Here we focus on how delays in upgrading dockyard facilities have become one of the limiting factors preventing the RN from getting submarines to sea and look at the efforts to resolve the problem.
Overview
Despite having an active submarine fleet numbering just 10 boats, there are currently not enough dry docks available to carry out maintenance on submarines. The work requires secure, nuclear-licensed docks and there are just two sites in the UK able to take submarines out of the water for repairs that demand full access to the hull, hydroplanes and propulsors. The shiplift at Faslane is a fine facility that allows boats to be worked on undercover while protected from the weather and satellite view but it can only take a single boat and the base has no other dry docks. The 30-year-old shiplift has been unavailable for at least some of the time during the last few years.
Devonport Dockyard is no longer a submarine operating base but the main site for nuclear submarine maintenance. This is a very large naval base and a cursory view would suggest there are ample facilities to meet the RN’s relatively modest requirements. At the time of writing, for a variety of reasons, none of the four dry docks in Devonport intended for submarines are ready to accept boats.
This situation will not last forever and an extensive programme of works is underway which will dramatically improve facilities in future. Unfortunately in the near term, the result is that boats are stuck alongside awaiting the availability of docks. There could also be a problem if there were to be an emerging defect that required dry-docking at short notice. This situation was predictable and is mostly the result of delaying the start of infrastructure upgrades by several years.
15 Dock, Devonport
Of most immediate concern is 15 Dock at Devonport. HMS Triumph completed the last major Trafalgar-class submarine refit in the dock, a 4-year work package that concluded in 2022. Subsequently, the dock has remained empty while it is upgraded in order to accommodate Astute-class boats and meet ever-more restrictive safety standards.
From early 2022 to March 2023, HMS Audacious spent 403 days away from the UK on patrol in the Eastern Mediterranean. While on this deployment she underwent maintenance periods in Souda Bay and in Limassol. The RN has revealed that during this time divers completed a very difficult repair to ballast tanks that would usually need a dry dock. Since returning in March, Audacious has been stuck alongside at Devonport awaiting 15 Dock to become available. One of just 6 active SSNs, Audacious is a relatively new boat, launched in 2017 but had already spent more than 4 years in the water before she was commissioned in September 2021.
Under contract Fleet 22, Babcock is refurbishing 15 Dock for enduring Astute-class Base Maintenance Periods (BMP). In January 2023 the SDA reported “design, on-site survey assessments and physical work has now commenced on site. Additionally, capability for a Hydrostatic Barrier has been integrated into the schedule in line with safety case requirements for the enduring capability ahead of the first docking”.
In September we submitted a Freedom of Information (FOI) request asking when 15 Dock will be ready. After a much-delayed reply, the SDA refused to answer, claiming it: “would provide potential hostile actors with an insight into RN submarine availability. Therefore, the balance of public interest was found to be in favour of withholding the information for the purpose of safeguarding national security”. The MoD is increasingly obscuring awkward facts under the guise of security despite claiming their “commitment to openness and transparency” in the same paragraph. If the date that the dock will be ready were made public, the length of HMS Audacious’ work package and the future maintenance schedule for other boats is entirely unknown and so would contribute little to accurately predicting future submarine availability. This became farcical when the MoD confirmed subsequently in an answer to a written question submitted by Jeremy Corbyn MP (ex-CND chairman and friend of Russia) that they expect to gain beneficial use of the facilities sometime in 2024.
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July 2022 aerial image of 15 Dock (left) and 14 Dock (right) Devonport, both undergoing upgrades. Decommissioned HMS Trenchant can be seen (bottom left) and HMS Triumph in maintenance on the corner berth (top left). (Image: Google Earth). -
The reverse view. The Reactor Access House (RAH) over 14 Dock (left) will be used to remove spent nuclear fuel and radioactive components from the boats being dismantled (Image: Google Earth). -
HMS Audacious continues her long wait for a dry dock in Devonport, November 2023 (Photo: CN pics).
Although not relevant to the fleet of today, work to prepare 14 Dock to support nuclear submarine disposal continues at a glacial pace. Under contract Defuel 23, the dock is being prepared to enable the removal of nuclear fuel and Low-Level Waste from decommissioned SSNs prior to dismantling. The SDA reported in January that the project was “well advanced and in addition, dock and enabling facility surveys to scope the supporting works necessary to commence and sustain PWR1 defuel operations are nearing completion”. 14 Dock should be ready for use sometime in 2024 although work on ex-HMS Valiant, the first boat at Devonport to be dismantled was supposed to start this year.
SWIF
The Submarine Waterfront Infrastructure Future project (SWIF) is the longer-term solution to SSN maintenance, part of a wider £2.5Bn 10-year package of investment in Devonport infrastructure. The most significant part of SWIF is a major reconstruction of 10 Dock but it also includes a new non-tidal SSN maintenance berth on the East Wall of 5 Basin as well as supporting buildings and services.
