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WASHINGTON (CNN) – The USS Enterprise is the nation’s oldest active duty warship, the first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier and a history-making symbol of America’s naval might for half a century.
But it’s now headed for the scrap heap.
Virtually all the weapons and ammunition has been off loaded. By the end of the week, it’ll make its final return to its home port of Norfolk, Virginia. On Dec. 1, “The Big E” will be become officially inactive.

But one doesn’t just take an aircraft carrier with eight nuclear reactors in its hold and park it somewhere. The Navy will spend three years and tens of millions of dollars removing the ship’s radioactive fuel and reactors before cutting it into scrap.
Mike Maus, a spokesperson for Naval Air Force Atlantic, said the process starts just up the James River.
“Following the inactivation period, it will be towed over to Newport News — to Huntington Ingalls Newport News Shipbuilding — where it will be defueled. They’ll remove all the fuel from it.”
The fuel will be shipped to Idaho for temporary storage, Maus said. “Sometime at a later date, it will be disposed of.”
While in Newport News, some of the Enterprise’s equipment will be removed then the next phase begins.
The carrier, minus planes, ammunition and a propulsion system, heads to Puget Sound, the long way.
“It will be towed around (Cape) Horn to Puget Sound, Washington,” Maus said.
The Enterprise, like America’s other nuclear carriers, is too big to fit through the Panama Canal, so it must round the southern-most point of South America to get to Washington State.
“It’ll be a very lengthy tow,” he said.
Once it reaches the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, the long and difficult task of removing the eight reactors from the Enterprise’s hold begins.
“In order to remove the reactors, it takes a lot of cutting and hacking on the ship to do that,” Maus said. “They do cut through the flight deck and they may very well be cutting through the hull of the ship itself.”
Once the reactors are removed, CVN-65 will be formally decommissioned.
According to a Navy Environmental Impact Statement, the reactors will be put on barges, floated up the Columbia River to the site of the former Hanford nuclear production complex where they will be buried in a huge trench near reactors from smaller decommissioned naval warships.
But unlike the USS Intrepid in New York City or the USS Midway in San Diego, the Enterprise is not destined to become a floating museum.
Removing the reactors essentially destroys the ship.
“Once the reactors are removed, to put the ship back in any shape to where it still resembles a ship the cost would be over the moon,” said Maus.
So the ship, all 90,000 tons of it will be cut up and the metal sold for scrap.
But that doesn’t mean the name Enterprise will fade from U.S. Navy history. There have been seven other warships to bear that name and there is already a petition to name a yet-to-be-built carrier the ninth USS Enterprise.

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bd popeye said:

Yep.. what can you do? The USN is not in the ship museum business. The ship will be unsafe once the nuclear cores are removed.

I just hope CVN-80 shall be named Enterprise.

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kwaigonegin said:

USS Enterprise to be scrap.

...for some reason I thought they will make her into a musuem or at least berth her somewhere..I guess I thought wrong.. bummer.. they're going to cut her heart out and then chop her into 100 million pieces.

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Jeff Head said:

They stoll very well could...you can bet, after fifty years plus of ops, that there are hundreds of thousands who will lobby for just that...your truly included.

We cannot do to this ship what was done to the USS Enterprise of World War II and repeat that assinine mistake. The most decorated combvatant in American history was scrapped back then...we will have to fight to make sutre it doesn;t happen here. What a wonderful museum she would make.

There are years to make this point and get the votes to make it happen.

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We cannot do to this ship what was done to the USS Enterprise of World War II and repeat that assinine mistake. The most decorated combvatant in American history was scrapped back then...we will have to fight to make sutre it doesn;t happen here. What a wonderful museum she would make.

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TYNDALL AIR FORCE BASE, Fla. — An Air Force F-22 Raptor fighter jet crashed near a Florida Panhandle highway Thursday, but the pilot was able to eject safely and there were no injuries on the ground, the military said.

The single-seat stealth fighter, part of a program that has been plagued with problems, went down Thursday afternoon near Tyndall Air Force Base, just south of Panama City on The Gulf of Mexico. The pilot received medical treatment and a section of Highway 98 that runs through the base was closed as rescuers responded.

The crash was on Tyndall land and no one on the ground was hurt, said Air Force Sgt. Rachelle Elsea, a spokeswoman for the base where F-22 pilots train.

The Air Force said the plane went down in a wooded area near the highway.

The cause of the crash isn't clear, but the Air Force has been trying to address problems with the $190 million aircraft for several years. In 2008, pilots began reporting a sharp increase in hypoxia-like problems, forcing the Air Force to finally acknowledge concerns about the F-22's oxygen supply system. Two years later, the oxygen system contributed to a fatal crash. Though pilot error ultimately was deemed to be the cause, the fleet was grounded for four months in 2011.

New restrictions were imposed in May, after two F-22 pilots went on the CBS program "60 Minutes" to express their continued misgivings. The Air Force has said the F-22 is safe to fly — a dozen of the jets began a six-month deployment to Japan in July — but flight restrictions that remain in place will keep it out of the high-altitude situations where pilots' breathing is under the most stress.

Internal documents and emails obtained by The Associated Press earlier this year show Air Force experts actually proposed a range of solutions by 2005, including adjustments to the flow of oxygen into pilot's masks. But that key recommendation was rejected by military officials reluctant to add costs to a program that was already well over budget.

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jackliu said:

This is not good, this is the 4th production craft going down. 200 million down the drain... totally unacceptable after almost a decade in service.

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