a ship straight out of the future—the future, that is, as seen from the 1950s. Featuring sleek, modern lines and a giant insignia of an atom, the Nuclear Ship Savannah once sailed the world to demonstrate the peaceful potential of atomic energy.
Constructed at a cost of $46.9 million ($386.8 million in 2016 dollars) and launched on July 21, 1959, the Savannah was the world’s first nuclear cargo ship and the second nuclear-powered civilian ship (coming just two years after the Soviet nuclear icebreaker Lenin). Owned by the US Maritime Administration (MARAD) and operated by commercial cargo companies, for nearly a decade she carried cargo and passengers around the world. She also acted as a floating herald for America’s seemingly inevitable, cool Atomic Age future. Savannah boasted all the latest conveniences, including one of the world’s first microwave ovens.
Many critics have since called the Savannah an expensive Cold War-era boondoggle, but she was in many ways a success. The ship was never intended to turn a profit; rather, Savannah was intended to demonstrate what was possible with nuclear power. Design compromises made to get her into service as a showcase ship with passenger service handicapped her value as a cargo ship, but Savannah did demonstrate the advantages of nuclear propulsion. There was no need to refuel or to take on ballast water as fuel was expended, which meant less time in port and less pollution. Ironically, the Arab oil embargo arrived about two years after her tenure, but Savannahcould have turned a profit during the situation despite these compromises.
Ultimately, the bright atomic future Savannah was supposed to herald quickly lost its luster. The $2 million in annual subsidies required to operate made her a target for budget cuts—especially when the price of oil was low. In 1971, she was taken out of service. By the 1980s, both Japan and Germany abandoned their own nuclear merchant programs; only Russia still operates nuclear-powered merchant ships from its Arctic port in Murmansk. The country has a lone nuclear icebreaking cargo ship and six icebreakers in service.
Today, nuclear power continues to draw a glimmer of interest from the shipping industry. Fluctuating energy prices and the cost of operating diesel-powered ships—particularly “Suezmax” oil tankers—prompted new designs and a change in the insurance rules for nuclear ships. But it’s unlikely that the US merchant fleet will play any role in the return of the nuclear merchant ship, because the US Merchant Marine is a shadow of what it once was.
So more than 45 years after her last voyage, the Savannah remains moored here at the Canton Marine Terminal in a sort of limbo. It has been defueled and had nearly all of its radioactive materials removed, but the Savannah‘s reactor is still intact—as is the ship’s license to operate from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).
The long goodbye
Savannah officially became a museum ship in South Carolina in 1981 as part of the state’s Patriot’s Point Naval and Maritime Museum. In the process, the state became a Nuclear Regulatory Commission co-licensee with MARAD. But in 1993, Savannah was turned back over to the Maritime Administration when she needed to be drydocked. “The museum said, ‘Just don’t bring it back,'” recounted Erhard Koehler, the ship’s senior technical advisor and manager. “That was when I became involved.”
For the past 24 years, Koehler’s life has been tethered to Savannah, first as a project engineer for MARAD and then as her chief caretaker for this past decade. Koehler is the man whose name is on the ship’s license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. During his tenure, Savannah has been drydocked or moored up and down the Chesapeake, coming to rest at her current Baltimore home eight years ago.
Designated as a national landmark, Savannah continues to be preserved. But the ship is also still regulated by the NRC and awaiting congressional funding for full decommissioning. It’s a step that the US government didn’t really even think about back when Savannah was built.
Atoms for Peace
The Savannah‘s story doesn’t really start with build or launch date, however. It begins with President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s desire to do something to turn the research conducted under the aegis of the Atomic Energy Commission toward something other than weapons of war. In a speech given before the United Nations General Assembly on December 8, 1953 (nearly six years before Savannah launched), Eisenhower urged the world to step back from a nuclear arms race and to metaphorically hammer weapons-grade nuclear material into atomic plowshares.
