I was just watching the navy admiral talking about the destroyers and he said they were powered by 4 gas turbine engines. I assume he meant petrol powered turbines, not nuclear. Why would they not give destroyers nuclear powered turbines? Gas powered turbines are very powerful and very reliable, but compared to nuclear powered turbines they would have to carry an enormous amount of fuel. I remember reading about 100 ft soviet ships that had a reliable dependable nuclear reactor on board to give it essentially limitless range. Why would the us not build destroyers with nuclear power?
Because hydroelectricity makes more sense. I mean, the ship is already in the water, duh!
>>65082276Man even European, Russian and Chinese SUBMARINES tend to be noisy as fuck diesel-electrics.
>>65082276They did. It's just too expensive for 9-15000t ddgs and cgs.
>>65082281Most american subs are nuclear powered bro. Soviet subs were all nuclear too. The whole idea behind ballistic nuclear subs was that you could have them sit underwater for years launching missiles and they wouldnt even need to surface.
>>65082276Nuclear reactors are a bitch to deal with for a whole host of reasons, to the point that every navy now either forsakes them entirely or uses them on a very small select number of hulls that benefit the most from nuclear power (i.e. carriers + subs).
>>65082294Thats news to me. It was my understanding that nuclear power was to an absurd degree preferable to petrol/diesel powered turbines. >Hardly any nuclear fuel required>hardly any spent nuclear fuel to worry about>no oxygen required for submarines>ability to spend decades at sea before requiring to return to port. What am i missing?
One simple reason is a lot of places will not want you in their ports.
>>65082276>I assume he meant petrol powered turbines, not nuclear.Marine diesel, not gasoline.>>65082276>Why would they not give destroyers nuclear powered turbines? Because nuclear is expensive to build (lots of red tape and oversight), expensive to operate (the Navy already can't recruit enough nuclear techs for their carriers and subs), expensive to overhaul (refueling involves cutting the ship open, you don't just yoink the fuel rods and carry them up the ladders), and expensive to decommission (lots of low-level waste as well as the spent fuel that we still don't have a secure repository for). You know how everyone is currently freaking out about oil being $100/bbl? It needs to be nearly double that before it's more cost effective to switch to nuclear.>Gas powered turbines are very powerful and very reliable, but compared to nuclear powered turbines they would have to carry an enormous amount of fuel.So carry a lot of fuel, what's the problem?>I remember reading about 100 ft soviet ships that had a reliable dependable nuclear reactor on board Soviet nuclear reactors have never been dependable or reliable. They have multiple facilities that each have had more nuclear incidents than the entire rest of the world combined.>to give it essentially limitless range.Small ships are extremely limited by food and fresh water.
>>65082302>ability to spend decades at sea before requiring to return to port.Are you volunteering?
>>65082302You need a whole lot of specialized civilian and naval infrastructure, and a bunch of specialized navy personnel who are hideously difficult to select and train. Not to mention the whole issue around nuclear power being a politically sensitive issue, which gets worse when you start putting nuclear reactors in every single vessel instead of using mostly conventional hulls to do patrols in or near other nations waters. Conventional turbines have none of these issues.
>>65082276Cost, some ships are designed for high risk missions where loses are expected, this is the role of destroyers and in a major war they will be sunk.To give you some idea 70 US destroyers were sunk during WW2, they get the picket ship role, they get the sub hunter role they are the point man.
>>65082302there's a navy decoded yt video on why there are exactly 11 carriers in the navy, and it mentions the fuckton of work that needs to happen for a reactor overhaul
>>65082276Cost.Nuclear vessels may have a reduced logistical burden in the short term (no need to refuel underway), in the long term it is greater because you have to deal with the reactor(s) on decommissioning. Reactors are currently reserved for SSNs and capitol vessels (boomers and carriers) for a reason due to cost. Maybe if we ever do Battleships or Arsenalships or Battlecruisers we'll get a non-carrier surface combatant with them again, but it's not going to be something as small as a DD.
>>65082276too expensive and some countries wouldn't allow them in their ports in peacetime
>>65082287kilos were nuclear?
