U.S. Navy's New MMO Wants Your Energy-Saving Solutions

[weirdee]

this would explain why naval units in advance wars blow through a full tank of gas in a few minutes

i'm still waiting for them to figure out how to beam power using microwave radiation cost effectively

 

[rednose1]

To everyone wanting nuclear reactors, one thing you have to realize, it takes trained people to run them. A problem the Navy ran into as late. Back in the beginning, NNPTC (Naval Nuclear Power Training Command) got rid of 50%+ of all the people that were in. This, combined with people advancing through the ranks and getting out, led to a shortage of people, which is still felt today (which is why at the time I left, they were offering $100,000 plus auto advance to E-5 for a 2 year enlistment. You put even more reactors out there, and the cost to keep the people alone would make it insane.

Additionally, the cost of generating the fuel, transporting it, and finally refueling and storage is huge. Then there is the political ramifactions of suddenly increaseing how much weapons grade Uranium we make. Try explaining that to countries when we are trying to prevent them from havening any weapons grade at all. Not an easy subject.

My best guess is to use the seawater and electrolysis to create hydrogen for power. Whether this would be cost effective is anyone's guess.

 

[2fish]

Spoiler: air is easier to move through than water

I feat there is no easy or cheap solution to the problem. I wonder what they will choose as the top solutions.

Spoiler

Invade in this order
[link]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_production[/link]

 

[vxicepickxv]

Just make smaller nuclear reactors for the other ships. Or repurpose submarine reactors. IT's a proven safe tech, we've only been powering subs and carriers with them for 40 or 50 years now, and they cost sooo much less to operate.

See, I thought that a large portion of our fleet was already nuclear, but I guess not.

The biggest problem with trying to make smaller ships nuclear powered is that you run into space issues. They actually tried this with 3 Los Angeles class cruisers, but you had too much unusable space in the ship, so they ditched them. Smaller ships would be worse.

My best guess is to use the seawater and electrolysis to create hydrogen for power. Whether this would be cost effective is anyone's guess.

Right now, it's basically about the same cost as fuel, but the replacement costs would ultimately be lower than fuel in the long run.

 

[Not G. Ivingname]

Just make smaller nuclear reactors for the other ships. Or repurpose submarine reactors. IT's a proven safe tech, we've only been powering subs and carriers with them for 40 or 50 years now, and they cost sooo much less to operate.

NO! That idea is to logical! D:

We must power our ships by firing off NUKES behind them!

The shockwave will carry off our finest to where ever they need to go!

OT: I wonder if what people will come up with. In many cases, the masses guesses are actually better than the things experts come up with.

That idea was actually proposed by members of the space program at one point. It was going to be used on rockets.

Other fun ideas for uses for Nukes was land mines, blowing a bunch up in a cave for power generation, short range artillery pieces, and landscaping.

Actually uses was once in a wargame excersice, bathing many soldiers in healing and totally healthy radiation!

 

[Not G. Ivingname]

The US government would never do that! What is wrong with you. ):<

All those men are white!

[/kidding]

How about using fewer and generally smaller ships? Aside from things like aircraft carriers, what is really the purpose of the majority of navy ships?

Air superiority seems more important, and if you can just make smaller more powerful warheads (which is something that is obviously always being worked on) then what do you need giant ships for anyway?

Missile boats and mobile launching platforms for aircraft seem like the only real useful naval ships to me in the 21st century...

But if anyone knows better I'd love to learn why

To protect the aircraft carriers from an enemy with air superiority, enemy ships, and submarines. You need to be able to keep your aircraft carriers alive if you lose air superiority, and make sure the enemy doesn't bomb the flight deck, making all the planes in the air unable to land.

The US navy doesn't really use huge battleships anymore. You will be hard pressed to find many Navy ships above a destroyers.

Even if the Navy downsized on their ships besides the aircraft carriers, it still leaves the problem of the fuel guzzling, giant aircraft carriers, which I think is the problem the Navy wants solved.

 

[Drops a Sweet Katana]

Start converting to hydrogen cells. You'll get more bang for your buck and lower emissions. Also, the militarization of it will make it profitable for the general masses, lowering your costs further.

Excellent idea as well, love fuel cells, but they are painfully inefficient on a overall energy scale. Getting the hydrogen requires that you use some other source to break down water, which is of course where we'd find the vast majority of our hydrogen. So, in order to mass produce hydrogen, your best bet would be to increase the nation's energy infrastructure first, hopefully causing us to finally realize that nuclear can solve nearly everything for us in power plants, then work toward getting fuel cells going. Another thing is that fuel cells are very, very heavy for their power output, so you have the potential of making vessels even slower. Perhaps they won't lose half of their speed, but even a max speed drop of five knots would be something to think about, and you of course need large fuel cells.

