After homecoming, USS Enterprise to sail off to history’s scrap heap

Process:

1) Sail the nuclear powered carrier Enterprise to Norfolk, VA

2) Remove nuclear fuel; ship to Idaho.

3) Strip equipment from Enterprise.

4) Tow the now unpowered ship around Cape Horn to Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, Washington

5) Remove nuclear reactors

6) Cut ship into scrap

7) Sell to China (probably)

There’s lots about this story to dislike, such as yanking the fuel out in Virgina then towing the hulk around South America to Washington… why not just sail it to Washington and skip some steps?? But worst is the act of scrapping such a historic vessel. It would make a massive and magnificent museum… I believe it would make a damned fine addition to Muscatine, Iowa (the nearest city on the Mississippi river to Riverside, Iowa… figure it out). Or give it a dignified death and sink it somewhere to serve as a dive site/coral reef. Or give it a *really* dignified death, and use it as target practice for a nuclear-tipped anti-ship missile. But chopping it up in to razor blades and cheap Chinese cars? Weeeeeeeeaaaaak.

Of course, there is another option, one the Enterprise should long ago have been used for:

And a final option: attach four ridiculously large lift fans to it and turn it into a flying aircraft carrier. Ridiculous? yes. Doomed to fail because physics does not support such a concept? Yes. A better use of taxpayer dollars than most of the bullcrap the US FedGuv does? YES.