How often are nuclear submarines defueled at the Pearl Harbor shipyard?
According to Navy spokeswoman Annette Campbell, about one submarine per year is defueled.
How often are they refueled?
Actually, since June 1984, the Navy hasn’t done any refuelings at all. Campbell declined to say whether refuelings would be undertaken in the future, saying only: “Ship availabilities beyond FY 1994 have not been announced.”
What happens to the defueled submarines?
After the reactor is removed, the submarines are towed to Puget Sound, where they’re cut up for scrap. The spent fuel is separately barged to Puget Sound, where – until recently – it was transferred to train or truck and shipped to Idaho Falls, Idaho.
The whole process would seem to make about as much sense as if one decided to junk ones car by driving it to a garage to have the battery removed, having the disabled body towed to the junk yard, and, finally, paying to have the battery shipped to the dump.
When asked for an explanation of the reason for this practice, Campbell provided this answer: “It is not practical for Puget Sound Naval Shipyard to accomplish all scheduled defuelings and inactivations. Therefore, other shipyards are tasked with some of this work. Defueling and inactivating submarines prior to decommissioning and towing the ship to Puget Sound Naval Shipyard for recycling and reactor compartment disposal has been proven to be a safe and reliable inactivation/disposal process.”
But efficient? The General Accounting Office doesn’t think so. “Puget Sound is the only shipyard that removes and disposes of reactor compartments from inactivated nuclear-powered submarines,” the GAO wrote.1 “Consequently all submarines inactivated at other shipyards must be towed to Puget Sound for reactor compartment removal and disposal, which, based on actual fiscal year 1988-90 costs, we estimate adds an additional $2.2 million to $3.7 million” to the cost of deactivating a submarine. (That same report found that inactivation’s conducted entirely at Puget Sound were $2.3 million to $7.8 million less than inactivation’s at other shipyards.)
And safe?
Safe so far, perhaps. But defueling is an inherently risky process. A Soviet defueling accident, which occurred in 1985 but was only disclosed in 1992, led to 10 deaths and widespread contamination.
Be It Resolved
Because of the risks associated with defueling, a resolution was introduced to the state Democratic Party’s convention last year, calling for the Navy to stop defueling nuclear submarines at the Pearl Harbor shipyard. The resolution was adopted – and immediately disavowed, after the Democratic leadership learned of the opposition of the shipyard union, the Military Affairs Council of the Chamber of Commerce, and the Navy. Democrats who had voted in favor of the resolution suddenly were claiming they did so on the basis of “erroneous information.” And, they claimed, the very procedures used in bringing the resolution up for a floor vote were improper, owing to “clerical oversight.”
Dennis O’Connor, chairman of the state Democratic Party; was then asked by resolutions committee co-chairs Ann Kobayashi (state senator) and Brad Mossman (consultant and contractor to the state) to have “the State Central Committee declare the resolution invalid” at its June 27, 1992 meeting.
On the day of the meeting, O’Connor received another letter from the Hawai’i Federal Employees Metal Trades Council President Richard Uyehara. According to Uyehara, if the shipyard could no longer do defueling, it would not be able to do refueling either (nevermind that it hasn’t refueled a submarine since 1984) – and if it couldn’t refuel, it could not undertake “SRAs” -otherwise known as “selective restrictive availabilities,” the Navy’s multisyllabic term for repairs.
“One SRA utilizes 400 workers,” Uyehara told O’Connor, “and brings about Fifteen Million Dollars into this State. The loss of four SRAs per year means the loss of 10 years of employment for an additional 1,600 workers, and the loss of about Six Hundred Million Dollars to the State of Hawai’i in today’s dollars.” Uyehara then factors in the added cost to the state of unemployment benefits for the displaced workers and welfare benefits for the less fortunate. “Total Financial Impact is 622 Million Dollars,” he wrote, while “Total Employment Lost is Three Thousand (3000) Workers.”
Be It Unresolved
Uyehara’s math makes about as much sense as the Navy’s convoluted “decommissioning” process. Despite the vagaries, it’s the sort of math that the Democratic Party leaders seem to understand. O’Connor placed the matter on the Central Committee’s agenda for its June 27, 1992 meeting.
As reported by Julia Steele in The Honolulu Weekly of November 4, 1992, “Under parliamentary rules, … it appeared that the Central Committee could not technically invalidate the anti-defueling resolution, since it had passed at the convention. According to Bart Dame, a member of the Central Committee, to surmount that hitch the committee voted… to pass a second resolution that in effect allowed the party to ignore the first one.” While O’Connor later told the trade union the vote was unanimous in support of the second resolution, according to The Honolulu Weekly Dame and others voted against it.
“Here you have a resolution saying maybe nuclear defueling’s not a good idea, not safe,” Dame is quoted as telling the Weekly. “And it passes the convention. The military brass freaks out and, to appease them, the Machine breaks party rules and kills the resolution. It’s unfair, and it pisses me off.”
1 See “Nuclear Submarines: Navy Efforts to Reduce Inactivation Costs,” GAO/NSIAD-92-134, July 1992, page 23.
Volume 4, Number 3 September 1993
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