Has anyone on the VPIRG staff passed a semester course in nuclear reactor design as I did in 1957, at Columbia University, operated or directed the operation of a reactor, held uranium in their hands, performed work in a radiation field, or know how to design shielding for radiation? Who amongst you has book above your desk from which you can calculate the decay of fission products? Who amongst you would believe a physics textbook?
I am a “cowboy.” That is a term in the nuclear power industry that refers to those of us that pioneered reactors. I assembled my first nuclear reactor within one year of graduating from Columbia University in 1957. Jim Day, another engineer, and I were handed the drawings and informed that we had been selected to put the S3G reactor together. That reactor was a new design by the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory of General Electric. The design had never before been assembled. We had to write the assembly procedures. Admiral Rickover interviewed me, standing on top of the reactor, while I supervised the insertion of a fuel assembly. The reactor vessel was not sealed and had been filled with water. Its reactivity was increasing while the fuel was lowered. I was able to calm the nervousness of some workers by being able to talk to Dr. Luce, the reactor core design physicist who was plotting the inverse of neutron multiplication in the core as it assembled. I understood the chart and could say that it was safe. That reactor ran until the early 1990s.
I repeated that assembly three times while assembling the two S4G reactors in the USS Triton, non-instrumented versions of the prototype S3G, including the disassembly and reassembly of one of the reactors. After assembling the two reactors, I directed one shift of the first simultaneous operation of two reactors, in a wooden shack over top of the reactors. The testing ended with switching off the cooling for each reactor at full power.
Following that work, in 1959, I was assigned responsibility for coordinating nuclear work in the shipyard of Electric Boat.
My first task was assembly of the reactor in the USS George Washington, the first vessel that could fire ballistic missiles from underwater. By pre-assembling the S5W reactor head and the control drive mechanisms in a clean room prior to loading the fuel and assembling the reactor, I reduced the time to assemble the reactor from six to two weeks and delivery of the ship by the same four weeks and reduced the reactor assembly cost by fifty percent. Estimated savings to the taxpayers was 19,879 man-hours for each ship of that class, including shift and overtime premiums but not overhead. The last time I read the procedures I had written for the S5W reactor assembly, they were a chapter in a NavShips Manual. Following that assembly, I taught the technique to representatives of the Navy’s Bureau of Ships and the Portsmouth Naval, Newport News, Pascagoula and Mare Island shipyards. This technique was used to assemble all ships of that class of vessels, and then some.
I assembled the USS George Washington reactor and reactors like that one in the USS Patrick Henry and the USS Scorpion and an S1C reactor in the USS Tullibee in a twelve-month span of time. During one of those assemblies, I trained the lead Rolls Royce engineer for the assembly of the reactor in HMS Dreadnaught, England’s first nuclear submarine. Later after I had been senior engineer for the refueling of the USS Skate, an S4W reactor, I taught a course to representatives of the English Admiralty, Vickers-Armstrong and Rolls Royce in refueling techniques. All told, I had on the job, hands-on, de facto custody of nine reactor cores.
Westinghouse contracted my services from Electric Boat to engineer the disassembly of a steam generator from the S1W reactor at the National Reactor Testing Station, west of Idaho Falls. That reactor was the first reactor built to produce power. After spending three days, plotting the radiation levels surrounding the generator to determine where it could be approached, a lead bonder, from A.O. Smith, and I draped it with three and one half tons of lead. It was then moved to an Expended Core Facility and taken apart. No worker received more than the allowed 300 mrem of radiation while disassembling with the exception of one grinder for whom permission was received for twice the allowed weekly exposure, which he received in a little over two minutes. Eight roentgen fields were measured at the face of the inlet tube sheet. I designed the shielding to reduce the radiation to acceptable working levels. While in Idaho, I assisted in the replacement of a fuel cell in the S1W reactor.
Background radiation at the Idaho site measured as high a five milli-roentgens from atmospheric bomb testing in Nevada and the testing of a proposed nuclear airplane engine at a site to the north of where I worked. Sorry about the use of the term roentgen but I am old school. There are a myriad of other tasks I performed involving radiation, contamination, decontamination and the handling of spent and unspent reactor fuel.
Three of the reactors of submarines in the shipyard during the time that I worked there are permanently disappearing into the mud on the bottom of the ocean. Two were the results of accidents and one, without any fuel, was disposed there. To date, neither the U.S. Navy personnel nor independent researchers have reported any release of the contents or other harm to the environment. The U.S. military does lots of things that they do not talk about. I do not know whether independent researchers have investigated the sites or the results if they have. I left the industry in 1969.
