If I were the Pollution Czar, I would attempt to use governmental power to force oil companies to channel sulfur into non-polluting products. But of course I am not any kind of Czar, and I do not direct any kind of political authority or force.

I know sulfur is cheap, and oil companies don’t want to waste time selling cheap things. But pollution is a big externality cost for the planet and for ordinary people, so if the governments claim to protect the ordinary people, the governments ought to force the oil companies to pollute less.

Sulfur is the fifth most abundant element. Commercial mining consists basically of shoveling it off the ground and transporting it.

Purity varies, but sulfur is easily purified, plus there are already many industrial processes that produce sulfur as a waste product, steelmaking, for example.

The fuel is mostly recycled. The problem is that the NRC treats “nuclear waste” like the children’s game “cooties”. Anything that was once radioactive is contaminated forever, even if the level of radioactivity was below normal background radiation.

Dixie Lee Ray, former head of the Atomic Energy Commission, had some blistering comments on such policies, but even being the nominal head wasn’t enough to overcome the bureaucracy.

And then there are the ports that won’t let nuclear-powered vessels dock. That was one of the problems with the Savannah. And you have countries — New Zealand, for example — who have blanket bans on all nuclear-powered vessels in their waters.

The no-nuke propagandists have had some successes over the decades. The KGB got a decent return for its investment backing the nutball movements.

The traditional process for disposing of a nuclear-powered sub begins with defueling the boat and towing it to Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton, Wash., where workers cut out the section of the ship containing the propulsion plants. The spent fuel, reactors and reactor compartments are packaged and sent to various Department of Energy facilities, which specialize in long-term storage and disposal of nuclear materials, in the Pacific Northwest.

They do? I thought they put all that stuff in a trench at Hanford.

Many years ago a colleague of mine ran a research project for the US NRC regarding the decommissioning of old nuclear power reactors. He concluded that the cost of decommissioning equalled the cost of construction, but no power company had ever factored that cost into it operating budget. The US Navy simply sinks the reactors into the sea, which is very convenient to them, but leaves a problem for our posterity.

Bunker fuel contains useful sulfur that can (in theory) be extracted by responsible chemical companies that profit by delivering pure sulfur. Sulfur is nice when we use it in nice ways. Sulfur is not so nice when we disperse it as bunker fuel exhaust.

The devil as always is in the details. The chemical companies that could theoretically profit by responsible extraction of sulfur are not necessarily interested in chasing those profits. The companies that are willing to chase those profits don’t necessarily have the right tech know-how. Some companies will promise to have a green solution for extracting sulfur but will turn out to be scams like Solyndra. And so on.

Also, off-topic but I bet many readers here will love this:

https://spaceflightnow.com/2024/02/02/sierra-space-unveils-fully-integrated-dream-chaser-spaceplane-amid-testing-campaign/

The green idiocy keeps vomiting these stupid ideas. There is absolutely no reason to stick a nuclear reactor in a cargo vessel other than pander to some European nutjob hallucinating about zero emissions.