I was a US Navy Nuclear Operator and Recruiter. Ask Me Anything.

[Gorrath]

Dear Navy,

Why does the Navy suck?

Sincerely,
The Army

Dear Army,

I don't know. We'll pull back and let someone else control the sea lanes for awhile. Let us know how that works out for you for the next war we fight.

Sincerely,

The Navy.

Dear Navy,

Think the Coast Guard can ship our tanks to us, or should we try Fed Ex? I'm not sure the former can fit a tank in those tin cans they bob around in and if we use the latter I'm not sure even DU armor can stand up to their package handlers.

Sincerely,
The Army

P.S.: How accurate was the movie "Battleship"? I'm guessing in a fight between aliens and the Navy, Navy would win.

 

[ecoho]

Dear Navy,

Why does the Navy suck?

Sincerely,
The Army

Dear Army,

I don't know. We'll pull back and let someone else control the sea lanes for awhile. Let us know how that works out for you for the next war we fight.

Sincerely,

The Navy.

Dear Navy,

Think the Coast Guard can ship our tanks to us, or should we try Fed Ex? I'm not sure the former can fit a tank in those tin cans they bob around in and if we use the latter I'm not sure even DU armor can stand up to their package handlers.

Sincerely,
The Army

P.S.: How accurate was the movie "Battleship"? I'm guessing in a fight between aliens and the Navy, Navy would win.

......don't mess with the coast guard those guys have their shit together more then us.

OT: hey easy question can you swim? and how many people do you work with who cant?

 

[Dalisclock]

P.S.: How accurate was the movie "Battleship"? I'm guessing in a fight between aliens and the Navy, Navy would win.

Never saw it so I can't comment(I heard it was transformers in the ocean, and I didn't like the transformers movies to begin with). Though most sci-fi alien invasion movies tend to have the aliens act like morons so humans can win.

Signs was a particularly good example, though my personal theory is that the aliens in Signs were basically criminals or some other undesirables who were dropped off on a toxic, hostile plant knowing full well that all of them would be killed.

OT: hey easy question can you swim? and how many people do you work with who cant?

I can. Everyone has to show some basic swim ability to finish boot camp, but unless it's part of your job, you probably will never have to swim after that.

I actually became a much better swimmer on shore duty then I ever was on the ship because I started going to the swimming pool a couple time a week, something I wasn't able to do on the ship.

I'm not sure about my coworkers. The idea is that as long as you could swim long enough to get to a life raft or boat, you should be okay.

OTOH, SEALs, rescue swimmers, divers, aircrew, etc had to show much better swimming skills because their job required it.

 

[Objectable]

So, you were nuclear, right?
Were you wild?
were you breaking up inside?
(Sorry if someone already asked those questions.)

 

[ecoho]

P.S.: How accurate was the movie "Battleship"? I'm guessing in a fight between aliens and the Navy, Navy would win.

Never saw it so I can't comment(I heard it was transformers in the ocean, and I didn't like the transformers movies to begin with). Though most sci-fi alien invasion movies tend to have the aliens act like morons so humans can win.

Signs was a particularly good example, though my personal theory is that the aliens in Signs were basically criminals or some other undesirables who were dropped off on a toxic, hostile plant knowing full well that all of them would be killed.

OT: hey easy question can you swim? and how many people do you work with who cant?

I can. Everyone has to show some basic swim ability to finish boot camp, but unless it's part of your job, you probably will never have to swim after that.

I actually became a much better swimmer on shore duty then I ever was on the ship because I started going to the swimming pool a couple time a week, something I wasn't able to do on the ship.

I'm not sure about my coworkers. The idea is that as long as you could swim long enough to get to a life raft or boat, you should be okay.

OTOH, SEALs, rescue swimmers, divers, aircrew, etc had to show much better swimming skills because their job required it.

ok good cause I know a few sailors that couldn't and it really bugged me that they sailed around the world but could barley stay buoyant.
now for a harder one why for the love of god do E1 navy personal think they can pick a fight with coast guard E5s and win? (had to break up a few um disagreements on post.)

 

[SlumlordThanatos]

I tried like hell to join the National Guard. Wanted them to pay for my college and was aiming for a job somewhere along the lines of resupply and logistics. Making sure people got what they needed to do what they do. Turned out I was unqualified because I took medication for my Asperger Syndrome up through high school and that automatically disqualified me. Didn't stop the recruiters from telling me to lie about my medical history so I could get in anyway.

