[2ICofafireteam]

Old boats are a HAZMAT nightmare.

Assuming you need to do everything responsibly and above board, you may get paid for the scrap, but you need to pay to remove and dispose of pipe lagging, fuel and lubricant residue, separate and recycle various materials and W.H.Y.

I don't know about the US Navy but if they have to account for the proper disposal of everything in those ships, that's a gigantic task and selling them for a penny may well be an excellent deal.

A tangential thing:

Where I am, on the BC coast, I'm told the old way to dispose of old vessels (including commercial) was to scuttle them somewhere quiet.

There was a startup out here that was offering, for a fee, to responsibly dismantle boats and sort through everything and responsibly recycle or dispose of everything. What the owner would get is a paper trail, especially weigh-bills, showing their ship disappeared in a legal way. I believe it failed because of the cost.

[Accujack]

Exactly. The cost to remediate the hazmat stuff as the carrier is disassembled allows the scrap yard to make a profit, but it's not getting "free money" from the government.

When the aircraft carrier Oriskany was sunk as an artificial reef, the environmental remediation cost was $11.89 million.