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>>A leak even the size of a pencil lead can decapitate you. You can’t hear or see the leak. The only detection as such is using a broom handle to wave it around in the area you are working in.

I was a co-op engineering student working for Georgia Power in the late 70s. One of the old school Boiler Operators giving the Auxiliary Equipment Operator class I went through at the plant taught us all of that, with additional gruesome real-life examples. Glad I never encountered any of it.

Back to the issue at hand, it is unreasonable to think that this many additional museums can be maintained, most will need to be scrapped. There are quite a number of carrier museums now, mostly Essex class ships IIRC.

Given your comments about naval architecture secrets, I don’t think we want to sell them to an Indian scrapper. Somehow the Chinese will manage to be all over them.

The yards are where ships are most vulnerable both too attack and to the enemy learning construction details. They learn construction they learn where too hit. I do wonder why the COLE attack was such a lucky hit? With that said I also think building a shipyard anywhere in the PG Middle East was the height of insanity. We have far better friends on the MED side of the Suez and better means to secure it.

Yea as for the museums it cost a fortune to even get a carrier to where it can be used for that much less maintain it. The taxpayers will pick up Kennedy though that is a political given. I'm just saying that because of the political reality of it. Forestall will never be forgotten in Naval history.

I read of guys on the ship before me tell of a Feed Water Pump impeller going through the housing and impaled into the deck above sometime in the early 1970's. While we were at sea in about 79 we lost an entire Main {boiler room two boilers each Main} because a feed water line ruptured into an electrical switchboard. It melted it literally. Both incidents no one got hurt by some miracle. Next thing was a fire in 78. I know that one because me and a guy in my shop found it. We were T.A.D. to Fire Dept and happened to walk by a storeroom off the hanger bay boiling out smoke. The heat transfer from that fire went up two decks real fast. I wasn't on duty but suited up for investigating other nearby spaces. I saw floor tiles bubbling two decks up.

After I got out sometime in the mid 1980's a JP5 pump-room exploded and killed two airmen unfortunate enough to be down there. I remember the place wreaked when we were standing in the chow line even back in the late 70's. After that in 1993 the ship had been sent on three six month deployments in as many years. When they returned on the third cruise they had a boiler explosion and went Cold Iron too the yards. She made one more cruise afterward and was decommissioned.

Nukes and conventionals are both steamers as far as what actually powers them. The difference is method of steam generation. That is why they still don't want much construction details seen.

BTW the worse thing that you can hear in a boiler room is complete silence. I mean by that you don’t hear anything whatsoever yet you see lights, on equipment running, etc. It means you have a major steam leak. It is above your hearing range but it literally silences everything else. We were warned about it. Spooky.