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Originally Posted by Urspankd
I was on a couple of boomers, east and west coast.
I figured this would be a popular topic and now I have some more sites to look tonight when I get home. Thanks and keep them coming!
It just amazes me that there are so many ships just left to rot when that steel and material could be used for many other things, not to mention clear up some obvious eyesores
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It all depends on supply and demand. There is a glut of recycled steel in the world, and a limited number of breaker yards. Plus, scrapping ships can be very expensive. Most of the main countries that do it these days manage to make a profit by simply ignoring the environmental effects (pictures of the waters and shoreline around some yards Bangladesh are just horrid). In the Persian gulf, excess super tankers are rafted up - it was cheap to make them so they got churned out, but it's very expensive to break them up, so unless the profit for the recycled material is very large, it's cheaper to let them rot somewhere.
Of course, a lot of naval ships in the US are kept for parts. That's mainly why ships like the USS Constellation are still floating at Bremerton - her parts are helping to keep the USS Kitty Hawk running. The James R. Ghost fleet is a big political issue here in Virginia. Many of the ships are in really bad shape, leaking and falling apart. But the cost of scrapping them is high, even just towing them to a foreign country for scrapping is expensive (and some now are deemed to be unfit for such a voyage without a lot of work beforehand). It's turning into a nice political mess.