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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."
Seems to me, a Somali crew could strip that sucker clean for free... just cruise off the coast of Somalia and let it drift, the pirates will take care of the rest.
Ken
"Simply"
You keep using that word.
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The price is ridiculous. I have been involved as an overseer in decommissioning several nuclear power stations in the UK. What happens is that most of the people and organisations involved see it as a money spinner and drag things out as far as possible. The on-site people (power station staff plus contractors) knew they would be out of a job once decommissioning finished, so they dragged everything out - things were done with agonisiing, unnecessary and theatrical "care", more so than when the stations were running which was already far more than careful enough, as the record shows on my watch. Visiting the sites was like watching movies in slow motion.
It is not helped by politicians (who know fuck all about tech, least of all about nuclear) worried about PR, with the anti-nukes (who also know fuck all about tech, least of all about nuclear) screaming that we were not being careful enough. The real agenda of the anti-nukes was for the sites not to be decommissioned at all, to remain as what they saw as an embarassing monuments requiring expensive staffing for ever more; to make things as expensive as possible as a continuing argument against nuclear tech.
Once the fuel had gone (a routine operation - it is replaced routinely when running), and the site left in mothballs for a couple of years for radioactivity to decay before dismantling begins, the remaining risk is actually trivial. I was senior enough to expedite some major operations and eliminate some unnecesary ones, and saved quite a few $millions.