Some reactor parts will be stored in special vaults by the Department of Energy at its facility in Hanford, Washington. The parts are shipped by barge - under Navy or Coast Guard escort - to a disposal site, while complying with Department of Transportation regulations. The Department of Defense "maintains and monitors the radioactive parts," according to the EPA. The Environmental Protection Agency has an entire webpage describing how the process should work. To say the process is complicated - both technically and bureaucratically - would be an understatement.Ī disposal site with reactors from cruisers and Los Angeles-class subs in Hanford, Washington in November 2009 The last of them, USS Arkansas, left service in 1998.īut scrapping a 100,000-ton aircraft carrier is a much more ambitious project. In addition to carriers and subs, the Navy also built nine nuclear-powered cruisers in the 1960s and 1970s. Since 1990, the Navy has inactivated - which entails removing the nuclear fuel and reactor compartment - more than 130 nuclear-powered ships, according to the GAO. (The first nuclear-powered surface ship was the Soviet icebreaker Lenin, launched in 1957.) The US Navy launched the first atomic submarine - the USS Nautilus - in 1954. The problem isn't that the Navy doesn't have experience dismantling nuclear-powered ships. A nuclear sub cost about $26 million to scrap, GAO estimated. "The bulk of the Navy's past dismantlement and disposal work is comprised of comparatively low-cost projects-particularly submarines-with limited resource demands compared to a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier like CVN 65, a multi-year project with a cost that will potentially exceed $1 billion," noted a 2018 Government Accountability Office report. USS Nimitz in the Persian Gulf in June 2003. Though the Enterprise was decommissioned in 2017, the Navy is just beginning a years-long process to safely dispose of it. The first is the USS Enterprise, which was commissioned in 1961 and was also the world's first nuclear-powered carrier. The Nimitz would only be the second American nuclear-powered carrier scheduled to be scrapped. The Nimitz was commissioned in 1975 as the first of the 10 Nimitz-class vessels that comprise most of the current US carrier fleet. In early April, the Navy published a pre-solicitation notice announcing that Huntington Ingalls' Newport News Shipbuilding division would formulate requirements for scrapping the USS Nimitz. Nuclear power allows the Navy's aircraft carriers and submarines to stay at sea for extended periods, limited only by the endurance of their crews.īut there's a downside to nuclear-powered vessels: How do you dispose of them when they're no longer needed? While most ships eventually end up in the scrapyard, breaking up a radioactive power plant is a different matter - specially when it's in a giant aircraft carrier. It often indicates a user profile.įor the US Navy, the tiny atom has been a big friend. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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