USS Gerald R Ford Vs HMS Queen Elizabeth - Nuclear vs Non-nuclear

the USS Gerald R Ford in the HMS Queen Elizabeth Arbor latest and most modern aircraft carriers in the world both used the latest technology to sport planes like the f-35 but why has the British carrier not followed in the footsteps of the American ones and used nuclear through its power systems and what are the pros and cons of being nuclear or non-nuclear in a modern Navy [Music] [Music] now this video is sponsored by nordley p.m. and just like the latest aircraft carriers it's designed to help protect you whilst you're out surfing the high seas of the internet which at times can make the Wild West look like a calm and peaceful place one of the problems I've had in the past with other VPNs is that once you're logged in if their system is slow then your whole connection is slowed down however when I tried Nord VPN I found there was hardly any noticeable drop in speed plus you can have up to sixty vices run through one account which is really useful to our house because when the kids come home from school we can have three computers two iPads and an iPhone all being used at the same time and the last thing I need is a slow connection and everybody moaning and complaining about it now just in case you're not sure why you would need a VPN basically once you're behind one it's much more difficult for hackers to find your real IP address and gain control of your computer to access any potential personal details like passwords emails bank logins and alike and if you're on the move and using an open public Wi-Fi access point your data is also encrypted you can also use a VPN to disguise your real location for content that is geographically locked away from him by making you look like you're in a different country and you can choose which country you appear to be in from is simple to use Nord VPN app now if you go with a three-year deal you get up to 70% off and you can get the first month free by using the coupon code curious droid at the address now shown there's even a 30-day money-back guarantee so there's no excuse for not trying and with that let's crack on with a video as the British influence and military budget shrank after World War two so did the size and number of its aircraft carriers in the belief that new carriers would be used as part of a larger NATO task force so the last generation of invincible-class light carriers was coming in around 22,000 tons compared to the u.s. Nimitz class which tipped the scales at a hundred thousand tons the British carriers were built primarily for anti-submarine warfare in the Cold War North Atlantic and not for projecting naval power around the world like the US ones however after a devastating Kasavin war of the late 1990s Europe was seen to have done too little too late to intervene so a European Union Rapid Reaction Force was proposed that will be able to act on a global level and independently of NATO in the US as part of this three new large aircraft carriers will be built which would share a common design to by Britain and one by France with the other European nations making up the support group however things didn't quite go to plan the French cancelled their carrier in 2013 due to budget restraints and a belief that they thought the non-nuclear propulsion was a step backwards for French technology so the British continued alone with the HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales as it was now believed that bigger was again better and that small carriers just couldn't provide the air superiority quickly enough which was one of the number of less learned from before Khan's war these are collectively called the queen elizabeth-class carriers or qec and named after the First World War super dreadnought battleships and not the current Queen of England just in case you were wondering even though over qec carriers are a bit smaller they are still the second largest non US Navy warships in the world after the world war two Yamato class Japanese battleships displacing 65 to 70 thousand tons depending upon the final build they were also to be of an adaptable design that could use either catobar which is catapult assisted takeoff barrier arrested recovery or ski jumps for short takeoff and vertical landing aircraft in particular the f-35b lightning - Joint Strike Fighter when the British carriers were on the drawing board nuclear power was looked at as an option with the right design it can provide enough power to run a ship without refueling for up to 25 years land-based reactors usually produce around about 1,600 megawatts the smaller marine reactors are a few hundred megawatts these reactors have to be very small yet powerful for their size to fit in the limited space of a ship even one the size of an aircraft carrier this small size means that more expensive materials have to be used that are more resistant to radiation and the neutron interaction with the fissionable material before it escapes into the shielding is much less so highly enriched weapons-grade uranium is often used this increases the power density and extends for reactor lifetime but is much more expensive and is a much greater security risk you also can't rely upon gravity to drop the control rods into the reactor core to shut it down like on land-based reactors because of the pitching and rolling motion of the ship in the sea so any mechanical control systems must work flawlessly this end extra things like the desalination of seawater to make freshwater for the cooling system all adds to the cost and makes it very expensive to build nuclear-powered ships in recent years there has also been a move against nuclear-powered ships with some countries not allowing nuclear-armed or powered ships in their territorial waters and as these are the flagships of the countries they represent they are also carrying now ecological as well as political baggage the size of a qec carriers also limits where they can dock and maintenance if they were nuclear could only be carried out at nuclear certified ports the UK has only two such certified experts at Devonport and fast lane maintenance also requires specialist nuclear technicians and then there is the decommissioning at the end of our working lives the US has a specialist area Puget Sound for the disposal of their nuclear assets and large areas in remote locations whoever remains of the reactors can be buried the UK on the other hand has still to complete the decommissioning of a single nuclear submarine although Britain could build nuclear carriers all its experience is in nuclear submarines and not surface ships the only shipyard set up for assembly of a nuclear-powered ship is the raw safe one which is currently booked up with decommissioning old nuclear subs and building new ones it would also need to bring in a substantial number of nuclear specialists from the US or France at considerable expense as we don't have enough of them in the UK all this contrasts with the US where the US Navy is one of the biggest and oldest nuclear operators in the world it has a