As much as I'd love to see nuclear powered cargo ships, they do still have to give consideration to the possibility of getting damaged.

Even putting aside exceptional situations like with the Houthis, we tend to get one or two highly public ship accidents per year. It would not be nice to have an incident like that involving a nuke ship every few years.

I feel like the solution for decarbonizing shipping would be carbon capture. Have the ships store the combustion products rather than exhaust them out, then reprocess them back into fuel on land using some other energy source (say, nuclear).