why do some countries navies prefer to sink old ships instead of scrap them?
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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.
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