Sink or Scrap?

In April 2005 the USN sank USS America, a Kitty Hawk class supercarrier, off Virginia in order to determine how resilient US carriers were to particular kinds of attacks. In May of this year USS Oriskany was sunk to create an artificial reef. According to Defense News, USS Belleau Wood (an amphibious assault ship) and USS Forrestal (the first supercarrier) will be sunk within the next year. Why the sudden interest in sinking aircraft carriers?

Apparently, the cost of scrap metal has crashed to the point that it is now cheaper to sink old ships than to scrap them (Forrestal would cost $65 million to scrap, and only $25 million to sink). 19 old Spruance class destroyers, for example, have been sunk while only five have been scrapped. Scrapping older ships also raises certain environmental concerns; French efforts to scrap the old carrier Clemenceau have run into all kinds of obstacles. Initially, Turkey refused to scrap the ship. After France sold the carrier to an Indian company for scrapping, Greenpeace lodged a series of protests regarding the ship’s transit through the Suez Canal and eventual dismantling. Clemenceau made it through the Canal, only to be refused by the Indians and sent back to France, where it currently rusts.

Defense News indicates that USN procedures for decontaminating old ships have improved to the degree that disposal at sea doesn’t pose a hazard. I’m a little bit suspicious of this; the bulk of the sinkings seem to have taken place since 2001, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find that either EPA standards had been gutted or enforcement has become lax. What Rumsfeld wants, Rumsfeld gets, especially when environmental concerns are the only obstacle.

Still, kind of an interesting phenomenon. The French are apparently asking for advice about how to dispose of their old ships, as are the British. I suppose that an end at sea is a little bit more poetic than the final trip to the scrapping yard.