US Navy Decommissions the First Nuclear-Powered Aircraft Carrier (engadget.com) 203
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: The Navy has decommissioned the USS Enterprise (CVN-65), the world's first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. The vessel launched in 1961 and is mainly known for playing a pivotal role in several major incidents and conflicts, including the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War and the 2003 Iraq War. However, it also served as the quintessential showcase for what nuclear ships could do. Its eight reactors let it run for years at a time, all the while making more room for the aircraft and their fuel. As you might guess, the decommissioning process (which started when the Enterprise went inactive in 2012) is considerably trickier than it would be for a conventional warship. It wasn't until December 2016 that crews finished extracting nuclear fuel, and the ship will have to be partly dismantled to remove the reactors. They'll be disposed of relatively safely at Hanford Site, home of the world's first plutonium reactor. Whatever you think of the tech, the ship leaves a long legacy on top of its military accomplishments. It proved the viability of nuclear aircraft carriers, leading the US to build the largest such fleet in the world. Also, this definitely isn't the last (real-world) ship to bear the Enterprise name -- the future CVN-80 will build on its predecessor with both more efficient reactors and systems designed for modern combat, where drones and stealth are as important as fighters and bombers. It won't be ready until 2027, but it should reflect many of the lessons learned over the outgoing Enterprise's 55 years of service.
Obligatory... (Score:5, Insightful)
“Let’s make sure that history never forgets the name Enterprise. Picard out”
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Kirk is better!
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Maybe if Captain Kames Kirk does great on the Zumwalt , they'll give him Enterprise!
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The odds of it are hilariously low. The first captain of CVN-80 will likely be someone who is currently ranked Commander or Lt Commander.
CVN-80 isn't scheduled for commission until 2027. There is a statutory retirement of 30 years of commissioned service. It requires a minimum of 21 years of commissioned service before you're eligible to be promoted to Captain. It is impossible for Captain James Kirk to still be a commissioned officer in the navy and have the rank of Captain because he would have hit the ma
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Oh, found out James Kirk was commissioned in 1990, which means he'll hit 30 years of commissioned service in 2020 so even if the Enterprise is commissioned in 2025 when it's scheduled to be completed Captain Kirk will be an admiral or retired.
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Nooocleeeaarrr Wessels
Re:Obligatory... (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, because the Navy wasn't going to continue building aircraft carriers after they proved invaluable in every armed conflict since World War II. Would you rather they continued to burn millions of gallons of oil to move the thing around and generate steam?
This ship proved that nuclear propulsion works, and is far better than diesel. And since the US Navy has had a grand total of zero nuclear reactor accidents in over 50 years of operating dozens of vessels, maybe this was a good thing. Chalk it up to Admiral Rickover's insistence that every officer serving on one of his nuclear ships needed proper training, and got it before taking the post.
Re:Obligatory... (Score:5, Informative)
US Navy never had a reactor accident not only because of the training but also because of a quite different reactor construction, generally quite small reactors built from prohibitively expensive materials and ridiculously high fuel enrichment (nuclear submarines run on almost pure U-235).
Naval reactors are also refueled just once or twice in their (rather short) lifetime. Nuclear propulsion works, but it is so expensive that only a military organisation with basically limitless funding can afford it. Civilian nuclear propulsion won't ever happen, icebreakers are the only exception.
Defueling (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Defueling (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Defueling (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Defueling (Score:2)
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Re:Defueling (Score:4, Interesting)
The limiting factor with nuke powered ships is the propellers; you can only spin them so fast before they start to cavitate (usually somewhere around 100 knots for a big surface ship, somewhat higher for a submarine), The engines can deliver the horsepower.
Umm, no.
The limiting factor on the top speed of the Enterprise was the strength of her propeller shafts. IIRC, the #4 propulsion plant's shaft was over 600 feet long.
Enterprise was originally built with high-speed screws that were removed in her first overhaul (again, IIRC) because the higher torque needed to spin them would have limited the life of the shafts.
Even without the high-speed screws, she was faster than the Nimitz-class carriers. Enterprise had a hull that was longer and thinner, and she had 320,000 HP compared to the 260,000 or 280,000 for the Nimitz class. I'd venture that Enterprise could top out at over 40 kts even at the end of her life.
But hey, what do I know. I only ran those propulsion plants for a couple of years.
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40 knots is awfully fast, requiring well over twice the power of 30 knots, and I don't know what the Enterprise's hull speed is offhand. She's about as long as ships that made 33 knots in WWII, so that would be my estimate.
Re: Defueling (Score:2)
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The USN has never published a top speed (just "at least 30 knots"), I wonder if they'll declassify the data now that the ship's been decommissioned.
