Nuke carrier won’t
fit here, Navy says

By Gregg K. Kakesako
Star-Bulletin

Forget a nuclear aircraft carrier at Pearl Harbor, forget the 3,000 jobs that would come with it. The Navy says preliminarily Hawaii can't support a carrier.

With the closure of Barbers Point Naval Air Station next year, the Navy has concluded in a draft environmental impact statement that there are no airfields in Hawaii capable of housing the 70 to 80 aircraft needed to support the carrier.

There also are no tactical air training ranges in Hawaii -- which would force the carrier to have to go Southern California to train.

Those were the main reasons why Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard, which last berthed a carrier in World War II, was rejected as a home port for one of the Pacific Fleet's supercarriers.

Instead, the Navy is proposing to station two additional carriers at North Island Naval Air Station in San Diego for a total of three -- the USS Nimitz, USS John Stennis and the USS Ronald Reagan, now under construction.

Two other nuclear carriers would be home-ported in the Pacific Northwest: USS Carl Vinson at Puget Sound Naval Station in Bremerton and USS Abraham Lincoln at Everett Naval Air Station, Wash.

Public hearings are currently being conducted here and on the mainland. In Hawaii, a briefing on the proposal will be held at 7 p.m. Oct 22 at Makalapa Elementary School at 4435 Salt Lake Blvd.

The Pacific Fleet's current force structure calls for six aircraft carriers -- five based on the West Coast and the sixth in Japan.

Of the five, three are nuclear-propelled warships while two belong to the older fossil-fueled class.

The Navy's draft environmental report notes that the Pacific Missile Range at Barking Sands on Kauai has insufficient space to expand to accommodate the needs of an air wing.

Barking Sands and the ranges at the Pohakuloa Training Area on the Big Island only provide limited training opportunities for the air wing, the study said.

"While some rudimentary training is possible," the study added, "absence of sophisticated tracking and tactically challenging ranges that are accessible in Southern California makes it unsatisfactory to train either the ship air wing team or the carrier battle group in Hawaii."

This would mean that a Pearl Harbor-based carrier would have to make eight six-day trips to the mainland during a normal two-year training cycle.

To accommodate a 97,000-ton nuclear carrier, Pearl Harbor also would have to be dredged, utilities upgraded, existing pier-side structures modified and a new 2,000-stall parking structure built.

The Navy's population on Oahu, now pegged at 18,000, would grow by 15 percent with the addition of about 3,217 sailors from a nuclear carrier.