“It is not enough to take this weapon out of the hands of the soldiers,” Eisenhower said. “It must be put into the hands of those who will know how to strip its military casing and adapt it to the arts of peace. The United States knows that if the fearful trend of atomic military buildup can be reversed, this greatest of destructive forces can be developed into a great boon, for the benefit of all mankind…The United States pledges before you—and therefore before the world—its determination to help solve the fearful atomic dilemma, to devote its entire heart and mind to find the way by which the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life.”
The speech launched the “Atoms for Peace” program, an effort to spread the joy of responsible fission around the globe and deplete stores of weapons-grade material. It also spurred the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, making civilian and commercial atomic energy possible. Highly enriched uranium was made available for research reactors and other civilian applications—including the first nuclear reactors in Iran, Israel, and Pakistan. All of those were built by the atomic energy and bowling equipment powerhouse American Machine and Foundry.
As the literal flagship of the Atoms for Peace program, Eisenhower ordered the construction of a nuclear powered merchant ship to show how safe nuclear power could be—a ship that would carry passengers and cargo in close proximity to a reactor for extended periods of time. After her christening in 1959, it took Savannah—named for the first steamship to cross the Atlantic—another two years to get her propulsion plant. Ultimately, she relied on a 74-megawatt Babcock & Wilcox pressurized water reactor to drive two steam turbines.
Savannah would become the most heavily visited nuclear facility in the world, and the ship gave tours of the engineering space during port calls. “It was not unusual to have 20,000 to 30,000 people per day come through in port,” Koehler said. “Savannah had over one and a half million visitors during its operating career.”
The upside of atomic
There were, on the surface at least, many potential advantages to nuclear-powered merchant ships during the postwar heyday of American merchant shipping. While it had already been acknowledged that diesel engines were the most efficient form of propulsion available for merchant ships, for a number of reasons—not all of them technical—“the Merchant Marine [ship] was primarily steam propelled even into the 1970s,” Koehler explained.
Part of the reason was that US Merchant Marine ships were essentially Navy auxiliaries—they were subsidized by the government because they could potentially be pressed into service in wartime to carry troops and material overseas. “They had to be fast and able to evade subs,” said Koehler. “They needed compact power, and compact power was steam up until the ’70s. It also takes more engineers to run a steam plant, so the unions were in favor of steam. But the maneuvering part was the reason.”
Nuclear power is essentially a really high-end version of steam power—the heat of the reactor creates steam, and that pressurized steam passes through turbines that convert the energy into rotation and propulsion. But nuclear propulsion has a number of advantages over conventional steam plants. The US Navy embraced nuclear propulsion for its aircraft carriers (starting with the USS Enterprise) largely because it eliminates dependence on refueling. This extends the amount of time at sea that can be spent on station and ready for combat missions. Nuclear propulsion also revolutionized the submarine fleet because it allows subs to travel for weeks or even months without surfacing.
But for the Merchant Marine, nuclear power had one major draw—it meant faster turnarounds in port. With conventional steam ships, “you have to take time to bunker fuel, and sometimes you can’t do cargo operations while you’re bunkering,” explained Koehler. “Time in port is time you’re not earning revenue. So if you can decrease your turnaround time, you can spend more time at sea, make more voyages, and earn more revenue.”
There’s also the issue of ballast. As steam ships burn oil, they need to pump water into the fuel tanks for ballast—to maintain the ship’s stability and draft. “As you’re burning fuel off as you go, you have to add water for ballast—and then you have to pump it out, putting oil in the water and causing environmental problems,” Koehler said.
Nuclear propulsion takes care of all those issues, Koehler explained. “Not burning off fuel, the ship’s arrival and departure conditions are the same, and these don’t have to bunker, so your time in port is limited to cargo time. Those were very attractive concepts. And in the 1950s and the ’60s, and even into the early ’70s—back when you’re not thinking about de-commissioning [the reactor]—if subsidies are in effect for construction and operation, these advantages might even outweigh the cost differential between steam and nuclear ships. If you can make 20 voyages when the foreign ship is only going to make 16, that’s motivating.”
