Deck 36 No. 09: Admiral Rickover, The Periscope is Down!

By: Jim O'Flanagan

Author's Note: When I was employed at Babcock & Wilcox I was involved with the Naval Reactors program. Engineers and other personnel were required to keep and hold a United States Department of Energy Level L security clearance. Some had DOE Level Q, like IT folks.

Part of holding that clearance is a lifetime commitment to security, even after employment ends.

It was was one of the greatest honors of my life to be involved with this program, and I take my oaths very seriously.

All info, pictures, & videos are downloaded from publicly available resources like Wikipedia. The description of my experiences is told at a high level, and doesn't reveal any info this is not already public, or is general enough to not add any context.

One of the things I wanted to get across in this column was how cool it was to be involved with this program. Hopefully this column does that.

I also wanted to talk about The Rickover Principles, which guide all work on this program. They were developed by Admiral Hyman G. Rickover when the USS Nautilus was developed and designed back in the 1950s.

We use them to help guide all of our engineering work now.

Happy Sunday, and Happy Reading, Dear Readers!

-Jim ??'

Introduction

This smooth jam plays quite frequently at Oapsie Inc. It is a Commodore's song, but Lionel Ritchie performs it live all the time. It's #Awesome! Music by: The Commodore's "Easy Like Sunday Morning"

About a decade ago I had the great honor of boarding a United States Navy Nuclear Fast Attack Submarine (SSN).

You know, like from The Hunt For Red October. Captain Bart Mancuso’s boat. (The Tom Clancy book is out-of-this-world good. You should check it out. Movie's pretty good, too. Sean Connery is in his best role ever as Captain Marko Ramius).

Only the sub I boarded was one generation newer. It was a Virginia-class fast-attack submarine, of which the US Navy is currently building dozens to replace the Los Angeles-class shown in The Hunt For Red October.

One of the many stops I have made in my Engineering career was at Babcock & Wilcox in Barberton, Ohio. They have been making nuclear reactors for the US Navy at the same facility in Barberton since the very first one, the USS Nautilus.

My colleagues and I went to the US Naval shipyard in Groton, CT, home of the Electric Boat Company, in order to plan out the shipment and installation of a steam generator, which is 1/3 of the boat’s nuclear power plant. The new reactor plant is to go inside the new US Navy ballistic missile submarine, the Columbia-class. (Core and pressurizer are the other 2/3 of a reactor plant).

Electric Boat (EB) has built the vast majority of the US Navy submarine fleet past and present; both nuclear and non-nuclear.

The scale of a full-size US Navy shipyard is like nothing I have ever seen before. Everything is big. Especially the security.

The reactor plant I was working on powers the new Columbia-class submarine. The Columbia is slated to replace Ohio-class, which is the current generation of US Navy ballistic missile submarines (SSBN).

Music by: The Beatles "Yellow Submarine" Seemed very appropriate for this article.

You know, the ones that carry around ICBM’s. And can be launched on a moment’s notice.

The keel had not been laid down for one of those yet, but there were 4 Virginias in various stages of construction for us to inspect.

One of them even had a fully fueled, but not operating, reactor core. And that's the one we went on.

After I stepped down off the scaffolding, and into the engine compartment, I realized my mid-torso was the closest thing at that particular moment to the (fully fueled) reactor core.

Naval Reactors are different from civilian ones due to their more extreme (and highly variable) operating conditions.

The consequence of this is that Naval Reactors must use weapons-grade uranium fuel, which is enriched to around 80% U-235. Civilian reactors use Uranium that is enriched to around 5% - 10% (approximately), and are not suitable to initiate a runaway chain reaction necessary for a bomb.

Basically, they produce enough heat to boil water, and make steam, but not enough to blow up catastrophically.

No high enrichment, no potential bomb. Lower national security risk.

Alas, this was not a civilian reactor.

The only thing separating my lower torso from a bomb that could destroy the New York City metro area was about 48” of de-ionized, pressurized light-water. The water, and the stainless steel reactor head, functions as the only neutron shield for humans.

There is no tritium or deuterium present in a nuclear powerplant, so there is no nuclear fusion, and thus no potential THERMO-nuclear explosion. But if a US Navy reactor core goes catastrophic, there will be a very big boom indeed. About the size of the one in the movie True Lies.

The science tells us that the radiation dose for sailors, even at the distance I was at, is less than that from the sun. All of the sailors wear Geiger counters to detect radiation exposure, and those numbers are monitors fastidiously.

Being that close to it, things felt different somehow. It seemed like you could FEEL the neutrons hitting your body.

This was probably all inside my head, but believe me, when you’re around one of these things, you start thinking about some weird s**t.

I can still remember feeling the presence of death.

