ENTERPRISE hull is now almost 60-years old. We don’t have any more 1950’s design reactors to refuel it. The ship has already been decommissioned and inactivated and is awaiting disposal plans to be determined by the Navy. Keeping it eats up 4-times the number of nuclear Sailors compared to NIMITZ class hulls.
This proposal is non-sense and this thread should be deleted.
You cannot keep a nuke in "reserve" because of all the maintenance, upkeep, training and operating costs to maintain nuclear safety. You don't just put a lock on a nuclear reactor and hang up the key.
And you don't just restart and idled reactor after a decade or so.
-another former steely eyed killer of the deep
When the Navy refueled the USS Enterprise in the 90s it cost almost as much to refuel as build a new carrier. The reason is, not like the NIMITZ class, they has not designed a carrier reactor, so they put 8 submarine reactors in it. Then they built two conventional carriers (CV66 and CV67) while they designed carrier reactors. So the NIMITZ class will be much cheaper to decommission and the Enterprise is a one of a kind problem and should just be dealt with. Way too expensive to keep around, they should not even have refueled it in the 90s, but it was the Navy’s pride and joy and was the fasted ship in the fleet with all that steam.
The proposal may be nonsense, but a lot of people don’t know anything about it, so I don’t think it should be dismissed and deleted. I think the discussion has good educational value, which is one of the things I love about FR.
The discussion has value, IMO, just for discussion purposes alone so more people than a few of us understand the issues...it is a defense related issue, and it involves over a billion dollars, so it is good to have a conversant understanding. I can envision one of our fellow Freepers with a group of people at a dinner or party, and someone says “My God, I just read an article that says it costs over a billion dollars to get rid of a ship!!!! That is clearly and example of governmental waste and inefficiency!” and our fellow Freeper says “Well, if you take into account, the age of the ship, the cost of maintaining it, (fill-in other tidbits they got from this thread) it is easy to understand why it is a real problem, and an expensive one.”
I think it is easy for someone who might not know better to ask “Why don’t we put her in the reserve fleet for later use?” You three (and I do too) know that it is an expense and maintenance issue, and that as time goes by, things on an old vessel like that need more and more maintenance to not only keep safe, but to simply keep operational. Plus, it wasn’t a class of ships, it was unique.
I have always been interested in the scrapping process, and watching the scrapping of the USS Coral Sea was a real eye-opener some years back, as it was one of the largest military ships to be scrapped to that point. In the past, they didn’t have all the environmentalists involved, and the hazardous waste disposal issues, they just tore the old cruisers and battleships apart and sold the scrap, throwing the asbestos in landfills, the toxic chemicals from the ship leaching into the water and mud...you get the idea. They were completely befuddled, and realized in todays world, there was no cost effective way to scrap it.
In the past, you could make a profit out of scrapping it, as they did with poor old USS Enterprise (that Admiral Halsey spearheaded a movement to try to save her as a museum) that was cut up “for razor blades”. Now, that is impossible to make a profit out of it, unless you have the thing towed halfway around the world to Bangladesh where they would beach her and have a bunch of barefoot poor people tear her apart, piece by piece.
Can you imagine the uproar if they said they were going to do a SinkEx on her? Even if her reactors are gone, the environmentalists would go absolutely apeshit. I was all for the USS America being sunk as it was...I think it not only provided good data, but...she rests on the bottom, having served her country well.
I know people say that ships don’t have personality, but...I have always felt there IS something to a ship, more than just a hunk of metal. Men lived their lives on a given ship, they did jobs, they ate and socialized, they were sometimes frightened, traumatized and killed, they watch sunrises, saw the stars wheel overhead from the middle of the ocean, and came back to a bunk after a night of liberty. I think there is something to a ship, it was home to men.
I saw a book a long time ago, a big picture book I have never been able to find again, that had pictures of US Navy ships being broken up in the years after WWII and being sold for scrap. I can’t remember which ship it was, but it was a heavy cruiser from WWII. She was in a dry dock, and they had removed her bow all the way up to the #2 turret. You could see all the decks below.
There was something about that ship that was incredibly sad to me. It resembled a human face that had the nose cut off. I had a sense that...it wasn’t right, it looked...desecrated...somehow, it made me feel It deserved better. I know it is only a hunk of steel, but...I guess I am sentimental about those things.