Glowing in the Dark

Just about 30 years ago, I finished 18 years of contract design engineering with an outfit that was known as National Nuclear Corporation and I was very sorry to see them go. After being sold to the Japanese, who ordered two of every item I had designed and not licensed NNC to manufacture (for back-engineering reasons of course), off they went. I was part of the transfer process and flew back out to the San Francisco area quite often to assist. This really ate me up as another beautiful, well organized, high-technology company was lost to gummit foolishness, in this case, that brain-dead creature, Jimmy, peanuts-fer-brainz Carter. When he doomed American excellence in nuclear design and production over the human-caused failure at Three Mile Island, he inadvertently had set in motion a bureaucracy that in these times is sooo careful (as if a bureaucracy can "improve" safety in an industry which has the absolute requirement for safety already) that the permitting, inspections, and requirement that EVERYTHING manufactured or constructed meet some truly arbitrary, gummit mandated requirements. This adds years to the process and vastly increases the price of the final product. Will this increase the safety of the possibility of human-caused error?

Try to think of growing a huge, new bureaucracy of know-nothing pencil-pushers to "improve" nuclear safety. Rough, eh?

This is an excerpt from Wikipedia on this FUBAR:

"The Three Mile Island accident was a nuclear meltdown that occurred on March 28, 1979, in reactor number 2 of Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station (TMI-2) in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, United States. It was the worst accident in U.S. commercial nuclear power plant history.[2] The incident was rated a five on the seven-point International Nuclear Event Scale: Accident With Wider Consequences.[3][4]

The accident began with failures in the non-nuclear secondary system, followed by a stuck-open pilot-operated relief valve in the primary system, which allowed large amounts of nuclear reactor coolant to escape. The mechanical failures were compounded by the initial failure of plant operators to recognize the situation as a loss-of-coolant accident due to inadequate training and human factors, such as human-computer interaction design oversights relating to ambiguous control room indicators in the power plant's user interface. In particular, a hidden indicator light led to an operator manually overriding the automatic emergency cooling system of the reactor because the operator mistakenly believed that there was too much coolant water present in the reactor and causing the steam pressure release.[5]"

I was on a red-eye jet from San Francisco to Miami after a month with NNC when I found out. For some reason, due to Carter's ineptness, I knew nothing good was going to come out of this, just didn't realize how thoroughly Carter would screw everything up and how long that travesty would last.

Here's another on the resume' "enhancement" of the know-nothing peanut-brained excuse for a president (remember Iran? ...and the installation of the Assihola Killmania? ...and the botched rescue of the hostages? That boy couldn't do anything right):

(snip)

"Resume inflation- how a peanut farmer became a "nuclear engineer"

Posted on August 27, 2009

It is embarrassing how much rubbish we acquire that accumulates the varnish of truth. Until I read Rod Adams today I carried around the belief that Pres. Jimmy Carter was a Navy-trained nuclear engineer and a former nuclear officer. He was neither. What is dangerous about this sort of resume-buffing and credentials-inflation is that Carter was able to destroy the entire US nuclear industry – in part because people thought he “must know about that nuclear stuff”."

Read the whole article. Or not if you've become as sick and tired of crap as I have.

I don't know if NNC would have remained in American hands if Jimmy had not been such a incompetent President. The Japanese were buying up everything American at the time anyway, or whether we would have had the massive gas lines, price increases, and gas rationing, or the really massive 16 percent inflation and 22 percent interest rates (this is the major reason the Japanese were able to, everything went at bargain basement prices. Thanks, klutz).

I was going to write something nice and light about National Nuke, there were a lot of terrific people there including one with the most infectious sense of humor, and another who knew I was going to be a father for the first time before me! Beth, wherever you are, I still remember you with lots of love...

I'll write the nice one next.