10 Dock is the largest dry dock in Devonport, expanded in the 1930s to accommodate battleships but the 2.61-hectare dock will be much reduced in size by massive reinforcement of the walls to protect against (highly unlikely) seismic events. This major civil engineering work includes extensive drilling to enable the insertion of anchors into the bedrock and the use of specialist toughened grades of concrete. Electrical, water and waste pipes will be accommodated in subway structures in the new walls and a Water Retaining Boundary (WRB) will be added to protect the dock from tidal surges and possible future water level rise associated with climate change. A new dock building will house workshops, instrumentation, control and automation technology together with modern worker amenities. This project will be similar to the huge upgrade of the adjacent 9 Dock carried out between 1999 and 2002 but avoids the complexity added by the need to conduct reactor refuelling operations.
Devonport-Submarine-Support-Facilites-SWIFEnabling work has already been underway for more than a year to de-risk the construction phase as well as building demolition, site clearance and construction logistics planning. Babcock formally signed the £750M contract for SWIF with the SDA in November 2023, construction will start in 2024 and is due to be completed in 2027. The dock will primarily be used to refit and maintain Astute class and the following SSN-AUKUS boats but will be of sufficient size to accommodate the Vanguard or Dreadnought class SSBNs, should it be required.
It should be noted that the original plan for the maintenance of Trident boats, Project RD57, involved the construction of two brand-new dry docks at Rosyth. A covered 190 x 30m dock would be for SSBN refits and the second 150 x 28m dock would accommodate SSNs. One of the existing dry docks would also be converted nuclear-qualified to provide an emergency SSBN docking option. Work began in 1987 but after 185,000m3 of rock had been dug out and concrete foundations laid at a cost of £120m, in 1993 the government switched Trident refits to Devonport as a more affordable option. The Devonport plan centred on the conversion of 9 Dock and had no SSBN emergency docking option, effectively SWIF will finally help address this omission.
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Babcock model of 10 Dock, complete with SSN-AUKUS representative submarine. The model emphasises how much narrower the new dock will be after refurbishment. Note the 5 fixed-position hydraulic cranes designed to improve safety when lifting loads in a nuclear-certified dock. (Photo: Navy Lookout). -
Overhead views. There is no RAH but a small (blue) gantry crane on rails. The dock has the capacity to accommodate the larger Vanguard or Dreadnought class boats if needed (Photo: Navy Lookout). -
Devonport, October 20203. (Left) HMS Bulwark still in refit in 8 Dock. Following 7 years of accommodating HMS Vanguard, 9 Dock is undergoing maintenance (blue-wrapped scaffolding) and is not yet ready to receive HMS Victorious. Initial works are underway around 10 Dock (Photo: Andy Amor). -
Old buildings adjacent to 10 Dock have been demolished and number 11 Dock (bottom left) has been cut in half with the addition of a new wall to add structural strength (Photo: Andy Amor, October 2023). -
Artist’s impression showing the development of 5 Basin East Wall for alongside SSN support.
HMS Vanguard finally left Devonport in May 2023 after her 7-year refit in number 9 dock. There is currently an ‘outage project’ managed by the Bechtel and Cavendish Nuclear programme delivery team to maintain and improve the dock ready for the next V-boat. HMS Victorious arrived at the end of May and is in 5-basin having begun the initial phase of her major refit. She will go into 9 Dock when the refurbishment work is complete next year.
With 10 Dock devoted to submarines, Devonport now only has 8 Dock and the 3 covered dry docks in the Frigate Support Centre available for surface ships of frigate size and above. The covered docks will not be large enough for Type 31 or Type 26 frigates so various options for another large dock infrastructure project are being considered.
Faslane shiplift and floating dry docks
The shiplift at HMNB Clyde was a very complex civil engineering project begun in 1987 and completed in July 1993, two years late and costing £314m. The lift structure rests on 600 vertical piles and 221 raker (angled) piles driven into the rock below the seabed as seismically-qualified nuclear sites have to withstand an earthquake measuring six on the Richter scale. The ability to take boats out of the water at short notice and work on them undercover has proved critical to the submarine service, especially for maintaining the deterrent force. Although the SSBNs have priority, the shiplift has also proved vital to keeping the early Astute class boats going in the absence of suitable dry docks. It is unclear if the structure will be refurbished for the long term to support the Dreadnought class but it will be needed again in the near term, given that 10 Dock in Devonport will not be ready for another 4 years.
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(Left) basic diagram showing the shiplift arrangement. The platform is lowered and the submarine is eased into the shed before being raised on the platform. (Right) the view inside the shed from the landward side (Photo: Babcock). -
The Shiplift at Faslane soon after construction was completed in the early 1990s. -
(This and main article image) Vanguard class submarine raised out of the water on the shiplift in the shed at Faslane – photographed to mark 50 years of maintaining the Continuous At Sea Deterrent in 2019. -
A wider view of Faslane. There are no dry docks but the shiplift (right) dominates the view. The finger jetty is in the centre with the Valiant (floating) jetty at the top of the image (Photo: Babcock). -
Bomber alongside at Faslane adjacent to the huge shiplift shed. -
AFD60 (Admiralty Floating Dock) was built in 1966 with a capacity for vessels up to 6,000 tons. It was used for SSN maintenance in Faslane until 1997 when it was sold for commercial use and moved to Hafnarfjördur, Iceland. -
American SSBN USS Nathanael Greene being brought into AFD60 at Faslane for emergency docking after losing her propellor in August 1984.
