So I assume this happens but you never hear much on details. Like a nuclear submarine is docked. It's probably not going active again. How long will a minimal crew stay on board. Do they sleep there or go home when shift is over. I was just really curious about this part of the submarine world. I don't mean the transitioning period. But that period the sub will probably never patrol again but nothing is in writing and it's not stricken
In my experience decommissioning a Los Angeles-class, much (but not all) of the crew remains assigned to the boat until after the reactor is removed. Final crew release, when the crew basically ceases to exist, happened about two months later. As when the ship is active, we only sleep aboard overnight when we are “on duty” which is every three days. I think we were able to get down to once every four days at some point during decom, but I don’t remember exactly (it’s been 19 years). Does that answer your question?
So… there is not really a “probably not going active again” status. The boat is either operational, scheduled for maintenance, or going through decommissioning, or decommissioned.
Crew offload happens in phases. This is based on the schedule for systems to be shutdown, depressurized, de-energized, etc. as well as whether the boat is waterborne or dry docked, and whether it is fueled or defueled.
Prior to dry docking, habitability will move from the boat to a barge. This is not exclusive to inactivation. It is normal for any submarine dry docking.
It actually does exist now. It is called the "idle" period. It is due to the delays in shipyard availability.
Source: on an idle submarine, no underways and not decommissioning for....awhile.
How much do you love life?
No underways is the coping mechanism. We are being used as a training platform for shipyard boats. Kinda sucks.
We could be dismantling the boat on our own and save time in the SY.
Seismic in the PNW? trying to be vague but I work with some idle boats
I drydocked 655 on multiple occasions in the mid 80's. The only time we slept on a barge while the boat was dry docked was while we were still in the yards.
Know a former nuke that decommissioned his boat. The nukes assisted with shutting down the reactor and monitoring as the reactor section was cut out. Then they travelled with reactor “pill” after it was sealed and barged to the reactor graveyard. And that was that.
The word you are looking for is decommissioning. You would have to find someone who has been apart of one. I feel like the crew stays until the shipyard takes control.
The nukes stay on board until the reactor is gone.
Are you asking about when we are in port? If so thhe ship gets divided into section, normally three or four. During the “normal” 8 hour working day the whole crew will be aboard. For the rest of the day (ie, overnight) only the section that is on duty will be there. So, between a third to fourth of the crew during non-working hours.
24/7
Are you talking decommissioned or just time between deployments?
If the reactor is on board the ship is manned 24/7.
Granted, it's been a while. But I've worked in a shipyard where we had 20 decommissioned boats, all with reactors in the pressure hull and not a single crew member assigned to any of the boats. My first boat, a 594 class boat sat next to a pier for over a year before the put her in a dry dock and cut out her reactor and then the remainder of the boat into tiny pieces.
My last time on the boat was after decommissioning, when she was sitting alongside the pier. I walked on board the boat and took one long last look in the areas I used to work and live in, and I was the only person on the boat at the time
The reactors would have been defueled, since the reactor compartment itself is what gets cut out, sealed, and shipped off to the graveyard.
Nope. I was there when the reactor was defueled and when the reactor was cut out. In neither instance was there any ships force. You also should know, this was way back when they first started decommissioning nuc boats and before the "recycling" programs actually started taking off.
We have to distinguish between the reactor (fuel) and the reactor (compartment). I, for one, have stood roving SEO/SRO on a refueled CGN. A few years later, on the other coast, I saw the hull parked in the recycling yard as I caught the ferry on middie liberty. Later I worked the refueling at the big HQ, then in real life at an even more westerly SY. The cradle to grave attention is very real…no American reactor is left without a watch. Even the clothes it was wearing get a watch.
We plan for the end of the ship’s life using the class maintenance plan. It has to be budgeted years ahead of time (think up to 5.) There isn’t a time when we’re collectively unsure about a particular ships’s end. Long range schedules for deployments and dry-dock use go out for more than 10 years and they are updated regularly as a result of real-world events. Dry docks, refueling equipment, and qualified fuel handlers are scarcer than they used to be, so we need to know when they are needed to level-load their workload.
The only “iffy” situations I can think of were MIAMI and that poor boat that graced HII for about 8 years (name escapes me at the moment.) In those cases we were working them toward readiness assuming a deployable future, until the decision got made.
BOISE?
I rode her once probably back in '09 or '10 to assist in post-avail sonar testing and even at the time I realized it was probably the worst boat among the dozens I'd been on. That crew was an inept hot mess and it was one of the few times that I had genuine concerns about their ability. Most sonar divisions have at least 2 or 3 guys who know what the hell they're doing but this division had exactly zero.
When I heard about their later woes in the shipyard I was entirely unsurprised.
That’s the one. Seems like the problems started way after I was involved so I’m wondering if there wasn’t another in the 2010-2 era. Looks like Caudle is talking about considering decom: https://www.businessinsider.com/uss-boise-shows-how-broken-navy-sub-maintenance-has-become-2025-8?op=1
Yeah, it's a cycle and anyone who has been around boats for a while has certainly seen it. I'm certainly not superstitious and don't believe in bad luck or haunted boats but when the boat is shit and the crew is shit the cycle just keeps perpetuating. The blow to morale overall makes it nearly unrecoverable and it really takes multiple crew half-lives before you have all of the poisonous elements out and things can get back to normal.
Maybe she can bounce back after all this downtime, who knows?
I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be on her when she finally gets off the hard.
“Crew half-life” I love that term. We just used the anecdote about spraying the new monkey with cold water.
Yeah. Look, we all know sometimes life on the boat sucks--but every division has that Negative Nancy who does nothing but bitch and moan and constantly sees and assumes the worst. And frankly it's perfectly fine if you can keep it contained but you'll really poison the new guys with that attitude before they've even had a chance to get situated. Bitch up, not down.
Until you can get all that rot out you have little chance of recovery. Shitty leadership can absolutely result in toxic commands but it's that deeply-rooted dissatisfaction that hurts in the long term.
I decommissioned the 610 in PSNS. I was a nuke and we had just finished WestPac. I think it was about 9 months from going into the yards that the final crew was released. We'd have watch stations pretty similar to any other shut-down period at first, and then when the important stuff was gone there was just a rover... maybe 4-section duty; show up for muster and news, then they'd let us go home. It was some pretty good duty.
Not a question that should be answered.
What's with your down votes, opsec people.