This article [navweaps.com] makes a good case that a top speed higher than 33.6 knots is unlikely.
With all 8 reactors at full power, the ship makes more steam than the turbines (rated for 280kshp) can handle.
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The limiting factor for speed of any ship is its length and the size of the resulting bow wave. Regardless of how much power you can put out beyond a certain speed a ship starts to effectively climb over it's own bow wave and suddenly needs an exponential increase in propulsion power for a maginal gain.
The propellers would cavitate and destroy themselves long before a ship overcame these limits imposed by their dimensions, not by their engine.
Re: Defueling (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.military.com/daily-news/2012/10/22/enterprise-nimitz-class-carriers-wont-be-museums.html [military.com]
Re:Defueling (Score:5, Funny)
I wonder how much it cost to take all the radioactive parts from the ship and store them until they are no longer radioactive. I'm guessing that's quite a long time, as spent nuke fuel has a half life of 10,000 years. What's the cost of just one night watchman for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for 10,000 years? I hope that was included in the costs/benefits analysis.
To be fair, the costs drop considerably after civilization ends...
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Good idea!
Hmm, what about somewhere geologically safe... and under a mountain... Yucca mountain looks good! Oh wait...
That's not a "quote" of Engadget's report... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:That's not a "quote" of Engadget's report... (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, but they did abbreviate it! They managed to remove all the paragraph formatting.
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...it's the entire contents of the article, minus the ads and with Slashdot's wrapped around it instead. This is copyright theft, pure and simple, and this summary should be deleted and replaced with a much, MUCH more abbreviated version.
Or... maybe Engadget's article could be deleted and replaced with a much, MUCH more detailed and information-rich version.
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If the article is so bad, why is Slashdot linking to it in the first place?
We're talking about the same Slashdot whose editors approve regurgitated press releases and Bennett Haselton, right?
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Re:That's not a "quote" of Engadget's report... (Score:5, Insightful)
...it's the entire contents of the article, minus the ads and with Slashdot's wrapped around it instead..
If the entire article is only 255 words, Engadget's paying that editor too much.
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Re:That's not a "quote" of Engadget's report... (Score:4, Informative)
255 words is about 3x the attention span of the average Engadget reader, so actually for them it's a long-form essay.
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No, that's simply copyright infringement.
You can't really "steal" a copyright unless you actually re-registered it in your own name somehow, perhaps by creating a fake memorandum of transfer. I don't see anyone depriving them of the copyright itself, just infringing upon some of the exclusive rights granted to them by copyright. At least, assuming the submitter wasn't authorized by the copyright holder. I sincerely doubt that they do have any such authorization, but Engaget and anyone they chose to infor
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I'm protesting the sort of unclear thinking that caused someone to use an emotionally charged word that is not correct on any level.
As for the rest, think what you wish, but I don't believe I have anything copyright infringing on here. I basically gave up on movies & TV a long time ago and I can hardly find anything to watch on YouTube or CR. My games are either free (Nethack, DF) or from GoG / Steam. No emulators or ROMs. You might well be right that nearly everyone has probably committed some sort
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That phrase is an oxymoron. Either it's copyright infringment or it's theft, but it cannot be both.
Re: That's not a "quote" of Engadget's report... (Score:2)
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The semantics of "theft" are generally that someone is unlawfully deprived of something. This can be things, or it can be work time ("theft of service").
The copyright holder is not deprived of anything by copyright infringement. The copyright holder might miss a potential sale, but there's lots of reasons to lose sales, and negative reviews are not considered theft.
Apparently, you don't understand what "semantics" means, and you have a pet phrase you like to pull out to cover your lack of insight. C
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...it's the entire contents of the article, minus the ads and with Slashdot's wrapped around it instead. This is copyright theft, pure and simple, and this summary should be deleted and replaced with a much, MUCH more abbreviated version.
*infringement.
C'mon, this is Slashdot. We've been making that clear distinction since 1997.
Enterprise (Score:5, Informative)
Personally, I wish they'd named the first ship of that class Enterprise, and let Ford be one of the latter ones, so it could be the "Enterprise Class." Ah well.
Re:Enterprise (Score:5, Funny)
Personally, I wish they'd named the first ship of that class Enterprise, and let Ford be one of the latter ones, so it could be the "Enterprise Class." Ah well. :)
Why not keep the ship name "Enterprise", but rename the class to "Constitution"?
Re:Enterprise (Score:5, Interesting)
Navy ships should have proper, bold, majestic, fighting names. Stop naming them after defunct politicians and overambitious military blowhards.
