The US Nimitz-class nuclear carriers are powered by two A4W reactors, each, and each reactor producing about 100 MW.
However, that’s not how much electricity each reactor produces—the ship’s propellers are driven by steam turbines driven by the reactors, not electricity.
Exactly how much electricity the carrier can produce is probably classified, but could anyone here venture an educated ballpark guess?
According to some random site I found on the internet (how’s that for an authoritative source) Nimitz class ships have eight steam turbine generators which produce 8,000 kilowatts of electrical power each, for a total of 64,000 kilowatts.
There’s no reference given. FWIW, here’s the site:
http://navysite.de/cvn/cvn68.html
I haven’t even a WAG to the OP’s question, but did know of something related of interest:
The archived copy of another now-defunct site alleged this was about 50,000 kW.
The Lady Lex had Electric drive. So they could have jumpered from the main buss to the shore connection.
I served on USS Nimitz in reactor department as a reactor operator. Each A4W reactor produces 550MW (thermal). You are correct, that does not correlate directly to how much electricity can be produced for two reasons. 1: The biggest load on the thermal power of the reactors is the main engines to move the ship; this consumes over 80% of the power produced. 2: No process is 100% efficient, therefore, even if the reactors only provided steam to electrical generators, they could only provide around 50-60% of electrical MW compared to the thermal MW.
So, if a Nimitz class carrier were designed only to be a power plant, it could provide roughly 600MWe to the grid.
The reactors only provide what electrical power the ship itself needs; there are 8 total turbine generators on a A4W plant, each capable of 8MW for a total of 64MWe capacity for the ship, and that far surpasses what the ship will ever need for reliability purposes (it is a warship after all).
I hope this info helps.
It does, most delightfully! Thank you! 