According to last night's update from the National Defense Industries Association, the US Congress's 2009 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) contains a provision requiring that all future "assault echelon" amphibious ships be nuclear-powered.
Congressmen, led by Gene Taylor (D-Mississippi) and Roscoe Bartlett (R-Maryland) have gotten into this habit recently of specifying legally how ships are to be built. Then again, with the US Navy's inexplicable and sometimes conflicting statements about some of its programs (we're all still scratching our heads about the issue of the Standard-2 and -6 missiles on the Zumwalts), who can blame them? So, last year's Defense Appropriations bill had similar language that required that all future cruisers be nuclear-powered. If you read my commentary from last year on this topic, you can stop here. Otherwise, continue on, for some readers told me that was a classic, so I'm reprising below much of that heuristic discussion of the benefits and costs 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. There are no significant carbon emissions (if that’s really a problem), no smog, and no need to mail large checks denominated in petrodollars to people like Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
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 those Super Hornets, Lightning IIs, and Rafales.
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. New Zealanders fall into the latter camp, but ortunately, 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 it bounces around ten times that much, and this is rather changing the economics of naval presence. Up until this point, 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, that is, 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 seems to have 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.
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 and assault ships. Back in the 1960s, the Navy had planned that every cruiser and destroyer would eventually be nuclear-powered.
Since a distaste for burning Bolivarian and Jihadist oil seems to be beating out squeamishness over all things atomic, this interest has resurfaced (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 well beyond that point 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, and the further millions on its maintenance over time, 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.
That said, the language in the 2008 appropriations and the 2009 authorization acts may not constitute a done deal for an expansion of naval nuclear power. There are four reasons for this.
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 pointed out in an article last year 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, whether subsidized or not. 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. Whether their reactors are actually better or safer than British or French ones is a fair question, and perhaps unknowable.
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. 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 the 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 power 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, which actually plays right into the planning proclivities of -08.
Taking the very long view, if this is really possible, how might this work? 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. 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 drag along a pilot, his ejection seat, and other 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. As at least one friend of mine on the naval staff may remind me, that's akin to the way that the fortunes of the Zumwalt program have risen and fallen.
For government customers, ceteris paribus, 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 CGX concept that the US Navy had hoped would follow the Zumwalt-class destroyers, whether the law required it or not.
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). It is perhaps no wonder that Secretary Winter caught a ride on one of the Visbys just last week. These ships 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. The esteemed naval architecture firm of 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? Possibly. It's at least as likely as pigs snorkeling, or -08 soliciting an outside opinion.
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