Mike Morgan

As an Ex Nuke Submariner (Engineer RN), I will tell you what I can remember. All Nato submarines as far as I know use a pressurised water reactor and
probably the Soviets used the same type.

In a shutdown state the reactors control rods would be down inside the core of the reactor, preventing fission taking place. To start the reactor these control rods would be withdrawn slowly until the reaction process began called (critical).

Depending on how far these rods were withdrawn related to how much power/steam was produced to drive steam turbines. All the subs I served on carried multiple safety devices that ensured the reactor would shutdown in the event of an accident. I'm not talking double or even triple redundancy - much much more than that. I might be biased but there was a hell of a lot of clever thinking by the designers to keep the reactor as safe as possible.

The control rods I mentioned earlier were designed to drop back into the reactor whenever the operating envelope was exceeding the design intent, and shut the reactor down, know as a 'scram'. When the reactor was shutdown alongside we could work within the reactor compartment within hours. We all wore film badges, basically a photographic negative that would measure the amount of radiation we had been exposed to - which, over the year, was less than somebody would be exposed to if they were living somewhere with plenty of granite like Edinburgh.

There have been a lot of reasons given as to what happened to the Kursk. I do not think the truth will ever come out fully, but if I had to make a guess on what I have heard so far then I think it would have to be a weapon exploding onboard causing a massive break in the pressure hull. A good analogy would be from the film Armageddon. Where the chap demonstrates by holding his palm out with a firecraker on it. Result burnt hand. Put a firecracker in your palm and wrap your hand around it, result-no hand!

That is the same sort of thing that would happen to the pressure hull of a submarine. The Soviet's reactor will at this time be scrammed and any residual heat will be dissipated by natural convection through the pressure hull to the cold sea water outside - that's a small amount of heat in a vast ocean. There isn't any recorded background radiation at this time, but I would have to agree that the sub should be raised and removed from the seabed. There could be a leak one day, but I think we are talking decades rather than tomorrow. There have been several other nukes lost at sea - the one that sticks out is a Soviet sub that sank several hundred miles off Hawaii years ago. And Howard Hughes (the American billionaire) built the Glomar Explorer, a converted supertanker, into a supposed deep sea drilling platform. Although it has never been confirmed by the American government it was fitted with a giant claw which was lowered to the sea bed five miles down and the Soviet sub was lifted into a moon pool built inside the ship. How much they recovered has always been subject to speculation, but I have seen a video of what was supposed to have been the burial of several of its crew members. This documentary was on Discovery Channel which is pretty factual in its coverage.

Without getting carried away with the politics of whether nuke subs should be at sea or not, I believe they have been, and still are the most effective deterrent against any potential aggressor. And until a safer form of propulsion is developed that allows subs to remain submerged indefinitely, then nukes will be around for a long time yet.

Finally as a fellow submariner my deepest sympathy goes out to the family and friends of the BRAVE crew of the Kursk.
 
 

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