HIGH FUEL COSTS SPARK TALK OF USING NUCLEAR POWER ON FUTURE SHIPS
Inside the Navy Vol. 17, No. 47
22 November 2004 

The rising price of oil and the uncertainty of future supplies has naval engineers asking if nuclear power on surface ships is a feasible option again, especially considering the power requirements for seabasing ships that must cross oceans at high speeds.

All the Navy's submarines and most of its aircraft carriers have nuclear power plants, but the rest of the fleet uses conventional power. The Navy has built nuclear-powered surface combatants in the past, but not in the last 20 years.

In recent months, the price of oil exceeded $50 per barrel. While the price has since dropped below that level, prices today still are about 50 percent more than they were at the start of this year. No one actively is studying the idea of putting nuclear plants back on surface combatants, officials said. But at a recent conference of naval engineers, a few speakers brought up the possibility.

"We've got to start thinking about the end of cheap oil," said Chris Cable, director of the ship and force concepts division at Naval Sea Systems Command.

Seabasing, the concept of staging and supporting combat missions from ships, could require new classes of huge vessels to travel at high speeds across vast distances. That raises issues of how to generate that much power, how to transfer it into the water through propellers, and fuel -- especially its quality, availability and cost, he said Nov. 16 at the American Society of Naval Engineers' conference.

"One idea my staff brought to mind: Should we think about returning to nuclear or some combination hybrid plants for surface combatants?" Cable said. "We've gotten away from that for a long time. Is it time to rethink that for the future?"

In seabasing, massive floating warehouses will carry troops and equipment from the mainland United States to a theater of war. But smaller ships, called high-speed connectors, will act as ferries between the bigger ships and the shore. Such ships also must be fast, but will not have much room for big power plants or large volumes of fuel to feed them.

"Looking at the fuel consumption issue [and] the amount of fuel that's going to be carried, nuclear looks like maybe a possibility," said Don Jacobson, the Marine Corps' science and technology advisor for high-speed connectors.

In a brief interview with Inside the Navy after his presentation, he said one study of a conventionally powered 120-meter ship showed that traveling 40 knots for 2,200 nautical miles would require 800 tons of fuel. Compared to the weight of propulsion plants and fuel for such ships, the weight of nuclear power plants and their insulation do not seem as heavy as they used to, he said. Nuclear plants have their own cost issues and political baggage, but the Navy has a perfect safety record with them, he noted.

"If fuel prices continue to grow, and steam doesn't look like it's going to be a viable option, then nuclear is there," Jacobson said.

Cable told ITN that "everything should be on the table for the long-term look at what the Navy needs to do."

Rear Adm. Paul E. Sullivan, the deputy commander for ship design integration and engineering, told ITN that no one is looking at putting nuclear plants on surface ships again. But if someone did, the total life cycle costs of conventional and nuclear plants would have to be compared, including manning and training costs, he said.

The Navy has built nine nuclear-powered cruisers, with the last one commissioned in 1980. The Arkansas (CGN-41) was decommissioned in 1998, according to Ron O'Rourke, an analyst at the Congressional Research Service. The question of whether to build more nuclear surface ships comes up periodically, he said, noting that the General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office) examined the nuclear option in the 1970s.

Nuclear ships have higher up-front costs than conventional ships. But if oil prices climb high enough, the total life cycle cost of nuclear ships could be comparable to conventional ones, O'Rourke said. And if enough nuclear ships entered the fleet, the Navy would have less need for oiler ships, he added. Nuclear ships also could sprint long distances without refueling. The only shipyard that could build them today is Northrop Grumman's Newport News shipyard, he said.