The instant I told a Marine recruiter that I was on Adderall for my Asperger's, he promptly told me they couldn't take me, and didn't call me back.

So if you don't wanna join the military, tell them you're on some kind of medication. I'm 25, and I'm only just now getting emails from Marine recruiters again.

It's always Marine recruiters...

Were you ever pushed by yout superiors to lie during recruitment. Not to be pushy, leave out details or exaggerate but blatantly lie. I've known two other recruiters, Marines and Air Force, and they were both expected by their superiors to blatantly lie in recruitment efforts.

I was never told to lie, but I was pressured by some of my immediate supervisors to be very selective in what I said to the applicants and to try to push people into certain programs(Nuclear in particular). As in, I was supposed to talk about how nukes make a lot of money but not talk about the long hours. How I handled it was I would obviously talk about the positives but if asked about the negatives, I'd be honest about them. I wouldn't specifically bring up "Hey, you're gonna work 70 hour workweeks a lot" when trying to get them interested, but before they joined, all the nukes I got into the navy knew "You're the first on the ship and the last off" and that there's a fair bit of suck invovled. If someone wasn't interested in an engineering-type job, I wasn't gonna try to push them into being a nuke, despite how desperately we needed one for this month.

Other times I had to do the "There's a chance the job you want will be available" even if I knew that chance was very small/almost non-existent(the caveat being that recruiters don't have access to that information). Though we also had a policy that if they were only interested in that one job, we weren't gonna bother taking them to the Military Entrance Processing Station(MEPS) to join and we made that clear to them beforehand.

I keep in touch with some of the guys I put into the Navy to this day and pretty much all of them have told me they felt I was honest with them, which gives me some satisfaction to know they were prepared and went in with eyes wide open.

I did work with a coworker who was punished and kicked out of recruiting because he told his applicants to lie(about medical history) so he could get them into the navy. That recruiter was being pressured by my supervisor, but by the time the issue came up, that supervisor had transferred to another district and thus couldn't be punished like the recruiter was. The rest of us didn't realize this was going on because he was being groomed to take over the office when my supervisor left, so they weren't really including us in those conversations and we had more then enough work on our own plates to pry into what he was doing. This supervisor was also the most abusive, toxic asshole of a boss I've ever had and when he left my job became a lot less stressful.

Sadly, Recruiting is very much a sales job and such there's a lot of grey area involving what you can say. Some of I really wasn't fond of but I did my best not to screw anyone over. If someone didn't want to join, I was a lot more willing to respect that then my boss sometimes was.

Sounds about right.

My grandpa was an Army recruiter after he got back from Vietnam, and he told me point-blank to not "believe a damn thing they say". It seems to be the same regardless of the branch, although I imagine the Marines are a bit more selective in who they take.

 

[Dalisclock]

now for a harder one why for the love of god do E1 navy personal think they can pick a fight with coast guard E5s and win? (had to break up a few um disagreements on post.)

Beyond the obvious answer of them being idiots, jerks or both, the only thing I can guess is a misplaced sense of inter-service rivalry, believing the Coast Guard doesn't deserve any respect(for reasons). The fact an E1 would be a couple months out of boot camp and probably doesn't know how anything really works(and possibly high off of making it through boot camp) probably plays into it.

Not trying to excuse it at all. Strangely, I'm used to the idea of Sailors and Marines getting into it, not so much Navy and Coast Guard Sailors(Hell, we're practically the same branch anyway).

 

[Dalisclock]

The instant I told a Marine recruiter that I was on Adderall for my Asperger's, he promptly told me they couldn't take me, and didn't call me back.

So if you don't wanna join the military, tell them you're on some kind of medication. I'm 25, and I'm only just now getting emails from Marine recruiters again.

It's always Marine recruiters...

I've heard the Army can be particularly bad, just because they have much higher quotas to fill(the Army actually had a rash of recruiter suicides back during the 2000's and had to limit their working hours). The Marines have the advantage of great PR and cool commercials, as well as having one of the smallest branches and thus lower goals. Though the Marine office near us were routinely working on Saturdays, whereas that was punishment if/when our boss hated us(So every other month).

I can attest that being on prescription meds is an auto-disqualifier. You'd need to be off it for at least two years(and have medical paperwork saying when you were taken off the meds) before you'd be eligible for the military. So if you don't want recruiters calling you, and telling them you aren't interested hasn't worked(sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't), telling them you have a medical issue or on medication should be more then enough for them to write you off. They pretty much have to take your word for it, because recruiters can't actually go look for your medical records unless you sign a release allowing you to do so.

