On Wed, 22 Jun 2005 09:38:17 -0500, in alt.home.repair OT: NE
Geezer Babble--was John Deere Riding lawn mower Duane Bozarth
wrote:

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?

Man, it sure is.

NucE (KSU)

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 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...

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.

....

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.

I recognize the name, but don't think I ever met him.

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.

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.

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...

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?

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