France is to send its decommissioned aircraft carrier, the Clemenceau, to India to be broken down for scrap metal after taking it off the hands of a Spanish contractor which unexpectedly tried to remove it from EU waters, officials said Friday.
The vessel, which was mothballed in 1997 after 36 years of service, will initially be stripped of its 210 tonnes of asbestos-laden insulation over the next six months in the southern French port of Toulon, where it has been moored since last December, the defence ministry said in a statement.
"Then, the shell will be towed to a demolition yard in India... (where) the residual captive asbestos will be removed and the hull demolished. That phase will also last around six months," the statement said.
The announcement was made after the signing of a contract Wednesday between the French government and a consortium, Ship Decommissioning Industries (SDI) Corporation, led by the German company Eckhart Marine Gmbh, the statement added.
The carrier will yield around 22,000 tonnes of metal.
The decision comes six months after France cancelled its contract with a Spanish company, Gijonesa de Desquaces, when it discovered the Clemenceau was being towed to Turkey for asbtesos-stripping in contravention of a clause requiring that be carried out in the European Union.
After a fruitless, months-long search for an EU port, which could carry out the operation, the French defence ministry decided to take it on itself and then send the hull to India.
The Clemenceau was superseded by the Charles de Gaulle, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.
During the last years of its service, it was deployed to the Gulf in 1990 and to the Adriatic between 1993 and 1996.
The defence ministry said the asbestos clearing task will be carried out an SDI subsidiary, Technopure, and the dismantlement operation will be undertaken by another SDI unit, Shree Ram Vessels Scrap Limited.
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