Really, the worst thing that could happen to you realistically in dealing with recruiters is that you can be red flagged and never allowed to join the military. Obviously, this is only a bad thing if you actually want to join. If the US ever revives the draft, I can only imagine the clusterfuck that's gonna turn into. "Sorry, I can't join. I smoked a joint this morning. I'll piss in a cup to prove it".

 

[Thaluikhain]

I already know for a fact that US government manuals and instructions that aren't classified can be found through a casual web-search.

Oh yeah, lots of great stuff there. If you want to learn how the US military operated in Vietnam, say, there will be copies of the training and field manuals around.

Mind you, the US Army site is terribly set up, and looking for old FMs made available to the public will link you to somewhere claiming to be for official use only, but there are other places around.

Wish more countries would put that sort of stuff online.

 

[Jux]

Does anyone find this to be an inefficient means of generating power?

Every couple of years there's rumors about building new nuclear powered crusiers whenever oil prices get too high, but apparently it's still not worth the effort because nothing ever happens.

A few thoughts on this. I think first establishing how efficiency is defined is pretty important. I'm going to assume you mean the Rankine cycle efficiency and not capacity efficency. Generally, you're going to measure it in the btu of a kWh divided by the heat rate. So efficiency can vary even in a single plant depending on what load it's at. Nuclear plants, at least civilian side, are around 38-40% efficient, which is about the same as a super critical coal plant (at least on the steam turbine side, if you're including the overall energy loss from the fission process passed on, efficiency drops way off). Efficiency can be a misleading number though, if we're examining this from the context of how environmentally friendly it is. Wind turbines only have a conversion efficiency of something like 30-45%, and solar is horribly inefficient, something like 20% at best, with annual rates closer to 12%.

Part of what makes nuclear power more expensive (not relative to fossil fuels, just overall), is the regulatory standards that need to be upheld. This may be wrong for the Navy, but I've heard that most nuclear plants have 3x the staffing of a comparably sized fossil plant, because of the redundancy measures in place for accountability. Which makes me worried to hear that ya'll are so understaffed.

For my question, I was wondering about the cooling process, and what kind of radiation emissions ya'll are allowed to put out? I am assuming that you have a closed loop cooling water systemm, which is probably itself cooled by sea water?

 

[Flames66]

AMA

What kind of sword do you prefer and how do you use it?

What is your preferred variety of tea?

What type of biscuit do you have with the above?

What do you think of the portrayal of the military in video games and other media?

Do you consider yourself patriotic? If so/not, how does this manifest itself?

What sort of techniques/tactics are used to recruit new people?

 

[Dalisclock]

Part of what makes nuclear power more expensive (not relative to fossil fuels, just overall), is the regulatory standards that need to be upheld. This may be wrong for the Navy, but I've heard that most nuclear plants have 3x the staffing of a comparably sized fossil plant, because of the redundancy measures in place for accountability. Which makes me worried to hear that ya'll are so understaffed.

For my question, I was wondering about the cooling process, and what kind of radiation emissions ya'll are allowed to put out? I am assuming that you have a closed loop cooling water systemm, which is probably itself cooled by sea water?

I'm not sure about the number of operators/technicians used in civilian nuclear plants compared to what we had, but how this usually manifests is rotation. As in, my friends and former coworkers who have gone to work in civilian nuclear plants talk about how the schedule in a civilian plant is so much better then in a Navy Nuclear Plant. On deployment, we pretty much never got a day off and were expected to stand watch in the plant for at least 5 hours a day on a rotating shift schedule, usually 20 hours between each watch, whereas civilian nuclear operators may have longer shifts but also get guaranteed days off and are compensated for overtime/extra shifts.

The Navy pretty much just tries to keep you on for another 5 or so by offering $90K reenlistment bonuses, which doesn't work very well considering how many nukes would rather head to the civilian job market. Promotion is incredibly fast for us because of this, but Promotion also means you have more responsibility and less free time,which doesn't sound too bad unless you're already not getting a full nights sleep most of the time anyway. It also leads to a lot of weirdness with the rest of the Navy, because putting on E6 at 4.5 years makes a lot of other people think you're the favorite son and they hate you for it, or wondering why you don't care that your boots aren't super shiny (after 18 hours in a 100-degree power plant)when you "should be trying to make chief"(If you don't know what that is, basically Chief is senior enlisted and a big, big deal in the navy. Considered more prestigious then becoming an officer by many).

