Do they have 'em? Or is this the reason they’re carrying a bunch of marines aboard?
Do they need 'em? Or do they simply heat up the flight deck? (Reactor coolant etc.)
I don’t know, but my wag is they must have snow removal equipment
Well, I see aircraft carriers almost everyday and I’ve never seen a snowplow on one. Here in San Diego.
Seriously, the ones I’ve seen have all sorts little tractors and things on deck, so they probably have snowplows. As well as whatever they need to de-ice the planes and such.
There’s no way in hell they’d be using reactor coolant to de-ice the flightdeck, not even as heating coils. One hole in the flightdeck==instant fast leak==very bad day for the whole crew, the ship, the Navy, and anyone down-wind / down-current from the carrier.
Come to think of it, I can’t see them heating the flightdeck at all: It’s about 1000 feet long by 125 feet wide. That’s a lot of area to heat.
Chief Scott’s the guy you really want to answer this question; he’s a Navy chief who lives on a carrier. I, on the other hand, was merely a surface warfare officer who spent a grand total of four days on a carrier (USS Midway) during my four years at sea.
But here are some observations/WAGs:
-
It’s very windy at sea. I doubt much accumulation is possible; certainly not enough to require snowplows.
-
Carriers (all Navy ships) have fire-suppression systems which include seawater firehoses. I’d bet any dangerous accumulation of snow could just be rinsed off the deck.
-
Most trouble spots carriers are commonly deployed to are in the tropics or temperate zones where snow is uncommon (Persian Gulf, Mediterranean, Taiwan Strait, the Koreas). Not the point, I know, but I’m sure it’s rarely been an issue.
But again, I’m often full of shit and it’s really Chief Scott you should be looking to for an authoritative answer.
They wouldn’t use reactor coolant. They would use steam from the steam generator and run it thru coils below the flight deck. The reactor coolant is in a primary system and the steam is produced in another system and they are never mixed.
There would be plenty of steam for this use. That’s how tankers heat the cargo holds so the oil is light enough to pump. Whether or not they use something like this I don’t know but it could be done.
Yup, that’s what I meant. I put it very inaccurately in my first post, sorry.
Can you say “Reactivity Addition Casualty”? That’s what happens when you suddenly start circulating secondary coolant in the volumes you’d find necessary to de-ice even a small portion of the flight deck. It’s also called a ‘Cold Water Accident’. It’s a very bad thing. Not to mention the large volumes of Grade ‘A’ clean water that would needed to be made up to feed the piping, and the havoc it would play on secondary chemistry. (BTW: Until recently I was a Navy Nuc) Also, by using secondary coolant, should you have a hole in the flight deck, you now have a massive steam leak, an extremely serious reactivity addition casualty, and are rapidly draining away your secondary coolant.
Maintaining the kind of piping necessary would be a Machinist Mate’s nightmare, as being part of the secondary coolant system, it’d have to meet nuclear standards, including piping inspections, requiring Controlled Work Packages every time you had to pull maintenance, periodic Non-Destructive Testing, etc. The alternative would be maybe to use electric boilers, but those are rather inefficient, would still be a nightmare to maintain, and be a risk to all systems around if they should leak.
Now, perhaps, electric coils under the deck, but that’d be an electrical nightmare, and would require a significant portion of the ships generation capacity to be of any use. I can’t speak conclusively about CVNs and de-icing, as I’m a submariner, so we need Chief Scott. I can tell you that monkeying around with reactor coolant (primary or secondary) in this manner would be a very bad idea.
Bring him in then. 
His e-mail link still says the Ike, the boat that he is no longer assigned to. He is a shore based bubba now, and if nothing else, my mention of the Ike as a “boat” should bring him out of the corner.
boat, boat, boat, boat…
Yeah, Tranq, but those dang birdfarms throw away like 200 gals of Grade A water with every launch off the steam catapult, so I’m sure a few more wouldn’t shake 'em up too hard. And if you don’t like that idea, maybe a Tertiary loop, at lower pressure still, heated by the Secondary. Whaddya think, huh?
And with four coolant loops per plant, even if they got a hole punched in one under the deck, there’s still plenty left to go around. Not to mention the auto-start cold-iron-to-full-load-in-13-secs 8000 MW emergency diesels they’ve got (four, IIRC). I was a sub nuke, too, BTW.
Anybody know if the Chief is a nuke? If he’s not, there’s probably not much chance he’ll know a whole lot more about this than the rest of us. Damn target sailors. 
