Well , I agree with his assessment that it would be impractical to retrofit a nuke plant into an Iowa .
For more reasons than he lists .
The Nimitz class are refueled , they refueled my ship about a decade or more ago ( ? ) and they are armored .
You need to go thru the armored hanger deck and then thru the armored lid of the RAR ( reactor auxiliary room ) then into the armored roof of the reactor compartment .
Granted , the armor and deck arrangement isn't similar to the Iowa so cutting thru the armor on that ship would be another barrier for a retrofit but not impossible . Beyond impractical and ungodly expensive but not impossible .
Even if you could somehow just replace the oil-fired boilers with a reactor ( you couldn't , there's not enough space for all the ancillary equipment to support the reactor itself and the steam generators ( boilers ) must be located in the shielded reactor compartment along with the reactor ) , it wouldn't work because those main engine turbines on the Iowa use superheated steam and nuke plants can only produce wet steam .
Oil fired plants send their wet steam thru another oil-fired reboiler to boost the temp/ pressure up . Nuke primary coolant operates around 500F or the fuel cladding degrades and the fuel elements begin to fail mechanically , contaminating the primary system and far worse begins to happen .
This 500F water is what is fed to the steam generators to produce steam , so that steam is in the mid to high 400F range , not the 850-900F it gets from the couple of thousand degree oil flame in the superheating reboiler .
So you'd need to replace the main turbines and the turbine generators that supply electric power to the rest of the ship .
You'd need to replace absolutely everything , including completely reorienting bulkheads and framing and then re-ballast the ship .
Probably be more expensive than a new Ford class .
And no , Navy nuke plants are not delicate . We proved it .
They're expensive to build and operate .
I agree that you probably wouldn't want a ship engaged in littoral operations and exposed to heavy shore batteries since it's high probability of destruction would create an environmental disaster , but not because it couldn't take the pounding .
Battleships are obsolete so it's a moot point .
BTW , I forgot to answer your question about the 4th shock .
It felt about the same as the 3rd one , at least down in the plant .
We were expecting it to feel more significant since the 2nd to 3rd event was a very noticeable difference .
I don't know what distances from the ship each was though .
Fun Fact : We carried a spare , 1 MW , reactor coolant pump motor in the hangar bay along with it's massive handling gantry .
We always thought that was pretty funny .
Replacing a primary coolant pump motor could only be done in a very capable shipyard , most likely Newport News .
It's like we were going to be sailing around after nuclear Armageddon and one of our coolant pumps goes down and there's no place to go to replace it so we're just going to do it ourselves .
Ignoring the radiological nightmare that would be cutting into the reactor compartment , we didn't possess the equipment to cut thru the hangar deck and lid of the reactor compartment .
Pretty sure we'd just run on 2 loops ( there's all kinds of restrictions due to core physics / fuel burn ) or just shut the plant down .
It would be like GM selling you a second transmission for your car when you bought it .
They put it in the trunk , give you a screwdriver and a wrench along with it .
You can swap it out on the side of the road all by yourself .
I always wondered if they deleted that BS from later Nimitz carriers or all of them still have them .
That gantry and motor aren't light and they take up valuable space in the hangar bay too .
It's Effing stupid , but I'm sure Newport News made a lot of extra coin on the deal .
I wish I could have been there for a refuel .
Maybe beneath the non-skid of the hangar floor there are fasteners that hold the armor decking in place so no cutting is required .
They were designed to be refueled so that would be logical , so maybe there is access areas above each coolant pump motor ,,, but what kinda equipment is necessary to lift and maneuver the armor deck IDK .
LOL , man , and then the reactor compartment ... not happening .
Between the hangar deck and the RAR is the main deck . There's a LOT of chit on that deck .
It's not something ship's company would even be able to attempt -- even if it didn't require cutting armor deck plate and there were .... OMG , the more I think about it .
Nope.
2 years in the shipyard with 100's of additional specialized shipyard personnel and massive amounts of additional tools equipment ...
you know how the Navy has written procedure for absolutely everything .There's probably some insane procedure using that gantry crane for the motor to lift the armor deck sections out of the way , starting at the hangar deck , then main deck , then the reactor compartment with all the shielding ( insane ) -- then hoist out the non-working motor , then lower and attach the new one .
LOL .
2 plant would be the easier since the aft mess deck is above the reactor auxiliary room and it's a wide open space , but 1 plant has all kinds of bulkheaded areas above it .
Anyways , I haven't given that insanity any thought since I left that ship 31 years ago , but yeah , it's ridiculous to carry that motor around . We knew it back then and now I remember all the reasons it was so stupid .