But it's a problem that's probably not gonna get better anytime soon. The Operations Tempo(deployments and time between them) and sequestration(Fuck you, Congress) for the past few years is making it hard to keep the equipment properly maintained and is pushing the nukes to the point of burn out. They can't really lower the standards(and apparently have no plans to do so) to get more nukes and the training pipeline is already close to capacity as well so it wouldn't really help anyway. With the economy getting better and a lot of civilian nuclear operators nearing retirement age, probably even fewer nukes are gonna stay in till retirement then they are now.

It's one of the reasons that I told the Navy Reserve recruiter that I wasn't interested in going to the reserves, because I'm not getting called back to that life(and I suspect a nuke call back might happen in a couple years).

Digression aside, we do use a closed loop cooling system, which transfers heat to a steam cycle, when then dumps any excess heat to seawater via condensers attached to the various steam turbines.

Radiation isn't really much an issue. The coolant system is entirely within primary containment, and really most of the primary systems stay within the shielding except for the few that have to be outside in order to operate them. Even then, we have radiation monitors posted around the plant and we had to wear personal dosimeters(which look like little black boxes that went onto our belts) whenever we were in the plant. Since someone is going to ask, we don't use the little radiation film badges routinely. Those are actually reserved for the event of a possible radiation leak when we anticipate there might be dangerous levels of radiation outside of containment, and if the badge exposes....you're pretty much already screwed(It's kind of a canary in a coal mine). If we issue badges, it's gonna be a bad day for everyone.

Our biggest concern with emissions is discharging coolant. We occasionally have to discharge excess(possibly contaminated) water from the coolant system and we have a holding tank system for that. When that system gets close to being full, then we actually have to discharge overboard and there's a lot of special precautions we have to abide by for that, such as ensuring we are nowhere near land at the time, coordinating with the bridge so that we don't potentially contaminate the hull and monitoring radiation levels at the point of discharge to make sure we aren't radiating the fish. The coolant usually isn't particularly contaminated to begin with, because we treat the water to make sure it's purified and less likely to have any particles that can become activated before we pump any into the system.

 

[Jux]

-snip-

Cool, thanks for the response. Just realized, one reason that they might not be expanding nuclear to smaller vessels could be staffing, if ya'll are finding it hard to staff the existing vessels as it is, expanding the number of ships that need to be maintained that way would be incredibly stupid. As an afterthought, I did a little google search, and this turned up from the CBO in 2011. Looks like the primary concern is oil prices, though I can't imagine they would ignore the staffing problems too.

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/42180

 

[ecoho]

Part of what makes nuclear power more expensive (not relative to fossil fuels, just overall), is the regulatory standards that need to be upheld. This may be wrong for the Navy, but I've heard that most nuclear plants have 3x the staffing of a comparably sized fossil plant, because of the redundancy measures in place for accountability. Which makes me worried to hear that ya'll are so understaffed.

For my question, I was wondering about the cooling process, and what kind of radiation emissions ya'll are allowed to put out? I am assuming that you have a closed loop cooling water systemm, which is probably itself cooled by sea water?

I'm not sure about the number of operators/technicians used in civilian nuclear plants compared to what we had, but how this usually manifests is rotation. As in, my friends and former coworkers who have gone to work in civilian nuclear plants talk about how the schedule in a civilian plant is so much better then in a Navy Nuclear Plant. On deployment, we pretty much never got a day off and were expected to stand watch in the plant for at least 5 hours a day on a rotating shift schedule, usually 20 hours between each watch, whereas civilian nuclear operators may have longer shifts but also get guaranteed days off and are compensated for overtime/extra shifts.

The Navy pretty much just tries to keep you on for another 5 or so by offering $90K reenlistment bonuses, which doesn't work very well considering how many nukes would rather head to the civilian job market. Promotion is incredibly fast for us because of this, but Promotion also means you have more responsibility and less free time,which doesn't sound too bad unless you're already not getting a full nights sleep most of the time anyway. It also leads to a lot of weirdness with the rest of the Navy, because putting on E6 at 4.5 years makes a lot of other people think you're the favorite son and they hate you for it, or wondering why you don't care that your boots aren't super shiny (after 18 hours in a 100-degree power plant)when you "should be trying to make chief"(If you don't know what that is, basically Chief is senior enlisted and a big, big deal in the navy. Considered more prestigious then becoming an officer by many).

