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Notes -
There could be benefits. Some immediate thoughts about challenges:
The current military procurement process is adversarial: the government creates the most detailed and specific requirements they can, and companies bid as low as they can to meet those requirements. So if a company can find an oversight or shortcut to deliver something shitty while still meeting the letter of the requirements, they (mostly) will. If, in the process of designing and delivering a new ship, its discovered that a new radar is 6" bigger than was originally planned so it has to be moved, you better believe that the company making the ship will get extra time and money in order to make that change, with rules for changes and delays and payments clearly spelled out in the contract. Those incentives don't translate well to commercial shipyards and designs. For a company like Maersk, they can develop a business relationship with their shipbuilders. They can say "Yeah, shipbuilder A is cheaper, but they're assholes to work with on maintenance. It'll be better to pay a little more to go with shipbuilder B who really takes care of us." When the government/military awards contracts based on existing relationships, it's called corruption (unless someone writes a detailed report proving the cost/benefit of shipbuilder B, which does happen, but is a lot more work than just doing the obviously correct thing).
It's still a very small market for military ships compared to commercial ones, so there will always be a bit of a premium there.
Military contracts are frequently political, with Senators and Congressmen ensuring those jobs and dollars go to their constituents. Changing this will be painful.
Even if everything was public spec, the military still has an incentive to maintain control and security over the entire building process. You can have innocuous objects planted in sensitive areas that may give foreign militaries valuable information. It's difficult enough to prevent Sailors from doing stupid, intelligence-leaking things when the design and building of ships is mostly controlled. I'm reminded of the German mathematicians' response when they discovered the Allies had broken the Enigma machine: they knew it was possible, but they were surprised we had gone through the trouble to do so. The incentives to sabotage or infiltrate US Navy ships are so great that I can't even imagine all the crazy schemes foreign militaries would try if they had more access to the construction process. If you mildly irradiate some of the steel used to build the ships hull, maybe you could detect that radiation signature at the ports it has visited in order to get a better understanding of US ship movements, deployment schedules, and maintenance periods. Subtly reducing the quality of some bolts or welds in key locations could cause major damage (and therefore loss of operational capability) long after a ship is delivered.
A known trend in military procurement is that America is addicted to cramming as many missions into each platform as possible. The Pentagon Wars focuses on the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, but I think it's worse for ships. Why was my landing ship, dock doing oil platform defense in the Gulf of Oman? Because we could, and we were already over there. Does it make sense to design amphibious troop carriers so that they can also prevent hostile insurgents from sabotaging oil platforms on the open ocean? Fuck if I know. Doesn't seem like it should, but that's how America does it, and we do have the best Navy in the world. Commercial shipbuilders can iterate and improve on straightforward things like reliably carrying cargo, but US warships need to do a bunch of everything. A tradeoff between, for example, an additional missile launcher versus a better stealth profile is a political decision as much as an engineering one.
The US is also very sensitive about naval losses. Strategically, we've known for a long while that lots of small ships win against fewer big ships, but there's no way that we'd accept losing a missile boat and a few sailors as a matter of course, nevermind sending sailors on suicide missions. So we can't even really optimize our fleet for winning a near-peer naval engagement. The free market, in turn, can't really optimize for something when there isn't a consistent view of what's "better".
Again, there could be benefits to moving to a more "open source" shipbuilding model, but there would also be plenty of challenges, and I don't think it's clear how the scales would tip until we start hammering out the details.
Radiation doesn't work that way.
Some stuff is radioactive; it emits (ionising) radiation. Exposing stuff to radiation is called "irradiating" it. Stuff that is irradiated does not itself become radioactive, with one exception I'll come back to. This is why people do things like irradiating drinking water and food to kill germs; the water/food is unchanged afterward except that all the germs are dead, and certainly isn't radioactive.
So, irradiating the steel would maybe damage the steel (which would be detectable), but the steel wouldn't then be emitting radiation. If you want steel that emits radiation, you have to mix radioactive stuff into it (ideally isotopes of the same elements the steel's supposed to be composed of; if you put plutonium in it or something, they might notice that your steel has plutonium in it when it shouldn't). And then that radioactive steel will irradiate the port, but that won't make the port radioactive; it might be detectable (though not necessarily from very far away), and it might hurt people working on the ship, but the port won't have some trace there unless the steel is corroding (which would also be detectable).
(I feel I should note that if you want data on US ship movements in peacetime, you don't need to go to this much trouble; ships other than submerged submarines are pretty easy to spot with spy satellites, and submerged submarines are radiation-shielded by the water so this plan won't work anyway. There's also the issue that because US ships usually are powered by nuclear reactors, some of the personnel will have radiation dosimeters, which will raise an alarm if the rest of the ship is radioactive for some reason.)
The exception is neutron radiation, which does cause things hit with it to become radioactive (though they don't generally then emit more neutron radiation; they emit beta and possibly gamma). The thing is, though, you generally need a lot of it to make something significantly radioactive - enough that it'll probably sicken people, because it's also highly dangerous to living beings. Sticking something in a nuclear reactor for a few days might make it noticeably radioactive, but sticking a person in a nuclear reactor for a few days (or a few minutes) will get you a corpse. Also, the only major sources of chronic neutron radiation are operating nuclear reactors and certain transplutonic elements (curium and californium) from spent nuclear fuel that undergo spontaneous fission; people will notice if you build an unshielded and undocumented nuclear reactor into a ship, and curium/californium have that issue where they are definitely not supposed to be in the steel so any chemical analysis (for e.g. QC purposes, or if it starts rusting strangely - they're both quite-reactive metals) will immediately turn up that "oh hey, some chucklehead mixed nuclear waste into the hull of our ship" (technically speaking, curium and californium are still viable fuel, but they're chucked out as waste in a lot of current reactors).
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