The Royal Navy knows how to do it.
Re:Enterprise (Score:5, Funny)
Navy ships should have proper, bold, majestic, fighting names. Stop naming them after defunct politicians and overambitious military blowhards.
The Royal Navy knows how to do it.
Only after they learned the hard way with what happened to The Prince of Wales.
Re:Enterprise (Score:5, Funny)
Name them like Iain M. Banks does. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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I love the culture novels, and some of the ship names are just fantastic. I was chuffed to see SpaceX name some of their drone ships after these. I really hope the next one is called "Funny, It Worked Last Time...". At some point it'll probably be very apt.
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The ships themselves need to be sentient for that to work, I think. Besides, even in Banks' creation, different civilizations have very different approaches to ship-naming. And the humanity from Earth is decidedly not part of Culture.
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SpaceX does that.
But then, their ships are autonomous.
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Navy ships should have proper, bold, majestic, fighting names.
The Royal Navy knows how to do it.
Only after they learned the hard way with what happened to The Prince of Wales.
I can assure you that the Prince of Whales was the only ship like that. Others were given names such as:
the HMS Pansy
er no ok wait, how about:
the HMS Cockchafer
I mean sure that sounds like an unpleasant thing to do to an enemy, but it doesn't sound exactly terminal. OK so how about:
The HMS Griper.
I heard there were also plans for an "H
Trump class a-coming (Score:5, Funny)
Are you that afraid of there appearing a Trump-class of ships some day?
It will be huge. And beautiful...
Re:Trump class a-coming (Score:4, Insightful)
Ha, indeed. Democrats are waking up to the realization that giving the government power will backfire.
Republicans, being slower on the uptake, have yet to learn this lesson.
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Everyone has their blindsides. Republicans knew much earlier than Democrats that the media was full of shit, but have yet to learn not to elect retards.
Re:Trump class a-coming (Score:5, Funny)
Are you that afraid of there appearing a Trump-class of ships some day?
Weapons on any Trump class ships will probably be unable to aim properly, inflicting equal damage on friend, foe, and crew.
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Re:Trump class a-coming (Score:4, Funny)
Are you that afraid of there appearing a Trump-class of ships some day?
Weapons on any Trump class ships will probably be unable to aim properly, inflicting equal damage on friend, foe, and crew.
Probably because the guns are so tiny.
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Are you that afraid of there appearing a Trump-class of ships some day?
It will be huge. And beautiful...
Now that is an amusing vision. I can see a warship entirely lit up in neon with giant golden letters spelling out TRUMP on the side. On the upside it will probably having onboard gambling and an excellent buffet
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They HAVE TO. There's just too many ridiculous British names...
Let's hear it for the HMS Ridgewell Hancock
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Really? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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In the 19th Century New Navy and on through WWII, battleships got state names (USS Kearsage being the exception), cruisers were named after cities, destroyers after people who'd been in the Navy and seemed worth commemorating, submarines after fish (although late in WWII they had to make up fishy-sounding names and kinda hope somebody would find a fish and use that name sometime). The first carrier was USS Langley, and the first real carriers were battlecruiser conversions and adopted the intended battlec
Re:Enterprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I wish they'd named the first ship of that class Enterprise, and let Ford be one of the latter ones
Personally, I think we should stop naming ships, or anything else, after dead politicians. Or, even worse, living politicians [wikipedia.org].
Re:Enterprise (Score:4, Informative)
In true Star Trek form though, the original Enterprise is actually a Constitution class [wikipedia.org] star ship. I'm too lazy to see if any of the later Enterprises defined their class.
Re:Enterprise (Score:4, Informative)
The -D (ST:TNG) is a Galaxy class. And I'm not enough of a Trekkie to know the rest.
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These are the ones from the TV show and movies.
NX-01 - NX class - served 2151 to 2161
NCC-1701 - Constitution class - served 2245 to 2285
NCC-1701-A - Constitution class (refit) - served 2286 to 2293
NCC-1701-B - Excelsior class (refit) - served 2293 to 2329
NCC-1701-C - Ambassador class - served 2332 to 2344
NCC-1701-D - Galaxy class - served 2363 to 2371
NCC-1701-D alternate timeline - Galaxy class (refit), aka Galaxy-X, aka Galaxy-dreadnought - served ? to ~2395
NCC-1701-E - Sovereign class - served 2372 to ?
NC
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These are the ones from the TV show and movies.
NX-01 - NX class - served 2151 to 2161 ...
