China has revealed detailed plans for what could become the world’s largest nuclear-powered cargo ship. The vessel, designed to carry 14,000 standard containers, will be powered by a thorium-based molten salt reactor (TMSR) producing 200 megawatts of thermal power, the same level as the reactors used in the U.S. Navy’s Seawolf-class submarines.
The concept of this ship was first introduced in 2023, but technical details have only now been made public. The information was shared by Hu Keyi, a senior engineer at Jiangnan Shipbuilding Group, in an article published in Ship & Boat, a Chinese trade magazine.
Hu explained that the 200MW of heat from the thorium reactor won’t directly move the ship. Instead, it will run a supercritical carbon dioxide (sCO₂) generator using the Brayton cycle, a process that turns heat into electricity very efficiently.
This system will generate about 50MW of electricity, enough to power the ship across oceans for years without
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