The response to my article of May 11, 2022, on Australian Proliferation, was laudable.
On May 12, 2022 Anonymous argued :
“Pete a few thoughts;
Firstly on training reactors, you are correct, SSN operators have always had them. However to date SSN operators have always had a nuclear power industry. If Australia reached a training agreement with the UK RN or USN for the nuclear-trained engineers to serve on RAN SSNs, it is not clear to me that Australia would need a training reactor. We will need Australian know how expanded, but in ARPANSA, ANSTO and ANU (ANU Arts was one of Pete’s Alma maters :-) the kernel of that knowledge base already exists. It needs expanding (about doubling in size in fact.)
Second on Indonesia I agree with Ghalib. Indonesia has not yet built even small research reactors comparable to Lucas Heights in Sydney. Past Indonesian proposals have involved Chinese or Russian help and have all fallen through. So they are far behind India in expertise.
The other thing that still concerns me with Admiral Mead's comments is timing. It bothers me nobody will nominate a start date for construction of SSNs in Australia. Without that how can industry plan to assist? I think we should do what the UK MoD did at the start of the Astute program and bring Electric Boat in as a managing contractor to run the ASC shipyard [at Osborne, South Australia]. [Electric Boat] got [BAE Systems] up to speed [building the Astutes] in about three years.
Pete Comment
As the AUKUS submarine project will cost more than A$170 Billion (being bandied about) planning preliminaries are not as fast as we submarine commenters would hope.
The Australian Nuclear Powered Submarine Taskforce needs to deliver (probably about April 2023, if Labor wins, maybe sooner if the Coalition wins) its all-encompassing report to the National Security Committee of Cabinet. Hopefully a public version of the report will be released.
Meanwhile the Federal Government has to go into the multi $Billion budgeting exercise for AUKUS subs. This will probably involve most government departments. Hopefully milestones and figures will be in the May 2023 Budget context.