Mud is self-encapsulating waste. There is a vast, deep amount on the bottoms of the oceans; far from human inhabited places. As time goes on, the mud deepens until the rock on which it sets sub ducts under a continent. What’s in the mud is sealed from most living things for geological lengths of time. Only a means of inserting our worst wastes is needed.
About 1964, Westinghouse General Electric and Combustion Engineering Corporations were initiating efforts to market the nuclear experience they had obtained from submarine propulsion to the electric utility industry. I concluded that the turnkey style of contracting and subcontracting was not the way to build nuclear reactors because authority and responsibility are too widely distributed. My experience was that very tight organization was the most efficient, responsible and safe way to construct and operate nuclear power plants. That belief has not changed.
Do not conclude, from what is written above, that I had no realization of the danger of that with which I was working. World War II was my childhood. I remember exactly where I was when it was announced that Pearl Harbor was attacked and when Hiroshima was destroyed. I grew up with buckets of sand in every room of my home with which to extinguish incendiary bombs. War over energy supplies is a greater risk than nuclear power. I once stood in a 20 x 20 foot square room in which all of the fuel for a reactor was in racks on the four walls. It was awesome to consider the energy that surrounded me.
I have not turned green. I do not glow in the dark. I am not covered with tumors. I have been contaminated and irradiated. Alcohol and cigarettes have done me more harm than the radiations and contaminations with which I have worked. Work in a chemical plant was more dangerous. At seventy-six, my health is good.
Skiing, chainsaws, wood burning stoves, horses, automobiles, steam power plants, typhoons, earthquakes, meteors and the sun have all killed more people and, most likely, will continue to do so, than nuclear power generation. It is interesting that there is no amount of radiation that is not harmful and, simultaneously, no way to escape this environmental phenomenon. It is naturally in the air, the food, the water and the soil that we breathe, eat, drink and walk on.
It my belief that as a society, we will need every possible source of energy if we are to maintain a lesser style of life than that of today as our numbers as a species increase. One of the ways to reduce our dependence upon centralized power stations is to make every residence and business as self-sufficient with respect to its energy needs, as is possible.
To accomplish this, a self-financing energy authority, a public utility, is needed in Vermont, similar to the New York Throughway Authority. I realize that statement is capitalist heresy. However, I can think of no other way to create the unified command structure to organize the energy future of the Vermont. Private enterprise is too self-serving to perform such a public task at reasonable cost. Vermont can efficiently wire its energy on its own without the middlemen of corporations.
Let me develop this concept. The State of Vermont would own alternate energy sources built to make each residence slightly more than energy sufficient, individually or as close as reasonable, if collectively. The State would purchase excess power produced from the owner of a property, charge the owner for any excess consumed and charge both the owner and ultimate consumers a fee for the amount of power transacted. A small amount of seed money could initiate financial expansion to all of Vermont.
Distributed generation would provide a more reliable, robust power grid throughout the State and reduce the need for large generation facilities, such as Hydro-Quebec and nuclear reactors. Failure, down time for maintenance or disaster would cripple such a network less than current generation and distribution.
The commission should be chartered to make Vermont energy independent. To do that, it should be empowered to finance it operations by levying charges on the purchase and sale of energy, to purchase sources of energy within Vermont and to create new sources of energy. Private enterprises will always fulfill the financial objectives of their management and owners before those of the public. They will shortchange the public for the cost of nuclear decommissioning responsibilities. Maintenance has priority over something out of service.
That does not mean nuclear power should be abandoned. There is no safe energy. The more concentrated energy is the more dangerous it is. It is irrelevant whether it is a horse, a racecar or a power plant.
Vermont should build a second, identical nuclear plant alongside the existing Vermont Yankee. The design is proved. It can be operated safely. The plant should be as identical to the existing plant as is possible to make use of the existing site, design, spare parts, trained operators, licenses, installed supporting facilities, etc. Sales of its power can finance the decommissioning of the current plant. Vermont should not renew the license for the Vernon nuclear power plant to anyone but itself.
VPIRG is wrong about nuclear power. I’ve been there and done that. It can be safer for the environment than combustion even if its power is used only to power the making of other more environmentally better sources of energy.
Keep up your good work. Knowledgeable, skeptical criticism is essential. Criticism driven by fear has no rational value. The key to survival is to never stop asking questions.