Vanguard Magazine

Vanguard February/March 2024

Preserving capacity, General Tom Lawson, Chief of the Defence Staff, Keys to Canadian SAR

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Figure 3 of these systems, and ensuring they are safe against the consequences that could lead to the loss of the boat. So it's un- derstanding that kind of process as well. And from a class society, it's bringing the commercial best practice of an indepen- dent third party, which is shown to your regulator and your bosses that you are meeting the minimum standard, you're able to benchmark your process as well. And again, you can follow it through the life cycle of the submarine. So when you get to life extension, you've got the justi- fications why, and you've got that design baseline which you can build on. It's all about the certificate audit trail. This is not the sexy stuff, but these are the bits that are going to keep your submarine at sea and it's going to maintain it through its in-service life. It's bread and butter is- sues. LUC CASSIVI: Thank you very much. I now welcome Mark Russell over to the podium and talk to us about all of this in the case context and other considerations. MARK RUSSELL: Waste disposal and waste disposal management are key to the submarine and its ability to perform its mission and remain a stealth platform. There are two key naval requirements that really are being addressed when we're talking about waste and waste management. We've already talked at length about the Arctic capability. We're also talking about the range element, the endurance. A typical mission that would be launched from Halifax, heading into the Arctic. on the East Coast, it's approximately 3000 nautical miles at a speed of advance of around eight knots. That is about 15 to 18 days to get into the mission area. At which point you then carry out, the three weeks 14 FEBRUARY/MARCH 2024 www.vanguardcanada.com sue certification on, which goes back to the regulator to show where environmen- tal compliance goes back to. And we're saying we are on the pollution there and this is how we control it. So, it's building into that process, but it very much kind of works on what the principles are of the naval submarine code. As I mentioned, it's a glorified question set. So, the first thing is, what is it, what are you going to do? How important is it? If you've got a system with a haul valve, how important is it if that haul valve fails, water comes into the boat, do you lose the boat? It's asking the questions, the criti- cality of the systems, and setting that kind of standard that you're looking for. What specification are you using? Are you talk- ing about the oil water separator? Are you using COTS spec or are you using a Cana- dian naval standard or another country's naval standard as your specification? And then you go through the processes of de- sign appraisal, equipment survey, and then yard survey and bring it in there as well. When we talk about standards, we want to know, is that standard the right standard? If you've always used that naval standard because it's an old standard, is it still rel- evant or do you need to do a standard justi- fication where you are tailoring commercial requirements into that naval standard to make a kind of hybrid blended solution to show "this is how I'm showing compliance, and this is how you can certify against it?" Submarine projects come along once every 20 years, it's about trying to store that design intent of why something was done and the justification. So you can go back to the reasoning. This is going to get my spec for the new piece of kit that needs to replace what is now obsolete. And then also it's bringing in risk based assurance into this as well to the assurance W A S T E M A N A G E M E N T of undetected operations followed by a transit back to the Halifax area. So what this tells you is it gives you an indication of what areas you're operating in, and what requirements there are in terms of waste discharge. It also gives you an indication of the volume of material that's gonna be generated over the course of those eight weeks of the mission. And similarly, from the West coast, you can see that a submarine departing from a Esquimalt is approximately 3500 nautical miles to get into the mission area. Now ob- viously there are missions that go to the east and to the west, and local patrols but this is the one from an environmental compliance point of view that is the most managed. And so it would be the one that really drives the submarine design to the greatest degree. So as was mentioned a bit earlier there are several elements that make up the waste that is generated onboard the vessel. There's the oily residue that comes from processing the water displaced fuel that you've got on board, there's black water or sewage. There's a variety of garbage that is gener- ated, including plastics and cardboards and paper. There's food waste, and there's grey water as well. There are a variety of regulations that have been implemented by Canada that govern what you're allowed to discharge. And the key takeaway from this is that north of 60 the requirement for discharging oil goes from 15 parts per million, which you can discharge under MARPOL in general, goes down to zero when you're operating in the polar area. MARPOL is not the only set of regula- tions that you'll find in the Arctic. Under the Canada Shipping Act there are several acts and regulations, including the Arctic Waters Pollution Prevention Act and the set of regulations that go with that. Also, there are dangerous chemical regulations. And then there's the Polar Code too. And as we've seen over the last 20 years, it's been a real evolution in regulation and laws that deal with the environment. You can ex- pect there will be some further evolution of these rules over the next 20 years. Then there is going to be an impact when we fi- nally get these platforms into service. Then if we run them for the next 40 to 50 years, that is another reason why you want to have a look at margins that you've got in these platforms because you may well end up having to make some modifications down the road. So, I've taken just a very brief snippet out of the Polar Code. It gives a reason-

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