NCC-1701 - Constitution class - served 2245 to 2285
NCC-1701-A - Constitution class (refit) - served 2286 to 2293
NCC-1701-D - Galaxy class - served 2363 to 2371
NCC-1701-D alternate timeline - Galaxy class (refit), aka Galaxy-X, aka Galaxy-dreadnought - served ? to ~2395
Aren't the NX-class prototype/experimental designs?
Kinda interesting they would use a ship like that for 10 years, yet the NCC-1701-D was only in service for eight years -- or was that because of it being destroyed in that one TNG movie? Also the original service design (NCC-1701) was in service for 30 years, but then gets only another five years after a major refit.
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Also the original service design (NCC-1701) was in service for 30 years, but then gets only another five years after a major refit.
Brain fart there. Seven years, not five. Still doesn't seem like much bang for the buck.
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These are the ones from the TV show and movies.
NX-01 - NX class - served 2151 to 2161
NCC-1701 - Constitution class - served 2245 to 2285
NCC-1701-A - Constitution class (refit) - served 2286 to 2293
NCC-1701-B - Excelsior class (refit) - served 2293 to 2329
NCC-1701-C - Ambassador class - served 2332 to 2344
NCC-1701-D - Galaxy class - served 2363 to 2371
NCC-1701-D alternate timeline - Galaxy class (refit), aka Galaxy-X, aka Galaxy-dreadnought - served ? to ~2395
NCC-1701-E - Sovereign class - served 2372 to ?
NCC-1701-J - Universe class (possible/alternate future) - served 26th century
Star Trek Online has the NCC-1701-F Enterprise - Odyssey class.
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Re:Enterprise (Score:4, Funny)
The next one should be Abstract class.
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I looked it up. None of the ships to bear the name Enterprise in Star Trek defined their class.
Ships with the name Enterprise were, in historical order from the main Star Trek timeline, of the NX class, Constitution class, Constitution refit class, Excelsior refit class, Ambassador class, Galaxy class and Sovereign class
Re: Enterprise (Score:2)
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Only about 24 carriers (Essex class) built during WW2 had a 90+ aircraft capacity. Most of the rest of those had a capacity of 24-36 aircraft and probably displaced around 11,000 tons. The Essex class had a displacement of 27,000 tons. The first supercarrier class was the Forrestal and Kitty Hawk at 60,000 tons followed by the Enterprise at 93,000 tons and the Nimitz and Gerald Ford classes at 100,000 tons displacement. Between Nimitz and Ford and the limit of 12 supercarriers in the navy you're talking a t
Who would sink a nuclear ship? (Score:5, Interesting)
You have to admit... what army/navy/etc. would sink a nuclear ship in their own waters during war? You'd have to think twice about that - it could be a good deterrent to being attacked. If sunk, it could be a major issue in your region for generations to come.
Re:Who would sink a nuclear ship? (Score:5, Informative)
what army/navy/etc. would sink a nuclear ship in their own waters during war?
Given the opportunity, all of them.
If sunk, it could be a major issue in your region for generations to come.
Nine nuclear ships have sunk at sea [wikipedia.org]. None of them resulted in significant radiation release. The reactors are designed to withstand sinking.
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Yet.
And precisely none of them were sunk under attack. (And two of them aren't even in the ocean any more - they are salvaged.) That's an awful thin experience base on which to make long term judgements.
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Water absorbs radiation pretty effectively
Indeed [xkcd.com].
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If you really want to know what can happen, then look to the Dai-Ichi reactor complex in Fukushima.
Non sequitur much? This is about a reactor at the bottom of the sea which stands a good chance of being flooded due damage to the vessel before anything melts down. Fukushima was about a reactor overheating and sending crap into the air. It also wasn't nearly as dangerous as the hysteria would have you believe, but that's another story.
As I said elsewhere, people will happily poison themselves and stunt their childrens' IQs by a few points by eating tuna that's been contaminated (*worldwide*) by mercury
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The ones that do dissolve in seawater *and* bioaccumulate can be a problem for the people who eat the fish, but unless this happens in the middle of a critically important/valuable sea food producting area, this isn't a catastrophic or even a particularly unusual problem
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It isn't the sinking that would cause the radiation release. It is the massive explosions, as a result of battle, that could breach the reactors while sinking the ship at the same time.
Nope. Naval vessels don't get blown apart unless you hit them with a nuke of your own. The massive explosions that would follow are the ICBMs that would rain down on whoever sank the ship.
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You have to admit... what army/navy/etc. would sink a nuclear ship in their own waters during war? You'd have to think twice about that - it could be a good deterrent to being attacked. If sunk, it could be a major issue in your region for generations to come.
It's astonishing that anyone (let alone 6 digit slashdotters) still thinks of radioactive contamination like this.
