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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."
To sink it somewhere will cost them $0.
"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
Bulk steel in the US costs roughly $1000 per metric tonne (depends on who you ask, that's a high estimate). At 93,000 metric tonnes, that's only $95 million dollars in steel. I strongly suspect that a 60 year old ship made of probably millions of pieces costs far more than that just to physically strip it down, not to mention the costs of reprocessing the metal. But it gets better: the ship isn't just made of steel, it's also got aluminium and copper (which, to be fair, are work 2-4 times that of steel), all of which needs to be separated out, graded, and reprocessed. Recycling might recoup some of the costs, but it's definitely not going to be nearly enough to cover it all. Maybe if it was small enough to break into cargo-container sized pieces, but this is a 342 meter long ship. Recycling it is not a trivial problem.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
If you want to learn more about nuclear decommissioning, see this link.
We decommission and dispose of nuclear submarines all the time.
We'll figure it out.
Kriston
Reminds me of the Goiânia accident