lmritger wrote:
Nope, the reactors are coming out here, from what I heard on the dock today. She'll still be seaworthy enough to be towed west, but they'll have to go down through too many decks and wreck too much stuff to get the 8 reactors and associated equipment out... it's just not feasible to put the multiple decks back in and try to turn it into something preservation-worthy.
That being the case, I'm changing my opinion on this and calling bullsh*t on the USN.
There are two ways to get the reactors out. Cut into the hull from the side, which would kill integrity and make her unfit for a long tow, or cut down from above and lift them out.
On a "supercarrier", the main strength deck is the flight deck. Cutting the flightdeck apart to get to the reactors would kill integrity as well, again making her unfit for a long tow.
Given that the reactors are coming out in Virginia and then she'll be towed around South America, my guess would be that they plan to cut down from the hangar deck, and remove the reactors up and then out through the elevator openings. That would preserve both aspects of hull integrity allowing her to be towed.
The fact is that, and I say this as someone who has visited three of the preserved carriers (haven't been to see Lexington. Yet.) and other preserved ships (including the battleships Wisconsin and North Carolina). I've been aboard Intrepid five or six times, Yorktown at least a dozen and unlike say battleships (with all the cool turret stuff) in my experience the vast majority of visitors to a carrier could really care less about going down below the hangar deck. They come to see the biiiiiiig ship, the control facilities in the island and the airplanes.
So even if Enterprise's hull below the hangar were left an empty, gutted shell, so long as the holes in the hangar deck could be plated over enough to support aircraft, the requisite simulators and the like she'd be a worthy candidate for preservation as a museum.
Heck, that's pretty much the condition that the Space Shuttles (with the exception of Discovery) are being turned over to museums in.
So it sounds to me that this is just another example of the Navy being all squeamish about turning nuclear powered ships into museums, even though they've been de-nuked. Nautilus was barely saved, and even though she was cut in half to get her reactor out (then welded back together) the Navy still controls her. Senator John Warner was, in not so polite terms, told to go p*ss up a rope when he tried to get Virginia for Nauticus. And there were serious attempts on the West Coast to preserve Long Beach and Mariano G. Vallejo, plus an effort to bring the USS Cincinnati to her namesake city.
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