Photo: Erhard Koehler, 2014.
Did you know that in the 1960s the US Army converted a World War II Liberty ship to a floating nuclear power plant? Neither did I. And as it is now heading for the scrap yard, will soon be no more.
In the early 60s, the US Army installed a 10 MW nuclear power plant in the World War II Liberty ship, SS Charles H. Cugle. The Liberty ship, renamed Sturgis, became a nuclear plant on a barge, designed to be towed where needed to provide electrical power. The Sturgis was deployed in Gatun Lake, between the Gatun Locks and the Chagris dam spillway in Panama to provide power to supplement the Gatun Hydroelectric Station, during a serious drought. Tellingly, the Sturgis was also assisted by a 20 MW conventional diesel-electric power plant on a barge, the Andrew J. Weber.
The Sturgis was retired from service in 1976 and ultimately moved to the James River Reserve Fleet. In 2015, the ship was moved to Galveston, Texas, where the dismantling of the reactor has been underway.
“Environmental monitoring has been continuous since prior to the arrival of the Sturgis in Galveston and no evidence of radioactive material, lead or increased radiation exposure from the Sturgis has been documented outside of the reactor containment area at any point during the project,” said Brenda Barber with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
The project was originally expected to take 18 months to complete but was delayed when larger cranes were needed to be brought in to lift material from the vessel. The original contract estimated the project would cost about $35 million, but the delays and additional equipment increased the cost to $51 million.
The ship will be towed to Brownsville later this month and then scrapped.
It was funny, when the original announcement was made that she was coming here for dismantling of her reactor, a lot of folks set their hair on fire about it. Then it quieted down and a few months later she arrived, to cirtually zero public notice. She’s been over there [points] for three years now, and I doubt one in a hundred of my neighbors has any idea.
Now There are (5) FIVE Surviving Liberty Ships: Sturgis, John W. Brown, Jeremiah O’Brien, Arthur M. Huddell, Albert M. Boe..
Sturgis was built after the catastrophic 3 January 1961 meltdown of the Army’s 3 MW SL-1 Land Based Nuclear reactor..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1..
Dad was an Engineer officer.
Somewhere in his “stuff” I’ve seen overhead slides (remember them?) of this vessel. I’ll try to find them and copy/forward them to you
The days of the newspaper reporter wearing a fedora, smoking cigarettes, drinking booze, and pounding out a story on the manual typewriter are long gone. Alas, blogs like Old Salt Blog furnish us with the news, that All of the Main stream media are overlooking!
Many Thanks!
I had no idea.
What was a day at work like, on this vessel?
Makes me wish more of our governmental bits ran oral history programs along the lines of NASA (worth visiting history.nasa.gov, punching “oral history” into the search box).