Nuclear-Powered Earth 300 Will Be World's Biggest Yacht and Scheduled for 2025

This team is looking to bring about a cleaner and greener future for this planet with the Earth 300 Superyacht. The result is a 300-meter (984-foot) ship made not only to travel the world on sight-seeing tours but also to act as the ultimate "next-generation" habitat for "state-of-the-art science at sea."

So what exactly is Earth 300? Well, simply put, it's a superyacht that's meant to travel the seven seas, and while doing so, will act as a place of living, study, work, play, and rest for a handful of scientists that are all looking to understand the universe we live in.

To get a better idea, it’ll help to run through a few specifications to put things into perspective. Overall, Earth 300 will be a vessel that’s 300 meters (984 feet) long. Oh, that spherical structure you see is also a 13-story-tall construction filled with laboratories of every kind, all aimed at solving and studying some of Earth’s current issues, one of which is climate change.

This brings us to the propulsion system of Earth 300, and it must be clean. To do that, Earth 300 will use a Molten Salt Reactor (MSR). Honestly, up to this point in my life, I had never heard of an MSR, so I did a bit of digging. So, to answer the question on everyone's mind, an MSR is a nuclear fission reactor fueled and/or cooled by a mixture of molten salt in a solid or liquid state, depending on the pressure exerted on it.

Two such reactors have been used throughout history, both in the U.S. and both as research reactors. Because operating pressures of such a system are near atmospheric levels, this system can operate safely with fewer components. Because of this, the U.S. military even went as far as testing this sort of reactor in nuclear-powered bombers.

This sort of system also produces a clean and sustainable means of propulsion, in line with the goals of this future venture. Speaking of venture, this machine is scheduled to launch in 2025 according to the manufacturer’s website. What isn’t specified is who may be involved in building this floating city.

What is revealed, on the other hand, are some of the interior spaces that will be found aboard and the number of guests that can be accommodated. I mentioned that there will be labs, but I never mentioned how many. 22 laboratories and 20 VIP cabins will be accommodating 160 scientists, 20 resident experts, 40 VIP guests, and 20 students. Finally, 165 crew members will be taking care of this marvel and its guests round the clock.

Once this mega yacht does roll around, it will be open to some of the public, in particular, “wealthy tourists” and charged no less than $1 million per person. According to a report from CNN, all this cash will be going towards funding the very sciences carried out on the ship. As for the projected price for this machine, $700 million, around €602 million at current exchange rates.

Because Earth 300 is meant to be a world-leading research vessel, it aims to offer live feed videos and interactive activities which can be accessed by people sitting in front of their PCs, at home. It will also be used as a repository for data and information about planet Earth, a sort of floating bank of information and experiments, all of which are, again, aimed at helping us understand our planet and universe just a tad better.

Whether 2025 rolls around and this ship is seen, remains to be a surprise. Hopefully, it doesn’t fall down the idea drain, as this yacht is one of the few to be built with the sole purpose of benefiting all humans and life on this planet.