USS Enterprise CVN-65: Eight Reactors, George Takei and a $1B Scrap Bill

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The USS Enterprise, hull number CVN-65, was the world's first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. Its keel was laid at Newport News in 1958 and it was commissioned in 1961: 1,123 feet long and driven by eight Westinghouse A2W reactors, because the Navy scaled up smaller submarine reactors for a ship no one had powered before. The final cost of $451.3 million forced the Navy to cancel the five sister ships it had planned, and the carrier went to sea without its Terrier surface-to-air missile launchers. It relied instead on speed above 33 knots, unlimited range and up to 90 aircraft. In October 1962 it joined the Cuban Missile Crisis blockade, in 1964 it led Operation Sea Orbit, the first all-nuclear task force to sail around the world without refueling, and in December 1965 it became the first nuclear-powered ship in combat, launching a record 165 strike sorties in one day.

On January 14, 1969, near Hawaii, exhaust from a jet-starting Huffer cooked off a Zuni rocket on an F-4 Phantom, setting off a fire that killed 27 sailors, injured more than 300 and destroyed 15 aircraft; the armored flight deck pushed the blasts up and out, away from the reactors. On September 11, 2001, the homeward-bound carrier turned around without waiting for orders, and its aircraft later dropped 800,000 pounds of ordnance in Afghanistan. In 2011 executive officer Captain Owen Honors was relieved over crew videos with profanity and anti-gay slurs made in 2006 and 2007. The ship was deactivated in 2012 and decommissioned in 2017. Museum requests were denied, and dismantling its neutron-activated structure is expected to cost over a billion dollars and run to about 2030.

• The SCANFAR phased array radar gave the island its boxy look, but its vacuum tubes ran hot, drew heavy power and kept burning out.
• In 1983 Captain Robert J. Kelly ran the carrier aground on a San Francisco Bay sandbar with actor George Takei on the bridge, and Kelly later became a four-star admiral.
• In 1985 the ship hit Bishop Rock on Cortez Bank, tearing a 100-foot gash and wrecking a propeller for $17 million in damage, and that captain was relieved of command.
• In early 2026 a glitch on a government website forced the reopening of a $536 million dismantling contract in Mobile, Alabama.
• More than 35,000 pounds of uncontaminated CVN-65 steel is going into the new Ford-class carrier that will be named USS Enterprise, CVN-80.