Scientists Locate Sunken, Radioactive Aircraft Carrier Off California Coast

HughPickens.com writes: Aaron Kinney reports in the San Jose Mercury News that scientists have captured the first clear images of the USS Independence, a radioactivity-polluted World War II aircraft carrier that rests on the ocean floor 30 miles off the coast of Half Moon Bay. The Independence saw combat at Wake Island and other decisive battles against Japan in 1944 and 1945 and was later blasted with radiation in two South Pacific nuclear tests. Assigned as a target vessel for the Operation Crossroads atomic bomb tests, she was placed within one-half-mile of ground zero and was engulfed in a fireball and heavily damaged during the 1946 nuclear weapons tests at Bikini Atoll. The veteran ship did not sink, however (though her funnels and island were crumpled by the blast), and after taking part in another explosion on 25 July, the highly radioactive hull was later taken to Pearl Harbor and San Francisco for further tests and was finally scuttled off the coast of San Francisco, California, on 29 January 1951. "This ship is an evocative artifact of the dawn of the atomic age, when we began to learn the nature of the genie we'd uncorked from the bottle," says James Delgado. "It speaks to the 'Greatest Generation' — people's fathers, grandfathers, uncles and brothers who served on these ships, who flew off those decks and what they did to turn the tide in the Pacific war."

Delgado says he doesn't know how many drums of radioactive material are buried within the ship — perhaps a few hundred. But he is doubtful that they pose any health or environmental risk. The barrels were filled with concrete and sealed in the ship's engine and boiler rooms, which were protected by thick walls of steel. The carrier itself was clearly "hot" when it went down and and it was packed full of fresh fission products and other radiological waste at the time it sank. The Independence was scuttled in what is now the Gulf of the Farallones sanctuary, a haven for wildlife, from white sharks to elephant seals and whales. Despite its history as a dumping ground Richard Charter says the radioactive waste is a relic of a dark age before the enviornmental movement took hold. "It's just one of those things that humans rather stupidly did in the past that we can't retroactively fix.""

Comments

Re:So

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd probably disagree on that. This was a time where people did things for the betterment of people as the top priority. For example the main reason why central Texas has water is because of the creation of a lake system via dams. This would be never, ever done today, either due to NIMBY, eco-whining, or the detachment of government from the people's interests.

Some of the biggest things that the US depends on now would never be made today, be it the Panama Canal, the Hoover Dam, the interstate highway system, or many other structures. There just is too much resistance and disinterest in building anything except perhaps more prisons.

Just staggering...

[Lucas123]

The amount of money we waste scuttling U.S. Naval vessels is shocking. We sink multi-billion dollar aircraft carriers as part of "live fire testing." Here's the USS America (CV-66) sunk off the East Coast after only 40 years of service. Why? The Navy chose to install diesel engines on it even after nuclear powered CVs had been launched. So, they decided the cost to replace the USS America's power plant with a nuclear reactor was just too expensive. Should be recycle thousands of tons of steel? Nah. There goes another $4.5 billion in taxpayer money.

Re:Just staggering...

[Fire_Wraith]

It should also be pointed out that at the time they were conducting the Able/Baker tests, they didn't realize just how nasty the effects of nuclear weapons against warships is. The military scheduled three tests as part of Operation Crossroads - Able, Baker, and Charlie, held at Bikini Atoll. It was considered important to know how effective nukes would be against ships, and what sort of defenses could be employed, how long they could survive, etc. Various animals were used in place of crew members at different points around the ships, with radiation measuring devices.

Able was an air burst, and for the most part the ships survived, partly because it missed its target, the Battleship Nevada, though it was judged based on the data that the Nevada would have been a floating coffin from the radiation. So the ships got hosed down and the second test, Baker, was conducted, with a nuke detonated some 90 feet below the water, which not only sunk multiple ships, but sprayed the radioactive byproducts pretty much everywhere, and it got into everything on all the ships, to the point that they had to cancel the third test because it was judged impossible to clean them up at that point.

So in short, they intended to clean up the surviving ships and recycle them, but the nature of the test served to make that impossible.

Re:So

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course not. At the time suspension bridges were the cheapest way to safely build such a bridge. These days we know of much cheaper ways to build bridges. Suspension bridges, unsurprisingly, are not as cost effective as they once were.

Anyhow, the new Oakland span of the Bay Bridge is the worlds longest self-anchored suspension span. It's not as iconic as the Golden Gate, but that's has nothing to do with our willingness to push the envelope from an engineering perspective.