The US Navy is Having a Hell of a Time Dismantling the USS Enterprise

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. 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 Navy decommissioned Enterprise in 2012 (don’t worry, the third carrier of the new Gerald R. Ford class will be named Enterprise, so the name will live on) 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.

More at: http://bit.ly/Time-Dismantling-the-USS-Enterprise

Music Credit:
Lost Frontier by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
Source: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1300039
Artist: http://incompetech.com/