A Proud Ship Turned Into a Giant Recycling Problem. So Brazil Plans To Sink It. (nytimes.com) 90
A decommissioned aircraft carrier, packed with an undetermined amount of asbestos, is being towed in circles off the coast of Brazil after it was refused permission to dock in Turkey for recycling. The problem? No government wants anything to do with it. From a report: Now, the Brazilian Navy says it plans to just sink the ship, the Sao Paulo, a Clemenceau-class carrier purchased from France in 2000 for $12 million, planes and helicopters not included. Environmentalists say doing so would cause irreparable environmental damage and could be a violation of international law. It would be "completely unexplainable and irrational" to sink the ship, said Jim Puckett, director of the Basel Action Network, an environmental nonprofit group based in Seattle that focuses on the global trade in toxic substances.
The story of Sao Paulo's demise started when a Turkish company called Sok Denizcilik bought the ship for just over $1.8 million in an auction in 2021. Its goal was to recycle the vessel, disposing of any waste responsibly while making a profit salvaging and selling the tons of nontoxic metals it contained. But the Turkish company's plans were met with protests from environmental groups that said the ship was carrying a lot more dangerous material than the company had disclosed. The 873-foot vessel, which served in the French Navy under the name Foch from 1963 until it was sold in 2000, hadn't been in service for roughly a decade. Some of its compartments have accumulated so much dangerous gas that it is now unsafe to enter them, inspectors said.
The story of Sao Paulo's demise started when a Turkish company called Sok Denizcilik bought the ship for just over $1.8 million in an auction in 2021. Its goal was to recycle the vessel, disposing of any waste responsibly while making a profit salvaging and selling the tons of nontoxic metals it contained. But the Turkish company's plans were met with protests from environmental groups that said the ship was carrying a lot more dangerous material than the company had disclosed. The 873-foot vessel, which served in the French Navy under the name Foch from 1963 until it was sold in 2000, hadn't been in service for roughly a decade. Some of its compartments have accumulated so much dangerous gas that it is now unsafe to enter them, inspectors said.
Environmental damage? (Score:3, Interesting)
These environmentalists need to be smacked. Anyone who has ever dived can attest to that sunken ships not only are not magically some environmental damage, but actually turn the often baron wasteland that is the ocean floor into a wonderful artificial reef and a great habitat for all kinds of sealife.
Re:Environmental damage? (Score:5, Interesting)
packed with an undetermined amount of asbestos
Some of its compartments have accumulated so much dangerous gas that it is now unsafe to enter them
Makes it seem like its filled with a lot more than rust.
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What part of the food chain is being harvested at a depth of 5000m (over 3 miles) under the surface?
Also, (honest question) how do the environmentalists intend to prevent a sovereign nation from sinking the vessel in their own waters?
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What part of the food chain is being harvested at a depth of 5000m (over 3 miles) under the surface?
Sure because the term 'food chain' does not indicate any kind of a connection to other parts of the ecosystem. Just because you think 'shit where you eat' is an excellent idea doesn't mean it's an intelligent thing to do. This situation is the result of apathy. corruption and greed and those who caused it should clean it up.
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I think they were planning to sink it in international waters.
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Of course, it was towed outside the environment.
(Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com])
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You mean, dumped right into the food chain?
I don't think asbestos accumulates in the food chain [asbestos.com] the way PCBs and radionuclides do. From all I've learned of asbestos the primary danger is as an inhalant much like oxidized pu-239 or U-238 cause respiratory disease..
The iron would probably be a good thing for the ocean though as the ship decays. As long as they pump out all the fuel and get rid of other nasty stuff this is probably the only other thing they can do with it since they can't recover costs from scraping it.
The article is paywalled -
Re: Environmental damage? (Score:2)
No, itâ(TM)s not discussed. You can read it here: https://archive.ph/cVpoJ [archive.ph]
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Thanks - I wonder what the built up gasses are CFCs perhaps?
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You mean, dumped right into the food chain?
