News AUKUS - new Australia/UK/US alliance

[trenchfoot]

Interesting. Out of the loop. Let's just say the US designs are very robust, inherently safe (convection cooling) and last an amazing amount of time with at least one refueling of course. I'm just speculating that the UK doesn't want to expend the amount of money it cost to refuel their reactors, thus the seemingly early, compared to US, retirement of the Vanguards. By the way, that end of the boat is not really in my wheelhouse, but, you hear things after decades in that specific business.

I have a brother who worked on nuke subs at Pearl (ret.) and his mentioning how the sub hulls had to be cut open for refueling. That sounds like a very time consuming and expensive task to accomplish, especially from the hull integrity safety point of view.

 

[hal2kilo]

I have a brother who worked on nuke subs at Pearl (ret.) and his mentioning how the sub hulls had to be cut open for refueling. That sounds like a very time consuming and expensive task to accomplish, especially from the hull integrity safety point of view.

Fortunately, as far as refueling, the newer reactors fuel last so long, they only need one refueling in their lifetime. The old Poseidon's probably had 2 or maybe even 3 before being retired.
They also, can have a hull with known problems that they will change it's depth rating and useable lifetime.

 

[pcgeek11]

They also have to do hull cuts for O2 generators and many other things...