The UK’s latest and greatest new aircraft carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth is driven not by nuclear power but by fossil fuels. Why is that? The Save the Royal Navy blog has an interesting analysis. Here are a few of the salient points:
1. The Navy oiler is already there.
The biggest selling point for nuclear power is that a nuclear-powered ship only needs to be refueled once every 25 years, give or take. In the case of an aircraft carrier, however, the ship is not the only hardware which requires fuel.
As long as the aircraft on the ship are in use, they require lots and lots of fuel, so a Navy oiler is already part of the carrier battle group. And since most of the carrier battle group is also powered by fossil fuels, several Navy oilers are required.
As virtually every other ship and plane requires fuel oil, providing oil for the carrier is not that big a deal, especially as it is likely that the Royal Navy will be spending most of its time in the Atlantic, a smaller ocean, as compared to the Pacific, making replenishment that much easier.
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The 
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