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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."
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.
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.
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
Drop it on a subduction zone and watch it get pulled into the crust over the course of a few thousand years. It's a geologic time scale shredder, with all natural, organic, pesticide free, gluten free recycling!
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
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
"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.
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.