The MoD recently initiated the Additional Fleet Time Docking Capability (AFTDC) Programme to acquire two floating docks and associated infrastructure at Falsane. Floating docks are less common than they used to be but there is already historical precedence. Until the mid-1990s Admiralty Floating Dock (AFD60) was in use for SSN maintenance at Faslane. The new floating docks will require the construction of a jetty, sea wall and other supporting building work but is the quickest and cheapest route to add capacity. They also have the advantage of mobility and can be built by shipyard anywhere in the world and be relocated if circumstances demand, although need more maintenance than a graving dock.
Floating docks for nuclear submarines are not subject to the same extreme safety regulations as nuclear facilities ashore but the AFTDC will inevitably have to be delivered to a very high standard. Assuming tenders are restricted to British industry, it will be an interesting challenge as no floating docks have been built in the UK since the 1960s. Because the Dreadnought class displace 17,200 tonnes, at least one of the new docks will have to be more than double the size of AFD60. The floating docks at Falsane would also, once again, allow the US Navy the option of taking their boats out of the water if they suffered an emerging defect while deployed in the eastern Atlantic area, something that was done routinely in the past.
In summary, submarine support infrastructure is currently in a parlous state with directly detrimental impacts on frontline strength. In the long term, the RN looks set to be spoilt for choice with 3 submarine dry docks at Devonport, two floating docks and the shiplift at Faslane. The biggest challenge will then be to maintain a cadre of civilian nuclear-qualified engineers and shipwrights needed to maintain the boats.
A very well researched article.
The future is bright but the present is a mess as the RN physical infrastructure investment taps were turned to a trickle through the 1990’s onwards.
Big civils projects like these, in historical locations, are not that easy to deliver. Then add nuclear.
It does seem odd to be filling in the large docks needed for the new frigates for SSN and SSBN use when all subs are now based in Scotland and frigates are based out of Devonport. Is it just me or is there an element of the barking mad at play here?
I think it’s a case of excepting the real world.
The workforce for big refits of nuclear submarine lives close to Plymouth. Only a very small proportion would be likely to move to Faslane if the work moved there. The existing workforce in Faslane is experienced in “running repairs” smaller refits and urgent defect rectification. I’m sure given time and money they could be trained to do big refits but it would take decades to build up experience. Managing the transition with a workforce at one end working hard to grow and at the other looking to leave to new jobs would be a huge risk. Given efficient modern undercover facilities for frigates will likely need new buildings why not make best use of the existing docks and workforce at Devonport for sub refits?
I totally agree.
Moving the whole nuclear thing to Rosyth would have been a big ask even back in the 1990’s.
I also agree that using more modern frigate refit sheds should make things more efficient.
Nuclear refit work had been going on in Rosyth decades longer than at Devonport. It was the refit site for HMS Dreadnought — the original one — and the Polaris subs from the 1960s. In 1984, Rosyth was chosen to do the future work because it already had the speciality, including the staff. It continued to undertake major submarine refit work until 1997 when it was sold off. Devonport only started work in 1981. The government took the risk to shift that work down south away from Rosyth. And it was indeed a big ask.
True but I thought that quite a bit of nuclear work was done down south prior to the consolidation?
Yes. Chatham kicked off not long after Rosyth and continued up to 1984. Devonport was still pretty new at that point, but I assume it was supposed to take on some of Chatham’s nuclear workload at least until the extra facilities in Rosyth were completed. Others will know more than I about the split.
The original Dreadnought, nuclear powered?
LOL. The secret nuclear project of the 16th century? They claim the Spanish Armada was blown off course, but really…..
I meant the original nuclear sub of the name.
Since 1553 there have been 12 RN ships named Dreadnought incl the one under construction
Trust me the skill base at Devonport has been seriously depleted, look at the drop loads all over the press not to mention what didn’t make it into print.
In retrospect, the 1993 decision to consolidate from the two sites to Devonport was two sandwiches short of a picnic. It was said to save the between £250m-£260m estimate to complete the new facilities at Rosyth (already £150m into construction). The government claimed that as Devonport and its contractors, DML, estimated that it would cost only £160 million to refurbish existing facilities, it would actually save £100m. Rosyth then countered saying rather than build new, it could refurbish its own facilities for £147 million. A pointless race to the bottom. However, they had already lost.
It was pointed out in the Lords that refurbishment costs invariably overrun significantly [well no sh*t] and a dual option of Rosyth for subs and Devonport for surface vessels was the logical one. Others stated that nuclear submarine facilities needed to remain at both sites. Of many participating in the debate only one, Lord Weir (chairman of a large engineering company, a partner in Devonport Dockyard), did not argue so. All others were for one or other of the dual options. Contribution were of the nature: “There cannot be an argument because the facts are so overwhelmingly in favour of keeping both Rosyth and Devonport.”
