It's too funny a story to miss, anyway.
Actually, you are probably wrong. Battery power is much quieter than nukes. If you want the silence of a "diesel" with the range of a nuke, you need only add batteries--and operate quietly on them, long as they last.
You'd have to run the noisy nuke to recharge--but you don't have to surface to do it. Nor, I warrant, does the nuke make as much noise as the recharging diesel does.