Floating nuclear reactor among James River's 'Ghost Fleet'
15 Feb. 2005
NEWPORT NEWS, Va. (AP) - The sign on a metal hatch in front of Ray Moses said "Caution Radiation."
Moses, an electrician with the Maritime Administration, unlatched several locks on a recent morning, broke through a plastic seal on the door and led several visitors inside.
Around a dark corridor was the refueling deck of a defunct nuclear reactor that sits on the James River. A large, egg-shaped containment vessel holds the old reactor. Contaminated metal and debris are sealed inside a nearby tank. Steel and concrete encase the entire area.
No, this is not Surry Power Station. Nor is it the Savannah, the world's first commercial nuclear-powered ship, which now languishes amid rusty vessels in the federal government's James River Reserve Fleet.
This is the Sturgis, a 440-foot-long World War II Liberty ship that the Army converted into a floating nuclear power plant in 1966. It provided power to the Panama Canal until 1976, when the Army decided to return the barge to the United States because of political unrest in Central America, said Hans Honerlah, project manager with the Army Corps of Engineers.
"When it was towed back from Panama, it got caught up in a hurricane," Honerlah said. "It sustained structural damage, which I think solidified its end." He pointed to a steel beam on the refueling deck that was originally vertical but is now bowed thanks to something large and heavy that bounced around the refueling deck during the hurricane.
Today, the Army Corps is studying what to do with the vessel. Unlike the rest of the James River fleet, it is not under the purview of the Maritime Administration and is not included in a 2006 deadline to dispose of obsolete ships in the reserve fleet.
Honerlah stresses that the Army removed the nuclear fuel from the ship long ago. "There's no real health or safety risk or hazard to human health and the environment," he said. Even with today's heightened awareness of terrorism, an explosion that would release the radioactive metal in the ship's tank would have to be huge - big enough to dwarf the risk of the radiation itself.
Honerlah is working on an environmental assessment that may be completed in September. The assessment will include the potential cost of fully decommissioning the Sturgis, which will range in the millions. The Army Corps didn't disclose a more precise estimate because the job may eventually go out to bid.
The Sturgis dates to an era when the Army was first exploring nuclear power.
The service built nine reactors in the 1960s. After the first was built in Fort Belvoir in northern Virginia, several others followed.
All were designed to be easily set up and taken down at remote military bases in Wyoming, Alaska, Antarctica and Greenland.
"The idea was to provide power for a command post in any area that we occupied," Honerlah said.
The Sturgis was the only floating power plant, converted to nuclear use in Alabama. Among the more notable electrician assistants on the project was musician Jimmy Buffett, who describes working on the Sturgis as a teenager in his book "A Pirate Looks at Fifty."
The ship's engine and propeller were removed and a nuclear reactor was built in the center portion of the vessel. Workers added an 18-inch-wide bulge of concrete as a collision barrier.
Mike Hunter served on the Sturgis during its first and only deployment to Panama in the 1970s. Hunter, now a civilian working for the Army Corps in Fort Belvoir, fondly remembers his eight-hour shifts.
"It was very unique," Hunter said. "It was a wonderful climate. And I really liked the people down there, the Panamanians." The Sturgis provided power to the canal during the dry season, when the hydroelectric dams in the region could not provide as much electricity.
Hunter said there were never any nuclear close calls on the vessel, which is now called a barge instead of a ship, since it is no longer self-propelled.
A list of regulations eventually made the nuclear business too expensive for the Army.
Hunter helped seal the barge's nuclear containment vessel at Fort Belvoir in 1976, before it was towed to the James River. In 2001, Honerlah and six safety specialists, environmental scientists and engineers opened the containment vessel to evaluate its contents.
"The biggest challenge for us was there was no air in there," Honerlah said. Air rushed into the vacuum after a crane removed a heavy concrete plug.
"You could hear the whoosh as good air was moving in, the bad air was moving out," Honerlah said. The assessment crew evaluated the volume and types of waste for their environmental report. They also catalogued the asbestos, PCBs and other hazardous materials in the rest of the barge.
The Maritime Administration helps with security and maintenance of the Sturgis.
"We have flood alarms and fire alarms, too," said Moses, who has mapped in his mind the location of each of the alarms situated in the depths of the barge's hull.
Moses is the vessel's unofficial tour guide, taking infrequent visitors through areas, such as the reactor control room, which is full of buttons and red tags dating from 1976 when the Army Corps decommissioned the plant.
Bare counters now stand out in a chemistry lab where scientists once sampled the water onboard to make sure it wasn't radioactive. The Army estimated that the Sturgis would have a 50-year safe storage period when it was decommissioned.
Malcolm McLeod, who provided engineering support for the Army's reactors in the 1970s, said the Sturgis represents the country's shifting philosophies on nuclear power.
"The country first had a philosophy of, 'Let's show a lot of the good things we could do with nuclear power,' " said McLeod. That was in the 1960s, when the Army built its reactors.
"But the philosophy toward nuclear power changed," he said. "In the 1970s, nuclear power was seen as a hazard, particularly for the environmental impacts. That's not true. Our plants were very clean.
But it was harder to site them. No one wanted them in their back yard."