>>65082327Yeah but with something like an aircraft carrier it becomes absolutely ridiculous to imagine using gas powered turbines instead of nuclear. Do you know how much fuel a gas powered aircraft carrier would have to carry? Same goes for huge subs. Nuclear is just better.
>>65082406Of course they were Comrade.
>>65082331Bro if we get in a war where out ships arebgetting sunk i guarantee you fucking nukes are going to be flying and at that point our ships are ghe last thing we need to be worrying about. A proper 2026 hegemonic navy should have nuclear reactors coming out the demon hole.
>>65082422
>>65082416few thousand tons on top of another few thousand tons for the aircraft, that's like 1-2% of internal volume
>>65082276Well maybe they would make sense when you'll build entirely automated ships that don't require living people and their icky needs such as food and water and their even more illogical psychological needs which lack thereof would turn them murderously paranoid. Because it turns out being stranded at sea for as long as the fuel rods give energy to the turbines is not exactly sustainable on a human level.
>>65082416Do you know how much fuel nuclear powered carriers carry?
If you get shot it makes a nuclear bomb and kills everyone and causes an ecological distaster
>>65082276United States Navy during 1950s-1980s had an active surface ship nuclear program with plans for destroyers and cruisers with nuclear power machinery. These would accompany the also then-new fleet nuclear powered aircraft carriers.After the experience and service record with several nuclear powered cruiser (California and Virginia-class, USS Long Beach CGN-9) warships it was decided not to fund these types of surface ships post-1990s and that future cruisers and destroyers would be gas turbine powered.Nuclear powered ships and their reactors require extensive costly maintenance, especially upon decomissioning that requires not just the reactor cores but most of the ship's hulk be disposed of as nuclear waste.DLGN-25 (redesignated 1975 as a 'cruiser')https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Bainbridge_(CGN-25)Read up on Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of the United States' nuclear powered navy(there was a brief time interval circa 1955-1965 when nuclear power was seen not just as the future of undersea submarine propulsion but also for the U.S. Navy's surface fleet)
>>65082276Because it isn't their use case.>I need enough electricity to last me forever, like if I was underwater forever or have to be a floating airfield foreverYou need nuclear power for this, logistics just slows you down or creates a weak point.>I want to do boat thingsYou do not need nuclear power to do this.
>>65082276We built did one nuclear destroyer, the Bainbridge, but nuclear reactors aren't cheap to build or operate which means if you're going to stick one a ship, you might as well make it a BIG ship. And even then, a nuclear-powered surface fleet doesn't make sense economically, except for aircraft carriers. It's just cheaper to do at-sea refueling from a fleet oiler. Even for the US, cruiser-sized nuclear surface combatants were only sustainable under a Cold War defense budget. The moment the peace dividend hit, we had to start scrapping them.To give some sense of the relative costs, back before the CG(X)-class got cancelled, the Navy looked into the possibility of making them nuclear but even for a 25,000-ton air defense cruiser blasting high-powered radars all the time, nuclear would only break even if gas hit $75-$225 per barrel in 2004 dollars (equivalent to $125-$375 in today times and even with the Strait of Hormuz blockaded. oil's still under $100 per barrel atm). I can't imagine how much it would have to cost in order for nuclear-power to make sense for a 10,000-15,000-ton destroyer
because like everything nuclear, its extremely expensive due to regulations and due to how the military likes to pay the same price for contracts forever, never improving production/design/cost/automation/etc
>>65082320>you don't just yoink the fuel rods and carry them up the laddersYou absolutely could if it was designed that way... civilian reactors are intentionally a shitshow to refuel for non-proliferation reasonsMillitary reactors don't necessarily need to be that wayAnd anyways afaik they design these things with enough fuel to last the lifetime of the ship nowadays
>>65082302>>ability to spend decades at sea before requiring to return to port.WHAT DO THEY EAT, ANON? WHAT DO THEY EAT?
