In part seven of the AUKUS infrastructure series, the focus turns to Henderson, where fragmented planning risks locking Australia into costly nuclear bottlenecks before construction has properly begun.

The establishment of the consolidated Henderson Defence Precinct in Western Australia, under design leadership from Bechtel Infrastructure Australia, represents a generational investment in Australia’s naval infrastructure. However, Commonwealth planning displays a profound lack of strategic forethought. By committing to fragmented shipbuilding contracts ahead of a finalised master plan, Defence has created severe spatial, regulatory and workforce gridlock at Henderson and Osborne before heavy civil construction has even begun.

This piece examines the maintenance workloads generated by an eight-hull Australian nuclear submarine fleet operating alongside four forward-deployed US Navy SSNs and demonstrates Henderson’s incapacity, under the current program, to deliver.

For starters, a single graving dock as currently envisaged creates an inherent single point of failure. For a force of four USN and eight RAN HEU-fuelled SSNs, incorporating two graving docks and one nuclear-certified floating dock into Bechtel’s baseline design is essential to prevent the severe dockyard congestion currently crippling US and UK fleet availability.

To provide national redundancy for the 80-year-old Captain Cook Graving Dock in Sydney without freezing nuclear maintenance, Henderson’s Dock 1 must be constructed as a ~300-metre x 45-metre dual-chamber facility. Equipped with an intermediate caisson, its two sections can then handle short planned and/or unscheduled emergency submarine dockings and be cleared to dock Australia’s 27,500-tonne Canberra-class Landing Helicopter Docks (LHDs) when needed.

Dock 2 (~180 metres x 25 metres) can then be dedicated to continuous, two-year SSN refits that physically lock out the facility from unscheduled emergency submarine dockings. Across an eight-hull RAN submarine force as planned under AUKUS, one to two submarines will be permanently in two-year refits (occupying Dock 2), while the in-service submarines will generate three to five shorter docking events annually (occupying Dock 1).

Rationalising Henderson requires relocating surface warship construction to free up waterfront real estate for SSN laydown areas and deep-water access. Co-locating nuclear docks with Collins submarine maintenance, surface ship sustainment, landing craft builds and Mogami-class frigate construction within a shared footprint creates unmanageable conflicts.

Moving the landing craft and 6,200-tonne Mogami frigate construction to an east coast yard, such as reactivating the Williamstown shipyard in Victoria, could offer an immediate, cost-effective solution. Applying US Navy dimensional standards (such as Dry Dock #5 at Pearl Harbor, costing over A$5 billion) demonstrates that an SSN dock requires a direct waterfront footprint of 2.5 hectares, which is currently unavailable within the Henderson facility plan.

Infrastructure at Henderson is further........

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