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It'll Cost $1 Billion To Dismantle America's Nuclear-Powered Aircraft Carrier (popularmechanics.com)
"Six years after decommissioning USS Enterprise, the world's first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the U.S. Navy is still figuring out how to safely dismantle the ship," reports Popular Mechanics. schwit1 tipped us off to their report:
The General Accounting Office estimates the cost of taking apart the vessel and sending the reactors to a nuclear waste storage facility at up to $1.5 billion, or about one-eighth the cost of a brand-new aircraft carrier.
The USS Enterprise was commissioned in 1961 to be the centerpiece of a nuclear-powered carrier task force, Task Force One, that could sail around the world without refueling.... The Navy decommissioned Enterprise in 2012 and removed the fuel from the eight Westinghouse A2W nuclear reactors in 2013. The plan was to scrap the ship and remove the reactors, transporting them by barge from Puget Sound Naval Base down the Washington Coast and up the Columbia River, then trucking them to the Department of Energy's Hanford Site for permanent storage. However, after decommissioning the cost of disposing of the 93,000-ton ship soared from an estimated $500-$750 million to more than a billion dollars. This caused the Navy to put a pause on disposal while it sought out cheaper options. Today the stripped-down hull of the Enterprise sits in Newport News, Virginia awaiting its fate.
"Although the Navy believes disposing of the reactors will be fairly straightforward, no one has dismantled a nuclear-powered carrier before...
"Whatever the Navy ends up doing, this will only be the first of many nuclear-powered carrier disposals."
The USS Enterprise was commissioned in 1961 to be the centerpiece of a nuclear-powered carrier task force, Task Force One, that could sail around the world without refueling.... The Navy decommissioned Enterprise in 2012 and removed the fuel from the eight Westinghouse A2W nuclear reactors in 2013. The plan was to scrap the ship and remove the reactors, transporting them by barge from Puget Sound Naval Base down the Washington Coast and up the Columbia River, then trucking them to the Department of Energy's Hanford Site for permanent storage. However, after decommissioning the cost of disposing of the 93,000-ton ship soared from an estimated $500-$750 million to more than a billion dollars. This caused the Navy to put a pause on disposal while it sought out cheaper options. Today the stripped-down hull of the Enterprise sits in Newport News, Virginia awaiting its fate.
"Although the Navy believes disposing of the reactors will be fairly straightforward, no one has dismantled a nuclear-powered carrier before...
"Whatever the Navy ends up doing, this will only be the first of many nuclear-powered carrier disposals."
Just beam the nuclear junk onto a Klingon ship.
We got some scrappers in Detroit that will make that thing disappear fast.
To sink it somewhere will cost them $0.
Just goes to show how fake the quantization into money is.
How many Economists does it take to get anything done?
an infinite amount, since nothing will ever get done if you use economists.
passphrase : chirped
I cannot change the laws of physics, Captain
It will be stripped from the metal parts, I guarantee it.
Once the carrier is stripped of the nukes, it should be loaded with a great deal of wonderful steel and just raw elements. Take it to one of the new up/coming steel mills on the great lakes and let them have it. They will tear it apart and then recycle it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If the nukes and the secret tech are out, why not offer the hull to somebody who might re-purpose it in some creative way? It still floats, right? Just sell it for $1 with stipulations on how it can be used--no Chinese military buyers of course. This could be towed away to some coastal city that needs housing or whatever.
"Whatever the Navy ends up doing, this will only be the first of many nuclear-powered carrier disposals."
And this one will be unique. The Enterprise is the ONLY nuclear carrier in its class, with EIGHT nuclear reactors. Every carrier built since then, both Nimitz and Ford class, has TWO reactors. Taking apart these will be much less onerous.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
3000 people doing
1 ton each, a day
at a salary of
$3000/month
is only (rounded up)
10 million us doll hairs
2x the price to dump the metal at your nearest scrap yard slash foundry
20 million dollares
2x the price again just to give your workers food and supplies to dismantle the ship
fourty million doll arses
sooooooooooooo
one billion minus fourty million = 960 million for the bureaucrats/politicons
for one month of work, for 3000 people
America. Get Real, go back to : school
The Enterprise has eight reactors compared to modern CVNs with only two. Considering that the cost of removing and cleaning from the reactors is a major factor we can only hope that later carriers will not be as costly to decommission.
Iâ(TM)m sure theyâ(TM)d be happy to buy it.
Pressurized salt water will eat that ship up.
