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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."
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.
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.