diemos wrote:Subjectivist wrote:The quoted cost is $2.70/gallon for jet fuel onboard the carrier vs $6.60/gallon for jet fuel delivered from shore to ship via high speed navy tanker ship.
Until they start deploying them on existing aircraft carriers I will take those numbers with a hefty lump of salt.
As you should, that figure assumes that the energy needed is free. As soon as you factor in the conversion efficiency and the unit cost of energy it's a lot higher.
On a nuclear reactor powered aircraft carrier the power is effectively free. The concern would be the cost to manufacture and maintain the modules shown in that short video, but in all honesty it is just a variation of Fischer–Tropsch technology developed just over a century ago. The material processes, catalysts and maintenance of those things are mature technology.
The key to the success of this is two-fold, first the bureaucracy of the US Navy has to accept it as a good idea, then they have to find the budget to pay for it. Unfortunately experience has shown many many times that anything new introduced to the bureaucracy is fought tooth and nail unless it is forced along by someone powerful near the top. For example the USA kept building Battleships right through 1945 despite Pearl Harbor in 1941, the navy kept building diesel power submarines for a decade after the first nuclear subs were launched and they built two additional oil fired aircraft carriers after they built the USS Enterprise and waited over a decade before building the second nuclear carrier.
I know the US Navy spends insane amounts of money on jet fuel, they don't just burn it on the aircraft carriers, nearly every smaller ship has one or more helicopters with their own fuel supply and hangar deck and most new ships are powered by gas turbine engines that can go through liquid fuel like nobodies business. I hope this works out because if it does the cost savings to American taxpayers will be significant.