I suspect you won’t find many crew who looked at the man pointing an AK at him who would not say they felt some degree of terror.
The lure of nuclear material being so easily available and very valuable will very quickly blur what little, if any distinction exists between pirates and your apparent definition of terrorist.
From Oxford Dictionary:
Terrorist
noun
adjective
“a terrorist organization”
I suspect you wouldn’t find ANY person that doesn’t feel terror when somebody point any kind of gun at them, AK 47 or any other brand.
Like Putin and Trump?
We don’t need a dictionary to describe the pirate or officially certified terrorist who hijacks a ship for money, political desire, or any other reason. You better believe that certified terrorists who meet your and the Oxford definition will be delighted to pay uncertified or unaffiliated pirates to do their shopping for them.
The people who board the ship are desperate peons. They deliver the ships to the brains of the operation who sponsor them and negotiate the ransoms. In the case of a nuclear powered ship, what’s to stop the organizers from having the peons deliver a the ship where nuclear scientists are or of flying them to the ship wherever it’s moored.
I think more than a few Iranian nuclear scientists would gladly sign up for the overtime.
I think the point is that the fear is not inline with the reality.
Do we honestly believe that if the risk were that great of a ship being hijacked that the navies of the world would do nothing to stop it from being transported to more hostile waters? We spend hundreds of millions on pirate interdiction off Africa and those ships are harmless.
Further, I’m not sure what a nuclear scientist is going to do. Even assuming this stolen ship is allowed to travel unmolested to where? Iran already has enriched uranium. Not that LEU will do much for you. And to convert stolen partially-used LEU fuel rods into truly dangerous HEU is not something that’s going to happen in some jihadist garage. Anyone with the technology to do that already is. Anyone without is looking at decades.
Nuclear commercial ships have the potential to operate safely and without credible risk of terrorism. I still don’t think they ever will though.
I’d be more concerned with traditional hazards of shipping like environmental concerns over time of reactors after sinking in a storm or fire.
How’s that working out?
Read my earlier post. They don’t need to convert anything. All they need to do is cut open the shielding, remove whatever fuel they can and pack it around a pile of C4 or a dud bomb they picked up somewhere and voila, a dirty bomb. The martyrs who dug the stuff out of the enclosure will be selecting virgins in whatever hell passes for their heaven but their brothers call them heroes.
This isn’t nuclear physics, it’s fundamentalist whackjobs with shop tools and improvised explosives.
Pretty well I’d say looking at that map. US and their coalition partners on the anti piracy taskforce were focussed on the horn of Africa, where last year there were almost no issues and this year not so much as an attempt. Most of the other attacks were basically petty theft, one from a canoe. No one is going to steal fuel rods with a canoe!
But further, it’s unlikely a nuclear powered vessel would be insured to (or have any reason to) sail anywhere near current hotspots like west Africa.
We can debate dirty bombs all day long, but it doesn’t increase the likelihood of the source being a ship. One study I read from (I think) the USNRC, estimated one item of some form of radioactive material is lost, missing, or stolen every day globally. Another suggested the sheer volume of unaccounted for radioactive material from Russia is staggering. And yet there is little evidence of one dirty bomb ever, in history.
Not yet. That’s no assurance that it’s not going to happen if the opportunity becomes easier. The end justifies the means though. If warlords or terrorists want to get their hands on dirty bomb material by hijacking a ship, they’ll figure out a way.
Link?.
Not that hard to avoid detection apparently.
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Turns out this isn’t happening 
Middleburg Heights, OH
SS Badger to become NS Badger
April 1, 2020
Mark W. Barker, President, Interlake Maritime Services and Sara Spore, General
Manager, Lake Michigan Carferry announced today the long awaited plans for the repowering of the historic coal fired carferry SS Badger. “Since Interlake’s purchase of the SS Badger, careful consideration has been given to several options for repowering the vessel to reduce carbon emissions and lowering operating costs. While some have felt that Diesel engines would be the most cost effective solution, we looked at the opportunity of becoming a zero carbon operation. When we found out the reactor from the retired “Atoms for Peace” demonstration ship NS Savannah was available at very favorable terms from
the Atomic Energy Commission we investigated potential conversion”. “Due to its excellent condition and compact size, it really became obvious that this was the ideal solution. Even with the lead shielding it takes up less space and weighs less than the coal fired boilers and ancillary equipment. The plan is to use the existing Skinner Unaflow steam engines. We are working with the successors to Skinner, the koninklijk nederlands stoomvoortstuwingsmachines constructeur bedrijf of Rotterdam to retrofit the engines to run at 1290 psig steam pressure and 780 rpm.” Conversion is to take place at General Dynmaics NASSCO in San Diego. Plans for a gala farewell to coal cruise from Ludington thru the St. Lawrence seaway and Panama Canal in late November are being finalized.