>>65082597>but nuclear reactors aren't cheap to build or operateThey are literally a lump of metal that magically heats itself up to boil waterThey are ABSOLUTELY cheap and simpleThe turbine is 10x more complicated than the reactor
>>65082607Nuclear energy is neither cheap (in capital investment) nor simple
>>65082276The biggest bottleneck is training nuclear engineers to safely operate and maintain the reactors. The school is infamously hard and unforgiving, and produces very few graduates--enough to keep the carriers and subs going, and not much more. And it's probably going to get worse as the generations raised on smartphones and social media come of age.There's also the issue that naval reactors have a higher total cost of ownership than gas turbines unless the price of oil goes to something ridiculous like $200/bbl. Thus, reactors are reserved for the vessels that need them the most (subs, obviously, and carriers, because reactors free up a large volume of space for carrying extra jet fuel for the air wing).The downside of not having nuclear-powered escorts, of course, is that you shouldn't really send a carrier all by itself on a 30kt speed run halfway across the planet, and if you send conventional escorts, they'll have to stop and refuel a couple times along the way.
>>65082276>100 ft soviet ships that had a reliable dependable nuclear reactorThe smallest nuclear powered ship ever built was the NR-1 which was a research submarine/engineering testbed with no military capabilities whatsoever which was so slow it had towed to its deployment sites by a surface ship and lacked a galley and showers and relied on burning cholorate candles to maintain a breathable atmosphere. It was still 146ft long.
>>65082626Because existing nuclear reactors are the product of regulations that fundamentally don't want nuclear reactors to existAlso noone in the west knows how to build things anymore
>>65082604>just irradiate the whole ship, it'll be fineHow very Russian of you.
>>65082642>ywn scoot around on the seafloor in this thingwhy live?
>>65082307>One simple reason is a lot of places will not want you in their ports.This to me is so strange that it's practically farcical. The US Navy, which has operated nuclear reactors continuously for the last 77 years, both on land and at sea, in peacetime and wartime, everywhere from the Persian Gulf to directly underneath the North Pole, with its 179 nuclear powered ships having collectively travelled 177 million miles, all without a single incident ever occurring, but yeah, I'm sure the 48 hour period a submarine would spend tied to a pier during a prearranged goodwill visit would put the people of New Zealand in mortal danger. And clearly, they had no choice but to ban every conventionally-powered US Navy ship from entering their territorial waters too because they might possibly maybe be carrying a nuclear weapon aboard.
>>65082695>Not one US Navy ship was allowed to sail through New Zealand waters for 33 years>Meanwhile, during the literal peak of mutually assured destruction...
>>65082647>Also noone in the west knows how to build things anymoreThis is such a wild thing to say in the same week we broke our own record for the furthest any human being has ever been from Earth.
For small ships nuke creates more problems than it solves. Not least of which is that every time a destroyer runs aground or gets rammed by a drunk freighter captain you have a potential reactor incident instead of an oil spill.We tried in in the 60s and 70s, it was bothersome and oil fired ships are just simpler to operate.Theres no deep complex reasoning for it, its just that gas turbines provided the needed power with a simpler supply chain, simpler upkeep and far less potential trouble.Now consider that DDs and Cruisers get blasted constantly in war since their whole job is to contest sea lanes. Every DDGN that eats a ASHM now becomes a field of radioactive debris. Same reason no one uses tactical nukes. No one wins a war if the area being contested winds up covered in fallout.
>>65082441Bro you are tripping. A gas powered aircraft carrier would need to have 1/2 its fucking gross weight in fuel.
>>65082732Carriers carry enough fuel to supply all the ships in their battlegroup. One more ship, even a large one, is not that much more.
>>65082711?The apollo missions literally orbited the moon, same fucking thingTheres nothing special about sending a capsule further out
>>65082732and its ignoring the fact that a primary benefit of nuc carried is that the carreir can now bunker avgas, jp and fresh water instead of fuel oil, MASSIVELY increasing its at sea endurance and reducing its need to underway replenishment.This benefit is so massive that the carrier itself becomes a replenishment ship for its own battlegroup, CVNs DO carry a bunch of a marine fuel oil even though they don't use it, it carried so they can top up their escorting destroyers and cruisers if an area is too hot for a supply ship to risk it.
