The USS “Nimitz” aircraft carrier has been very active around China in recent years. Before the People’s Liberation Army’s exercise around Taiwan in early April, the “Nimitz” aircraft carrier formation tried to closely monitor the Chinese-made aircraft carrier Shandong that participated in the exercise. As a result, the exercise At the beginning, the “Nimitz” turned around and fled north. The US media recently disclosed that the future fate of this US aircraft carrier that has been in service for half a century is actually already doomed-the US Navy is studying how to dismantle it as soon as possible.
Screenshot of US media report.
The U.S. “The Drive” website stated on the 14th that the U.S. military has begun planning to study the dismantling and disposal of the “Nimitz” nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. Although the U.S. Navy is working hard to make this half-century-old aircraft carrier last for a few more years, the Pentagon believes it is necessary to plan ahead given that the disassembly of the first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier “Enterprise” has not yet been completed.
USS Nimitz aircraft carrier.
According to the report, according to a public notice issued by the US government department on April 6, in order to arrange the complex decommissioning and dismantling process of the “Nimitz” aircraft carrier, the US Naval Sea Systems Command directly communicated with the Huntington Ingalls Corporation. Contact the Newport News Shipyard to establish the relevant requirements. The “Nimitz” was commissioned in 1975 and is the first ship of the US Navy’s “Nimitz” class nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. Although it has been riddled with many diseases and has repeatedly exposed the problems of aging equipment and system failures, the “Ford” aircraft carrier that replaced it has been unable to form combat effectiveness for a long time, and the lack of maintenance capabilities of the US Navy has resulted in insufficient number of available aircraft carriers. The U.S. Navy has repeatedly extended the service period of the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier. According to the U.S. Navy’s fiscal year 2024 budget application, the decommissioning of the “Nimitz” will be postponed until May 2026.
Even though there are still a few years before decommissioning, the U.S. Navy is determined to “do it in advance” because the decommissioning of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers is too complicated and expensive. According to reports, the “Nimitz” is not only a behemoth with a full load displacement of about 97,000 tons, and the construction materials contain many harmful components that need to be disposed of carefully, but also it is powered by two A4W nuclear reactors. Radioactivity is a very tricky problem.
At present, all nuclear-powered aircraft carriers in the United States are built by Newport News Shipyard, and it is also the only shipyard in the US Navy that can perform decommissioning and dismantling projects for nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. At present, the US Navy’s first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier “Enterprise” has been waiting for disposal at the shipyard. Although the shipyard successfully removed the nuclear fuel from the Enterprise as early as April 2018, subsequent dismantling work stalled. According to the website of the United States Naval Institute, the relevant dismantling work may not be carried out until 2025, and the specific dismantling cost may exceed 1.5 billion U.S. dollars-equivalent to one-eighth of the cost of building a new nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.
According to the latest report of the U.S. Audit Office, in order to reduce the dismantling cost of the “Enterprise”, the U.S. Navy has proposed two main options. The first would be dismantling by the Navy, with the commercial sector dismantling parts that do not involve nuclear power. This also means that the 27,000-ton propulsion chamber containing the nuclear reactor will be disposed of by a professional team of the US Navy and will eventually be transferred to the Hanford radioactive waste disposal center in Washington State. This kind of plan is relatively safe, but it is the most expensive, with a minimum of 1.05 billion to 1.55 billion US dollars, and it will take 10 years to complete. The second option is for the commercial sector to do all the work, with the nuclear reactor being transported to a designated storage site. That would cost $750 million to $1.4 billion and take five years.
It can be seen that the decommissioning and dismantling of the “Nimitz” will also be a very expensive and time-consuming process. More importantly, after the “Nimitz”, its ships of the same class will also be decommissioned one after another. The US Navy must straighten out and optimize related work processes in advance. Otherwise, the storage of these decommissioned nuclear aircraft carriers that cannot be disposed of in time will not only consume a lot of money and manpower, but they will also occupy the limited berthing area of the US Navy Shipyard, further increasing the maintenance turnover pressure of the US Navy Shipyard.
But on the other hand, the difficulty of handling the US nuclear aircraft carrier has also raised a warning for other countries in the development of nuclear-powered ships. At present, the decommissioning and disposal of large nuclear-powered ships is indeed a difficult problem. The USS “Long Beach” nuclear-powered cruiser has a displacement of only 15,000 tons, but its dismantling work lasted for 17 years! Most of the large number of nuclear-powered surface ships left over from the Soviet Union only adopted the method of direct storage, and did not fundamentally solve the problem of nuclear reactor disposal. There are high calls from the outside world for China to develop nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, but drawing on the experience of the US Navy, future nuclear-powered aircraft carriers also need to be prepared in advance.
Zhi Ge Tang
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