Highest Rated Comments


Emfuser69 karma

We've been pretty happy with Bissel's Big Green Clean Machine, but it's not as good as paying for heated extraction. I think a home unit is great to have for pet stains and kid stains when paying for professional cleaning every time is impractical.

Emfuser25 karma

I can answer this since OP is probably asleep by this point. I'm a Reactor Engineer at an operating station as well.

A NE degree can be a ticket into Reactor Engineering, Core Design, Safety Analysis, Probabilistic Risk Assessment or Operations at an operating plant or the corporate HQ for a fleet, except for Reactor Engineers, which are plant-based.

You could do any of those except RE for a vendor such as Westinghouse, Areva, or GE. There are also a few vendors out there doing niche things like dry fuel cask loading analysis who might want to hire NE folks.

You can also contract to big outfits like Bechtel Bettis or directly with the Navy or you can join the Navy as a nuke officer.

There are options, but it's easy to get sort-of trapped as well. I've been in commercial nuclear for 13 years and I'm specialized enough that my options are now fairly limited outside of commercial nuclear plants or fleets. It significantly limits where I could work and for what entities and means that entrepreneurship within my specialty is quite difficult because of the niche market and high entry barriers.

Emfuser1 karma

This was started about 3 AM EST. I take it you're on night shift for outage support?

Emfuser1 karma

This job is not necessarily terribly stressful. It can be depending on where you work and who you work for, and what's going on.

The biggest single delay we had during a startup was when we ended up accidentally grounding 2 of 3 phases of the back-feed from our main transformer to our 7.2kV Balance of Plant busses and blew up the two grounding carts (ground straps) installed in the feeder breaker cubicle of each of those busses. That caused a fire, declaration of an unusual event to the NRC, and about a week delay as we did repairs. It scared the literal shit out of the guy who was taking a nap in one of the switchgear rooms. I'm not sure if they ever fired that guy since sleeping inside of our plant area normally gets you instantly terminated.

Can't think of any big fuck-ups in our containment though there was a good annoying one (for me) last outage where our night shift was doing a pre-offload (of the core) Foreign Object Search and Retrieval and the camera handling system literally fell apart on them inside of the reactor vessel. That was a 4 AM phone call I wasn't looking forward to. That fried one of our cameras pretty good since it sat about a foot off of the top of the core for around 8 hours or so before we pulled everything up and out.

So far as the boroscope thing goes, if you poke a hollow object through a bunch of water aka shielding, then you've basically created a radiation laser from whatever the other end of that object gets to. 3 rem to the eye shouldn't be anywhere near fatal, but that shot to the brain might not have been so good. I don't recall reading any industry OE to that effect that resulted in a death, and deaths in our industry are quite rare, so it does sound like someone was exaggerating the outcome.