This just in from Defense News regarding the 2008 Defense Appropriations Bill:
"Chairman [of the Seapower Subcommittee] Gene Taylor, D-Mississippi, and ranking member Roscoe Bartlett, R-Maryland, both restated their strong support for nuclear-powered major surface combatants, and included in the markup a provision requiring that new classes of such ships be designed and built to be powered by nuclear reactors."
Requiring? That’s ambitious. It immediately reminds of the text that John Warner inserted in the 2001 authorization act:
"It shall be a goal of the Armed Forces to achieve the fielding of unmanned, remotely controlled technology such that by 2010, one-third of the aircraft in the operational deep strike force aircraft fleet are unmanned; and by 2015, one-third of the operational ground combat vehicles are unmanned."
The Army has some slides floating around that show how it has already complied with the ground combat vehicle part of this—by classifying every backpackable iRobot and even Radio Shack kit in Iraq as a “ground combat vehicle”. That mark, strictly speaking, didn’t require anything—it merely set out goals, which mean little without enforcement mechanisms. I have a goal of a thousand-acre ranch on the Pedernales River, just like LBJ, but it’s not quite in the budget for 2007. Taylor & Bartlett’s mark has a little more teeth to it, but that still doesn’t mean that it’s a done deal.
To understand why, let’s first recount the benefits of naval nuclear power. These are well known, but they do vary by the type of vessel:
For all ships, nuclear power offers freedom from oil. Ships can circle the globe a dozen times or more without refueling, and devote the space that would have been taken by fuel tanks to ordnance and other martial purposes. Oh, and there are no significant carbon emissions, no smog, and no need to mail large checks denominated in petrodollars to nutjobs like Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. If that translates into a few more Tomahawk missiles headed Mahmoud’s way — well, one can probably live with that.
For aircraft carriers, the tactical freedom is valued even more, since they can carry really vast amounts of ordnance in the space that would otherwise have been taken by fuel tanks. This means more precision-guided bombs for Super Hornets, Lightning IIs, and Rafales to drop on... well, you get the point.
Submarines benefit from all this, but for them, the foremost value is stealth: nuclear-powered subs don’t need to snorkel for air to run their diesels. New air-independent combustion engines (like the Sterling cycle ones in Swedish and German ships) offer a less expensive way to do this, but they lack the nearly boundless range and high transit speeds that nuclear power offers.
That said, navies worldwide have not, for quite some time, been enthused about nuclear power in the way they once were. This is for two reasons:
The political squeamishness is well-known. Some port authorities classify nuclear-powered vessels as hazardous-cargo ships, restricting either partially or completely their entry. Lefty New Zealanders, always curmudgeonly about matters of international security, fall into the latter camp. Fortunately, Auckland is about as far off the beaten path as one can get, so no one much cares anymore. Personally, I’d rather breast out alongside a nuke than a liquified natural gas tanker. One just glows slightly; the other is a genuine floating bomb.
The other reason is money: in the late 1990s, oil was selling for less than $10 per barrel, so no one cared about burning the stuff.
Now, of course, the price of oil is closer to $70, and this is rather changing the economics of that naval presence thing. Up until this point, though, it’s no surprise that the vast majority of nuclear-powered warships have been submarines: the economics for cruisers haven’t been as overwhelming. The United States, Russia (including the Soviet Union before it), France, the United Kingdom, India, and China have all operated nuclear-powered submarines—the US since the commissioning of USS Nautilus way back in 1954. The US and France have operated nuclear-powered aircraft carriers; the US and Russia have operated nuclear-powered surface combatants, though not many.
What’s interesting is that while Russian and French commitment may be wavering, US commitment may be growing:
Time was, Admiral Gorshkov and the Soviet Red Banner Northern Fleet had aspirations of Atlantic grandeur. Trouble was, geography did not cooperate: getting past the Greenland-Iceland-UK gap could be challenging in the face of determined NATO opposition. For the Russian Navy today, a new 2,000-ton frigate program seems reasonable, and Russia has oil to burn, so to speak.
