By Emelie Rutherford
The Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) is trying to kill a relatively new and controversial requirement that future Navy surface combatants must be nuclear powered.
Two House lawmakers who pushed for the nuclear mandate, brought about via the fiscal year 2008 defense authorization act approved in early 2008, told Defense Daily last Friday they expect a battle over the provision during House-Senate negotiations on the fiscal year 2010 defense authorization bill.
“We did the right thing several years ago and I can assure you we’re going to do everything to keep that language in requiring nuclear propulsion,” said Rep. Gene Taylor (D- Miss.), chairman of the House Armed Services Seapower and Expeditionary Forces subcommittee.
The SASC unanimously reported out its version of the FY ’10 bill last Thursday, and in it called for repealing the nuclear-propulsion requirement in the FY ’08 statute. This action would allow “the Navy to conduct analyses of requirements and capabilities for new ship classes without biasing the analyses in favor of one propulsion option or another,” according to a SASC bill summary released last Friday.
The Navy has struggled with the nuclear requirement initially crafted by Taylor and Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.), the former ranking member of the Seapower panel. The service has not publicly committed to putting a nuclear-propulsion system its future CG(X) cruiser, a long-analyzed ship Defense Secretary Robert Gates wants to delay planning on until the Quadrennial Defense Review is complete.
Navy officials have said the high up-front cost of building a new cruiser with a nuclear plant could impact their already daunting task of bolstering the number of ships in the service’s fleet. Some critics of the nuclear requirement have said that such ships are a luxury during today’s tough economy.
Yet Bartlett pointed to a study showing the savings over the course of the next cruiser’s lifecycle if it has nuclear instead of diesel propulsion. Such savings identified in a Navy study are contingent on the price of oil.
“We just have to be able to look down the road and make decisions that are in our future best interest, not just our current-year best interest,” Bartlett said.
Taylor predicted the price of oil will further increase, bolstering the lifecycle-cost-savings argument. And he argued it is illogical to use cruisers, which protect aircraft carriers that run on nuclear fuel for 30 years, that have to be refueled every few years.
Taylor acknowledged the Navy resisted the nuclear-propulsion mandate but said naval officials have come to agree with it.
The House Armed Services Committee’s report accompanying the FY ’10 defense authorization bill the House passed last Thursday encourages the Navy to begin detailed design and construction of the CG(X). It adds: “The committee remains committed to the direction of section 1012 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008 (Public Law 110-181), which requires the use of an integrated nuclear propulsion system for the CGN(X).”
The FY ’08 defense authorization act calls for major surface combatants to be built with nuclear-power systems, and the FY ’09 authorization measure builds on that nuclear requirement to include large-deck amphibious ships.