>>65082533Bro nuclear reactors are like dilaudid. They have almost zero cost and almost limitless reward. The reason most submarines are nuclear powered is bc they can stay at sea for 20 yrs straight if they need to. Thats part of the nuclear deterrent. Ppl like putin know that if they launch nukes they are going to die which keeps their dick in their pants and that surety is what keeps our planet spinning. If our subs needed to refuel every 6 months then other world leaders would start thinking their dicks were as big as american dicks. Nuclear reactors vs gas turbines for a US naval ship is like turbofans vs piston engines for a commmercial jet. The ppl who are terrified of nuclear are basically of subhuman intelligence. Nuclear is clean and safe. Chernobyl happened because they basically made a list of 100 things that could go wrong with a nuclear reactor and they went one by one checking every thing on the list making every possible thing go wrong. If it werent for that shiteating faggot dyatlov chernobyl wouldnt have come anywhere close to the disaster that it became.
>>65082739>we can't do [thing we haven't done in a long time].>okay, we can do it, but who cares? we already did that before.
>>65082569>NUKULAR IS POISONBro nothing would happen. You could dump 20 tons of enriched nuclear fuel into the middle of the pacific and the world wouldnt even notice. Uranium comes from the earth. Its not like evil alchemists gave birth to some bionic superpoison in a lab. Remember that whiz kid who built a working nuclear reactor in his garage in the 80s?HES STILL ALIVE.
>>65082750you fell for bill gates propaganda
>>65082751Done cheaper and faster before computers even existed, whats ur pointArtemis is a joke program, not a success story
>>65082577Interesting. The whole nuclear waste thing is a facade tho. The small amount of spent nuclear fuel produced by a reactor, you could wrap it up with a billion dollars of USD and dump it somewhere in the ocean and treasure hunters would never be able to find it.
>>65082602Kill the regulators.
>>65082606In 3rd grade physics i learned that volume increases with the 3rd power of length, so it would be incredibly easy to store 20 yrs worth of non perishable food on a reasonably large naval ship. Were you not paying attention to your 3rd grade physics class? The food might have gotten repetitive but theres lots of foods that lasts forever but still taste great. Astronaut ice cream would be an example.
>>65082607This.
>>65082276too exposed to enemy fire.other nuclear platforms are cowards and hide from battle
>>65082642I saw a doc yrs ago about some sort of soviet ice breaker ship that was about the same order of mag size as a fishing vessel on the deadliest catch. It had a nuclear reactor and it would break thru any ice it wanted to by slamming the throttle and beaching itself onto the ice then crushing through the ice via its huge weight.
>>65082711Buddy Neil Armstrong WALKED on the fucking moon in 1969 and here you are bragging about getting a little farther than him 57 FUCKING YEARS LATER. Thats like humans colonizing mars in 1969 and bragging about crashing a probe into jupiter 57 yrs later. >b-b-but its farther foe foe foe….You obv have a low iq so i would encourage you to get the fuck off of 4skin before your self esteem gets rekt for life. This is the fucking ocean my friend.
>>65082642I feel like this thing wouldve been claustrophobic as fuck. The massive soviet super sub that inspired the movie “the hunt for red october” actually had a small swimming pool inside of it. I think this was just the russians trying to outpiss the united states but still it would be pretty cool to be swimming in a pool inside of a 600ft long submarine under a sheet of ice in the arctic circle.
>>65082695This is kind of maddening. I lost alot of respect for new zealand upon hearing this.
>>65082606barnacles, algae and sea weed collected from the ships hull. garnished with paint flecks and corrosion.>>65082302the only significant advantage would be that you only have to stop for fuel every 10 years or so.where as with combustion engines refuelling at sea is somewhat necessary but tactically hazardous.
>>65082723Bro a reactor powered ship dumping all 100 pounds of its uranium into the ocean wouldnt be anywhere close to as damaging as a gas ship leaking thousands of tons of petrol into the ocean. You sound like a scared little girl with your blanket fear of ANYTHING NUCULAR IS POISON. go read a book you scared little faggot.
>>65082302>What am i missing?The sheer exorbitant cost of the qualified personel and infrastructure required. From enrichment facilities to qualified technicians and engineers to build, install, maintain them and later dispose of any waste properly. For small navies that field destroyers in the single digit category it is not economically feasible and for large blue water navies (i e. the USN) that need a considerable number of destroyers for power projection, it would be also unjustifiably expensive because other assets on the fleet like carriers (and their airwings) and submarines are also fighting for the same budget. Decommissioning costs too, are higher for nuclear powered ships, and generally a nightmare.
