OT: more on nuclear subs (C5 documentary)

Should've bought it from Toyota. Zero failures (allegedly).

As a sixth former in the 1960's, I worked in a petrol station where Donald Campbell had an account. He had one of the first Toyota Corollas in the country. His comment to the gaffer about Toyota reliability was "Do you know, I had to replace a side-light bulb".

Trenchant is 35 years old and, according to the Wiki, is due to be decommissioned before the end of the year. Maybe that's why cameras were allowed on board.

"Trenchant's final four-month deployment in the Atlantic was filmed for a Channel 5 television documentary called Submarine: Life Beneath the Waves, which was first shown in the United Kingdom in September 2021. On

Had to hunt for this official quote but it puts it into more perspective

?Ten weeks? filming went into the first episode so it appears more ­dramatic than it is. It does seem that we have a lot of misfortune but

He probably had a nervous breakdown. Does not see like health and safety or reliability are the watch word for submariners from your description. Brian

Knowing our lot they probably got it made by Dylan or maybe specsavers.

Brian

Back in those days though it was reckoned that if a car was built to survive the trip from Japan then it could survive anything. Brian

So two questions then. 1 surely the ancillary items mentioned, and certainly the burn, would I think hardly be anything but bad luck or lack of looking after or provisioning things, 2nd, what do they now do with the reactor. Do robots go in, replace the bits near end of life and chuck the unit into a new submarine?

Brian

I don't know the answer to that, and it may well be classified. They certainly would not be re-used. The original reactors were refuelled every 10 years or so, the new ones are, I believe, at least notionally fuelled for life. There has been a lot of "updating" work on the reactor and/or fuel handling equipment at Devonport over the past decade or two.

If they follow civil nuclear practice, they will remove all of the fuel as part of decommissioning, then leave the rest of the reactor hardware somewhere safe for a century or so (almost certainly inside the hull) because the induced radioactivity in the steel etc. will by then fall to levels that make it easy to handle.

If they don't take the fuel out, then (inside the pressure hull of the boat) they have a lump the size of the pressure vessel which is probably two or three metres wide and high and weighing 100 tonnes or so. Since the pressure vessel is designed to contain water at maybe 200 bar, it provides pretty solid protection to anything nasty that might happen. In that state, it is not particularly dangerous or difficult to keep safe. Nothing short of an invading army with very substantial cutting and lifting gear is going to be able to steal it and you would need military level demolition skills and equipment to breach it. Provided you put it somewhere that is difficult to get at, it is not an attractive target for terrorists.

they were only copying European & British practice.

The engines had a serious workout when being unloaded from the boat :)

The may have survived the trip from Japan but not so much the UK weather!