Makes sense to me as well I remember watching a documentary about the building of an astute and the officer sent to start the reactor saying it could easily power a city like southhampton my immediate thought was if we have a reactor that powerful and that small that it could have massive civilian potential bearing in mind we are trying to keep the lights on.
The Future of Britain.
- Thread starter ComeonBritain
- Start date
Yeah, they're incredibly powerful. Funny thing, HMS Ajax - the 7th Astute - will get the PWR3 rather than the PWR2 like the rest of the Astutes. The PWR3 being the reactor sheduled to power our Vanguard replacement.
Considering the size difference between an SSBN and SSN, it makes you wonder what sort of performance Ajax will have in one form or another.
The general public opinion is nuclear power is evil, so it's still a sensitive issue.
I was reading about thorium reactors the other day although in their infancy there is much less weapons grade material created it seems the UK may miss the boat as the article suggested we were more interested in developing our present urainium reactors despite having a large domestic resource of thorium. I think nuclear despite its high cost will have a role to play as energy security will be having a bearing on our future direction of the kit we buy.
There's not a huge export market for nuclear subs is the deal - it's one of those prestige platforms where if someone wants one, they want to develop it themselves. Our diesel boats were quite good but quite high-end - the Oberon's were pretty much a Trafalgar without the nuclear bit in the middle. And there may well have been capacity issues - the US has a yard big enough to handle sequential builds of three subs simultaneously - I don't think Barrow does ?
It's small to fit in a submarine. It needs to have a very high power density (ratio between output & its size & weight). But being small isn't an advantage for a civilian power station. You can make power station reactors several times bigger without having a significant impact on the overall size of the power station. And that very high power density can make it trickier to handle.
BTW, many nuclear power stations already use reactors derived from military designs. That was where the development money went, so those reactors were more developed, & were therefore adopted despite their military-optimised design features.
I understand that regarding the reactor size but it seems if we aren't ready or willing to export our technology ( which is understandable with nuclear) then some of the economic benefits could be gained by allowing some of the tech to flow through to the civilian world. like Swerve said, the smaller reactors seem like they are tricky to handle yet we seem to manage that risk quite well. I think factors such as energy security will be of as high vital importance regarding the future of GB. I think they missed a trick by not putting the reactors in the carriers though. I know life costs etc but these will be our most expensive capital assets in a long time, especially since we are already putting the latest reactors in attack subs the ability to be sent any where with out refilling I would have thought would be a price worth paying the extra for.
You'd need a new reactor design sadly - or have to install several of the PWR2's.
Any idea how much that would cost? For the sake of tech we already own and are building I know the modern diesel engines are high performance machines, but it still seems to be a missed opportunity.
The usual figure for fitting a nuclear reactor to anything like that size I've heard touted (in respect of the CG-N proposal for the USN) is about $800m.
Add in through life costs of having 4 nuke certified watchkeepers per reactor on tap 24/7/365, one of whom has to be with the reactor at all times and another of whom has to be on 20 minutes notice when the ship is just tied up alongside, well, it's expensive.
Indeed, IIRC isn't that just what the French did with CdG?
Also it seems to have been given the tags of "slow" and "underpowered" because of this.
Still quicker than a QE
I think the issue with CdG was that they'd selected a reactor from their existing sub program that needed refuelling more often with a lower grade of uranium, hence more maintenance cycles - not sure how true that is however.
Only by a few knotsStill quicker than a QE
I think the issue with CdG was that they'd selected a reactor from their existing sub program that needed refuelling more often with a lower grade of uranium, hence more maintenance cycles - not sure how true that is however.
I've heard that a fair bit about CdG + it seems like a nasty attribute for her, having to refuel that often.
I'm looking forward for snaps from Cougar 12 in the next few weeks, the RN RFTG and the MN CBG with CdG.
Cougar 11 included HMS Ocean, HMS Albion, T42 destroyer HMS Liverpool, T-boat HMS Triumph, T23 frigate HMS Sutherland + RFA Argus + Cardigan Bay (+ others) so it should be pretty interesting to see how a T45 does fitting into this and a French CBG.
I reckon - if a T45 goes along - it'll be Dragon.
It got some press recently being described as the RN sending a flotilla ready to retrieve British citizens from Syria.
Sod that, foreign office advice has been not to travel to Syria for over 18 months. They can buy their way out with gold or whatever.
Indeed, but it was just the media linking 2 seperate events.
Apart from Brazil, where are there real export oppertunities for the Type 26?
To build a nuclear powered carrier, the French had to either use an existing reactor, or spend a large sum developing a new one. They chose the cheaper option.Still quicker than a QE
I think the issue with CdG was that they'd selected a reactor from their existing sub program that needed refuelling more often with a lower grade of uranium, hence more maintenance cycles - not sure how true that is however.
Since nuclear reactors are big things, this limits the scalability of the ship design. It can get bigger or smaller only in rather large increments. Rather than go bigger & fit another reactor, the French chose to squeeze as much as possible out of the minimum reactor fit, to keep the cost down - again. So the reactors per se aren't the cause of the limited speed (which is a lot better than it was when she was using old propellers from Clemenceau), but the choices made on number of reactors & size of ship.
They've lengthened the time between refuellings for the reactors in the Barracuda submarines, but that's too late for CdG. Still, she'd need refits about as often as the refuellings anyway: the refuelling just means the refits take longer.
I'd say that depends on whether you mean immediate opportunities, or opportunities while they're building. If the latter, I'd say there are more, e.g. Chile, which has frigates commissioned 1986 (2), 1988, 1990, 1991 (2), 1993 & 1997. They're all second hand, & the scope for buying relatively new second hand ships to replace the older ones seems to be diminishing, not least because we now seem committed to running on our remaining T23s for much longer than those we sold to Chile, & handing down their equipment to T26. Also, Chile is prospering. A few new T26 should be affordable - but won't be needed quite yet.
Look forward, & there could be other customers by 2030.
Well you did offer the Upholder to Australia and eventually sold them to Canada as well as offering the Trafalgar to Canada when they were looking at buying a dozen SSNs in the 80s. If either Australia or Canada expressed interest in SSNs I am pretty sure the UK would be there with the Astute.
Most probably would, because they're our allies.
But I was thinking more along the lines of what the Germans did with the Type 209 and are doing with the Type 214. Or the French are doing with the Scorpene.
Depending which place you look at, Type 209 production went up into the 60's which - to me - is staggering.
Just seems like it could be a very profitable market to edge into, but we don't have the capacity to do it, sadly.
Which is pretty much the route we'd have had to go down for the QE's - there's no way we could go down the route of designing a nuclear reactor just for the QE's which means fitting PWR2's - probably two of them as a "next best fit" for a ship the size of a QE - of course, complicated by the fact that the PWR2 isn't designed for refuelling - and the life of a QE is likely to be double that of the submarine it's otherwise fitted to.
I'm seeing the idea of a nuclear powered QE as a non-starter