Andy Dinsdale – Lost of all power, so loss of fresh food, just cheese sandwiches

So, without naming the submarine, but we ended up with full reactor scram, so you effectively lose propulsion and the knock-on impact of that for …

Simon: And everything else that relies on power.

So, you do have back-up systems onboard so you don’t lose everything, so a nuclear submarine does have a battery back-up and things like that so you can maintain aspects of life onboard, but for a time afterwards, depending on what had happened, it was quite a harsh environment onboard.

Simon: So, you have to then restrict a certain number of things, water or …

So you have to restrict various things like water, like water production, like the number of showers you’re allowed like what you can do in terms of cooking, like ‘fridges. So, there are times when you ended up … with one particular incident, where basically there was a problem with a ‘fridge, and so you ended up with no fresh food or anything left onboard.

Simon: And that’s for the rest of the time away.

That’s for quite a long time, too long, and a few days was too long, but it was more than a few days, and you end up with … at the start you had bits of … ‘cos when you realise you’ve got some challenges, you eat as much fresh food as you can but that sort of dies away fairly quickly and we ended up with cheese sandwiches.

So, freshly made bread, which you can still do, so you’ve got the ingredients to make bread, and cheese, and I vowed at the end of that particular sort of period, never to eat a cheese sandwich ever again (laughs) ‘cos it eventually got to you either have one cheese sandwich or two, or do you want a cheese sandwich or not?

Simon: And there’s not a variation in the cheese or pickle or …

No, no variation, and yeah, you can put tomato ketchup on it but eventually that runs out, so I did vow never to eat cheese sandwiches ever again.