>>65082802yeah now thinking about it couldn't you catch enough fish to feed the whole crew if you throw a big trawling net overboard each day?
>>65082647Kek. This guy you and i are replying to i cant believe he actually struts around 4chan with his dick hanging out of his pants saying shit like >>65082626>Nuclear energy is neither cheap (in capital investment) nor simpleOr,>>65082711>This is such a wild thing to say in the same week we broke our own record for the furthest any human being has ever been from Earth.and he doesnt even flinch when he spews his low iq opinions. Im totally fine with low iq ppl as long as they are humble like forrest gump. I just cant stand watching low iq anti-nuclear liberals strutting around with their cocks hanging out bc they think they are part of the intelligencia bc they read the economist and dont watch television.
>>65082423>ook ookNo, depending on who you are fighting nuclear escalation can mean "are we willing to trade 20 cities for this?".Everyone acts like military planners are so fucking retarded that if they lose 5,000 men they default to sacrificing 5,000,000 of their own civilians.
>>65082811Bullshitters like you are why trump got elected. >omg nucular is so hard and dangerous you have to plant trees and build windmills to offset the nuclear poison and train 200 engineers to monitor the boiling water on each submarine 48 hrs a day and you need these engineers to be trained for thousands of hours to accept trans ppl and hire thousands of psychiatrists to talk to the engineers about their feelings about running a ship powered by nuclear death poison omg its soo hard and expensive omg…You should seriously weight the pros and cons of killing yourself.
>>65082822Wtf are you talking about?Deterrents are everything faggot. You dont keep the 1st world safe by telling sandniggers >ok we will let you have nuclear weapons that the russians taught you how to build as long as you pinky swear to be nice and not use them ok?You keep the first world safe by saying,>if having nukes matters to your collective self esteem then you are dangerous people,and>we dont let dangerous people have nuclear weapons. simple as…
>>65082815Jules Verne purports this method to be reliable.tho an occasional visit to port might be needed to stock up on limes (and thiamine supplements if not enough Salmo and Salvelinus can be caught)
>>65082320>Soviet nuclear reactors have never been dependable or reliableDon't you dare talk about my K19 submarine that way!
>>65082830>Deterrents are everything faggot.Deterrents against what? If a US plane gets shot down do they nuke? What if a base if hit with missiles or drones? What if they take 40,000 KIA?All of these have happened since the US became a nuclear power.At what point do you think the US nukes? You seem to think they won't lose a dozen destroyers without nuking, I disagree and think they could use a whole carrier group without it reducing second strike capability or force projection enough to trigger nukes.
>>65082832What happened to the savannah? It looks beautiful.
>>65082841Thats the point. The US is trying to maintain a world in which they would never come close to using nukes. But that takes hard work like we are doing in iran and we have to have a visible deterrent to anybody who tries to threaten the united states like the iranian sandniggers did. >huda hudda hubaduba b-b-but the iranians didnt say “death to america” and “we have enough nuclear fuel for 11 missiles” in the same sentence so its not a threat hudda hubadudabuda huh huh huhuh…Kill yourself
>>65082852The US lost ~40k men in Korea, ~40k men in Vietnam, thousands of planes in Vietnam, ~5k civilians in a terrorist attack and hasn't nuked since WW2.You don't understand escalation at all and think a couple of ships being lost = nukes.
a>>65082842deactivated 1971dry docked 1994power plant pending decommissioning 2008 to 2023 (lack of funds to do so)by 2031 its radioactivity will be so low as to no longer require regulation or supervisionbut as of the present day its still sitting at Pier 13 of the Canton Marine Terminal in Baltimore, Maryland.seems in good condition desu.