Something unfortunate to consider as well is that the catalyst in fuel cells used to allow protons to pass through to join with oxygen but to prevent electrons form flowing is made using platinum. We have no other material yet with which we can make the catalysts. That, of course, means you need to have pretty deep pockets until something comes along (glances as molybdenite-based substitute).


Aha! Sorry about all that, guys. I saw this article only had ten comments to it, so I got all of my discussion responses in at once! Feels good!

Lets not also forget the big problem with hydrogen, it combusts easily and violently. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindenburg_disaster] So having it on a warship might not be a good idea.

OT: crowd sourcing certainly seems to be all the rage these days, and it might end up being a good thing too!

That's why you would want to use hydrogen. It provides a ton of bang for the buck when used in a combustion engine. You just wouldn't want it to leak that's all.

 

[Not G. Ivingname]

Use deployable hydro electric power plants as an auxillary power source, and also to recycle a portion of the energy through the ships' motion. They could create some drag, so it would be important to create a streamlined design and position them carefully, preferably where they will receive the most sea currents.

Navies ought to exploit the most abundant resource in their natural habitat - the sea.

Well, I know submarines at least make their own air and water from the resources all around them (the only limiting factor on how long they can stay down is food), I imagine the rest of the fleet does this as well.

 

[Namehere]

I'm guessing you guys have a lot of empty oil barrels by now. And obviously money is no issue for the US Navy. So what you do is contact these guys: http://witricity.com/pages/contact.html

Then you go out and lash those barrels together, you mount solar panels on them. If your quite clever maybe some sort of wind and or tidal harness technology as well. You tie an anchor to each unit you drop in the ocean. Each of them far enough apart to reach the vehicles passing between them. Then you put out these vehicles you designed while you were building that new electrical grid in the ocean. These will be small vehicles, perhaps not even multi-purpose. Maybe one with a camera, another with a sonar device on it, possibly even one with radar. Then you operate these little machines, giving you eyes and ears on the water, between that electrical grid. How many coast guard vessels did you just stop using to go look around?

You rout all of that to central locations, C&C on land, near an urban centre so you can supply it with out ships. More fuel savings, less supply ships because all the stuff looking at stuff is now unmanned and run from these offices. You rout it all to the Pentagon, White House god and your electrician are the only creatures who care where else. And presto chango, fuel is somewhat out of the picture. Can't say for sure how your electrical line of floating oil drums will be received internationally, or what sort of range the folks at witricity can give you on their transmitters, but its another idea.

Saving money is even easier but I've done enough heavy lifting tonight.

 

[Dalisclock]

I propose Steam power! You can build anything with that stuff the Internet told me so.

On a more serious note the most effective thing you could do would be to utilise the water water around you to create energy i.e. hydro electric generators.

damn too slow

Well, the Carriers and Subs are already Steam powered, utilizing water from the ocean. They just have a nuclear heat source to make the steam.

 

[Dalisclock]

To everyone wanting nuclear reactors, one thing you have to realize, it takes trained people to run them. A problem the Navy ran into as late. Back in the beginning, NNPTC (Naval Nuclear Power Training Command) got rid of 50%+ of all the people that were in. This, combined with people advancing through the ranks and getting out, led to a shortage of people, which is still felt today (which is why at the time I left, they were offering $100,000 plus auto advance to E-5 for a 2 year enlistment. You put even more reactors out there, and the cost to keep the people alone would make it insane.

Thanks for bringing this up. I was going to mention it.

Apparently the 50% drop rate has gone down a bit, but they still offer $90K bonuses routinely to get people to reenlist. However, it's the shitty Economy that's keeping a lot of people right now and when the Economy gets better, it's only going to become harder for the Navy to retain and recruit trained nuclear operators. Especially if deployments become longer or more frequent then the 6 months in port and 6 months on deployment per year a lot of carriers are doing right now.

 

[devotedsniper]

Since most ships are diesel powered why not just use veg oil for fuel or biofuel? Theres plenty of people out there that have diesel cars running on veg oil, theres abit of a process to making the veg oil good enough but it works out alot cheaper when you compare the price per litre at petrol pumps in the UK at least(granted it's different pricing compared to a regular car but it still the same theory and anything that stops us from burning fossil fuels is always good provided it doesn't take us a step back).

 

[mixadj]

Solar sails and electrolysis to create hydrogen anyone? Heck, aircraft carriers that have safety nets on the sides of the deck could have soft panels installed in said nets. Use the hydrogen produced from electrolysis in fuel cells or a modified ICE.