Francis Urquhart
Well-known member
@Francis Urquhart, while this might sound silly, does a combined gas-turbine/nuke plant make sense at some point?
There's an engineering problem in that the cost and weight of a nuclear plant isn't directly related to its output. We had that problem with the Tullibee back in the 1950s. So, if one's going to put a nuclear plant in, one might as well get as much ooomph from it as we can. Now, gas turbines would be useful boost but here's the thing. Remember a nuclear plant is just a steam plant with a different source of steam and putting steam and gas turbines together is a match made in hell. It's called COSAG (combined steam and gas) and was used by the British in their Country class destroyers back in the 1950s. HMS Bristol had the same layout and the same issues - ie repeated serious fires. That was bad enough with oil-fired boilers for steam and gas turbines but I'd really not want that risk next to a nuclear reactor.
Arguably why not just combined nuclear-diesel? Then you don't have the volumetric waste that is the massive air intakes and uptakes for a gas turbine that are its main weakness. For high speed and economical cruising you use the nuke; for everything else the diesels.
I've never heard of CONAD being used although the Chinese are reputed to be going that way for their next flight of carriers. The problem is that diesel is really the cruise system so we have two cruise systems and no boost. There's also a problem that steam turbines generate rotational energy while diesels generate reciprocating energy and gearing the two together causes a lot of problems. That's why CODAG (combined diesel and gas) is tending to be dropped these days in favor of CODOG (combined diesel or gas). I don't really see an application for a CONOD plant. That might change with the world shifting over to turbo-electric machinery. There both the reactor/steam turbines and the diesels would be generating electricity.
P.S. isn't that fixed cost per reactor so since we use redundant reactors our modern nukes are really about a $800 M premium on a carrier?
Actually its per two reactors on a surface ship and one reactor on a submarine (the rafting and silencing on a submarine makes up for the cost saved by a single reactor). All the CVNs have two high-capacity reactors.