huge amount of experience that dates back to the end of a Manhattan Project in the 1940s it's developed 27 different reactor designs there have been used in 219 nuclear-powered vessels and brought over 526 reactor causing two operation it currently operates 81 nuclear-powered vessels including 11 aircraft carriers and 70 submarines it's clocked up over 6 thousand two hundred reactor years and the nuclear-powered vessels have traveled over 240 million kilometers without a single reactor accident and it has a safety record that is second to none one of the major differences between the new u.s. for class carriers and the previous generation Nimitz class was the introduction of the more powerful a 1b reactors built by Bechtel which are both smaller and simpler to operate yet generate at least 25% more power than the a1 w Westinghouse built reactors in the Nimitz the nimitz-class carriers have been in service since 1975 and in that time a lot of new technologies been developed such as the emails electromagnetic aircraft Launch System as well as many more modern systems requiring an electrical supply there is also the near future weapons and defense systems like rail guns directed energy weapons and dynamic armor in the pipeline all of which will require large electrical supplies something that the nimitz-class hadn't reached the limits of the Ford class carriers were designed to have at least double the electricity generating capacity of anything they would need now to allow for future developments the u.s. carriers use steam power not only to power the turbines for propellers but also electrical generators and steam catapults to launch for planes steam being something which nuclear generators produce a lot of but all the steam plumbing creates a lot of complexity maintenance weight and more manpower to operate and also determines where the reactors are placed in the ship while steam catapults have been very reliable in the past they also have no form of feedback control and as such can transmit very large tow forces that can stress the airframes of planes especially lighter ones which means more maintenance cost and aircraft downtime so for the Ford class carriers the emails launch system was developed this uses a electric linear motor that uses feedback to accelerate the plane smoothly depending upon its weight it also is lighter and less complex to fit when the old steam ones and with a quicker recharge time should be able to launch more sorties in the same amount of time something which is often talked about is the unlimited range of nuclear-powered ships well yes they do have an unlimited range but unlike nuclear submarines which travel alone a carrier always is a company by the Carrier Strike Group of supporting warships and supply ships which are often non-nuclear the planes themselves also require aviation fuel which has to be replenished by supply ships along with food water and ammunition if extended missions are ongoing the Royal Navy has never operated nuclear carriers so it always had Oilers or fuel replenishment tankers to resupplies aircraft carriers as part of their operation this meant there was much less of an incentive to go nuclear with the new carriers also the cost of building and maintaining nuclear is much higher than running conventional oil powered carriers even with rising fuel costs factored in it will take about 15 years before the cost of fuel catches up with the extra cost of building a nuclear version and that's without the periodic nuclear refueling costs and the very expensive and problematic decommissioning at the end of their service life old conventional aircraft carriers are sometimes sold onto foreign powers so some of that money can be recouped nuclear ships on the other hand can not be sold on and become a liability about every 25 years or so the nuclear reactors in the nimitz-class carriers have to be refueled and this can take them out of service for several years and is usually combined with a major refit and cost billions to complete the Royal Navy has only a small number of nuclear technicians for its submarine fleet and would struggle to find new ones to look after any new nuclear carriers so if nuclear was out what could be used in its place the solution they opted for was integrated electric propotional I hey with electric motors to drive for propellers instead of steam something which is well proven in the commercial shipping sector but he's still a novel feature in military ships the new zumwalt-class destroyers in the US Navy also used this type of IEP propulsion using a combination of two rolls-royce marine trent mt 30 36 megawatt gas turbines basically a rolls-royce trent 800 jet engine mated to a generator and for 11 megawatt wärtsilä diesel generators this combined setup can supply up to a hundred and sixteen megawatts of electrical power the qec carriers have twin propellers each driven by 220 megawatt general electric induction motors the diesel generators provide the base load supply for normal cruising and when extra speed or power is required the gas turbines are used as well as the entire system is electric that generators can be anywhere on the ship that is suitable freeing up space for other things like aircraft hangar storage both for qec carriers were designed with the emails launch system in mind even though it wasn't fitted in the end but they still have enough power generation to allow it to be retrofitted at some point in the future if required lessons learnt from before grands war showed that the Stovall or short takeoff from vertical landing sea Harriers on a light carrier like hms invincible could carry out more sorties than conventional aircraft on a larger catapult powered aircraft carrier like the ark royal as it would have been severely limited due to the bad weather in the south atlantic if it had been in service and it hadn't been scrapped two years earlier so instead of using the conventional take-off f-35c VAT the US Navy opted for and which he suited to the larger four class with the emails launcher the mo D opted for the f-35b Stovall version which meant the need for a catapult and arresting gear was removed and echoed the Falklands experience but now with a full-sized carrier and many more aircraft a ski-jump at the end of a runway requires nothing in a way of power or complexity compared to a catapult but achieves the same result with stovall aircraft so in the end the role Navy ended up with two of the most modern carries in the world but without going down the nuclear route yes there were cost-cutting measures along way but then the u.s. defense budget is around about 600 billion a year compared to the UK's 50 billion and you could have two qec carriers for a price of one for class carrier with a substantial amount of change and without all the nuclear baggage of long term cost that that entails and still do a very similar job what do you think of the latest carriers from the UK and the US let me know in the comments below so thanks for watching and please don't forget to subscribe thumbs up and share [Music]