I checked http://www.Google.com to see if they has photos of snow on aircraft carriers and found this site:
http://www.webcom.com/~amraam/vulrow.html
which was pretty spectacular even though it did not have snow photos…
Jois
So you know why they’d not use primary or secondary coolant. Tertiary loop. Hmmm… No major reactor safety issues… No chemistry issues… So, maybe. BUT: Still a cast-iron bitch to maintain, and a leak risk.
Most likely they use non-rates and E4’s with deck brooms and shovels, like the Tin Cans do.
Target sailors have a purpose: They sail the targets out where we can sink them! 
I was aboard the USS CARL VINSON (CVN 70) back in February of 1987 when we steamed into the Bering Sea. There was a lot of snow and ice on the flight deck, as I recall. One member of my Division had never seen snow in person before so he just had to go up to the O4 level (that’s the 4th level above the main deck; going up from the main deck you count levels, going down from the main deck you count decks - decks don’t have the letter designator in front of the number, levels have the letter O) and scoop up some of hte snow outside the WTD (water-tight door - hatches go between decks/doors between compartments on the same deck/level).
I really don’t recall how the snow was cleared away, but with approximately 6,000 folks aboard manpower’s not an issue.
I have absolutely no idea about this but if the carrier was conducting flight operations wouldn’t the jets do a nice job of heating up the deck?
Although Chief Scott hasn’t showed up yet I’d wager the Navy must have some plan in place for snow removal even if they do manage most of their operations in tropical locations. You never know when the President will order you to steam up near the arctic circle and protect Alaska or some such thing.
fish,
I can speak for two carriers, the USS Midway (which was not a nuclear carrier) and the USS Theodore Roosevelt (which is). My husband was a flight officer stationed aboard both of these ships. The Midway, which has a long and glorious history of naval service, was forward deployed in Yokosuka, Japan when he was stationed on it, and the Roosevelt was, and still is, stationed in Norfolk, VA. Both places get snow, Yokosuka more than Norfolk.
Neither ship has snow removal equipment per se, unless you count young sailors with shovels, etc. Why? Because when you are in port, you don’t have flight operations, so it doesn’t really matter if it snows. Just below the flight deck is the hangar deck, and you can cram all the planes in there if you have to, plus when you are homeported the planes usually aren’t on the ship anyway.
If you are deployed and it snows while you are doing flight operations, the heat from the steam catapults, the heat and blast of the jet engines, and the fact that the flight deck is essentially just the “top floor” of the ship, with above-freezing temperature spaces below, tends to keep snow and ice from accumulating. So in the end it’s really not a problem.
If you look up the USS Theodore Roosevelt, they have an official website with lots of pics, including a couple of the flight deck with a dusting of snow while it’s in port. The snow is melting in a grid pattern which would be consistent with the infrastructure below the deck. Midway also suffered through a trek up around Greenland in the mid-40s called Operation Frostbite, where they saw plenty of snow, ice in the water and rough seas. That was back when the ship still had a wooden deck and prop planes, and special precautions were taken to keep the planes’ engines from freezing. I bet that was some crappy duty <g>.
So anyway, that’s what I know about this.
Aircraft Carrier Operations, 15 September - 25 November 1950 –
Snow and Ice on Aircraft Carriers
Grainy b&w pix, unfortunately no snow removal action.
Brunette, possibly naive, trusting chick reporting.
Engaged, many years ago, to a sailor (hangar deck) aboard the SHANGRI LA. I don’t remember the circumstances, but I remember him telling me that they’ve had to DUMP AIRCRAFT OVER THE SIDE. Wouldn’t a snowplow be faster, easier than 50 guys pushing?
Alright guys—now that you’ve laughed yer asses off and spit yer drinks all over the screens and keyboards—let er rip----I can take it.
LOL—any chance he wasn’t kidding with me?
This does happen at times, most notably during the fall of Saigon on the USS Midway. 1
From what I remember of the footage, they were using forklifts or something similar. I’ve seen at least a few vehicles in documentaries and whatnot, so my WAG is that you’re correct and plow attachments are used. It’s maddening that of all the aircraft carrier websites, there doesn’t seem to be a single shot of this activity. If only the Navy were as proud of its snow removal expertise as the New England Patriots were in 1986.
I asked a Navy person about this question and got this answer:
I have never seen a snow plow on board a carrier, but I have never seen snow on one either. I know that they have the equivalent of a small bulldozer for the movement of aircraft and crash remnants. I saw those being used in the film about the fire on the Forestall during Vietnam. I don’t have much in the way of specifics though.
Looking at the photos from DQA’s site, those ships must be big enough to carry any thing they want. Gee and darn, they are living large!
Jois