[Steve_Seattle]

"This government is a POS, and has screwed up lots of important things, but this case is not obviously a screwup (unless there was monkey business in the contract awards, etc.) nor is it important (at least not to most people)."

Well, the one-cent price makes me wonder. Is that an approximation of the net difference between (1) the value of the scrap metal and (2) the cost to scrap it?

[buwaya]

I don’t know.
I suspect that the government is paying someone to do the scrapping, on a separate contract, as the thing is probably considered a floating environmental cleanup problem. A 1-cent price just serves as a legal way to transfer ownership.