The French Navy has, I think, stopped talking about the carrier Charles de Gaulle as a cursed ship, but the experience and the cost overruns were sufficiently daunting that the next French carrier will be powered by gas turbines. [That assumes, of course, that Sarko defeats Sego in the election on Monday; otherwise, there may not be another French carrier, or much French military power at all.] The next ship may share a design with the forthcoming Queen Elizabeth-class of British carriers, for which nuclear power was never much fancied anyway.
In the United States, however, some quarters harbor autarkic ambitions for energy policy, and industry cranks out another naval nuclear reactor every year or so anyway. If they can power submarines and carriers, then they should, the thought goes, be able to power cruisers. Back in the 1960s, the Navy had planned that every cruiser and destroyer would eventually be atomic powered.
Since a distaste for burning Bolivarian and Jihadist oil seems to be beating out squeamishness over all things atomic, this interest has resurfaced (ooh... another naval pun). Congressman Bartlett last year asked the Congressional Research Service (CRS) to determine, tactical and strategic considerations aside, what price of oil would make the provision of nuclear power to various classes of surface ship cost-effective. The quick answer is that we’re already there for the largest of amphibious ships — at $70 per barrel, the helicopter carriers that are to be built as the LHA(R)s are more cost-effectively built as nukes. That is, for a 50,000-ton ship, the $500 million or more that would be spent on a reactor is a better bargain over the power plant’s 30-year lifetime than burning Diesel Fuel Marine. That assumes, of course, that oil prices will not again decline, but with Chinese and Indian demand growing, that seems a safe bet.
So why, as I indicated above, is not the Taylor-Bartlett initiative a done deal? There are four reasons:
The first is a matter of capacity constraints. Building new reactors and the industrial infrastructure to support them takes rather more time than dropping in a few new gas turbines from GE. The Navy can’t just turn on the contractors tomorrow. It can, however, over time, as is happening ashore, with new nuclear reactors under consideration around the country. While only 20 percent of American electrical power ashore is generated by nuclear plants, about 50 percent of French and Czech power is, so much more is demonstrably possible.
The second is a matter of labor availability. As Lisa Lambert of Reuters recently pointed out in an article on the nuclear-electrical business ashore, training reactor operators takes time, and Homer Simpson aside, there just aren’t that many available. Naval nuclear power operators are all volunteers, and the last time that the US Navy tried to involuntarily assign officers to that duty, the number of junior officers resigning their commissions at first opportunity jumped traumatically. Submarine duty has a cache for some, but laboring in the bowels of any old cruiser, nuclear or not, just doesn’t seem quite as sexy to the average NROTC or Annapolis graduate. So the Navy could order the ships, and not find the people to man them.
This could change if the Navy were willing to procure more automated reactor plants, but Naval Reactors (NR)—the secretive bureaucracy-within-a-bureaucracy that controls naval reactor design, is a legendarily powerful and technically conservative organization. NR is properly Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) Directorate 08, but it’s a testament to how seriously the Navy takes reactor safety that the organization is headed by a four-star admiral who’s generally appointed to a term of eight or more years. This leads, naturally, to a startling lack of economy and intrepid idea generation.
Commercial electrical power producers—at least in open markets—need to compete with gas, coal, hydro, wind, solar, and even political hot air. US naval reactor designers, however, are in an economic world as fenced off as Japanese rice farming. I hesitate to quote other bloggers (since most of them are lunatics), but the former US submariner who claims to have the top Google hit for “naval reactors gestapo” wrote a few years ago that “if you want an organization to design the best and safest military reactors in the world where price isn't an object,” then NR is the outfit to call. I don’t know whether their reactors are better or safer than British or French ones, but the word on the street is that these guys make Captain First Rank Marko Ramius look like a real ‘buckaroo’.