Asbestos is completely inert when consumed. You can eat it all day as long as you don't inhale it.
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I don't think the asbestos is a problem if you sink the ship. There might, though, be other things present that *would* be a problem. What KIND of gas is filling those rooms?
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Re: Environmental damage? (Score:5, Informative)
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As it is a silicate, I assume it pretty mu
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Well, somebody above said, I don't know on what authority, that there were a lot of PCBs, and implied that they were soluble. So that gas *might* be something you really wouldn't want sitting around. But all the summary said explicitly is that it was too dangerous to allow people near it.
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Its a carrier sized boat containing PCBs, not a factory spewing tons of PCBs. If the PCB situation for the carrier is that bad, remove it before sending it out to sink in deep ocean, away from fisheries. (Oh no, we may piss off the Atlanteans...)
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Makes it seem like its filled with a lot more than rust.
I'm sure it is. But many things are bad for while being utterly inert underwater / to sealife. One group of such things are ... gasses.
Now sure those gasses came from somewhere and the scuttling of a ship does need to take basic measures into account. No one is proposing just driving out there and detonating a torpedo in its own hull. That's not how sinking ships on purpose works.
But it largely sounds like no one wants to deal with the asbestos first and foremost. Asbestos is perfectly inert in the food cha
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I was going to say this, but you beat me to it.
Re:Environmental damage? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with your argument is that when ships are sunk to make a reef, they are cleaned of everything but the steel. Even the paint, if I'm not mistaken. You can't just sink a ship full of thousands of gallons of motor oil and other dangerous chemicals and say it's not going to cause a problem. Eventually that ship will rust through and relase its deadly payload.
Re: Environmental damage? (Score:4, Interesting)
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And at that point... why sink it? If you got thousands of tons of nothing but steel... how is that not pretty easily recyclable... as steel?
Basically at that point, it's not actually cost effective to make a reef.
And honestly, its probably cheaper to just build a reef from new steel than clean and scrape the paint of an old ship. So it sounds like making a reef out of an old ship is more of a symbolic thing to do than an practical or cost effective use of an old ship.
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"ship breaking is either dangerous or expensive."
Primarily due to dismantling and removing all the hazardous materials and so forth.
So if you are going to strip it down the steel to make it a reef, you are already doing the most time consuming, hazardous, and expensive part.
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Options c and d are obviously cheapest if you ignore the externalities from all of the pollution.
What pollution? Its down at depths miles underwater and hundreds of miles away from a coastline or fishery. No people are getting poisoned, unless you compare it to all the people being poisoned in Germany from coal use.
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During WW2, about 3,000 ships, complete with fuel, cargo, and usually sailors, were sunk in the Atlantic by German U-boats.
Obviously nobody stripped them of anything.
What environmental effect have these had? It seems absurd to complain about one, albeit large, ship, when thousands are rotting on the bottom of the ocean.
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They found a German U-Boat (864) in the North Sea Strait. And it is apparently filled with several tonnes worth of Mercury canisters. A few of those are already leaking and creating havoc with marine life.
While I don't think it is of any consideration with sinking this particular carrier, ships are known to carry more items than is mentioned on their manifests. So sinking any vessel can cause major problems once the rust gets through.
Being unaware of profitable fishing grounds and how the sinking of militar
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I guarantee you no one here is proposing to sink a ship full of oil or other hazardous to the environment substances without cleanup on purpose. That is a rather stupid assumption since it would be breaking all sorts of international laws.
The reality is a large part of what makes something non-viable / hazardous to dismantle on the surface becomes a non issue if scuttling at sea. Specifically it seems no one wants to deal with asbestos, which is fine. It's an inert mineral to any lifeform which doesn't brea
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Except they are proposing just that. Perhaps asbestos doesn't have issues underwater, but there are more dangerous chemicals on an aircraft carrier than just the asbestos. In this situation, it may be the asbestos that is halting the recycling of this ship, but don't fool yourself in thinking that is the only problem with this scenario.
