“He told me that ships of the Enterprise class had EIGHT separate nuclear reactors aboard. Modern nuclear flat-tops only have two. I can’t help but wonder if someday the loss of the extra redundancy may cause problems in combat.”
I was assigned to the U.S.S. ENTERPRISE as a nuclear trained machinest mate. It is true, there are 8 nuclear reactors aboard. There are divided into 4 seperate reactor compartments. The ENTERPRISE was the fastest ship in the fleet at one. It was once used to prove Rickover’s case to Congress about the need for a faster class of submarines.
However, the NIMITZ Class, and eventually the FORD class have just two. If you think about though, the NIMITZ has been around since 1975. Its two reactor redundancy has been proven for 37 years. Also, all of our submarines have just one nuclear reactor. The only back up that they have is returning to snorkel depth and running the diesel.
Rooster tail was above the flight deck!
I was an FT/G on the Perkins (DD-877) when, on a Midshipman's cruise leaving Hawaii, she raced Bainbridge (DLGN-25) and USS Long Beach (CGN-9) and I am pretty sure that Enterprise won. All we saw was them leaving the horizon!
