The idea of submarine cargo vessels able to transfer different, including liquid, cargoes under the ice of the Arctic Ocean irrespective of weather conditions has captured the minds of scientists and engineers long ago.

     A number of projects and programs were developed recently including the project of American company General Dynamics of a submarine tanker for liquefied gas transportation from Arctic, five-year program of Canadian Government of creation of submarine-surface vessels for oil, gas and other mineral resources transportation, etc.

     St.Petersburg Design Bureau “Malakhit” holds several patents for submarine tankers and dry cargo ships.

     Nevertheless, none of these projects and programs was implemented. It might be explained by the fact that all these projects required considerable capital investments in the design and construction of very specific submarine transportation facilities as well as in creation of infrastructure in ports of embarkation-disembarkation and basing of submarine transportation facilities.

     SOE CDB ME “Rubin” proposed its own concept.

     At the beginning of 1990-s deep research studies had been started in the direction of finding the most cost efficient method of transportation submarine construction. A special attention was paid to utilisation of nuclear missile submarines decommissioned from the navy. It was the most rational way of problem solution as replacement of missile weapon with a useful load allowed to use efficiently technical abilities of ships that became obsolete in military respect.

     Therefore, it was not by chance that RAO “Norilsk Nickel” addressed CDB ME “Rubin” with a proposal to create a transportation system for products of “Norilsk Nickel” on the basis of potential abilities of decommissioned nuclear submarines as an alternative to the existing transportation system based on the ice-breaker fleet.

     It is proposed to create a transportation submarine intended for regular export of products of the “Norilsk Nickel” integrated works and delivery of consumables required for the production process irrespective of ice conditions on the basis of re-equipment of a heavy nuclear submarine cruiser of Project 941 (“Typhoon”), decommissioned from the Russian Navy.

     There are outlined engineering and design solutions for creation of a transport submarine on the basis of heavy nuclear submarine cruiser of Project 941 (“Typhoon”) that is able to take aboard and export the payload up to 15,000 tons from the Arctic areas of the Arctic Ocean all year round irrespective of weather and ice conditions. It is achieved due to forming the required submarine buoyancy by means of non-traditional technical solutions. These solutions provide for meeting active requirements to the submarine survivability, reliability and unsinkability as well as crew safety.

     The nuclear submarine propulsion methods allow to reduce the duration of the passage in winter by 2-3 times as compared to ice-breakers.

     For decreasing the berthing time in the port it was proposed to use a horizontal loading of the payload by means of port standard loaders through special loading hatches of 4.5 m diameter.

     The following tasks were resolved:

• stabilised (without the draft and trim change) position of the ship standing at loading berth during the entire loading period;
• nuclear submarine passage up to Dudinka port in surface condition across a shallow water (depth of 10 meters) area of the Yenisei river.

     They proposed such a design of the submarine forward end structure that allowed cruising with breaking the ice cover both from below and from the top (the ice-breaker mode).

     Different variants of a propulsion system were developed that provided the most efficient cruising modes: at speed 16-18 knots in submerged condition and at speed about 2-3 knots in surface condition under conditions of solid ice cover up to 2.6 m.

     The routes “port Murmansk – port Dickson” were optimised in order to decrease the passage time between the ports in summer and winter as well as the most efficient variant of the nuclear transport submarine application model.

     The most efficient method of the combat nuclear submarine conversion into a transport submarine with minimum required scope of repair of completing equipment and the ship in general under conditions of SOE PO “Sevmashpredpriatie” was proposed.

     The enterprise also proposed the optimum variant of transport cargo traffic using three converted nuclear submarines and the most efficient variant of organisational structure of the transport company.

     The major advantage of the transportation system based on submarine cargo vessels is the regular transportation in the Arctic region at comparable transport costs..

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