The third is a matter of scale economies in reactor construction. In the first place, the problem concerns the size of the reactor and its associated costs. The CRS assumed the fiercest of conservatism from -08, which means (1) relative cost-invariance with scale, and (2) no clever engineering to make a low-power reactor that could fit in an ISO container. The USAF briefly had a plan (if it could be called such) in the late 1980s for providing electrical power to expeditionary airfields this way, though one wonders why the aviators would think for a moment of anything but just firing up generators with the vast quantities of jet fuel that they need for those operations anyway. For naval applications, though, smaller reactors would be very useful for the smaller ships that the Navy wants to procure in larger numbers. Without this sort of sea change, nuclear power doesn’t get interesting for small frigates until oil hits about $200 per barrel. At that point, most defense ministries would have bigger problems on their hands.
The fourth is scale economies in ship construction. While this has been achieved repeatedly with submarines, neither the Russians nor the Americans have ever gotten there with surface ships. Ordering a carrier every five years or so doesn’t count, and the record with cruisers has been even worse. The US Navy has operated nine nuclear-powered cruisers over time, but the building record has been a bit strange.
The first three ships, Long Beach, Bainbridge, and Truxton, were individually built as one-of-a-kind projects. The Long Beach was built from the keel to be nuclear-powered, but with the same massive phased-array radar as the first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, USS Enterprise, with whose superstructure hers thus shared a remarkable and unappealing profile. The Bainbridge’s arrangement above decks was virtually identical to that of the contemporaneous Leahy-class cruisers, except that the Leahys’ four 1200-psi oil-fired boilers were replaced with two D2G pressurized-water atomic reactors. The Bainbridge’s crew was a bit larger, given NR’s penchant for manpower-intensive solutions, even back in the 1960s. NR’s conservatism did lead to reuse in this respect, as the D2G was subsequently installed in the Truxtun, but she was otherwise a unique design again. The later two-ship California-, and four-ship Virginia-classes also used the D2G, and this showed that the Navy could order nuclear-powered surface ships seriatim—with the presumed benefits in the cost curve—though only when the service and the Congress held fast to the concept over very long time lines.
This does not mean that wider application of naval nuclear power is sunk (there’s another!). Rather, it simply indicates that the problem is a big one that would require a multi-faceted solution:
Resolving issue #1, the need for greater infrastructure, would be largely subsumed by issue #4, the need for serial construction; that is, if you order them, they will build them. While only two shipyards in the US are authorized to build nuclear-powered ships today, several more have been in the past. As indicated by the relationship between the Bainbridge and the Leahys, top-side and reactor plant construction are somewhat separable issues. Two of the most recent Russian nuclear-powered icebreakers, the 20,000-ton Taigyr and Vaiguch, were procured this way. The ships themselves were built by Wärtsilä at the Helsinki New Shipyard, starting in 1989, but they were towed up the Gulf of Finland for installation of their reactor plants at Saint Petersburg’s Baltic Shipyard.
Resolving issue #2, the need for enough reactor operators, is similarly linked to issue #3, the need to build big reactors — and thus big ships. With the commercial power industry ashore offering good gigs at high payrates, the Navy would need to economize on staffing should it plan to comply with Taylor & Bartlett’s language. If it doesn’t want to break the bank buying reactors (and it has enough problems with affordability these days), it can only order so many. This suggests that the desired average ship size would increase, and that would rather differ from the approach that the Navy had wanted to take.
In both cases, some uncharacteristic long-range planning and commitment to restrained design objectives could mitigate the problem. Despite the nuclear community’s single-mindedness, there is more than one way to build a nuclear-fired ship. If ships needn’t cruise everywhere at top speed, they can be built with CONAG (combined nuclear and gas) arrangements, in which the reactor plant powers electric motors for cruising, and on-demand gas turbine generators can be quickly brought on line to supplement that power when the tactical situation calls for moving really fast. For keeping station as the duty missile defense ship off the North Korean coast, or just keeping a Tomahawk bulls-eye spot over Tehran, this sort of design philosophy could work well. The benefits would be standardization in (smaller) plant design amongst multiple classes (and sizes) of ship. Heck, that plays right into the planning proclivities of -08.
Taking the very long view (which normally makes me squeamish, given the uncertainties involved), how might this work out? What, indeed, would happen if petroleum prices continued to climb, making nuclear energy more attractive, and inducing other effects?
