The Secrets of Trash on Nuclear Aircraft Carriers
September 11, 2008 · Print This Article
What’s life like on a nuclear aircraft carrier? That’s what 10-part PBS series ‘Carrier’ aims to find out. Filmed aboard the USS Nimitz, Carrier follows a core group of personnel living and working on the carrier. The average age of the crewmen is 19, and many of the jobs are far from glamorous. One segment that caught our eye focused on the trash processing department. For anyone not already familiar with the practice of dumping at sea, it’s shocking. Check it out starting at 10:40 below.
In the clip, Captain Ted Branch says, “The Navy has always been a very good steward of our environment. You’ll find that when compared to the civilian cruise liner industry, we are far more environmentally friendly than those types of ships.” Another unidentified sailor says, “We don’t dump anything that, like, could contaminate the water or anything, everything we dump is like regular cans or food that we don’t eat.”
That doesn’t make it any easier to watch as the bags of trash slide down the chute and out into the open water, adding to the already serious problem of pollution in our oceans. Everything but plastic gets thrown over the side of the ship.
Even better, another sailor talks about seeing protesters from Greenpeace and how absurd he thinks it is. “There’s absolutely no merit to what they have to say. To me, it’s almost like the KKK – they’re real fired up about something that makes no damn sense at all.” Amazing.
Continue watching for some interesting tidbits abut the nuclear reactor and the people who work in it, who are described by one woman as “the trenchcoat people, the weird ones.”
Link [Hulu]
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If you think the dumping at sea of rubbish is bad, consider the environmental damage that is done by the dumping of ballast water! They fill up their ballast in one part of the world, which will inevitably contain species from that area, then dump them as invasive species elsewhere!
Just atrocious!