That’s the best way I can describe it. Everything about this stuff was deadly serious, too. From our Secret Level security clearances on down.

I’ve been close to death a few times in my life, and this is exactly what that felt like.

What a weird feeling.

There is a picture of the shipment article we were designing attached to this post. The picture itself was taken from a load test we conducted on that article out at Girard Machine, in Girard, OH. Girard Machine also fabricated two copies of this shipping rig for us. I was the project manager, and main design engineer, on the design and fabrication sides of the project.

Girard Machine was an excellent partner to work with on this. I understand they were bought out a few years back, so I don’t know if their facility is still being used for steel fabrication. Along with the shipyard, their facility was quite impressive to just look at, and the general size of things was somewhat incomprehensible.

We won’t know when, but that shipment article we designed is scheduled to be used in the next few years to ferry all of the steam generators from Barberton to the Groton US Naval shipyard for the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine construction program.

I am very proud to have contributed to our nation’s safety by working on this project. I am not a military veteran, but this did give me the chance to be around a ton of them.

B&W/BWXT also likes to hire naval officers for management positions. Smart move. They are literally schooled in the Rickover Principles, are world-class managers, and have the people skills to get things done. We discuss all of this below.

Plus, a lot of the active duty sailors came thru, like the reactor crew from USS Gerald R, Ford, the Navy’s next-gen aircraft carrier. It was always interesting meeting them.

Very serious bunch, by and large. Makes sense, given what they were tasked with operating and safeguarding.

Admiral Hyman G. Rickover

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Admiral Hyman G. Rickover quite literally invented the Nuclear Navy, and along with it, an entirely new, and conservative approach to mechanical design.

They are emobodied in the Rickover Principles. These are a list of maxims that a successful manager/engineer can use to run their teams and keep people safe.

There are many forms of it, and we have a few in this article.

So these are a management philosophy, as well as an engineering philosophy.

Not a bad thing to keep in your engineering toolkit, whether working on nuclear subs or not. These principals are embedded in the very DNA of the the entire US Naval Reactors program, which contains about a few dozen military and civilian organizations. Like most of the national labs (Sandia, KAPL, etc.), for example.

The Rickover Principles

==========================

There are several variations on the Rickover Principles. The first is the "7 Principles of Success." They are:

Rule 1: You must have a rising standard of quality over time, and well beyond what is required by any minimum standard.

Rule 2: People running complex systems should be highly capable.

Rule 3: Supervisors have to face bad news when it comes and take problems to a level high enough to fix those problems.

Rule 4: You must have a healthy respect for the dangers and risks of your particular job.

Rule 5: Training must be constant and rigorous.

Rule 6: All the functions of repair, quality control, and technical support must fit together.

Rule 7: The organization and members thereof must have the ability and willingness to learn from mistakes of the past.

They are obviously meant the nuclear navy, but they are great to apply to just about any engineering application.

The second is the one I am familiar with. It is a list of 14 principles listed on this placard:

Defense in Depth

===================

What did I learn from my time at B&W? Conservatism in mechanical design is a great thing.

It is a safe thing.

And what safety means, in a program like this, is people not dying. That is why there has been no loss of human life in the US Navy due to reactor incidents Their record of safety is clear, as well as the design philosophy that created it.

Of all the Rickover Principles, “Defense in Depth” is the one the sticks with me the most. Along with our ID badges and security placards, we used to wear a tag that stated all of the Rickover Principles. "Defense in Depth" was at the top.

For me, these three words encapsulate the entire Rickover design philosophy. Double and triple check everything. A 10X factor on your stress analysis is not a bad thing as long as weight is not a huge consideration.

And in submarines, weight is often the 4th or 5th design priority.

This also manifests in not changing design too much over time. The basic design of a military pressurized light water reactor has not changed much since the 1950s. The two things that have changed since then is the relative overall safety of the system, which has gone up, and the safe allowable operating conditions placed on the reactor plant.

It is a concept I try to apply in any field o d engineering I am in.

Academic Rigor

=================

Another cool feature of B&W's approach to engineering is the academic rigor applied to the work product that actually went out the door.

For us, that normally meant paper. Design reports, mechanical drawings, machine drawings, you name it.

But it also meant the actual designed parts and machines.

For even a simple drawing, on a minor part, at B&W a committee is assembled from across the company to review and sign off on, every single sheet of paper that would go to the customer.

One main difference about how B&W did this compared to everyone else is that they actually meant it, down to the core.

They actually expected everyone to give their opinions. And they were listened to when given.

Because after all, not doing so could mean the loss of someone's life.

Psychological Safety 101, everyone. Great stuff!

That was a great motivator to make sure everything we sent out was indeed correct, checked, and the best engineering analysis we could provide.

Have a great day, Dear Readers!

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