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Did you guys know that the Enterprise is the United States' only nuclear wessel?

I am not sure if you mean this as a joke.

There are ten Nimitz class carriers in service. Nuclear Powered Surface Ships of the World

I was obsessed with the NS Savannah recently because she is such a beautiful ship - I love ships and this cargo ship looks like a yacht. Whilst I am not a fan of the Nuclear Industry in it's current form her reactor appeared to be reasonably well constructed and whilst designed to cruise at 21 knots, she outperformed her design spec by steadily cruising at 24 knots - pretty fast for a cargo ship. Check page 16 of the MARAD documentation (warning - pdf).

There is significant historical information about her operation. Until 9/11 she was part of the National Defense Reserve Fleet (NDRF) but her reactor was permanently disabled due to concerns she could be used as quite a convenient weapon of terror. Sadly, her hybrid design condemned her to a short operational life (10 years) and she is now a ghost ship. There are plans to make her a museum ship whilst waiting for her decommissioned reactor to cool down for eventual disassembly, but no one seems interested in the project. Despite that the seafarers Union have been working to maintain the ship by improving her general appearance.

NS Savannah's crew dispute was because the executive officers traditionally got paid more than the engineering crew on board the ship, this dispute, high running costs, low oil costs all contributed to her eventual demise. An interest group (with mailing list) is looking for photos and artefacts whist she was in operation.

lots more photos, her community organisation, glory days, historical landmark program, service history and specifications, floorplan and schematics, current status, passenger lounge, reactor control room, dry docked , and finally a flickr photo stream and a rather excellent photo essay of the NS Savannah. A little bit of history for you to enjoy.

There was SL-1: http://www.radiationworks.com/sl1reactor.htm

They learned the hard way that you should not build a reactor so small that it requires *manual* withdrawal of control rods. By manual I mean a guy hunkered over the core with his hands on the rod itself. End result: said man impaled by said rod - to the ceiling.

Yep, that is the one I was thinking of, bad design and all. You beat my by a few :)

There was SL-1:
http://www.radiationworks.com/sl1reactor.htm

They learned the hard way that you should not build a reactor so small that it requires *manual* withdrawal of control rods. By manual I mean a guy hunkered over the core with his hands on the rod itself. End result: said man impaled by said rod - to the ceiling.

Lets just hope they don't bring in these guys to start the things up...

http://www.radiationworks.com/sl1reactor.htm

The US is not the only ones that have a say in it. Germany and Russia have done it.

http://www.radiationworks.com/ships/nsottohahn.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_50_Years_Since_Victory

Sidenote: The US has done it before, government owned ship, but a DOT not DOD ship.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_Savannah

There are sound solutions, but that's not one of them. Nuclear reactions cause changes in radioactive toxicity and in chemical reactivity; a large chunk of the nuclear waste is more toxic than the starting uranium. Glassification isn't a bad idea, but you want to find a hole not likely to have groundwater issues for a few hundred years.

Ignoring the facts, such as the fact that any coal fired plant that's running releases radioactive gasses (14-CO2) at levels that would be considered an "incident" in a nuclear plant

IIR, it's the traces of thorium and uranium in most coal that's the bulk of the activity-- although you're partly right. Those release levels from a nuke plant would cause a permanent NRC shutdown five minutes after discovery, and that if the coal ash waste came from a nuclear plant instead, it would have to be treated as "high end" low-level nuclear waste.

Adroitly dodging regulation while imposing absurd regulatory burdens on nuclear power, and then using this to claim that nuclear isn't as cheap as promised.

Fact: even if you were willing to run mindbogglingly stupidly unsafe designs, it would never be as cheap as they promised back in the 50's and early 60's. "Too cheap to meter" was a dumb slogan even then. Yes, some of the nuclear safety requirements are excessive. Most are reasonable, based on probable cost/benefit calculations. Of course, those for fossil fuels are generally unreasonably low....

Nuclear power may not be perfect, but even the horror stories are better than what we're drifting into by letting the fossil fuel industry lead us down the garden path.

No; the horror stories include Chernobyl. OTOH, Chernobyl included design flaws that the US had prohibited since early small scale learning experiences.

About the worst disaster the carbon mongers will inflict is global warming. While the "risk" of that is judged near-certainty by everyone outside of the current White House, even worst case, that won't cause humanity to go extinct... just modern civilization. I contrast, widespread nuclear disasters are much less likely, and easier to avoid by design... but do have the potential to kill off humanity if we're stupid enough.

Myself, I'm pro-nuclear... but not blindly so. I understand why some people are nervous, and fission is only likely to solve the energy problem for a hundred years or so. The biggest problem I have is the people who insist we shouldn't use nuclear power because it isn't perfectly safe. Nothing in life is perfectly safe; you just have to make careful choices of calculated risks.

Because, ultimately, the safety systems at Three Mile Island were able to keep the plant from blowing up, where other nations have not done so well when they had accidents. Nuclear power systems are safest made by advanced technological nations... even leaving aside the number of agressive loons who want nuclear bombs to lob at their obnoxious neighbors. True, even the current guys get it wrong... but the US has 60 years of experience in screwing up, and tends to not make the same engineering mistakes twice. (Political mistakes are another story.) If the developing world gets to use advanced safety designs, even if only by borrowing them rather than having to build them themselves, it's probably safer than them trying to reverse engineer the product and botching it.

You want to stop nuclear proliferation? How about starting with the United States, Israel, England, France, India...

Ummm... because stopping proliferation means keeping those who don't have nuclear weapons from getting them, which is incidentally easier than it is to get the ones who have them to give them up?

Hey. Let's not forget close-call that was "3 Mile Island" and another snafu here in the US: The SL-1 Accident in Idaho.

3MW according to my source