It might be an issue for the fishing industry due to bioaccumulation, but there would be no other significantly worrisome effects. Water absorbs radiation very effectively and unlike fallout on land, currents would eventually disperse any radionuclides that didn't immediately settle on the sea floor.
We're constantly surrounded by radiation. The entire Earth is, in fact, a nuclear react [scientificamerican.com]
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You have to admit... what army/navy/etc. would sink a nuclear ship in their own waters during war? You'd have to think twice about that - it could be a good deterrent to being attacked. If sunk, it could be a major issue in your region for generations to come.
You sink the ship, then accuse the country that owned the ship of attacking you with a nuclear capability.
There you go, you now have given yourself approval for a nuclear retaliation.
Seems like crazy logic, but let's see if it happens in the South China Sea soon.
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Seriously? Then why all the brouhaha over nuclear plants?
Because there's a massive amount of misunderstanding and hysteria. There is one potential issue in bioaccumulation in sealife harming the fishing industry, but this would be fairly localized.
few dozen RC dozers could clean up Fukushima in a week or two. Why on earth has this never been proposed?
Well, there's the fishing and there's radioisotope terrorism, but those are largely driven by emotions, too. You make a fatal error when you assume that the public as a whole, or policymakers, are driven by cool, rational, relative risk and cost-based thinking.
Nuclear dangers have always been grossly overstated. We
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They can't even construct the plants efficiently, let alone be trusted to operate them.
They can't even be trusted to mine coal, let alone burn it. [wikipedia.org]
You *were* aware that there are dozens of coal mine fires burning around the world right now, right? That they spew forth toxic gasses and cause the ground to collapse and it ends up rendering many square miles of land uninhabitable? That thousands of people have been forced to evacuate? That it's not too unusual for the fires (like Centralia's) to hav
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If you're just going Luddite on me, life was of course no walk in the part before we had access to modern technology including electricity. I might hate Monsanto too, but the people who argue for locally grown, organically fertilized everything are being extremely stupid.
If you're not being a Luddite, you're just aimlessly blathering. And/or you haven't wrapped your mind around some rather elementary misanthropic truths.
And you, you, you seemed inclined blame the environmentalists for it.
F
Nuclear desalinization after disasters (Score:5, Interesting)
My father pointed out to me that the nuclear carriers can be a great help after humanitarian disasters as they can desalinate large quantities of water. I found an article about the Carl Vincent that says that it can desalinate 400,000 gallons of water a day. We stationed it off the coast of Haiti after the earthquakes there.
http://content.time.com/time/s... [time.com]
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the Carl Vincent
Please tell me that's your spellchecker.
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Indeed it was. I'll correct the correction. Thanks for the catch.
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Yeah, but all of that would be far more efficient with a purpose-built ship that wasn't also carrying an entire airbase.
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Photons? (Score:4, Interesting)
I have the coordinates of the reactor.
Kirk here.
Admiral, we have found the nuclear wessel.
Well done, you two!
And Admiral... it is the *Enterprise*!
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First thing I thought of, too.
I was bummed to find out that the the USS Enterprise in the movie was actually played by the USS Ranger, temporarily re-branded.
Hanford "relatively safe"??? (Score:3, Informative)
Looks like the Hanford site has had quite a few problems:
Hanford Nuclear Waste Cleanup Plant May Be Too Dangerous
https://www.scientificamerican... [scientificamerican.com]
Report finds serious defects at Hanford nuclear waste treatment plant
http://www.latimes.com/nation/... [latimes.com]
Civilian use? (Score:2)
I wonder if there's any possibility of this ship being used for civilian purposes? If it's good enough for carrying armed aircraft and hundreds of crewmen, it should be OK for doing the same minus the weapons.
Or... after all those years in service, will the Enterprise still have any shipbuilding secrets worth hiding?
Apart from the obvious use as a supervillain HQ, a large ship with helicopters and airplanes could be useful for rescue operations and support to places needing help following natural disasters
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Such ships seem like a great idea - some years ago there was one for sale (not sure who the previous owner was). I seem to remember it was for sale in the low-millions of dollars sort of range. The thing is, to get it off the dock you need millions more just to tow it, millions more to dock it somewhere you can work on it and then (probably) hundreds of millions more to refit it and make it work in any useful sense.
There's a reason military budgets get measured in the billions ;-)
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OK... I get the idea...
Could this one be the ship you saw in the news: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
?
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It would be far too expensive to maintain or operate and ocean travel can take a long time. More likely than not a US supercarrier is going to be closer to the disaster that occurs than the repurposed Enterprise.
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