Those may have been the reasons merchant ship lines were interested in nuclear ships, but they were not what motivated Eisenhower to order Savannah. “Eisenhower wanted a peace ship—a merchant ship that was non-military to demonstrate the atoms for peace idea around the world,” Koehler said. “It would have been fine for him if it had operated for two or three years around the world and then was finished.” But the president needed to get funding, and congressional consensus was not behind that sort of expenditure for a show boat.
“The Maritime Administration wanted to use it as a demonstration platform, as did the Atomic Energy Commission,” Koehler explained. Congressional budgeting, MARAD, and the AEC’s desires influenced the final design. “So the Savannah, in many respects, is not the ship Eisenhower intended,” Koehler noted. “But what makes it most relevant today is exactly what Eisenhower wanted. It has become successful in that regard. As an experiment, who else was going to do the experiment?”
The green side of nuclear
One reason occasionally floated today for considering nuclear propulsion for ships is that it is essentially the original zero-emission system. So while the Savannah‘s remarkably small carbon footprint and zero emissions were not necessarily a selling point in the 1960s, they certainly would be today—aside from the issues of reactor fuel disposal, of course. The steam-powered ships of the 1950s and 1960s, while somewhat less of a blight than their predecessors, were still by comparison floating environmental disasters. But as an environmental solution, nuclear power today is a bit of overkill.
“Frankly, it’s a really high-end solution to a problem that didn’t exist then,” Koehler acknowledged. “And even if you look at emissions control now, it’s a very high-end solution.”
In order to be an effective ambassador of the atom, Savannah had to be safe. The ship was the first merchant vessel to have roll stabilizing fins to reduce the impact of sea states on the reactor (and on the passengers). And the architects of the ship were also highly focused on making sure that a possible collision at sea wouldn’t create a nuclear accident. That need was reinforced by the 1956 sinking of the Andrea Doria after a collision at sea.
“The designers were very concerned about that even before the (Andrea Doria) incident,” Koehler said. “But after the incident, they were working very hard to ensure the ship could survive a collision.” The collision boundary around the Savannah‘s reactor containment vessel is an “armored box in the middle of the ship,” Koehler explained. “So you have a collision boundary—concrete sandwiched with one inch of steel and three inches of redwood, then backed by concrete. The concrete surrounds all four sides, and the redwood is only on the port and starboard sides. And the scantlings of the frames and the decks in this area are much stiffer than elsewhere.”
While the box provided collision protection, it also created some other issues. “The problem with an armored box is that the ship wants to keep bending” as it rides the seas, Koehler said, “but it can’t because of the box.” That rigidity in the middle of the ship can cause problems. In a hurricane the ship rode out at sea in 1964, for instance, the ship’s hull buckled under the stress.
The reactor’s containment vessel sits within that armored box, but it essentially rides within it. “Like any other heat-producing or affected structure on the ship, it rides on the foundation so it can expand and contract thermally,” Koehler explained. “So if the ship were to have capsized, it could theoretically fall out.” To prevent that, the ship’s architects put a hold-down brace above the containment vessel.
Just feet away from one outer wall of the reactor compartment was the ship’s butcher shop. One might be concerned that this brought new meaning to “irradiated meat.” But the ship was built to demonstrate the safety of nuclear power, and “it demonstrated that by putting people next to it,” Koehler explained. “The shielding was designed to keep exposure outside the compartment to 0.5 millirems, and it worked just fine.”
The ship carried hundreds of passengers during its career until passenger service was ended as a cost-savings measure. That decision wasn’t due to lack of demand—the ship’s 54 berths were always fully booked.
Nuclear economics and nuclear people
While Savannah didn’t burn fuel, she required a much more technically trained crew to operate—which led to a rather unusual labor structure for a merchant ship. “The engineering complement was much larger,” Koehler noted. “You had three engineering officers on watch at any time—most ships only had one.” As a result, the overall crew was much larger (65) compared to the average steamer’s crew of 45. And the engineers—who needed to go through a separate nuclear licensing training program—were in a separate union from the ship’s deck officers.