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You can't just sink a ship full of thousands of gallons of motor oil and other dangerous chemicals and say it's not going to cause a problem.
The Deep Water Horizon disaster spewed out magnitudes more "dangerous" chemicals than the aircraft carrier could possibly contain!
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Rock also doesn't break down easily, and enters the food chain. And you know asbestos is a form of naturally occurring rock, right? Here, let me clarify it for you https://www.cancer.org/healthy/cancer-causes/chemicals/asbestos.html [cancer.org]:
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but not so much when it's full of asbestos, which doesn't break down easily, and will inevitably enter the food chain.
You do know that's what this story is about, right?
Yes I do. You do realise asbestos in the food chain is inert right? I mean it's a completely natural mineral that has no negative impact on the body ... providing the fibres don't get lodged in lung tissues. Sinking asbestos is not an issue.
Do you seriously think that environmentalist groups oppose sinking ships on principle?
No I don't think that. I know that because they demonstrated the exact same principle on every planned ship sinking over and over again in multiple countries around the world. Plus most environmentalists are fucking idiots. We can thank them largely for our CO2 release d
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Yup. Whatever hazardous materials that are still contained inside the carrier is not enough to cause an "ecological" disaster, compared to the size of the South Atlantic ocean. They're about as "useful" as anti-nuclear power Germans.
Requiste (Score:4)
Sounds like a Cluster Foch
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I was thinking of posting that the French really Foch'd them pretty good. But this is close enough, you beat me to it, and I want you to know that I'm proud of you. :sniff: lol
Asbestos is nasty in air, but in water, silica... (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, it is a nasty material in the air, but in water, different story. Most likely the stuff will just fill up with water and sit in the ship indefinitely. It isn't like this is a naturally occurring rock or anything like that. The benefits by sinking a ship which provide places for marine life to hide and set up homes is likely far greater than what the contents would have.
Just find a deep part of the ocean, off the continental shelf, sink it, and life goes on. It will wind up so far down in the high-p
Re: Asbestos is nasty in air, but in water, silica (Score:2)
Ironically asbestos IS a naturally occurring rock.
Re the gas in compartments - why dont some guys with breathing equipment just go down and open some doors to let it out?
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Someone has to pay for it. There's a lot of dangerous stuff in it, it's not about "asbestos". But no one has come up with a solution other than "not in our backyard".
Re:Asbestos is nasty in air, but in water, silica. (Score:5, Informative)
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Mod parent up. This is what I was wondering about, since asbestos remediation while costly, is not that difficult and there are a lot of people that do it. If it were just asbestos, you could either encapsulate it or have crews with respirators remove it and encapsulate it.
TFS should have mentioned the PCBs. That's the real hassle. It's a royal PiTA to safely remove, store and dispose of that.
The carrier from Crimson Tide? (Score:3)
Asbestos is fine if it's stationary (Score:3, Insightful)
Asbestos in and of itself isn't really an issue. It's manly a problem when it gets turned into dust and gets sucked into your lungs. That won't happen if the ship is at the bottom of the ocean.
Breaking the ship on land is more likely to cause asbestos-related problems than sinking it.
Not sure what the environmentalist guy is whining about. Would he rather have a few hundred people breaking the ship into small pieces on land, causing all kinds of land-based disposal issues?
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It sounds like there is more than just asbestos that is dangerous on the ship.
It's probably the least of the issues.
Re:Asbestos is fine if it's stationary (Score:5, Interesting)
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https://www.sciencedirect.com/... [sciencedirect.com]
Based on that it sounds like asbestos dumped in the ocean can make it inside your lungs, because it migrates around, gets picked up and deposited on land as precipitation, and then gets into your body.
Oh noes, "dangerous gas" ! (Score:3, Funny)
Just imagine if they now fill it with the deadly Dihydrogen monoxide, that kills 236,000 people per year.
Get the facts on this menace:
https://www.dhmo.org/facts.html
Uh, environmental victory? (Score:5, Insightful)
The ship and its tug, which by then had reached Gibraltar, had to turn back. Environmental groups counted it as an enormous victory.
