ping
Living history.
or Corrosion?
Outdated electronics?
More electrical power, Mr. Scott?
It looks like ol’ Enterprise just might make it to retirement before the coming global conflagration.
Never open a boat unless you are charging “time and materials”! Every time you “open up” an older boat for a refit you almost always find about twice the trouble and that almost always leads to twice the initial cost.
What price freedom,,,,?? I’m OK with $450M or so...
Go Enterprise!
In other words, a typical DoD project.
Well, if they decommission her in 2013, she’ll be in tip-top shape as a floating museum and possible return to duty.
Bttt
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When Enterprise was built, she was powered by 8 small nuclear reactors, and a great deal of the superstructure that supported the entire engineering plant was completely inaccessible once she was fueled, and was highly irradiated forever afterwards.
There simply wasn’t any way to even inspect parts of the ship that essentially kept the Reactor department from falling through the bottom of the hull, and there were plenty of people in a position to know, who feared that was exactly what was going to happen some day. Nobody was sure how much corrosion, damage, and deterioration from long term exposure to ionizing radiation there was, which is at least partially why the overhaul expanded so dramatically.
As I recall, she has been operating with a number of her original reactors deactivated, and still has plenty of power to spare, but Newport News and the Navy put off making permanent repairs as long as they could and finally ran out of time. I believe some of the original reactor deactivation activities consisted of filling certain spaces with concrete, which of course does nothing to preserve steel and in fact probably accelerated much of the deterioration, not to mention creating another whole mess of highly radioactive waste material.
I’ve heard talk for years, speculating that it would be cheaper to scrap her than to try and rebuild her, and I think her time has almost come. Enterprize is a one of a kind hull, and I don’t think she will ever end up as a memorial anywhere; she is simply too hazardous to keep around. More than likely, large parts of her will have to be buried as high level nuclear waste for centuries, once she heads to the boneyard for scrapping.
Till then, she’ll keep on shootin’ ‘em and catchin’ ‘em...