It might make sense to build a new forge right next to a port with a dry dock. Pull a boat or freighter in, start stripping the metal off and load it right into the forge for recycling into new steel. Sell the steel to defray the cost of scrapping the boat.
I'm not sure how much forges cost, but I'd imagine it's a lot less than a billion dollars.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
"Whatever the Navy ends up doing, this will only be the first of many nuclear-powered carrier disposals."
Good. So, spend the billion dollars to dismantle the first one, figure out the steps, construct the necessary infrastructure, and then economies of scale suggest that the subsequent ones will be much cheaper to dismantle.
In Star Trek some of the various Enterprises were usually destroyed, either completely or irreparably damaged, by falling out of orbit into the atmosphere, where it would burn up or crash into a planet's surface. So the Navy just needs to figure out a way to launch the air craft carrier into space, and then let its orbit decay until it burns up or crashes also.
It costs a lot of money to decommission large military ships, nuclear or no. They're filled with all sorts of toxic stuff like asbestos and volatile organic chemicals, and many of the valuable metals are tied up in composites which make them not worth recycling. For awhile the navy was paying breakers to dismantle them, but that became so expensive they went back to using old ships as targets and sinking them. If I had to bet I'd guess with the fuel rods removed that's how Enterprise will end up as well.
For the time being, just move the Big E to a naval mothballing area and let it sit. Wait until a general nuclear recycling system is in place. By the time we have robots feeding it piece by piece to a breeder reactor along with spent fuel rods, the cost will be substantially less. Depending on the value of medical/industrial isotopes at the time, it may even turn a profit.
The Enterprise is a bit of unique ship, even within the nuclear community.
The legend stands that Rickover built it using eight submarine nuclear plants because someone bet him that it couldn't be done. Even though they are smaller, eight plants causes a lot of redundancy. She uses nearly twice the propulsion plant crew vs a similar sized two plant craft. Reactor cores, piping, steam generators and associated piping are going to be contaminated (or treated as contaminated until proven otherwise).
Those reactor cores are going to be challenging to dispose of... For disposing normal submarine plants, they just cut away the rest of the ship, cap off all the piping and ship it to the middle of nowhere and bury it. The Enterprise cores are not packed in convenient steel tubes.
Then factor in that the plants were made with what was then advance technology, that all the weakness weren't fully understood. There's a reason now that the Nuclear Navy has a mnemonic about why Austenitic Stainless Steels are not desirable materials to work with. The rumor that I had heard from other Nukes was that certain setups and certain water chemistries caused more leak-though and other (relative) nightmare to keep to minimum standards.
Posting as anon because cannot be bothered to find my password.
Also, I use the (strained) analogy to nuke power to paralell that "you shouldn't have your current 2019 car because Covairs and 1960 Jeep Wagoners were death traps?" Retire with a quickness the plants that were designed in the 1960s, and replace them identical Gen III and hopefully Gen IV with the lessons learned applied.
Hmm weird I was promised nazi interment camps. All I got was democrats bitching and making fools of themselves. Worst. National Socialist worker (NAZI). EVER.
Best of all he is still president! I get several more years of you guys being pissed off all because the corrupt one did not win. Hell she even rigged her own party to win the nomination and STILL LOST! This has been amazing. Please never stop!
That's tragic.
An unwanted child of unsuitable parents that goes delinquent can generate huge ongoing revenue for Prison Inc. before finally going too far and facing ol' sparky or lil pointy.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Stick a $500.00 sticker on it and it will vanish overnight.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
Its a floating city. Why are we are we taking it apart? Make it a homeless shelter.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
We don't need to sink it or take it apart. Park it in some shallow water in the South China Sea and claim it as a new island.
It's life, Jim, but not as we know it, not as we know it.
It's life, Jim, but not as *we* know it, not as we know it, Captain.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
"sending the reactors to a nuclear waste storage facility"
Problem is, there is no such thing.
'This leaves American utilities and the United States government, ... without any designated long-term storage site for the high-level radioactive waste stored on site at various nuclear facilities around the country. '
Wikipedia
But BILLIONS for taking apart old weapons of war. What a shithole country!
The current promise is that they'll be able to do it for a billion and a half. It'd be more reasonable to say that nobody really knows what it will cost, but it's going to be more than a billion and a half.
Even if it cost, say, three billion to decommission this, it's not so bad when you amortize that cost over fifty years of service and consider it costs about a half billion dollars annually to operate one of these things, not counting all the other supporting ships in a carrier group. And we operate ten carrier groups...