When the ship first came into service, there were five separate unions representing the crew. At one point, pay discrepancies between the unions led to a series of labor disputes that disrupted service—and this eventually led to the ship’s management being shifted to a new company. To save money, the Savannah‘s new operator stopped offering passenger service and cut the required crew.
It wasn’t like there was a large pool of nuclear-qualified merchant engineers to choose from, anyway. Even while there was a good deal of initial interest in building additional nuclear-powered merchants, there was little incentive for their construction. Koehler explained that it was largely because of the way US merchant ships were financed. US merchant ships largely depended on federal subsidies, but these subsidies were based on what it cost to run other ships. “There were no other nuclear ships, and the capital cost of building them was significantly more,” Koehler said. So the question of how to adjust the subsidy for a new type of ship was never resolved.
These economic issues put nuclear merchant ships out of the reach of most private companies. Even the nuclear merchants built by other countries (the Soviet nuclear icebreaker Lenin was the first) were all constructed “with direct government funding,” Koehler noted.
In limbo
And this was all before anyone started thinking about the end-of-life costs for nuclear ships. Part of the problem with nuclear-powered vessels is that the reactors they carry essentially outlive the ships themselves, because ships typically have a limited number of “hull-miles” in them before they need to be overhauled or scrapped. “Nobody was thinking about decommissioning costs until the 1970s,” Koehler said. “The power plant outlives the ship.”
Today, the Savannah‘s future remains uncertain, because the decommissioning process for the ship’s nuclear reactor requires money—and Congress appears to be in no hurry to write a check. There’s also the question of who’d be willing to take care of the Savannah once her reactor is removed—she already had one life as a museum ship, and that didn’t exactly end well.
“Really, the reasons [Savannah] failed at Patriot’s Point as a museum have very little to do with the mechanics of making it a museum,” Koehler says. “Museum ships are expensive propositions, and they take a lot of work to maintain. Many museum ships survive on the backs of their volunteers, who are usually former crew.” Savannah didn’t have anybody like that readily available, he explained. After all, when she became a museum, all the Savannah‘s crew were still working in either the merchant marine or the nuclear industry.
And while Patriot’s Point had examined plans for using Savannah as a restaurant or hotel, Hurricane Hugo “knocked everything for a loop,” Koehler said. “Hugo sat on top of it for two hours, and the ship opened like a sieve.” Short on the resources to restore her, Patriot’s Point asked MARAD to take the ship back.
Over the past two decades, Koehler and MARAD have worked to rehabilitate the ship as its caretakers, carefully documenting parts of the ship as they go. The reactor has been defueled, and ion-exchange resins used to decontaminate the water in the system have long been buried in South Carolina. “But everything else is intact—pressurizer is there, the steam generators, the control rods, reactor is there,” Koehler says. “There’s just residual radioactivity plated in the system. So the utilization facility that is licensed by the NRC remains intact, even though it’s not utilizing anything. We’re in that 60-year, post-shutdown licensed termination phase, and when we get money from Congress, the plan is to take the reactor out.”
Luckily, decommissioning the ship’s power plant wouldn’t mean tearing the Savannah apart. “The hatch opens, the cupola head comes off, and it can all come out through the top without affecting the surrounding fabric of the ship,” Koehler said. “The containment vessel would stay intact. Everything just comes out, then it closes up again, and the ship is still a ship and still a national historic landmark—though its fate is somewhat uncertain.”
So for now, the Savannah sits moored at this obscure former grain pier under Koehler’s care. The ship is mostly used as a setting for occasionally hosting events, scout sleep-overs, and government meetings. In addition to the original furnishings, government surplus furniture has now been used to turn the Eisenhower Room—a former lounge space rededicated to the president that ordered Savannah built—into a conference center. Initially, this space hosted regular NRC-mandated license hearings. But if Koehler and other Savannah supporters get their way, the need for such meetings will fade while their historic setting moves on to the next stage of her life.
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Source: Ars Technica
Fascinating article. Thank you