However Vicount Cranborne, Defence Minister summed up:
He also claimed:
That latter makes it seem to me the government already had prejudged the options and were unwilling to look closely. Once Devonport had become the preferred option for nuclear, everything else followed. By 1997, when work began, the target costs for reburbishing the facilities of Devonport were just shy of £400m.
In August 2002 project costs were estimated to total £933 million. And still no emergency dock.
If you need to read all the excuses as to why it cost so much I suggest reading “The Construction of Nuclear Submarine Facilities at Devonport, Report by the Comptroller and Auditor-General, HC 90 Session 2002-03, 6 December 2002.” But it’s all the same-old same-old BS.
Could this be an effect of the peace dividend. eg the defence budget went down but cost of infrastructure etc normally stays the same.
So the lower your defence budget the higher the percentage get’s spent on infrastructure.
While your point about infrastructure increasing as a proportion of budget is doubtlessly true, it can’t account for an absolute increase in costs from £160m to £933m in less than a decade.
I suspect the key phrase (repeated from the article) here is “ever-increasing safety standards”. Once you go down the ALARP route, quantifying and mitigating risks gets very expensive, very quickly.
Also worth remembering that Chatham also conducted SSN refits from the late 60s through to mid-80s. I’m old enough to remember the RD57 fiasco. It would probably have been a better bet than Devonport – in fact the two concrete plinths for what would have been the docks were still visible up until the noughties when spoil from the work to make 1 dock suitable for the carrier build was dumped there and later filled over when Babcock fancied turning that part of the dockyard into a container port.
How big a part do you think the long running antagonism to the Tory party in Scotland played in the decision?
Probably not too much. At the time, Options for Change (aka the Peace dividend) was all the rage and because the nasty Red Banner Northern fleet had largely gone away, there was a perceived decreasing need for Naval Facilities in the North.
Which is why Rosyth Naval Base closed in 95(-ish?) and the dockyard was run down. In the late 90s / early noughties it was a ghost town compared to now. It remains a bit of an oddity, the only dockyard without an associated naval base.
The whole base and dockyard infrastructure issue has been in flux for the best part of thirty years. It’s not much more than fifteen years ago that people thought we could close Portsmouth as a naval base.
I think that the naval base has finally been re:-instated.
DML had supposedly had the risks transferred to it and it was called a fixed-price contract, but that liability was capped at £35m, so anything over that was paid by the MoD.
I think we are getting the picture, right?
With it being fixed price, there was obviously no need to supervise.
And DML didn’t tell them what was going on. The Nuclear Installations Inspectorate for policy reasons would only talk to DML and refused to engage with the MoD until late 1998, because DML was the nuclear licencee not the MoD. So even if it had wanted to oversee, the MoD would have been completely blindsided during the first couple of years.
I’m sure there were plenty of people in the MOD trying to find out and raising the issue. Just not the right people. We are back to the old problem of willfully bind people in charge making sure that nothing is seen to go wrong on their watch, which they hope will be over before the brown stuff hits the fan.
Yes, yes. Enough!
Jon
As always, yours are a very good set of points.
You have however skipped over the huge consequences of a few key issues…
The first of those underlying technical issues used to be that, up until the very late 1980’s, the Nuclear Licensing regime did not apply to the UK armed forces. That was because they were all covered by Crown Immunity.
Thus, throughout the UK military’s nuclear programme during all of the (original) Cold War, the armed services made up their own safety rules…and… just to make it worse….most of their activities were covered by very-extreme secrecy. Anything with the word “nuclear” in it was automatically “top secret”. Some rules were excellent: others were crap!
From the 1960’s until late 1980’s, the Royal Navy generally followed the USN regulations. Enforced by Rickover, the USN’s atomic regulations were extremely tough. However, as many US nuclear facilities are quite deliberately located in very remote areas of the US of A, their safety requirements for their fixed nuclear infrastructure needed to be much less onerous than here in the far-more-densely populated UK (i.e. Idaho has a surprising large number of experimental nuclear power plants)
Thus, at the end of the 1980’s and early 1990’s, four things happened almost simultaneously:
Therefore:
,
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The impacts of these changes was very apparent as the Faslane / Coulport project developed through its the various phases.
Initially it had had been severely delayed because of finding unexpected mountains of asbestos all over the site (from old shipbreaking activities). However then the design were all changed to comply with the tighter post-Chernobyl design rules. That meant endless redesigns and answering the eight year old’s favourite question “Why? (Note: the eight year old’s were mostly working for RN, MOD and HM Treasury).
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Thus, picking up on your key points about Devonport:
I would add that, in the recent photos that Navy Lookout has just published for this article, I have already spotted a least half a dozen items that I personally am surprised are allowed by the dockyard management to occur on a nuclear licensed site.
Thus it appears to me that DML Dockyard Management should still be wearing their “L” plates on their lanyards.