>>65082287The soviets and russians still use diesel electrics like the Kilo and Lada classes as patrol subs.>>65082302Ships mave to be designed around their reactor more often than not, we aren't in the age of effective miniturization of modular reactors (with quick swapping) but we are closing in on it, different reactors require differently cut fuel rods (no standarsization), fuel life is a factor of 8-10 years however cooling system maintenance and overhaul is at much shorter intervals (again this could be improved with miniturization improvements).Endurance is limited by other factors like food supply, potable water, plumbing, etc.Diesels have Stirling engines ie AIP now (Air-independent propulsion) which makes them even quiter and prolongs their endurance to a whole month underwater (non-AIP modern subs like the Kilo still have an endurance underwater of ~10 days).The easiest thing to understand is you go nuclear when you need very long ranged endurance and time in theater, diesel boats will require a larger logistics footprint and need to be fueled underway, but that doesnt stop them from operating long distance - Russian Kilo (and historically earlier classes like Foxtrot) class boats have operated in the carribean before - they have had the friendly ports to do so
>>65082636There's also the huge gaping morale problem that plagues Navy nukies.They atttend a intensely demanding school that rivals pilot training in complexity and time and vastly exceeds SEAL training in time, and they end up enlisted faggots who promote at the same speed as cooks, only rarely getting shore leave because their maintenance tasks are critical.If anything nuke power school and the Nukie rate is circling the drain then Navy treats them like red headed step children when they should be treated in the same way the Army treats special forces graduating Q course and moving to operational SF Groups - instant and guaranteed E5 or warrant officer only, when you graduate, easy AF transition to officer, fast promotions, elevated bonuses
>>65082824What manner of gorilla nigger reading comprehension is this? How does expense conflate with hippy bullshit in your brown mind? Stupid /pol/tard tourist.
>>65082916And that is why I ducked the Navy recruiter who tried to get me to nuke for six fucking months before I got out of high school. Worse, he wanted me on subs. Offered every bonus known to man. My granddad was a veteran surface fleet sailor, so he gave me the drill. Joined the Army instead and still got fucked. LOL
>>65082916The already established USN officer class does not want nuke people coming in as warrants and then going to officer school because the standard liberal arts skool officer is behind them by 20-25 IQ points and wont be able to compete for promotions. So nukes must stay as bottom rank enlisted and are then drummed out of service as fast as possible by having their duty station being extremely uncomfortable.
>>65082606RETVRN to the custom of the sea
>>65082758>facadeWrong. Reactor decomissioning is the most costly part of all nuclear power (ship/submarine propulsion or land electrical generating plant), even more than spent nuclear fuel and components. Not possible or feasible to 'dump in ocean' or 'shoot into the sun' a spent nuclear reactor vessel.All of nuclear power is a massive government-subsidized and propped up grift, has been from outset: From the mining of uranium ore, to the extremely costly production of fissionable fuel material (gaseous diffusion, look into the cost of the Oak Ridge plant most expensive part of Manhattan Project), reactor lifetime operation costs and safety systems, spent fuel/component disposal, and reactor decommissioning. By far the most rube goldberg method to boil water ever devised, nuclear power has always been a gov-propped-up financial gigaboondoggle (entirely aside from the safety and long term generations-into-future environmental contamination and monitoring issues).
>>65082320My Grandfather captained the NS Savannah. He loved that ship, said it was the cleanest vessel he'd ever commanded. He spent his entire career in the Merchant Marine and while he thought nuclear power was the future of cargo shipping he acknowledged it was simply too expensive to be viable for the forseeable future.
>>65083191>joined the Army to stick it to the Navy recruiterNOW YOU FUCKED UP
>>65082739>>65082757>>65082784>>65082820>Moon grapes are probably sour anyway t. foreigner that doesn't have moon rockets
>>65082287>they wouldnt even need to surfacewhere do you think food comes from
>>65082782I will agree that's rad as shit, but still the smallest nuclear icebreaker was 440ft long. That's about three times the length and 15-20 times the displacement of the fishing trawlers on Deadliest Catch
>>65082842The Otto Hahn was a real looker too.
navy nuke herenuke boats are expensive to make, maintain, and train people to work onalso most of the advantages you hear about aren't really>never need refueling lolexcept ships still need jet fuel, food, and letters from your cheating wives. and when they do eventually refuel it takes 7 years and billions of dollars>unlimited range lmaoyou know what doesn't have unlimited range? the rest of your fucking fleet>can stay underwater indefinitelythis one is actually kinda dope and useful
>>65082832Nuclear-fueled hydroponics citrus grove when??
