UNDATED (CNN) -- A hulking piece of U.S. Navy history is headed for the scrap heap.
The nation's oldest active duty warship, the USS Enterprise is bound for it's home port of Norfolk, Virginia where it will officially become inactive on December 1st.
The vessel is the Navy's first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier
It will take three years to remove the ship's radioactive fuel and reactors.
The work starts in Newport News, Virginia where the fuel will be removed.
After that, the ship will be hauled to the Puget Sound in Washington state where the nuclear reactors will be taken out.
To get there, the ship will take the long way around the southern tip of South America because it is too big to fit through the Panama Canal.
Finally, the ship will be cut up and sold for scrap metal ... a whopping 90,000 tons of it.