{"id":142862,"date":"2025-09-14T15:34:11","date_gmt":"2025-09-14T15:34:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/142862\/"},"modified":"2025-09-14T15:34:11","modified_gmt":"2025-09-14T15:34:11","slug":"australia-to-spend-8-billion-on-nuclear-sub-shipyard-dw-09-14-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/142862\/","title":{"rendered":"Australia to spend $8 billion on nuclear sub shipyard \u2013 DW \u2013 09\/14\/2025"},"content":{"rendered":"

Australia<\/a>\u00a0is shelling out an initial sum of AU$12 billion ($8 billion, \u20ac6.8 billion) to upgrade facilities at a shipyard as part of a 20-year plan to turn it into a maintenance center for a future fleet of nuclear-powered submarines<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u00a0The Australian government is pumping funds into the Henderson shipyard near Perth after a 2021 agreement with the United Kingdom<\/a> and the United States<\/a> \u2014 called AUKUS \u2014 to acquire the submarines.<\/p>\n

Under the pact, the UK and the US will provide Canberra with nuclear-powered attack submarines from the next decade to tackle China’s growing influence<\/a> in the Indo-Pacific region.<\/p>\n

\"RichardAustralian Defense Minister Marles said the US would be able to use the planned defense facilities in Perth to help deliver the AUKUS submarines [File photo: September 12, 2024]Image: Mick Tsikas\/AAP Image via AP\/picture alliance<\/p>\n

Shipyard key to Australia’s AUKUS ambitions<\/p>\n

Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles said on Sunday that the “very significant” investment will be spent over a decade at the shipbuilding and maintenance precinct situated in Western Australia.<\/p>\n

“Henderson is a key piece of the AUKUS story, and, from that point of view, it will be welcomed in the US, as it will be welcomed in the United Kingdom, for sure,” Australia’s Sky News quotes Marles as saying.<\/p>\n

“But this is about what Australia needs to do in order to meet its strategic moment,” he added.<\/p>\n

The AUKUS deal \u2014\u00a0 which is worth hundreds of billions of dollars \u2014\u00a0 will see the US sell<\/a> several Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarines to Australia, while Britain and Australia<\/a> will subsequently build a new AUKUS-class submarine.<\/p>\n

\u00a0At present, Australia has no infrastructure to service nuclear-powered submarines.<\/p>\n

The country’s center-left Labor government plans to prop up Henderson with\u00a0high-security dry docks to maintain the\u00a0submarines.<\/p>\n

It will also create facilities to build landing craft for the Australian army and new general-purpose frigates for the navy, in steps that could support\u00a0around 10,000 local jobs.<\/p>\n

Australia says US will have access to nuclear submarine shipyard<\/p>\n

The Australian defense minister also said the United States would be able to use the planned defense facilities near Perth to help deliver the AUKUS submarines.<\/p>\n

“This is about being able to sustain and maintain Australia’s future submarines but it is very much a facility that is being built in the context of AUKUS,” Marles told Australian Broadcasting Corporation television. “I would expect that in the future this would be available to the US.”<\/p>\n

US President Donald Trump’s administration is conducting a formal review of the AUKUS pact.<\/p>\n

Edited by: Sean Sinico<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Australia\u00a0is shelling out an initial sum of AU$12 billion ($8 billion, \u20ac6.8 billion) to upgrade facilities at a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":142863,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-142862","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142862","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=142862"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142862\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/142863"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=142862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=142862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=142862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}