Regards Peter The Irate Taxpayer
This is a fantastic response and one of the reasons this site is so valuable, on top of a good article, to give knowledgeable insight into some of the decisions taken at the time. Your comments deserve an article of there own!
Other similar low power research reactors was at Queen Mary College in central London, Manchester University and for Scottish Universities at East Kilbryde
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argonaut_class_reactor
Sizewell B was being built in 1988.
I did the radios on the tower cranes.
https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/1993-07-22/debates/a1d62501-179d-49be-8395-c551f7dfa050/Rd57SiteRosyth
Rosyth is used for the storage and dismantling -(low level and high level waste to come) of nuclear submarines under Babcock control
https://www.onr.org.uk/sites/rosyth.htm
‘Rosyth Dockyard was used for the refit, repair and maintenance of operational nuclear submarines from the 1960s until 2003. As each submarine reached the end of its operational life, it was defueled and decommissioned onsite. Phase 1 of the decommissioning is the removal of low-level waste from the decommissioned submarines.’
Not sure what point you’re trying to make?
Well aware of what happens to the seven boats at Rosyth thanks. Not least from having been aboard one or two of them….
It seems some ( not specifically you) have suggested that the upgrade at Rosyth for nuclear dismantling never happed/cancelled. And yet ONR says differently.
This gives the general reader some balance from the other comments
Dry informative – I learned quite a lot from that and reconnected with a few memories!
First of all, a very well done to Navy Lookout for an excellent article. Superb!
Nuclear Expertise
One of the big issues not mentioned here is the amount of nuclear engineering expertise in the UK – both professional design engineers and also key technical / skilled trades – has dramatically declined since the end of the 1980’s.This has been for two reasons:
One of the very few things that will dramatically help out the RN’s submarine fleet is IF the government gives the go-ahead to the many civilian small modular reactors proposed by Rolls Royce (another government decision which is late!). That will really help build up the skills base.
Resilience
In order to provide properly resilience for the submarine fleet it is probably always going to be essential go have two entirely separate sites: both with full drydock facilities.
Faslane / Coulport
Judging by the photos, it has not changed much in the last three decades!
These two sites really need to be considered as single entity
Geographically, the Falsane / Coulport base is there for two very good reasons: it is close to the deep water of the North Atlantic and at one end of the the vital GUIK gap.
Then, especially for the Trident boats, being able to arm “on site” is vital. Loading nukes would never happen nowadays at Plymouth!
I would query the assertion that this base is “remote”. The rather large city of Glasgow is only thirty miles away (Clydebank only 20 miles) and even Rosyth (Edinburgh) is only two hours away. Both cities are well known for engineering and shipbuilding expertise.
The Navy could do itself a really big favor at Faslane – with both its own crews and also the huge local workforce – by asking Network Rail to build a railway station at Falsane and extending the fast suburban service up from Helenburgh. That was proposed back in the 1980’s and (apparently) once again quite recently: however nothing ever seems to happen! Abut two thousand people live and work there: which is more than enough to justify the small investment. That alone would remove the “impression” of remoteness.
It was always something of a mystery why Falsane never had a “proper” drydock built back in the 1980’s: one instead of the ship lift (or the “Sh**lift ” as it was known in our design office was I was working on it as a new graduate). The only long term solution for proper maintenance at Falsane is to build a proper drydock – not mess about with another ship lift.
Furthermore, as Supportive Bloke quite rightly notes, in the most recent proposals the MOD/RN is making life very difficult for itself: by insisting (in its recent tenders) that major civil engineering contactors carry out massive civil engineering work inside the maximum security areas. As Supportive Bloke quite rightly notes: why oh why do they keep making this very basic mistake?????. It adds many many millions to every bill – and delays everything by years
Finally, I have always believed that key issue with Falsane has always been that many navy officers, especially the most senior ones, simply don’t like to be too far away from the centers of “political power” in London, Portsmouth (especially) and Plymouth. Therefore investment in Faslane, to make it a submarine “center of excellence”, has always been put on the backburner….. Hence the real reason why the Navy is in a mess today…
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Submarine Disposal
As Navy Lookout has quite-rightly said on so many occasions, the Navy has made an even bigger bodge of disposing of its old submarines than it has on maintaining them.
Simply because it is near to Sellafield….. the right place for doing this thankless task must surely be Barrow-in-Furness. Please build an all-new submarine disposal facility at Barrow!
It would be quite-easy to take each old sub up to Cumbria on a semi-submersibles ship, then – one at at time – cut the old subs into large pieces. Then just send the entire reactor section by road up to Sellafield for final burial
That alone would release a huge amount of land and docks at Devonport. It would also stop the expensive nonsense of tying up a skilled workforce cutting up old subs into tiny pieces.
Devonport
It was always a very bizarre decision, coming on top on many others, to demolish the working dry dock and replace it on the same site!
Devonport still has vast acreages of underused land. One of these areas, especially to the south, should have been used as vacant land to build an all-new dock. That would have left the old one in service until the new one was completed. It would have also made the new one much chepaer and easier to construct (ie. Supportive Bloke again!)
