Oh, I thought you were in Tennessee. That must have been some other message I read.
I know of what you speak re: typical spring. So far we've been lucky at our place. None of the several storms that have already passed have hit our place. The last bummer we had was one of those hurricanes that came up from the Gulf last summer. I was cutting firewood for three weeks after that one.
Vic Dura wrote: ....
....
Ahhh, I see how you could have gotten that impression...was in Oak Ridge something over 25 yrs which is where I had the experience I mentioned regarding usage of the mower in question on an inclined plane :)
Came back to the farm here in KS after Dad died in early '99....
Small world. I was a nuc engr for 30 years befor retiring. The last 15 years where at Browns Ferry near Athens Al.
...
Yes, indeed! I spent first 10 at B&W in Lynchburg, leaving at the time McDermott announced the takeover (roughly year ahead of TMI). Went to Oak Ridge w/ a consulting firm, gradually evolved from nukes to fossil ending up w/ last 10 doing I&C R&D w/ EPRI I&C Center situated at Kingston Fossil...
What consulting firm where you with? Prior to Browns Ferry I was with SAI (Science Applications, now SAIC) for 10 years in their LaJolla office. The used to have a large office at Oak Ridge, but I have never been there.
What ever happened to B&W? Did they make BWRs or PWRs? I can't remember now. I seem to remember BWR, but I'm not sure.
BTW, if you reply to this, change the subject to "(OT)N.E. Chatter" so we don't start to annoy anyone.
...
Gets smaller all the time, doesn't it? :)
I went to O-R from B&W when a former B&W manager who had gone to O-R as Licensing Manager for the CRBRP saw Carter's handwriting on the wall and went w/ the then almost brand new SAI office in O-R to start the engineering side of the operation (up to that time the O-R SAI office was exclusively environmental work, but was only 5 or 6 full-time staff when I got there). Stayed w/ SAI/SAIC until '94 (I think it was) by which time the internal structuring finally made the cost to try to support commercial clients outside the major markets totally intolerable...by that time EPRI had also decided not to subcontract the I&C Center operation so I moved by EPRI consulting contract at one renewal time to a small Knoxville company CSI (Computational Systems, Inc, the (primarily) predictive diagnostics folks) and continued to support the I&C Center and CSI new product development engineering until Emerson Electric bought them up. Dad passed away suddenly in '99 and that was the final impetus to do what I'd been wanting to do for some time--quit the consulting ratrace and come back to the farm (ratrace? :) )...So, here I am...
SAIC/OR was over 500 at the peak--it's shrunk considerably since then owing to the sizable DOE retraction in OR. The engineering group I was with has shriveled to virtually nothing--just four or five oldtimers waiting 'til they also retire. It's almost all IT services now, w/ most of the work coming down from DC. There's still some remediation work for DOE, but only a pittance comparatively.
Did you ever happen to cross paths w/ Joe Penland in La Jolla? He was moved to a Corporate VP job and moved to La Jolla. He then died of some virulent liver cancer while still in his 50s. He's the fellow I followed from B&W to SAI.
Ed Straker was the Group VP over OR/Huntsville/McLean offices early on. He and Joe P and a few others were all UT-Knoxville PhD grads of roughly '64-'68...I don't know if Ed's retired yet or not...he moved from LaJ to McLean some years ago when that area became so much more significant to SAIC/OR and the commercial nuke business dried up.
No, GE was/is the only US BWR vendor--W, CE and B&W were all PWR vendors.
B&W was bought by JR McDermott in '78 which precipitated my leaving as it was becoming clear the market was going to be minimal at best and it appeared by looking at JR McD's previous annual reports that internal R&D would not fare well and I did not want to work in either field services nor back in the day-to-day design/engineering groups...I'm a NucE (KSU) w/ Physics grad degrees. I joked I spent over 30 years as an engineer and never built a thing...my interest was always in the more "science'y" side, not the actual reactor design/end use, but the underlying technologies required. (I did finally actually participate fairly heavily at CSI in a product that won a "New Product of the Year" award--a wireless vibration monitoring system for predictive maintenance, however. When it made production was when Emerson decided product development was way overstaffed.) :)
They're still going on the fossil side and the nuclear side is services and refueling. Of course, the Nuc Navy Divicison (NNFD) is the sole supplier for the Navy nukes, but they're completely separate from what was NPGD (Nuclear Power Generation Division). I don't know the internal organizaton at all any more. There are only a handful of individuals still there from my stint by now, of course.
Bellefonte is a B&W 205 FA design--speaking of which, what did TVA ever decide? They were in the throes of the study to either convert to fossil, finish as nuke, or abandon the site when I left Kingston and I've not followed up to see what (if anything) was ever decided...
Man, it sure is.
Is that the one in Manhattan? I was accepted there as a 3rd year transfer student in 1968, but decided to go to OU instead. What years were you in the NucE department?
...
That consulting game was just that. Nothing but a rat race and getting worse every year. By the time I left SAI in 1985 they were making the transition from R&D work to doing whatever they could get the government to give them a contract for. Ten years earlier we would not bid something if we didn't think it was something we could do well. By the time I left they would bid anything. I remember one time our division manager wanted to bid a *word processing services* contract, just so he could get his numbers looking better. We were doing Energy R&D work at the time. Word Processing???!!! I knew then it was getting time to leave.
...
I recognize the name, but don't think I ever met him.
Ed Straker is the guy that hired me. He and Larry Kull. I knew Ed better than Larry (who was Ed's boss), and liked them both. I even gave Ed one of my old slide rulers for his collection. He had a
*bunch* of them in a really nice collection. I think he retired a couple of years ago. When he hired me, a guy named Lee Simmons was my division manager. He was a wild-man. We were doing environmental radiation effects studies at the time. I did that for about 5 years before moving over to Energy Systems.It's still in moth balls and they still have the site. Every once in a while they talk about doing something with it but nothing has happened yet. There was even talked of turning it into a trash burner (incinerator) at one time. I seem to recall that the scheme called for adding a trash-buring furnace somewhere on-site while keeping the NSSS in moth balls. I didn't understand the logic of that, but I wasn't following it closely and I may have missed something.
Well, it was all good then, but not anymore. I'm glad I made it out and it sounds like you are too.
What are you farming there in KS? Wheat?
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.