The British experience with nuclear-powered submarines: lessons for Australia

Decommissioning and dismantling nuclear-powered submarines

The UK experience is that the decommissioning, defuelling and scrapping of nuclear submarines is fraught with technical problems and delays arising from those problems. It is also clear that these issues give rise to ever-increasing costs.

In 2019, the National Audit Office published its report of an investigation into submarine defuelling and dismantling. The investigation took place between 2017 and 2019. The NAO reported that despite the Ministry of Defence's 20-year-old commitment to dispose of the 20 submarines it had decommissioned since 1980, none had been completely dismantled by 2019 and that the Ministry stored twice as many nuclear submarines as it operated.

The long-term management, storage and disposal of radioactive waste streams from nuclear submarines remains unsolved in the UK after many decades. And radioactive waste management remains unsolved in Australia, which does not even have a national repository for low-level waste, let alone a disposal option for long-lived intermediate-level waste and high-level waste.

Sinking of civilian vessels, collisions, near misses, groundings

Between 1982 and 2015, UK civilian sources collated a dossier of information on 170 "interactions" between civilian vessels and nuclear submarines including net "snaggings", collisions, near misses and at least 30 suspicious unexplained sinkings in UK waters. These incidents have led to loss of life, total loss of vessels and loss of fishing gear. Despite not firing a shot in anger, UK nuclear submarines have been responsible for the death of a number of UK citizens as a result of such interactions.

Despite the best attempts of both civilian and Defence authorities, the secrecy surrounding nuclear submarine operations makes risk avoidance that much more complex, with notification of nuclear submarine movements not publicised and the details of patrol and training strategies not divulged to judicial or government agency inquiries.

Another problem concerns radioactive discharges from submarine bases. One study demonstrated that a coastal population living approximately 32km downstream of a submarine base received a higher dietary dose of man-made radioactivity from locally grown food stuffs than did a population living next to a civilian nuclear power station.

The report, "The British experience with nuclear-powered submarines: lessons for Australia", is online or direct download PDF.