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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.
"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.
The carriers still have military value. As such, far better to just recycle that. And in this case, it could actually help any of the steel mills with lowering their costs.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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.
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.
There must be miles of copper wiring but the cost of getting it might be greater than the value of the metal. Could there be construction techniques that would be exposed to other nations? "Oh, so that's how they do that...."
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.
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
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.
I doubt a ship from the 1960s has that many secrets of interest to competing powers.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
Is it possible in the case where there are fewer reactors that they're bigger? And therefore the 1/X number of them each contain X times as much shit to be cleaned out?
Leaving aside that they may be wildly differing designs anyway.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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."
Is that actually true? Installing an alternative power plant might cost more than building one from scratch, or buying a second hand one.
Wouldn't cost much to knock holes in the side for oars, I suppose. Or install masts, matey!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I doubt a ship from the 1960s has that many secrets of interest to competing powers.
You'd think that, but I've been trying to find a diagram that shows where the reactors are even located, and I haven't managed anything except probably being put on a whole bunch of watch lists. Maybe that stuff is in Jane's, but I don't have a subscription :p
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
robotics.
Seriously, the coming ships are ideal for breaking down with robotics and simply recycling.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
"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
This why they need to simply use robots to cut it up and then smelt it. Easy enough, to raise the temp to say 1100 and then drain off various metals including copper. The problems come when ppl try to recycle everything, including plastics, etc. Just burn them, but capture the output.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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
Most nations are not capable of building an Aircraft Carrier. That is why CHina bought Russia's because they did not have the tech know-how.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
"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 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.
Everything is recyclable if you put enough energy into it. When it costs more in energy to recycle versus what it would cost in just getting more material elsewhere is when recycling becomes pointless. If we want to see more recycling then we need cheaper energy.
Until then breaking up junk into pieces and dropping the bits in a hole in the ground is a perfectly viable means of disposal. We are not going to run out of places to dig a hole any time soon. When we have the technology to recycle this stuff and not lose money/energy/resources to do so then we know where to find it and dig it up.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
All of those problems can be easily solved by passing yet another revenue-generating tax cut.
Until then breaking up junk into pieces and dropping the bits in a hole in the ground is a perfectly viable means of disposal.
You misspelled "means of creating a future superfund site" there. Ships are toxic AF.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Is it possible in the case where there are fewer reactors that they're bigger?
Sure, but the size isn't the chief problem. It's doing it at all.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If you want to learn more about nuclear decommissioning, see this link.
Because we're not fighting China or Russia, so the carriers are not obsolete. They are 5 acres of sovereign American territory that can be parked nearly anywhere on 70% of the Earth's surface.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
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.
Right, lure all the pirates on board the Enterprise, then activate the self destruct. Problem solved. I saw that in a movie once.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
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
We decommission and dispose of nuclear submarines all the time.
We'll figure it out.
Kriston
Modern aircraft carriers are more hydrodynamic, use lighter metals, are designed to have fewer staff and make use of greater automation.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Reminds me of the Goiânia accident
that is why I suggested to take it up the great lakes and have one of the mills cut it and recycle it. Transporting that metal all over really makes little sense. However, the ship can be tugged through the panama, and then up into the great lakes. There are multiple steel mills right on the great lakes. From there, use robotics to cut it up. And even if they lose money on the enterprise, there are multiple ships coming, including subs and other AC. By setting up robotics to cut up ships and recycle, it should enable future ones to be done cheaply.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It is far far cheaper to recycle steel than it is to dig up and process iron, molybdenum, manganese, chromium, and nickel. This is why China is stopping importing things like paper and electronics, but continues to import metals.
BUT, I agree about wanting cheap energy. That will always be the case. That is why we need things like SMRs.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
You need real-time satellite imagery for that and you can blind satellites or take a course that avoids their orbital tracks which are well known.
Very few countries have that kind of capability. Unless they are within visible sight of a coastline they are hard to find - to hit it with a missile you need to get close enough to target it.
That's why China is still Importing all kinds of waste from all kinds of places. But American waste was just too mixed and random. If you could be bothered to sort it they would probably still take it.
Thanks, hadn't heard about that one. Interesting and scary reading.
Why can't they just pull that decommissioned vessel to somewhere above the Mariana Trench and then sink it?
The bottom of the Marianas Trench is not the Earth's interior.
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
Only about half the heat of the interior is the result of radioactive decay—most of the rest is heat energy left over from the Earth's formation, with a small amount also being due to gravitational pressure.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Other nations could even get their jets into the sky without ramps.
So yes the US tech is the best and still holds secrets spies have not found and given away to other nations.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
For a nation like China, which never build their own carrier, but bought a nearly finished one from Russia, it might.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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.
I'm afraid she won't fit :)
USS Enterprise is 342 m long, 78.4m wide, and has 12m draft. The (new) panama locks allows max 49m beam. The real problem is the st. Lawrence seaway, however: to get beyond Montreal max draft is 8.2m, and the locks can only accomodate 233.5 m length and 24.4m beam.
Sources: good ol' wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I wonder if part of the price was towing the damn thing from Puget Sound to Virginia. Seems pretty ridiculous moving a decommissioned ship that far, when you have a perfectly good Pacific boneyard in San Francisco.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Isn't it hilarious how the so called progressives are just as bigoted as those they hate
revenues in April totaled $515 billion — a 13% increase over last April
But apparently, they didn't cut taxes enough: The budget deficit this year is up by 21%.
Well, that sux. Thanx for the good links.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
"One does not simply disposed of a nuclear aircraft carrier".
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.
I'm not even American you nasty little bigot but with your homophobic ranting you'd fit right in in Putin's Russia.
That's why China is still Importing all kinds of waste from all kinds of places.
China just stopped doing that about 3 months ago https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/1...
Bulk steel in the US costs roughly $1000 per metric tonne ... aluminium and copper (which, to be fair, are work 2-4 times that of steel),
Copper is closer to 100 times the value of Steel as scrap...
Your nation stopped taking it from most nations. Personally, I'm happy about that. And separating it is not the real issue.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Beijing's surprise decision to stop taking in 24 types of scraps starting 2018.
How many types of waste are there? More than 24?
The country's imports of solid waste, which include plastics, paper and metal, fell by 54 percent in the first quarter of 2018 following the January ban, according to Chinese customs data.
So still about half as much waste as before.
Glad to see someone who knows his stuff explain this situation properly. The cost for this is due to the insane fear of low levels of radiation (watch Galen Winsor and the Nuclear Scare Scam), and so they can charge extreme prices for what should be a straight forward operation. The costs of the Chernobyl and Fukushima operations are similarly outrageous, and nobody needed to be evacuated from either location. The 1000 or so people who did not leave Chernobyl have shown no health problems at all. Education is the answer.
AC many still had to use ramps for many years.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"