Mobile Teams
In the commercial ship maintenance world, techniques have moved on since the 1980’s.
However the Navy is still wedded to “one workforce: one dockyard”.
Why not transfer key worker by plane (weekly) between Falsane and Devonport? ; something which would certainly assist several key maintenance programme’s. That is now SOP in the commercial world
Expertise
I am of the view that this omni-shambles is yet another example of the consequences of the absence of professional engineering expertise within the Royal Navy: especially near very top.
The Submarine Delivery Agency suffers from a similar lack of professional competence.
Thus they have fritted plenty of money away on storage of long-dead subs; major refits (instead of replacements) refreshing worn-out facilities etc = when they should have got on and done the job properly in the first place.
In the nuclear business, which is by definition a long-term business: buying new kit works works out cheaper and more reliable in the long run!
Money
No shortage of this key commodity!
The submarine fleet uses up between one-third and one half the Royal Navy’s total budget every year.
regards Peter The Irate Taxpayer
Well said!
Minor point on weekly plane flights is that Plymouth Airport has been closed for many years and has no chance of reopening. That means Newquay, Exeter and many head to Bristol.
Charter flights at monday morning fri day evening
,
I was being a bit silly. But the RN has bases at each end of the country and a small personnel pool. Facilitating moving them about more easily might ease things……..
I did the first T42 refit back in the late 80s.
10 days on 4 days off 9 days on 5 days off.
Flew Edinburgh to LHR and coach to Portsmouth.
It’s do able but it’s not sustainable especially as we were paying for our own flights and then claiming it back.
Rosyth’s issue then and I suspect its still the same was that nobody wanted to be there for a refit and that included the Polaris Boats. Middle of nowhere. Really, really bad accom and awful traveling to and from your (then) base port areas
There was a perfectly effective double track rail link to false bay in the 1950s. It was a branchline from the West Highland linevthrough Helensburgh Upper. This was decommissioned and the tracks pulled up when the shipbreakers (Metal Industries) closed and the naval base started to expand. The route of the line has now been built on for the bypass and new building on the base.
An extension of the lower line from Helensburgh central is a non- starter. There is no room along the shore through Rhu
seems like we need another dry dock for 5 overall. maybe build one where the carpark is?
when one need’s upgrading we only have 3, which is not enough.
Given the size of the Sub fleet 3 dry docks (+1 for decommissioning) in Devonport, together with a ship lift and 2 floating dry docks in Faslane sounds plenty. The refit work in Devonport is planned years in advance so shouldn’t be a problem. 3 sites for out of water maintenance in Faslane is far more than has been available in the past. Money for any area of defence isn’t unlimited and needs to provide realistic VFM.
Good reminder of how important the unglamorous side of naval warfare and fleet operation is. It’s too easy to fixate on the specs or numbers of this or that warship and lose sight of the implications of those decisions. The biggest surprise for me was to realise how changes to safety regulations can have such an impact on fleet support and operation.
I believe availability of maintenance ance assets in the USA is also an issue for their submarine operations.AA
And for pretty much the same reason. Post cold war peace dividend followed by GWOT focus on counter insurgency. The return of great power competition has come as a complete surprise to military chiefs and even more so policy makers. The issues we’re having are repeated across the west.
It’s across their whole fleet.
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Unsurprisingly the story of fleet support infrastructure appears to mirror that for the surface fleet and RFA. Currently stretched and struggling to meet operational requirements due to past decisions to cut budgets and delaying the start of projects…
But a lot of work currently underway which should solve these and provide a much better situation in the future. The question is, how quickly can this brighter future be delivered given the slide to greater global instability and the increasing decrepitude of current resources (eg T23).
Investing in nuclear submarines is more than an investment in defence, it is an investment in the industrial base of Britain and therefore the whole economy.
It doesn’t surprise me that this escapes the residents of the Westminster Village.
“Number 11 Dock has been halved in size by the insertion of a wall to strengthen the adjacent dock with capacity for nothing larger than a harbour tug. With 10 Dock devoted to submarines, Devonport now only has 8 Dock and the 3 covered dry docks in the Frigate Support Centre available for surface ships of frigate size and above. The covered docks will not be large enough for Type 31 or Type 26 frigates so various options for another large dock infrastructure project are being considered.”
According to Kevin Russel-Young, Babcock’s program director for infrastructure projects the 11 and 12 Docks will be devolopeed for “the new type frigates”. I would guess that the old wall between 11/12 Docks will be demolished and 12 Dock will be used for Type 26.
Yeah, I also have seen articles stating that expanded 12 dock is to be used for frigate maintenance – anyone know which one of these 2 statements is correct?
Looking a a map that looks like a bad idea if it’s for refits rather than just for emergencies and quick jobs.
12 Dock is very isolated, even if there is space to build a shed over it there won’t be much space for workshops, stores, offices and workers facilities after the nuclear dock has taken the space it needs.
GDEB & Bollinger have got a contract to design and build Floating Dry Docks that can accommodate the new USN Columbia class SSBNs. Subject to acceptance by the UK nuclear regulators (probably not as simple as it should be) It should be possible, at low risk, to build another in the UK
SubMick
I will give you a score of a C+ for this suggestion.