For government customers, carriers—of more than one type—look increasingly attractive. Forecasting the eventual doom of the aircraft carrier has been a sport for nay-saying defense pseudo-analysts for decades now, and they’re still all wet (pun! pun!). Taking missiles, marines, and aircraft to sea is pretty much the raison d’être of any navy. Aircraft are much more cost-effective at killing things than surface-launched missiles, and marines are in a world of hurt without air support. What changes with the increasing cost of oil is the nature of the aircraft: unmanned aviation gets even more alluring, as the aircraft in question needn’t schlep along a pilot, his ejection seat, and all the associated scar weight. This does not necessarily mean more Gerald Ford-class carriers, but it may move the tradeoff point between attempting to fulfill certain naval requirements with larger or smaller ships. Several years ago at Congressional hearings concerning the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) program, then-CNO Admiral Vern Clark was asked whether the Navy had studied whether sea control could not be better accomplished with LH-type ships carrying squadrons of armed helicopters and attack drones. Clark indicated that the LCS concept was pretty much just a gut instinct, and for some reason, that flew.
For government customers, missile cruisers look better than missile frigates. That is, if one is going to drop the money on the reactor anyway, it makes sense to put it in a ship that can bear the cost. Conversely, if the ship needs to be that big for another reason, then the reactor is more affordable in the larger scheme of the structure of the fleet. This is why nuclear power has been under serious (if very vague and preliminary) consideration in the missile-defense CG(N)X concept that the US Navy hopes will follow the Zumwalt-class destroyers.
For big shipbuilders, life could get a little easier—or not. Not that many shipyards in any country can build warships larger than 10,000 tons, and only two companies own such yards in the US. What’s less certain is what happens should reactor installation prove a separable activity. If each yard installs its own reactors, cost structures are duplicated, but it’s unclear ex ante whether competitive benefits would accrue to the customer. This leaves in place today’s situation in the US, where factor-inefficiency at Electric Boat or Newport News is hardly fatal, since government policy seems bent on maintaining two ‘nuclear-capable shipyards’. If a single facility were to install the reactors for the surface ships of several yards, then competition would focus on the production of hulls and the fitting of weapons and systems, which could be less friendly to the long-term viability of the less efficient yards.
For smaller shipbuilders, there’s a silver lining. Pulling some of the missions of small frigates into the purview of (nuclear-powered) cruisers and carriers may actually increase interest in corvettes and smaller types. That is, since something has to wander into the archipelagic areas in which capital ships shouldn’t tread, more navies may find interest in vessels akin to the Royal Swedish Navy’s Visby-class corvettes (600 tons) or the Finnish Navy’s Hamina-class missile ships (300-tons). They don’t carry aircraft or high-altitude air defenses, but under a protective umbrella, they’re affordable enough to hazard in clearing a minefield or sweeping up a brigade of Boghammars. Building them is so far not the acumen of the larger yards in the US, so there remains a long-range competitive opening.
For naval systems houses, bigger would be better, but maybe not enough. In the first instance, this should make Lockheed Martin and Raytheon happy, and slightly discomfort potential competitors. If the ships are bigger, the bigger integrators will maintain a competitive edge against the upstarts. On the other hand, a further shift from missile cruisers to carriers (above that experienced at the end of the Cold War) could lead to an overall decrease in business. After all, how many boost-phase defense ships are needed to cover the handful of grumpy men in funny hats or platform boots with nuclear missiles?
In the end, I really must acknowledge that this is the stuff of very long-range plans: technologically-intensive niche industries like shipbuilding and atomic power don’t scale up their facilities and labor pools industries like software houses, so we have a little while to plan. Taylor & Bartlett may have spoken, but the results they desire — and thus the challenges that naval arms suppliers may face — are a few years off. Do I actually expect much of this to come to pass? Sure, when -08 solicits an outside opinion, or when pigs snorkel — whichever comes first.
Taylor & Bartlett... Maybe these two could set up a naval architecture firm after they retire. I’d definitely drop by to try to sell them some work.