Channel: Curious Droid

Views: 2,689,606

Rating: 4.7562962 out of 5

Keywords: hms queen elizabeth, uss gerald r ford cvn-78, uss gerald ford aircraft carrier, nuclear aircraft carrier, paul shillito, curious droid, aircraft carrier, us navy, royal navy, qec carriers, hms prince of wales aircraft carrier, f-35b, f-35c, nuclear vs non nuclear, british aircraft carrier, us aircraft carriers, catobar, stovl takeoff

Id: ObTKRHkIkgI

Length: 16min 4sec (964 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 22 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/SurfCrush]

CuriousDroid is a solid YT channel- good combination of info, watchability and accuracy.

The only thing incorrect is the suggestion that STOVL method is equivalent to CATOBAR. The CATOBAR approach has more advantages over STOVL (can launch more types of aircraft, allows higher takeoff weights/ranges, aircraft are less expensive than VTOL versions, etc.). The biggest reason CATOBAR designs aren't more common is because they are expensive.

Sure, the VTOL aircraft can deploy to unimproved airfields, but history shows that this isn't really done in practice because aircraft are increasingly expensive so putting them closer to harm's way doesn't make much strategic sense. They use aerial refueling to make up for the range gap so they are staged farther away from the action. The only time I can think of that VTOL aircraft were used away from a carrier in a significant conflict was during the Falklands War, but that was out of necessity (since they didn't have enough carriers for all the aircraft they wanted to use).

If you have the money for a CATOBAR carrier, it is the clear choice. STOVL is more of a budget option, but only for the ship itself- the aircraft tend to be more expensive individually.

[u/gentlemangin]

This is a good video. The only things I disagree with are that he said the ski-jump gives you the same thing as cat-launch with STOVL aircraft, which, it doesn't, you still have lower take off weight. Also, I feel like the EMALS upgrade option wasn't actually incorporated into the ship's design. Sure the powergrid for EMALS is there, but none of the other infrastructure required and it'd probably be cheaper/better to build a new carrier than try to retrofit EMALS.

Thanks for posting, just finished watching it from my own YT feed and immediately came here to post it.

[u/CautiousKerbal]

You got ninjad.

[u/Clovis69]

One works, and one is a harbor queen.

Too bad the Ford is a giant waste of money and effort

https://news.usni.org/2019/10/22/carrier-ford-may-not-deploy-until-2024-3rd-weapons-elevator-certified