Why don't the scrap and recycle the steel?
There is no place in America to do that anymore. Ships of this size are sold to foreign scrappers and it is literally pennies that are gained. Also not like you want to give the Chinese or someone else a good chance to examine our ships for vulnerabilities and any of the countries that do scrapping will be happy to sell that privilege to anyone.
Smaller image control tests of these sorts to evaluate future designs would have had to have been done anyway. There was far more useful information gathered by doing the sink-ex in a very controlled and studied fashion that any benefit of the relatively small amount of money gained in selling her.
