Recently, teams of Navy specialists have successfully removed 230,000 gallons of fuel, or close to 800 tons, still aboard the Prinz Eugen when it sank at Kwajalein, 72 years ago.
The bottom of the lagoon at the Kwajalein Atoll is littered with dozens of sunken ships. Most are from the Battle of Kwajalein in 1944, during World War II. One ship, the German heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, was a survivor of not one, but two nuclear weapons tests conducted by the United States at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands in 1946.
Prinz Eugen, a German war prize from World War II, was part of Operation Crossroads, a pair of nuclear weapon tests conducted by the United States at Bikini Atoll in mid-1946 to investigate the effect of nuclear weapons on warships. The German cruiser was part of a fleet of 95 target ships assembled in Bikini Lagoon. The ships were fully fueled and provisioned. The lagoon was hit with two detonations of Fat Man plutonium implosion-type nuclear weapons similar to the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, each with a yield of 23 kilotons of TNT.
Prinz Eugen was anchored around 1,200 yards from the epicenter of both blasts and suffered minor damage from each. The second blast caused a minor leak which could not be repaired because the ship was contaminated by radioactive fallout. The radioactive ship was towed to Kwajalein where it sank five months later.
By the mid-70s, there was increasing concern that the fuel aboard the cruiser might leak and contaminate the waters of the atoll. In February 2018, the US Navy including the Navy’s Mobile Diving and Salvage Unit One, US Army, and the Federated States of Micronesia conducted a joint oil removal effort with the salvage ship USNS Salvor, which had cut holes into the ship’s fuel tanks to pump the oil from the wreck directly into the oil tanker Humber. They removed almost 230,000 gallons of oil that had remained on the ship in 173 tanks. By October 15, 2018, the Navy announced that the work had been completed having removed 97% of all the fuel aboard the sunken ship.
So… possibly 1000 gallons left in the wreck and their job is considered done?
J-P
Please give praise where praise is due
Well done the US Navy
Bravo Zulu to all involved in the recovery of the oil. I imagine the Navy only had a maximum estimate of the amount of oil that was on board. How much leaked during the nuclear tests and towing, who knows?
230,000 gallons of fuel on one of ninety five ships that were all loaded fully with fuel. Granted not all the ships held 230,000 gallons of fuel. Yet there is still an awful lot of fuel yet to be accounted for in that lagoon. Metal still rusts under water. Seems we are only patting them on the back for doing the easy one that is at the surface. Yet willing to ignore the other potential 10 million gallons of fuel in the rest of the ships being ignored.
Oh yes, 230k is very important when we ignore 10 million
94 ships times 100,000 equals 9,400,000
Rounded to an even 10 million
Is it possible to use the recovered oil or would the nuclear contamination prevent that?
In which case what is done with it?
The oil back then was probably bunker oil. A very thick crude. In 80F weather, if poured from a bucket (presuming it was pushed out of the bucket), would retain the shape of the bucket for a minute or so. Bunker oil is great for boilers when they can atomize it to burn.
In the Live Steam hobby fuel by heat were as follows.
Wood (soft)= 3
Wood (hard)=4
propane =5
kerosene = 7
Motor oil = 11
It is only supposition yet it is my guess that bunker oil would be about 25.
What do these numbers mean. Well if you wanted to heat a boiler at 100 psi and you used bunker oil? 1 pound of bunker oil would be about 5 pounds of propane to do the same amount of heat.
My apologies if these calculations are wrong. I learneed it when I was 18, alas now I am 60 and my memory is starting to blurr.
Could it be reused? I dont know. Does oil have a radiation life? In my elementary days there was something about aftter 7 years we would be able to grow crops again.
Thanks Willy
Residents of new houses built on St Mary’s Island (part of the old Chatham dockyard which used to maintain nuclear subs) have a ban on growing anything for consumption in their gardens. That is after about 25 years of it being a brownfield site and the land being ‘decontaminated’ before building commenced.
I did wonder about the oil reclaimed from wrecks in Scapa Flow, which was not nuked, was it pumped straight into the bunkers of the salvage vessel?
Can bunker oil be used in a diesel? I believe the answer is a firm no. Diesel engines need a thin oil to flow through the injectors. If it is bunker grade fuel? They would have to refine it to be able to use it.
Tho the fun part about our fuel? There is more diesel available in the world than there is of gasoline or propane. As you refine diesel? You get gasoline and propane from cooking diesel. So the next time you hear a supposed expert say on the news. Diesel is more expensive than gasoline as there is more gas than diesel. You too will know the expert is full of BS
However, despite the raging fire and ravages of time, some 500,000 gallons are still slowly seeping out of the ship’s submerged wreckage: Nearly 70 years after its demise, Arizona continues to spill up to 9 quarts of oil into the harbor each day. Dec 7, 2011
https://www.history.com/news/5-facts-about-pearl-harbor-and-the-uss-arizona
Phil
Phil
that article was about 2011, well before the extraction in 2018 so what is your point?
Ah, I get it now, in the case of the Arizona they are playing lets just guess how long it will take to rust through rather than removing the oil before it makes a huge expensive mess.
“They” we’re kvetching about is us, ignoring the difference between they who are doing and they who confine work to prattling on keyboards. Pretty much everybody directly involved in creating the mess is dead, so now we all own it, or pretend we don’t. Complaining about imperfection in comments is pretty much to do nothing at all, a pretense of its own.