One Does not Simply Decommission a Nuclear Carrier

it takes time, money...then more time and money...and lawyers with time and money

I have an affection for all the ships I have been on, and the Big E is one of my girls. I like to keep an eye on her.

She’s the ship that keeps on giving, in a lot of ways.

I am quite sure that when the USS Enterprise (CVN 65) was laid down during the Eisenhower Administration just 13 years after the end of WWII, someone had to have thought, “How are they going to deal with all the radioactive bits when they decommission her in the next century?”

I’d place a pretty good bet that in hushed tones, the general response was, “We’ll be dead by then. That will be someone else’s problem.”

Maybe not. Back then they probably thought we’d do something responsible like, “Oh, they’ll just encase them in glass and then dump them at the bottom of the most isolated and stable part of the ocean floor, or deep in some cave in Nevada. Don’t worry, it isn’t like they’ll just put them in a metal box and stack them all together out in the open in CONUS. It will be fine.”

Oops.

We are just a few months shy of a decade removed from the Big E’s decommissioning, and her hulk is still haunting Pier 2 in Newport News. There she is, at the top of the post.

So far, it appears that the lawyers have been doing the most work.

Via Luis Reyes at AutoNotion,

The fuel, at least, is long gone. More than 1,000 shipbuilders defueled all eight reactors in a job that ran from 2013 to late 2017, and what’s left behind is low-level radioactive structure. Even so, Navy documents say the hull could still hold more than 8,000 tons of hazardous or radioactive waste.

The contract took two tries and a federal judge

Here’s where it gets messy. The Navy first handed NorthStar this job in May 2025, for $536.7 million. Then HII ShipCycle filed a protest. HII is the parent company of Newport News Shipbuilding, which means the outfit that built the Enterprise, defueled it, and has it tied up at its own pier also wanted the contract to destroy it. Frankly, you can’t blame them for trying to keep the whole life cycle in house.

HII’s complaint said the government’s online bid portal glitched on deadline day and shut its offer out. In February 2026, Judge Philip Hadji of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims sided with HII, called the contracting officer’s handling of the situation “arbitrary and capricious,” and ordered the Navy to rerun the competition. The ruling pointed out that HII’s proposal came in roughly $100 million below NorthStar’s. NorthStar appealed, the Navy reopened the bidding anyway, and everyone got to submit fresh offers.

The do-over changed the price. NorthStar won again on July 15, this time at $418.5 million, about $118 million less than its own first bid. It wasn’t free, though: the finish line moved from November 2029 to September 2030.

For those doing the math, that is 13 years after her decommissioning in 2017. That really doesn’t tell the full story, as she was deactivated five years earlier, in 2012. They still have not announced when they are going to tow the old girl—18 years after she was of any real use to the fleet.

Unlike our other CVN, which have only two, the one-off Enterprise had eight reactors and all the glowing bits that go with it.

Navy documents say the hull could still hold more than 8,000 tons of hazardous or radioactive waste.

I was going to make a snarky comment about all the asbestos I personally took with me when I left, mostly in my lungs and clothing, but a different topic for a different day.

The glowing bits have a long journey to the eastern deserts of Washington.

Here’s her glowy-bits’ new neighborhood. Trench 94, with all the other Navy nuclear waste we don’t have the institutional bravery and vision to find a more secure and permanent home for.

This is what we consider the final resting place? Really? One day, just pile sand over it and hope for the best?

I hope we get better and faster at this. USS Nimitz (CVN 68) is not that far behind.