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The Enterprise has eight reactors, a triple hull and armored plated stern. It came with all the options. The story is that Admiral Rickover did not want a nuclear powered carrier. So he made sure it was really, really expensive. So expensive that CV-66 and CV-67 were conventional.

I'd say AMERICA and Kennedy were conventional for several reasons. One could have been projected availability of trained reactor operators. You can train a conventional Snipe pretty quick. Most are standing second and third level watches before a Nuke ever sees a ship much less qualifies on it.

Another thing would be cost as we had the WW2 & Korea war debt. America was awarded under Ike's term and the keel laid right before JFK was sworn in. Coventionals were cheaper to build, easier and quicker to train the Snipes, and DFM was fairly cheap.

That said I remember seeing some piping blueprints in Engineering Central when I was tracing down some piping that had CVN {slash} CVA-66 and nobody knew why.

BTW some carriers had customizing done. The AMERICA was the only Sonar Dome carier.

I'm sure there were several reasons, but Rickover's idiosyncrasies were legendary. And they make for more interesting reading. The man drank a glass of water from a reactor in a congressional hearing for heaven's sake.

Until the late 80’s nucs went to a conventional A school then on to NNPS and prototype. There were already a dozen nuc subs and a couple nuc cruisers, so the nuc pipeline was already established. Of course, a carrier requires hundreds of nucs, not just dozens, so they had to pump out a lot of trainees.

I trained at the mock up of the Enterprise engineroom in Idaho. It was up and running for years before the Enterprise became operational. Half of my class went to the Enterprise at the start of the 1990 overhaul. The other half went to the new construction George Washington. There were only two of us, out of about 200, that went to submarines. Ironically, I went to a boat in post shakedown availability, so the other sub guy was the only person in the entire class that did not end up in Newport News Shipyard.

BTW some carriers had customizing done. The AMERICA was the only Sonar Dome carier.

If you mean post-WWII carriers, that may be true, I'm not sure. But Several of the Essex and Improved Essex Class carriers had sonar. I spent 4 years on the USS Intrepid, CVS-11, and I can personally assure you that she had a dome. I spent the longest 3 weeks of my life at Quonset Point, R.I. down in that dome replacing Transducers on the SQS-23C array. It's really, really dark and close and stinky down there. Plus the dome plugs leaked like crazy.

I still have nightmares. I know I wasn't claustrophobic before that!