Unfortunately this it is not (quite) what’s needed to do the job in hand……
These particular Floating Dry Docks are intended for use at the Electric Boat Company in Groton (a US town which properly lives up to its name!). These are not really intended for maintenance. These are intended for floating out the new-build Columbia boats and then lowering them, for the first time, very carefully down into the “grimey bathwater”.
The nearest equivalent here in the UK is the ship lift at BAe Barrow: which does effectively the same thing for each new Astute / Dreadnought boat.
Thus these type of drydocks are not realty suitable for heavy maintenance and are definitely not suitable for big refits: especially those refits involving “twiddly bits” in and around the nuclear reactors.
So, nice idea, BUT!
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I have always been a big fan of the traditional concrete “hole-in-the-ground drydock”. It has the massive advantage of simplicity:
Provided that you do not attempt to built your new drydock on very wet mud (note to DML: a very big hint has just been given here!) it is also quite remarkable easy to design a big block of reinforced concrete for absolutely anything that HSE-NNI may throw at you as a “design requirement for ALRAP”.
In marked contrast, raising several thousand tons of Barrow-built metalwork vertically upwards (by say ten metres) is, frankly, very hard work: whichever way you try to do it.
Thus there are huge complexities and (often forgotten) very big maintenance costs for either:
Thus traditionally-built drydocks abide by the key engineering “KISS” principle: (Keep In Simple Stupid).
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To return to the key point of my earlier posts. For heavy maintenance and a big submarine refits, what is needed for a proper drydock (or ideally two) is:
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The key lesson from many projects – and Falsane / Coulport back in the 1980’s/1990’s was a prize example this key principle – that with big self-contained new-build civil engineering projects, you get a lot of “Bang for your buck” when you design and build it on a fresh site to a design that is fit for purpose (so not severely compromised by “bodging” an existing facility)
Thus a completely new build submarine dry dock (or preferably two) to the south of the existing Devonport factory (i.e. on the ample vacant land) would have been far quicker and cheaper to build – by a competent civil engineering contractor – than what is now happening on site at DML with Babcock
A the present time DML are spending over billion quid of taxpayers money on a facility that will ultimately, – well, somehow, sort of, like – eventually do the job. However it will be nothing like as good as one which had been designed, on a fresh sheet of paper, to do the job properly.
Thus we can expect that every single future submarine refit to take longer and thus it will cost more. Furthermore, during that refit, the submarine will not be out patrolling in the wet and grimily: because the matelots will be zig-zagging along Union Street.
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Finally:
There is nothing new under the sun with this particular issue. Navy Lookout is only the most-recent!
This link is one from Parliament back in 1908; spoken by an MP at the very height of the original Dreadnought era:
https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1908/nov/24/the-construction-of-docks
Kaiser Bill also remarked on this issue at about the same time. However simply because I failed to take a German “O” level” back in the early 1980’s, I will have paraphrase what he said:
“We here in German design our battleships to fight. Only then do we design the drydocks. Over in Britain they design all of their new battleships to squeeze into their existing drydocks. Madness!”
Over one hundred years on: the RN has still not learnt this important lesson!
regards Peter The Irate Taxpayer
Sounds like the usual Navy cock-up.MOD (as always) grossly incompetant,together with poor quality senior navy commanders and totally pathetic politicians.
Navy guys don’t understand large civil engineering project – to them it is a concrete hole in the ground with a shed.
Senior civil servants don’t understand large civil engineering project – to them it is a concrete hole in the ground with a shed.
etc etc
The reality is that if you start trying to modify any complex ancient existing structure things. There are a lot of unseen and unseeable risks that you cannot contract for. The idea that anyone can do a fixed price contract for this is for the birds.
Then add base security, slowing everything down.
Then add base operations having to continue and the H&S nightmares that created with the interactions managed.
Then add live nuclear site…
You get the picture?
So if you want to do things at fixed costs you simplify things as much as possible.
So, if you take a piece of cleared land and you let the contractor check it thoroughly you can pass the risks and costs over to them.
As an experienced construction director I would expect the cost difference of clean land vs reworking old nuclear certified docks to be 5x at least.
Rosyth Dockyard was stabbed in the back and slowly chocked to death by Malcom Rifkind in his decision to award submarine re fitting to only one dockyard. this was a huge betrayal of the workforce for which he will never be forgiven, he put all the eggs in one basket and the result of this is clear to see today some limited capacity should have been retained at Rosyth with its large dry docks nuclear approved pinned to bedrock ( can Devonport say the same) ,even after all these years it still leaves a bad taste in the mouth. the re fitting facility at Rosyth would have been the best in the world and the safest ,instead we were left with a huge hole in the ground and a daily reminder of what might have been . however despite of MOD’s best efforts Rosyth lives on building ships ,so you can keep the radiation at Devonport good luck.