>>65082281>89 replies and /k/ just lets this slideDiesel-electric is quieter than nuclear kiddo.
>>65082784Gotta bring back the nazi scientists and engineers.
>>65084134He's partially right. Russian and Chinese diesel-electric are noisy as fuck. It's the European ones that are quiet.
>>65082688In theory you could make some nightmarish design where the fuel rods get encased after they get extracted from the reactor and the casing is then brought up through the interior of the ship. Total radioactive material control/proliferation nightmare however.
>>65082811>The sheer exorbitant cost of the qualified personel and infrastructure required.to illustrate that infrastructure, the british QE class carriers and the subs are a good example. In their early design tender stages, the options of making the carriers nuclear or conventional powered were both assessed. the British already had naval reactors; the rolls-royce PWR3 series reactors in the newest class subs are roughly on par with the GE S9G reactors in US use, and conveniently, the contract pricetag is public information: a 600 million contract supplied 5 reactors for the last of the astutes, and the 4 dreadnought class. So, 120 million per reactor, roughly speaking.British subs however operate out of Faslane in Scotland, while the carriers were to be operated out of Southhampton or Portsmouth in England. the assessments for the design of the carriers effectively boiled down to "you have 7.5 billion pounds to spend. You may have: 2 conventional carriers,. or 1 CVN, and the infrastructure to service it built around the chosen home port." they went with two conventional CVs. If we assume a QE CVN would've had two reactors, like the ford class, and that the 120 million is a ballpark figure for the reactor itself, the rest of the hull's cost isnt going to change significantly, that illustrates that the infrastructure for just one CVN - let along a fleet of DDN's would be in the region of 3 billion pounds, close to 4 billion dollars. and that's infrastructure for one single port.
>yo just stick some nuclear reactors on DDs>>65066017>"Events developed according to the worst-case scenario"
>>65082302It's too expensive to do nuclear refueling. On the old nuclear cruisers it was cheaper to pull out the spent reactor and put it a new one. But that required an insane access cut.
>>65082276They were planning making everything nuclear powered, on the basis that a fleet moves at the pace of its slowest ship. Just imagine, a carrier group would had been able to sail 24/7 to the other side of the world, not even stopping once. But then the Soviet Union collapsed and no one could be bothered.
>>65082754Sorry to bring it to you, but he died. Turns out fent is stronger than Uranium.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn#Death
>>65082754>hur durr nukular come from da groundYou think they just shovel rocks in the reactor like a fucking coal boiler on steam engine? Any idea why nuke refineries are loaded with precision centrifuges, dumbass? Concentrated fuel rods, even spent ones, are just a BIT more radioactive than uranium ore. Turn in your computer to the nearest adult. You're too stupid to be on the internet without supervision.
>>65084846Do you have any idea how effective water is as a radiation shield? I'll give you a hint, they use it in reactors to do just that in addition to cooling.
>>65084846>Concentrated fuel rods, even spent ones, are just a BIT more radioactive than uranium ore.false for us naval reactors. those use heu. it's significantly more radioactive.
>>65084221>they went with two conventional CVsWhich bit them in the ass because neither of them work, so instead of 1 working CVN they have 0 CV's.
>>65084221Assuming the PWR3 is in the same class as the S9G, you would need seven of them to match the output of a Ford.
>>65082597We built a bunch of them in the 60's and 70's. I was on the USS California, CGN-36. They were originally classed as destroyers (DLGN) and later claaed as cruisers.As everyone else has already said, they are way too expensive to build adn operate, especially compared to gas turbines.
>>65085184>Assuming the PWR3 is in the same class as the S9G, you would need seven of them to match the output of a Ford.Given that the ships using said reactors will be a seventh the size, that sounds fine to me.
Surface ships must form fleets and keep pace with other ships. Even if some ships can achieve high speed for long periods of time with nuclear propulsion, there will be no opportunity to utilize it.
>>65085260>Even if some ships can achieve high speed for long periods of time with nuclear propulsion, there will be no opportunity to utilize it.You're not thinking long-term.A ship with nuclear propulsion does not need refueling, meaning the oilers can be fewer in number (and thus be made more expensive, being faster, more capable, etc)It frees up heaps of space for use for storing food, ammo, more weapons/electronics/etc. Hell you can make the warships themselves CARRY FUEL and act as the fleet's oilers!