I should have known better than to comment and close all my browser tabs…
The article I had seen said every other day, not every day, in the US alone, per the guy who worked on the Stanford database that tracks these incidents.
“Within the United States, you’re losing track of radioactive material literally every other day. Every other day. And controls there are among the highest in the world,” said nuclear physicist Fritz Steinhausler — who fostered the database as a visiting professor at Stanford — in a telephone interview from Austria with Bellona Web. He said that the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) lists an average of 200 radiation sources that are stolen, lost or abandoned within the United States every year.
Certainly not that all are nefarious or voluminous enough to be concerning.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Incident and Tracking Database (ITDB) is perhaps a good source:
Since 1993, 3686 incidents have been reported to the ITDB, of which 290 involved a confirmed or likely act of trafficking or malicious use. Twelve of those incidents included high enriched uranium and two included plutonium. Radioactive sources continue to be reported as stolen or missing, underscoring the need to improve security measures for such sources, especially during transport
That includes another 1,018 incidents of unknown intent. Assuming everyone is accurately reporting of course. (140 nations participate in the database as of 2020, including Russia and Iran…not North Korea).
From a Stanford article back in 2002:
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, a large amount of weapons-usable material was left without adequate protection. The U.S.-sponsored Material Protection, Control and Accounting Program has secured only one-third of the more than 600 tons of weapons-usable material in Russia, she said.
And another good idea of why (historically) you wouldn’t even need a commercial ship if you were a serious terrorist:
One Russian military prosecutor in a case involving the theft of bomb-grade uranium remarked that “potatoes were guarded better” than the bomb materials.
.All that to say that if a rouge actor wanted radioactive material for a dirty bomb, there seems to already be plenty out there. And as for the Gulf Sky, if I understood that article it was a tanker basically abandoned by its suspected Iranian front company owner for months and then to have been stolen back by them and transferred to a different company under the control of the same person. Not surprising that no-one reported it missing.
I would think if it was a nuclear vessel owned by a reputable company that could afford to have built said vessel, it would not have been so easy to avoid detection if it went missing. It also wouldn’t have been abandoned near Iran in the first place.
I just fail to see why a vague fear should hold back forward progress.
You are mixing logic and reasoning into a discussion that is about fear.
Fear is not always based on anything resembling logic, reasoning. or has anything to do with science.
That applies to anything nuclear, anybody and anything different or “foreign”, or newly discovered contagious diseases, among others.
Sure there is. The only problem is all of the stuff is in tiny amounts scattered or lost or stored in back rooms of NDT shops all over the country. If the people who owned and used the sources can’t find it, good luck to those who want to find enough to make a dirty bomb. The sight of a thousand terrorists combing the nations hospitals, factories, and labs for lost, stolen, or misplaced X-ray sources and lab samples would make a great Monty Python sketch.
Their transportation costs alone would probably be enough to buy a chunk of plutonium from one of their supporting nations.
Believe me, having sailed under nuclear power, I have no fear of nuclear power and actually believe it offers the best alternative to the dominance of petroleum and all its evils. My resistance to nuclear powered commercial vessels is the current abysmal state of ownership, manning, and regulation of shipping and ships. It is to a large extent a dirty and corrupt business that operates in an environment stinking of even worse corruption and abuse that provides great opportunities for political and religious fanatics who are capable of no end of violence.
The cost to protect even a single commercial nuclear vessel would certainly negate any benefit that ship might offer. That cost, in today’s world, would be better spent developing other alternatives to oil based power at sea.
Looks like more options for terrorists to get hold of nuclear material:
Without even having to hijack a ship on the high seas.
PS> Maybe they can hijack a tug or two and tow the power barges to wherever they are needed?
Are you filling in for Heiwa?
Google Translation:
NOTE;
Small LFTRs are also suitable for large ships as LFTR can be scaled down to a few MW size. It is the only technology that can really change the fact that the current merchant fleet emits more pollution than the whole of Germany. LFTR will also be more cost-effective than other alternatives.
Which is only about $6 billion US dollars. Someone like Elon Musk could cover that with the loose change in his jeans.
Or it might be a better investment than about a third of an aircraft carrier.
Too many people have spent too much time training the public to completely freak out at the word “nuclear”. This is actually an epic own-goal for the environmentalist movement, imagine if the 1st world looked back on burning things to generate electricity as horribly primitive and smokestacks were relics from the 1950s.
NOK 30-50 billion = US$ 3.5-5.7 Billion.
At the lower end that don’t even get you 1/3 of an Aircraft Carrier.
PS> But you may get a whole lot of slightly used LCSs for a lot less, I hear. 