The U.S. Navy has said that it would like to ship the country’s first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier to a commercial shipyard for dismantlement rather than use its own resources to do the job, according to a recent draft environmental impact statement.
“The workforce of the public shipyards of the Navy has been under tremendous pressure to execute their primary mission of maintaining the operational fleet,” the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program (NNPP) said in the Aug. 19 draft environmental impact statement for the proposed dismantlement of the USS Enterprise. “Commercial dismantlement of ex-Enterprise would allow the Navy to keep the specially trained and qualified … workforce focused on high-priority fleet maintenance work and submarine inactivations.”
The Enterprise, first commissioned in 1961, operated for over 50 years until 2017. The flat-top aircraft carrier was powered by eight nuclear reactors housed in four separate compartments within the ship. Spent fuel from the Enterprise’s reactors was removed in 2017 and is currently stored at Idaho National Laboratory. The ship’s hull is docked at the Navy’s Newport News, Va., shipyard.
The Navy has three commercial shipyards in mind for dismantling the Enterprise, the environmental impact statement said: one in Hampton Roads, Va., one in Brownsville, Texas and another in Mobile, Ala. Dismantlement of the aircraft carrier would be managed under a Navy contract process.
As part of the dismantling process, the Enterprise’s eight reactors would be taken apart and packaged into “several hundred small containers,” NNPP said. Those packages would be shipped to a low-level nuclear waste disposal facility. The Navy is considering Waste Control Specialists’ Texas site, the EnergySolutions facility in Clive, Utah or DOE’s Savannah River Site for such a job.
The Navy estimated that, using the commercial option, the Enterprise could be fully dismantled between 2025 and 2029 at a cost of around $700 million.