>>65084146Yea, but only because they suck at building them. Soviet/Russian and Chinese diesel-electric submarines are still quiter than their nuclear submarines with the same age. (like the Kilo-class)Nuclear reactors need the cooling pumps to always be running and the submarine is constantly circulating sea water into and out of the hull. This creates alot of noise. Diesel-electric submarines however can be almost completely silent while sitting underwater, because their electric storage has (usually) no moving parts.Nuclear also takes up more space, thus making the submarine larger and therefore more vulnerable to active sonar
>>65085324Bro a reactor and its FUEL take up about 10% of the space taken up by a gas turbine and its FUEL.
>>65085324>This creates alot of noise. Modern primary/secondary loop pumps are very quiet. Especially since they've clinched natural circulation, so they don't need to oversize them, like they did on designs from the 1970s. The biggest source of noise remains the turboelectric machinery (gears, couplings, clutches, the turbine itself etc.)
>>65085324>Nuclear also takes up more spaceNuclear takes up considerably less space, especially with modern reactor/turbine setups.
>>65084134>>65085324>and other 90s lore I learned from Tom Clancyget updated, gramps>>65084348>They were planning making everything nuclear powered, on the basis that a fleet moves at the pace of its slowest ship. Just imagine, a carrier group would had been able to sail 24/7 to the other side of the world, not even stopping oncethey did build enough to theoretically make it, and they did try that kind of op; there is a photo somewhere of two CGNs and a carrier making a fast dash, and I'm sure they practised that kind of op more than oncebut they gave up on that because the small number of nuclear-powered escorts they could build was too few to do more than take this tiny task force out of support range of the rest of the fleetand as you say, the Cold War ended>>65082597>onelollmao
>>65085258Are the QEs really that small?
>>65085694The QE's aren't, but Britain could make an armada of very powerful nuclear destroyers/cruisers instead of pretending to be an actual first world country.
>>65085151But both of them do work?PoW is preparing for a deployment to the northern Atlantic later this year?And any issues are unrelated to the conventional turbines.>>65085258The QEs are 80k (tons). That isn't a seventh of the size you retard.
>>65085721>But both of them do work?Lol.Lmao even!
>>65085736You can check the Wikipedia pages lol. They've been active every year since their service dates.
>>65085747>They've been active every year since their service dates.Yes, active in drydock, active without an escort (protip that means it'll be sunk by any retard with a submarine) and active without operational planes.Such a great duo of carriers.
>>65085762Why bother saying this? Its like a single google search to find photos of them in Japan, Korea, ME and US etc? Like who are you trolling
>>65082734No they don’t, stupid
>>65085776Driving around without escorts or actual warfighting capability doesn't mean anything you retard.
>>65082732>QE2 class is 80,600 metric tons displacement at full load>carries 4 million L of F-76 for the ship power generation at ~3,335 metric tons>at full load, the ship's displacement is ~4.12% ship's fuelYou're a fucking retard.>>65082740How heavy is a nuclear powerplant, it's shielding, and associated equipment compared to fuel and generators?
>>65085697Sounds like something the Soviet Union would do to larp as a first world country.
>>65085697Britain's glorified-helicarrier were the only things that deserve to be nuclear.But given how much trouble they have keeping just one working, they would probably fail with a nuclear one.
>>65082294Absolutely wrong>>65082302Nuke is by far the most preferable propulsion system, it's limiting factor is how much the Navy wants to spend on it as nuke reactors require specialty labor and handling protocols and can be prevented from entering ports
>>65086109What if they're all actually nuclear and the Navy is lying so they don't get restricted from foreign ports?
>>65085339>>65085514Are you really retarded enough to think that DIESEL-electric submarines run on gas turbines?>>65085342I am counting the part of the maschinery that transforms reactor heat into electricity as part of the reactor setup since diesel-electric doesnt need most of them>>65085673tf you yapping about?
>>65085776>Like who are you trollingYou, obviously>>65086402>he doesn't know
