In article ,
"HEMI-Powered" wrote:

HiFlyer added these comments in the current discussion du jour ...

And let us not forget the NS Savannah (Nuclear).

I toured the Savannah where she is moored at Patriot's Point near
Charleston, SC. Smaller than I had envisioned her.

I missed that sort of fun when I came back from Europe on the
USS United states. I was told that there was a hurricane that
summer and she outran it. Took a sort of detour to stay out of
it as I understood at the time. I think that was 1964 or 65.
She had the speed to do so. At the time I heard that she was
sort of like the empire state building moving through the
water at 60 knots.

She was a big and fast ship, but I think 60 knots was out of her
reach.

Last I knew she was laid up in Norfolk, Virginia. There is a
fine exhibit about her at the mariners Museum in Newport News;
She was built at newport news Shipbuilding and Drydock Company.

Also, she is SS United States, not USS.

"SS" means Steam Ship. "USS" means United States Ship, the
designation of a U. S. Navy vessel, from the age of fighting
sail to the present age of nuclear and gas turbine ships.


Small was the NS Savannah's problem. She could not make it financially.
She was built as a small break-bulk cargo ship, just as large
containerships were coming along. Her nuclear power plant required
highly trained and therefore very expensive people. The Captain
(understandably) objected to being paid less than the Chief Engineer,
and so it went. Could not make enough money in the small break-bulk ship
to pay the high costs of her crew, not to mention the high costs of
maintenance of the nuclear power plant.

Even the U. S Navy found smaller nuclear-powered surface ships too
expensive to operate and maintain, because of the large number of
highly-trained and highly-paid nuclear power plant operating personnel,
and the high cost of overhauling the nuclear power plants. The Navy has
found that nuclear-powered aircraft carriers make sense, and of course
nuclear submarines do because they don't have to come up for air, but
the nuclear-powered cruisers proved hard to justify after the Soviet
Union collapsed, so they are all decommissioned and scrapped. I served
in two of those ships, and am a firm believer in nuclear power in the
right application, but a small ship is not a good application for
nuclear power.

--
Bill Collins
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