why do some countries navies prefer to sink old ships instead of scrap them?
In: Other
They are often sunk to form artificial reefs to help support the ocean environment. They drain and scrub all the oils and other problematic chemicals out of the ship beforehand.
The cost of labor to scrap a large ship is more expensive then the value of the scrap they get out of it. It a economic reason, they don’t want to pay the costs to recycle what is already made but no longer useful.
It’s much cheaper to sync them not necessarily good for the environment
Many navy ships have enough environmental hazards on them that the cost of cleaning them out exceeds the value of the scrap
I’m not supporting the practice, but that’s one of the reasons it happens
Sometimes, yes, they’re done for reefs
Most of the time, the money made from the scrap metal is less than the cost of the labor it would take to cut and process that metal. That is unless you live in a country where the labor is insanely cheap. Which is why you’ll see ship breaking yards in countries where the workers are making the equivalent of a couple US dollars a day at best. Plus there’s little regulatory oversight to control exposure to unsafe conditions and environmental damage which also pushes that cost even lower.
Barring that, it’s cheaper to strip all the hazardous material out of the ship, attach some explosives at the right point and sink it somewhere out of the way. If you plan it well, you can actually have the ship become a diving destination and a man made reef for fish.
Destroying something is often more expensive than building it and the industry is far less robust on that side too. There is no incentive either since you make nowhere near as much money destroying as you do for building. So they’re used for exercises/training, then as target practice and once sunk they provide a decent artificial reef for wildlife, if they’ve been properly cleaned of harmful materials.
Sinking ships is a great way to test weapon systems and observe real-world effects on their impact on ships. It is also a great opportunity for your units to practice using weapon systems on real targets to test them.
There is not a lot of ship-to-ship combat today and you do not want to test destroying new ships. Building ships just to be used as larger is to expensive too unless you talk about cheap boats like speed boats or mockups like containers on barges you do not use real warheads on.
The test of weapons and the target ship in addition to the training is why ships are sunk with weapons
In regard to cost others mention there are no money gains from scaping an old ship because of hazardous material in the ship. That needs to be done to almost the same degree to protect the environment from sinking the ship. You might not need to remove exactly everything, asbestos might be considered stable even in a sunk ship. US ships sunk in text like this have requirements of 50 nautical miles from land and 6,000 feed depth
Another reason is artificial reefs are quite good for the environment. If just that is the goal you flood the ship by opening the sea chest in the bottom or by blowing up small holes ot let water in. That is done in shallow water and will require more extensive cleaning than sinking them as targets at deep sea.
Navies get paid nothing for a ship sold to a scrapper today. The might get $1 so it is a legal contract or the Navy needs to pay for disposal. Sinking a ship will require clean to so it is not free, it likely costs more but it is worth it for the testing.
Historically you could make money from scaping naval ships. Environmental considerations, worker safety etc were not the same back then and when less complex materials are used and there are thick armor plates you get a lot of stuff you can sell.
Civilian vessels that are scraped and you make money on it are typically sent to third world countries where it is like in the past in the West.
For naval vessels, there is security implications too. You do not want you potential enemy to know exactly how your ships are built. So Naval ships tend to be scraped in the country that operated them. It might not be equally important for all ships but for carriers, it will be a major factor.
A Chinese company purchased the Soviet carrier that was laid down as Riga in 1988, It was built in Ukraine, and with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the construction stopped. It was sold in 1998 to a Chinese company that said they would use it as a folding hotel and casino. What happened was it was rebuilt and commissioned in 2012 as the Chinese carrier Liaoning. Two other Soviet carriers were sold to China and are a tourist attraction, you can be sure the government has studied them and used the knowledge in their own carrier program.
Latest Answers