Nuclear power as a propulsion system for merchant ships was the future that never arrived. The Otto Hahn was the second of only four nuclear powered commercial cargo ships ever built. The first was the NS Savannah, which operated between 1962 and 1972 and is now laid up in Baltimore, MD. The Otto Hahn was recently scrapped after a long and varied carrier, most of which as a non-nuclear ship.
The Otto Hahn’s keel was laid in 1963 by Kieler Howaldswerke A.G. and she entered service in 1968 when her reactor was commissioned. The ship was named in honor of Otto Hahn, the German chemist and Nobel prizewinner, who was credited with the discovery of nuclear fission of uranium in 1938. She carried ore for ten years until she was laid up in 1979.
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Containership operations has always been like riding a roller coaster, with many highs and lows and unexpected twists and turns. One sign of this is the fluctuating speeds of container ships over the years, going from slow to fast to slow to fast to and now to slow, once again.
Does politics make for strange shipmates?
The Sea Shepherd farce continues. The ex-captain of the Ady Gil cut through anti-boarding nets to board a Japanese whaler and was immediately arrested. In related news, Sea Shepherd crew onboard the Steve Irwin, a vessel named for the television host of the show “Crocodile Hunter,” are now throwing fake crocodile eggs at the Japanese whalers.
Here is an intriguing article suggesting that we humans have been taking to the sea for far longer than had been previously recorded. Recently stone tools have been found on the island of Crete which date back at least 130,000 years and may be much older. As Crete has been an island for more than five million years, this suggests that those who carried the tools to the island were very ancient mariners indeed. Thanks to John for passing the article along.
An interesting perspective from the The 
Strange but true. Digital memory cards are indeed an amazing technology.
As truly awe inspiring as the huge and high tech America’s Cup boats are, we shouldn’t forget that iceboats are the real speed demons on the water (even if it is frozen.) Will at the Tugster blog has some 
Over thirty years ago when I was in college studying naval architecture, a classmate of mine got a summer job working as a naval architect for Sun Shipyard helping to design some part of the new deep sea mining ship, the Hughes Glomar Explorer, being built for Howard Hughes’ Global Marine. Years later my friend was chagrined to learn that the ship he was working on was not intended for deep water mining but was a top secret CIA project to raise the K-129, a sunken Golf Class Soviet submarine. The cover story was that the ship was intended to raise magnesium nodules from the deep ocean floor.
Last October, we wrote about how researchers are using eighteenth century Royal Navy ship logs to study climate change. (See 