Rifkind was a lawyer before entering the Commons so wouldnt know one dockyard from another. He would have just said ‘cut the budget and make it snappy’ , his Spads and MOD would have done the details and didnt care how it happened
HMS/M Valiant in Chatham…….
https://thedockyard.co.uk/news/warship-wednesday-hms-valiant-the-first-nuclear-submarine-to-be-refitted-and-refuelled-at-chatham/
Terrifying the idea of doing nuclear handling in that open environment with a dry dock designed like that.
Zero chance of a proper clean up if anything goes wrong.
Zero containment topside….
That makes the Winscale (Cockcroft) Plutonium Piles look like a good idea.
It is very, um, open. Scarily open………
Dont understand submarine nuclear reactors do you. What are you expecting …a meltdown or explosion. The reactor is cold remember and the fuel rods removed.
A “shed” wouldnt be any help for your overactive imagination.
The subs reactor compartment is its own containment structure
I didnt mention this in relation to our Irate Taxpayer getting worked up about the Greenwich reactor as he had very useful information. But the silly scare stories dont help.
Some more ‘scarily open ‘ submarine overhaul/refuelling . ROFL
They won’t be refuelling and refuelling the reactor in there like that.
What was scary about Chatham was re and de furling was done in the open using jury rigged kit.
But I doubt you have ever worked in a nuclear certified environment?
Nothing scary about doing some hull work in the open even if it is the enemy of productivity and quality which is rather essential in submarine work.
Yes it was . Victorious refuelling overhaul
Vanguard at Devonport just a few years back.. sunny side up
Vanguard’s refit is the last one I would choose as an example of good practice.
The saying was in Chatham that you got a free vasectomy
Haha
I do understand how the kettle works very well thnx.
BTW how do you think the fuel rods were removed? That’s right by a winch from the scaffold under the tarpaulins.
At Chatham there were no specialist facilities.
What happens if one is dropped and fragments?
Or if the scaffolder didn’t do up the clips properly?
The withdrawn fuel rod containment can’t have been very solid as there is no high capacity crane on that dock.
If you drop something inside an appropriately designed building the *dust* is contained.
If you drop it in the open it isn’t contained.
There FIFY.
“Dont understand submarine nuclear reactors do you. What are you expecting …a meltdown or explosion.”
Nope – because that is not the risk that is being mitigated here.
“The reactor is cold remember and the fuel rods removed.”
“A “shed” wouldnt be any help for your overactive imagination.”
A properly designed shed helps a lot if you have a radioactive steam leak or you have some mildly radioactive dust that gets about. It is very, very, very unlikely but the more things that are fully planned for and mitigated the better. It is called a risks reduction strategy.
Inside a compliant nuclear facility you have
“The subs reactor compartment is its own containment structure”
“I didnt mention this in relation to our Irate Taxpayer getting worked up about the Greenwich reactor as he had very useful information. ”
The Irate Taxpayer is 100% correct. Very few people knew about the Argonaut in Wren’s Masterpiece. Except the Bond producers ironically……that is a story for another day.
“But the silly scare stories dont help.”
Sealed for life was because of the technical advances from US naval reactors which was shared with UK. First came the midlife only refuelling which didnt work out that way for a while.
Its cheaper but the sub is bigger and more expensive to build
The French as you know , with LEU, go the other way with still quite frequent refuelling’s ( and smaller subs), maybe every 10 years for their subs.
De Gaulle has done 2 refuelling’s [2007 and 2017]
Doesnt make sense as you suggest having ultrathick concrete dock walls for ‘containment’ unless the concrete covers the roof as well. The NL stories suggest its for seismic reasons. I understand the refuelling process is very safe, which is why its done in Devonport but the nuclear and conventional weapons are removed and held at Faslane.
Putting the fuel rods in or out of the sub reactor , is just the final part of their journey through a busy Britain
How many people knew about the same Jason low power training reactors at Queen Mary London University or Manchester University, presumably also in their basements
Have you ever been a student there or inside the buildings?
Supportive Bloke
The NBC analogy you have just used (above) sums it all up very nicely
It is very easy to forget that Nuclear, Biological and Chemical “nasties” are all classified within the same TLA category = for a very good reason!
regards Peter The Irate taxpayer
Just more corroboration for the plain truth that any effective navy is only as good as its supporting infrastructure, especially ordnance and mechanical maintenance. Even an otherwise too small Royal Navy would be much more effective in an actual hot war scenario if it was properly maintained and had sufficient stockpiles of fuel and munitions. Unfortunately, however ….
One of the drivers that sustained the Industrial Revolution was outfitting the Royal Navy.
The government opted out of sustaining a serious technology base for defence with the 1957 White Paper. Too far behind now.
Just every level of the tinny tiny little~ always broken ~ Royal Navy is so very depressing.
An interesting article with regard to the total lack of forethought and planning evident from both the government and MoD. I am not sure why the gratuitous insult to Jeremy Corbyn was included but I suppose he is still the bete noire to right wing dinosaurs. Perhaps they should vent their spleen on better targets such as people getting huge performance bonuses despite submarines being delivered 17 months late.