Boomer Submarine Trident Tube Retrofits

Navy built full-size 30-foot HY100 sections for boomers in the 90s for welding experience before committing to an all-HY100 hull.

This is another problem with our pressure vessels. You guys still use ASME pressure vessel steels. Almost all of those were developed in the 1940s, and it would cost probably half a billion dollars to qualify new steels for pressure vessels. The Department of Energy has tried to qualify 9% nickel steel — sorry, nickel-1-molybdenum — to use at higher temperatures for some of the nuclear reactors. They've been doing this for 40 years, and people are still somewhat hesitant. They haven't got a big enough database out there until you actually start building prototypes and get experience. That's why the Navy, before they went to an all-HY100 hull, built a couple of full-size 30-foot-diameter sections for a couple of boomers back in the 90s and put them in service, even though they were still on HY80. They wanted to get the experience with welding it. And even when they did go to a full-sized ship — Sea Wolf in the 90s — they still had major problems. One of the reasons for building things like Alvin and the Sea Cliff was as part of the prototyping research exercise. You build small submersibles, deep-submergence things, but it also gives you experience with fabricating what they hoped would be the next HY-series alloys.

Brief mention. The Electric Boat–trained welder whose shop took the Millstone contract was simultaneously doing SSGN conversion work — inserting clusters of ~19 non-nuclear warhead tubes inside former Trident tubes as part of SALT-era nuclear arsenal reductions. Used to establish the welder's credentials.

No one was willing to bid on it. They called in a team of us to figure out what to do. They did find a company — a guy who used to work at Electric Boat and started a very fancy welding company. He was doing a lot of Electric Boat work. When we went through, they were redoing some of the boomers — the SSGNs. They take the tubes and they put a bunch of non-nuclear warheads in there. This was all part of SALT, cutting down on the number of nuclear warheads. They were putting like 19 of these tubes inside one of the big old Trident tubes.