It was nearly to a port that was going to properly dismantle it. But the environmentalist (I guess) wanted more tons of polluting fuel burned to send it back so that it could be disposed of at a DIFFERENT port? Oh, and now "the tugboat was guzzling 20 tons of fuel a day." just to keep it offshore.
What, exactly, was wrong with having it dismantled in Turkey?
In an era of Environmental responsibility. (Score:2)
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Brazil bought it so it's their problem now!
Re: In an era of Environmental responsibility. (Score:2)
Turkey bought it so it is their problem.
Re:In an era of Environmental responsibility. (Score:5, Informative)
France sold it and the responsibility of the decommissioning was certainly an article of the sale contract. France does not have the facilities for this. When the sister ship Clemenceau needed decommissioning in 2000, France launched an international tender for public contracting. The Government of France paid 20 million euros to have the Clemenceau dismantled at the ABLE Seaton Port in Hartlepool, UK https://www.ableuk.com/operati... [ableuk.com] . This solution is available to Brazil anytime, but their whole idea was to try profit from the sale of steel, not to pay for responsible decommissioning.
Note that the fate of the Clemenceau already included shady business involving Turkey.
Originally the French government granted the decommissioning contract to a shipyard in Gijon, Spain. But after leaving the Mediterranean port of Toulon in October 2003, the boat did not head to Spain and instead took the strait of Sicily in direction of Turkey maybe to be resold to some shady actor, in breach of the contract with the government of France. The ship is arrested in sea, taken back to Toulon. Greece refuses to take it. India originally accepts, then in 2006 its Supreme Court refuses due to the presence of dangerous materials. The British company accepts to take it in 2008. The whole time, Greepeace and others hold protests and make "freedom of information" requests to Courts to read the contracts for removal of asbestos.
It would say Turkey could be mad for last time, or for being considered the landfill of Europe. It also seems such trouble has potential to happen again to countries who build or purchase large ships without facilities to dismantle them.
Background information (in French, but you certainly can find a way on the internet for such translations):
* Wikipedia page on the dismantling the Clemenceau https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
* News article from 2003 about when the Clemenceau was seized near Italy https://www.leparisien.fr/fait... [leparisien.fr]
* News article from 2006 with the chronology up to that point https://www.nouvelobs.com/soci... [nouvelobs.com]
* News article from 2008 about the transfer to UK: https://www.lefigaro.fr/actual... [lefigaro.fr]
Hydrogen sulfide (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Hydrogen sulfide (Score:2)
Hydrogen sulfide as in the same hydrogen sulfide found on volcanoes eruption?
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There is an excellent two part documentary about the Pearl Harbor salvage on youtube.
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Usually from the waste tanks, but especially bilges, slop tanks and sewage. [safety4sea.com]
Other ways (Score:2)
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They should sink it off the cost of France, where it was made.
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Can't. The Mediterranean is a sea only in name. Its just a huge lake that connects the developed European and North African world.
Oh no, a horrible accident (Score:3)
Mayday, mayday, we're sinking! Oh the humanity!
Fortunately we were sailing with a skeleton crew and there were a whole lot of other marine vessels nearby. Thank our lucky star, too bad the ship is lost.
Dangerous Gas... (Score:5, Informative)
The problem isn't a gas that's killing people, rather it's the lack of oxygen.
Basically, all the oxygen in a ship gets turned into rust, and as more oxygen is consumed, there's less available in the space to breathe.
Seafarers know it as The Rusty Assassin, [archive.org] and it has killed many, many people over the last century.
can i have it? (Score:1)
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Tell me you were in the Navy without telling me you were in the Navy, LOL!
So dumb, my head hurts now .... (Score:3, Informative)
They're afraid of it because asbestos!?
That's a naturally occurring substance that's not harmful at all unless you grind it up and breathe it in ... and even then? It's over prolonged periods of time. So bad news for people working in a factory that works with asbestos-lined brakes all day, every day, for many years. Also bad if ingested, like the concerns about small kids eating lead paint chips off of walls.
