The Maritime Administration planned to welcome visitors for an open house visit to the Nuclear Ship Savannah, which is still docked in Baltimore Harbor and had its reactor removed and shipped to Utah for disposal last year.
The open house was planned for Sunday, May 21, as part of the Port of Baltimore’s observance of National Maritime Day, a spokesperson for the Maritime Administration (MARAD), part of the Department of Transportation, wrote in a Wednesday email to the Exchange Monitor.
The open house was to begin at 10:00 a.m. at the port’s Pier 13. The last visitors will be admitted at 3:00 p.m. and all visitors must be ashore by 4:00 p.m., the MARAD spokesperson wrote.
A joint venture of Radiation Safety and Control Services Inc. and EnergySolutions are decommissioning NS Savannah, a nuclear-powered merchant ship commissioned in 1965, during the Lyndon Johnson administration, as part of the Atoms for Peace program created during the Dwight Eisenhower Administration.
The 9,570-ton ship, 595 feet long, had a crew of 60 and an 80 megawatt Babcock and Wilcox reactor. It proved a commercial failure; nuclear-powered ships never gained a foothold outside of Navy fleets.
In December, the decommissioning joint venture removed NS Savannah’s and shipped it over sea and rail to Clive, Utah, where it was disposed of in EnergySolutions’ Clive Disposal Facility as low-level radioactive waste on Dec. 8, the MARAD spokesperson wrote. The reactor pressure vessel was packaged on Nov. 8 and shipped out of the harbor on Nov. 22, MARAD said.
Energy Solutions’ Clive facility will also eventually receive the Savannah’s control rod drive system, pressurizer, reactor pressure vessel, neutron shield tank, steam generators, primary system piping, reactor vessel and all primary system components, according to a 2022 EnergySolutions press release announcing the joint venture. All of these will be disposed of as low-level waste, EnergySolutions said.
