Vic Dura wrote:

....

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.

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.

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.

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...
BTW, if you reply to this, change the subject to "(OT)N.E. Chatter" so
we don't start to annoy anyone.

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