Otherwise, it's far less dangerous than a lot of other materials. Seems to me the environmentalists just CAUSED a whole environmental issue by whining about the original plans to dismantle the ship and recycle a lot of it. Utterly stupid ....
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The article singled out asbestos as a toxic material of concern, so yes, I bring it up specifically too!
"A hundred other toxic substances" is meaningless. I have a hundred or so toxic substances in any automobile, most likely. Does anyone really care? No ... because there are ways to handle them, or they exist in such small quantities, they don't pose a real concern.
Build-up of dangerous gasses (Score:3)
This problem isn't restricted to this particular ship; it's an issue all navies have to deal with.
Thing is, these ships are typically manned mainly by young guys, and those guys don't exactly have healthy diets - their emanations sometimes are silent but deadly...
Why sink it themselves? (Score:2)
Sell it to Russia and they can let Ukraine sink it as part of their war.
Lets be real (Score:2)
No government wants it? (Score:2)
The French government should be forced to accept it for recycling, as they produced it.
Donate it to Ukraine (Score:1)
I hear they're jonesing for matériel.
Ignore details - go crazy without reason (Score:3)
The paranoia about asbestos is amazing. Most of the people who go nuts about it [a] do not know what it is, [b] do not know why it was used, and [c] do not know what the actual health risks are, so they've heard it's DEADLY and they're in a panic... they're like those people who glove-up and triple mask before going hiking alone in order to avoid death by Covid-19 [eye roll]
Asbestos is a NATURALLY OCCURRING MINERAL. It's NUTS to go crazy over the idea of placing a thing back into a remote part of the environment that was originally IN THE ENVIRONMENT. There are probably a lot of other MAN-MADE things on that ship that will do far more environmental harm if dumped into the ocean.
Asbestos was NOT some plot by some James Bond villain to wipe out humanity; Asbestos was discovered at a time when humans had no practical alternative for fire-resistant/fire-proof needs. Ships like this one tend to have MILES of pipes inside that are covered in asbestos to keep the crew members from being maimed or killed by contact with pipes full of insanely hot high pressure steam. People need to get some perspective: Asbestos has saved millions more lives than it has claimed. I know for a fact that my life was saved by the stuff more than once. Now we have more modern materials, but decades ago we did not; that's just how human existence works.
Asbestos is not some chemical, or virus, that will kill you if you get too close to it or if you touch it. Asbestos MIGHT damage you or kill you if you inhale the fibers into your lungs (this is why most who are harmed/killed were either people who mined the raw material, or people who installed/removed it - people in a position to inhale LOTS of asbestos dust). The vast majority of people who served on a ship or worked in a facility loaded with asbestos-covered stuff were never exposed to the dust and are at no risk. There was never a reason to panic over asbestos; there WAS a need to panic much earlier over the handling of asbestos DUST.
Asbestos is still useful and interesting, it's just obsolete.
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people who served on a ship or worked in a facility loaded with asbestos-covered stuff were never exposed to the dust and are at no risk.
On the other-hand, my father worked for 30 years at Paris Jussieu University when he finally died from damages caused to his lungs by exposure to asbestos. Asbestos there lined the inner walls and conduits. The thing dust was so prevalent that a thin dust mix of concrete asbestos collected on surfaces and needed regular dusting off.
Never smoked and had an otherwise healthy life. But the university was built from the 1950's to 1970's. The whole place was lined with asbestos.
Brent Spar? (Score:2)
Remember the hype around the Brent Spar, oil drilling platform that Shell wanted to sink? Greenpeace made a huge stink of it. And finally the platform got torn apart somewhere or other, at huge cost. It turned out that actually Shell had it right all along, the danger was minimal and sinking that rig would have been a good solution. I wonder if that's at least partly true here, too.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for nature, it's only sensible to protect the environment we live in. But I'm not for ideological e