The fact that people find a multi-billion dollar bill to scrap an old nuclear carrier surprising suggests to me a lot of folks don't really understand how much we spend on this kind of stuff.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
N. Korea will nuke it in the middle of the Pacific for half that.
Table-ized A.I.
When someone pops up talking about pro nuclear stuff, I will happily point how nuclear is in a category by itself for deaths per terawatt, which ends the argument right there.
Has anyone done a cost to benefit analysis on what the rest of our nuclear fleet is going to take? This seems to imply to me that those GR Ford class carriers that we don't even need to build, but are still being built are going to eventually cost more to get rid of than they cost to build.
So why the ever loving hell are we building them?
Waste of resources, waste of energy, waste of labor, waste of time.
Seems real nice to say the US has the largest fleet of nuclear powered aircraft carriers in the world. Then you realize we have a larger fleet than the rest of the world put together. With more firepower than every navy that ever existed in history added together. No bloody point to any of it.
Just more proof the GRF class is one of the worst investments the USA will ever make.
If you want to learn more about nuclear decommissioning, see this link.
What the fuck is the deal with slashdot's not being able to interpret quotation marks and apostrophes in posts from certain devices, (such is those running iOS)? Is this a problem with iOS? With slashdot? WhatÃ(TM)s (hahahah) What's up with this?
I notice it only happens when using the mobile version of a page. On an iPad, when using "Request Desktop Site," and posting, it handles punctuation marks like apostrophes and quotation marks fine. Anyone have any ideas? Is there some switch I can flip besides requesting the desktop version every time?
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
It will be handled just like decomissioned US subs: the reactor compartment will be cut out and placed into the repository where the sub reactor compartments are stored/disposed and then the rest of the vessel will be scrapped in the traditional manner.
The reason for the high cost here is that Enterprise was the only ship of its class and Enterprise has more reactors. After Enterprise was in operation, the lessons learned informed the designers of the follow-on carriers which are very different structurally and have fewer (but more powerful) reactors.
It's really only a news story to the extent that some lawmakers are making noises about the price, while the congress has been aware (for decades) of the need to eventually decomission and dispose of her and that doing so would be expensive. Lawmakers love to pretend to be surprised by things they themselves have long known and sometimes were involved in causing - particularly in election years.
1) Get the Navy to pay you half of this cost say 500 millions and then tow it to San Francisco,
2) Build a bridge to the deck, convert and rent out all the space for living quarters.
3) Profit!
4wdloop
Worse, though most of the cost is going to salaries, almost all of it is going to a paperwork drill and lawsuit drill for permitting. Very little actual work is required versus the cost.
We decommission and dispose of nuclear submarines all the time.
We'll figure it out.
Kriston
Reminds me of the Goiânia accident
Shitty US bureaucrats strike again !!
Why can't they just pull that decommissioned vessel to somewhere above the Mariana Trench and then sink it?
Why do they have to make everything so fucking complicated ?
Radioactive? We live on the surface of a planet with a very, very hot interior, and it is the Radioactive Shits such as Uranium / Plutonium / whatever -ium which provide all the warmth
Thanks, hadn't heard about that one. Interesting and scary reading.
The Ghetto was invented for the Jews. Except Jews were able to thrive in them. It's funny how that kind of thing works out differently for some people.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Isn't it hilarious how the so called progressives are just as bigoted as those they hate
Keep sucking Putin's dick crybaby traitors, Trump hangs either way.
Just park them at San Onofre. San Diego Gas &Electric's decommissioned nuclear power plant, that they are turning into a nuclear waste dump. So what if it was built right on the ocean, on an earthquake fault.
They're probably still good. After WWII we recycled those ships. Sometimes an old WWII Steam Turbine shows up on the market, still works. Wonder if these can be put into service as new power generating nuclear cores. All 8 of them *MIGHT* be enough to power Googles search center.
can they just use it as a floating power station? It would of course never leave the pier.
I'm not even American you nasty little bigot but with your homophobic ranting you'd fit right in in Putin's Russia.
Isn't it hilarious how the so called progressives are just as bigoted as those they hate
If both sides are equally bigoted then it's time to just have a war of annihilation and see who wins isn't it? I'd certainly enjoy seeing Americans of all political persuasions murdering each other until there is nobody left, and I'm always glad to see people working towards this.
P.S Don't misunderstand this as some comment from a sarcastic progressive - I'm genuinely in favour of mass killings to sort all this out.