Buying the ship is the expensive part of any shipbuilding program. Building somewhere to put it is supposed to be the easy part: a slab of concrete, some bollards, a fuel line, done.<\/p>\n
Australia has spent the last three years finding out that the easy part can go wrong too.<\/p>\n
Crews at the Port of Hobart have started pulling apart Macquarie Wharf 6, the berth earmarked as the permanent home for Australia’s Antarctic icebreaker RSV Nuyina<\/em>.<\/p>\n More than 12,900 metric tons of concrete, steel and timber are coming out of the water over the next five months, about 14,200 US tons, and it is being taken down in sections. TasPorts announced the start of demolition on August 5<\/a>.<\/p>\n What goes back in its place is a purpose-built Antarctic berth with a shore power connection, paid for with A$188 million from the federal government. Practical completion is set for August 2028.<\/p>\n That is a long wait for a ship that arrived in Hobart in October 2021 and has been tied up at a wharf that was never built for it ever since.<\/p>\n Demolishing a wharf is not the same job as demolishing a building. Everything you knock down is standing over the River Derwent, and the project is not allowed to fill it with rubble.<\/p>\n So the contractor works in sections. A crawler crane rated at 280 metric tons, about 310 US tons, sits on the deck alongside excavators fitted with rock breakers, shears and pulverizer attachments.<\/p>\n Bin barges built locally are parked underneath the structure to catch what comes off, and the material gets lifted out for processing and recycling on land. Silt curtains and marine-life monitoring run alongside the whole job.<\/p>\n “Deconstructing a structure of this size over water is a genuinely complex undertaking,” TasPorts chief executive Captain Allan Gray said in the port authority’s announcement. Once the wharf is gone, crews move straight into piling for the new one.<\/p>\n The work is being handled by Hazell Brady Joint Venture, a partnership between Hazell Bros Group and Brady Marine & Civil, which won the design-and-construct contract from TasPorts in December 2025 and mobilized on site in March 2026.<\/p>\n Australia has plenty of heavy plant in the ground right now, from the borer that finished its run nearly a kilometer under the Snowy Mountains<\/a> to the pair of Sydney Metro machines that got rebuilt and put back underground in Brisbane<\/a>. Hobart’s job runs the other way. Nothing gets built here until 12,900 metric tons come out first.<\/p>\n The Nuyina<\/em> is not a small research vessel with a helipad bolted on. It is 160.3 meters long, 526 feet, displaces 25,500 metric tons, about 28,100 US tons, and stands 40.7 meters above the waterline across 11 decks.<\/p>\n It carries 117 expeditioners and 32 crew, 1,200 metric tons of cargo and 1.9 million liters of fuel, roughly 502,000 gallons. It can push through 1.65 meters of ice, a little over five feet, at a continuous three knots.<\/p>\n There is a moon pool cut through the hull for launching sampling gear and remotely operated vehicles, the same broad class of machine that produced the first map ever made of the underside of an Antarctic ice shelf<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Australian Antarctic Division<\/a> puts the design-and-build cost at A$528 million, inside a A$1.9 billion package that also covers 30 years of operation and maintenance. The AAD calls it the single biggest investment in the history of Australia’s Antarctic program.<\/p>\n Damen built it at Gala\u021bi in Romania, Serco operates and crews it, and it has been the country’s only link to its Antarctic stations since the Aurora Australis<\/em> retired in 2020.<\/p>\n None of which helped when it turned up in Hobart and needed somewhere to sit.<\/p>\n The berth problem and the fuel problem are two different problems, and only one of them is being solved by a crawler crane.<\/p>\n Hobart’s fuel terminal is at Selfs Point, a little over two nautical miles upstream from the wharf. Getting there means passing under the Tasman Bridge, and since 2023 the Nuyina<\/em> has not been permitted to do it on safety grounds.<\/p>\n The sticking point is the turn the ship has to make on the approach, where an icebreaking hull leaves very little margin for sideways drift between the bridge pylons.<\/p>\n So the ship goes to Burnie instead, on the opposite corner of the island. That is 674 kilometers by sea, about 419 miles, and AAP reported in May that it adds as much as A$875,000 a year to the fuel bill.<\/p>\n AAD head Emma Campbell told a Senate hearing that the ship made three Burnie runs in 2026 instead of the usual four, at a cost of A$600,000, and that she expects the voyages to continue into 2027.<\/p>\n The A$188 million is not a grant with a ribbon on it. It sits inside a Federation Funding Agreement schedule<\/a> signed by then environment minister Tanya Plibersek in January 2025, and the document is public.<\/p>\n It lists three things Tasmania agreed to deliver: redevelop Wharf 6 to the AAD’s functional requirements, provide shore power for the Nuyina<\/em> at that berth, and deliver a refueling solution. The money is released against ten milestones, from A$20 million on governance in July 2025 to A$26 million on a maintenance plan in September 2028.<\/p>\n Milestone 3 is the refueling one. It required Commonwealth acceptance of Tasmania’s refueling solution, available for use in the 2026\u201327 Antarctic season, and it carried a A$2 million payment due on July 31, 2026.<\/p>\n What Tasmania put forward at Senate Estimates in May was trucking fuel to Macquarie Wharf. Federal environment department deputy secretary Sean Sullivan, whose department administers the agreement, was not impressed. “Tasmania just hasn’t delivered something that’s sensible or usable for us,” he told the hearing, according to AAP.<\/p>\n Independent MP Andrew Wilkie, who holds the Hobart seat of Clark, put a number on the trucking plan<\/a>: by one estimate it would take 64 road tankers over five days to fill the ship. He also flagged the obvious risk, calling a workable refueling fix “an essential pre-condition for the Federal Government grant of $188 million.”<\/p>\n Campbell told the Senate that Tasmania had confirmed it would not meet the deadline and wanted it pushed back. That date has now passed, and neither government has announced that the milestone was met.<\/p>\n The part of this that actually changes daily life on the ship is the shore power connection.<\/p>\n Right now a vessel sitting at a wharf runs its diesel auxiliary engines to keep lights, heating, cooling and systems alive. Shore power replaces that with a cable to the grid, and in Tasmania the grid is largely hydroelectric.<\/p>\nNothing here can be dropped in the river<\/h2>\n
The Nuyina is 526 feet of ship that Hobart had no dock for<\/h2>\n
Three years on, the ship still can’t reach its own fuel depot<\/h2>\n
The refueling deadline came and went on July 31<\/h2>\n
The new berth comes with a plug<\/h2>\n