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With the release of Black Sea, a film about a sunken U-boat, full of Nazi gold, I was wondering how feasible such a thing was? If a U-boat / Submarine came to rest on the seabed floor, intact, with all water tight doors closed, how long would it take for the seals to fail and the boat to flood?

Salt Water.......steel......going to forget about the paint job entirely....all compartments are totally flooded...Putin though will find a way to raise that sucker off the seabed wearing just a peanut shell and two rubber bands in a row boat

 Wolfstan wrote:
With the release of Black Sea, a film about a sunken U-boat, full of Nazi gold, I was wondering how feasible such a think was? If a U-boat / Submarine came to rest on the seabed floor, intact, with all water tight doors closed, how long would it take for the seals to fail and the boat to flood?

The gold would probably survive - it's one of those metals that's hard to corrode. Hence why gold fillings, subject to all that acid, last for years.

Gold is more or less incorrodable.

The U Boat itself would be largely intact unless it had been damaged by weapons or the crew had opened hatches to excape.

The door seals and so on might have failed.

The structure would be obscured by more or less mud, plant growth and so on depending on the location.

There are various WW2 submarines both Axis and Allied whose wreck locations are known and some of them have been visited.

In all likelihood it's be in fairly decent condition, all things considered.
I scuba dive recreationaly, and I've dived a few wrecks (including a u-boat) and while they are rusted, it's not as bad as you'd think, and the deeper you are, the better it gets, as the oxygen content of the water drops.
The boat would be flooded though, the seals would have perished.
One thing to be aware of though, sunken u-boats and other such things are usually considered war graves, and in many countries it's an offence to disturb them.

The seals will eventually fail, but the hull will remain there for quite some time. Considering the wreck of the titanic is still ship shaped some 100 years after it sunk.

The gold will be fine, and you probably won't run into any skeletons either.

If the U-boat were flooded before sinking, then the hull could be laregly intact. If there is a compartment with air in it (and secret Nazi gold), then when the sub reaches crush depth, it will violently implode. This is why the USS Thresher is in tiny pieces on the ocean floor, but K-129 was relatively intact (until the salvage attempt, at least). If the sub goes down in shallow water (around 300 ft or so) then crush depth and implosion is not an issue (unless the sub is built out of plywood and unicorn farts). Saltwater would cause corrosion, and sea life might start to live on the wreck, both of which could damage the hull. As for how long the door seals would last... that's harder to determine. It is possible that corrosion of the door might seal it shut permanently, but if not, any small leak would become a bigger leak in short order (water pressure is a witch, doncha know).