But it's a problem that's probably not gonna get better anytime soon. The Operations Tempo(deployments and time between them) and sequestration(Fuck you, Congress) for the past few years is making it hard to keep the equipment properly maintained and is pushing the nukes to the point of burn out. They can't really lower the standards(and apparently have no plans to do so) to get more nukes and the training pipeline is already close to capacity as well so it wouldn't really help anyway. With the economy getting better and a lot of civilian nuclear operators nearing retirement age, probably even fewer nukes are gonna stay in till retirement then they are now.

It's one of the reasons that I told the Navy Reserve recruiter that I wasn't interested in going to the reserves, because I'm not getting called back to that life(and I suspect a nuke call back might happen in a couple years).

Digression aside, we do use a closed loop cooling system, which transfers heat to a steam cycle, when then dumps any excess heat to seawater via condensers attached to the various steam turbines.

Radiation isn't really much an issue. The coolant system is entirely within primary containment, and really most of the primary systems stay within the shielding except for the few that have to be outside in order to operate them. Even then, we have radiation monitors posted around the plant and we had to wear personal dosimeters(which look like little black boxes that went onto our belts) whenever we were in the plant. Since someone is going to ask, we don't use the little radiation film badges routinely. Those are actually reserved for the event of a possible radiation leak when we anticipate there might be dangerous levels of radiation outside of containment, and if the badge exposes....you're pretty much already screwed(It's kind of a canary in a coal mine). If we issue badges, it's gonna be a bad day for everyone.

Our biggest concern with emissions is discharging coolant. We occasionally have to discharge excess(possibly contaminated) water from the coolant system and we have a holding tank system for that. When that system gets close to being full, then we actually have to discharge overboard and there's a lot of special precautions we have to abide by for that, such as ensuring we are nowhere near land at the time, coordinating with the bridge so that we don't potentially contaminate the hull and monitoring radiation levels at the point of discharge to make sure we aren't radiating the fish. The coolant usually isn't particularly contaminated to begin with, because we treat the water to make sure it's purified and less likely to have any particles that can become activated before we pump any into the system.

I can attest to being promoted too fast makes people resent you, but more importantly it very stressful. I went from an E3 when I entered basic(had ROTC) to an E7(2 AIT, sgt training and then one promotion to position) and people hated me right when I got on post took me 6 months to gain the experience needed to do my job and a year to earn the respect that should have come with my rank. my advice to anyone who wants to join go for it but don't take a promotion unless you know you can handle the responsibility and the crap that comes with it.

 

[SlumlordThanatos]

I saw you talking about sequestration, and that got me wondering.

I've always heard horror stories about how the Army basically wastes materiel because they're always getting new stuff and they have to use what they have to replace it with new stuff. Although, as I recall, it was mostly munitions and uniforms. A friend of mine in the Air Force was deployed to Afghanistan and they replaced their boots after every couple of months. The boots that were replaced were in such good shape that he ships them to another friend of mine and he continues to wear them.

So, is the Navy much different in that regard? How much money do you think the military in general could save if they were less wasteful?

 

[Dalisclock]

So, is the Navy much different in that regard? How much money do you think the military in general could save if they were less wasteful?

It happens in the Navy too, the "If you don't spend your budget this year, obviously you didn't need it and we can give you less next year" attitude. My parents did 20 and retired and saw the same thing. A lot of people think it's wasteful but I'm not sure if anyone has a solution. Strangely, spending money on new uniform designs might be even worse(as in, each branch, the navy in particular, love to design and roll out new uniforms every few years, and that costs millions).

As for numbers, I really couldn't tell you. I'm sure someone has done the math somewhere but I don't know where to find that information.

What kind of sword do you prefer and how do you use it?

What is your preferred variety of tea?

What type of biscuit do you have with the above?

What do you think of the portrayal of the military in video games and other media?

Do you consider yourself patriotic? If so/not, how does this manifest itself?

What sort of techniques/tactics are used to recruit new people?

-A Hattori Hanzō sword. "If you meet god, god will be cut".
-Green, though I can drink any type. Preferably with some cream and a little suger.
-Tasty Biscuits. No type in particular,as long as it's not a coaster .
- That's a complex answer. It really depends on the work because some do a really good job and some not so much. The biggest issue across the board I've seen is people getting basic details right.

For example, I was watching an episode of the TV show Fringe last night and there's a bit that involves evading the military in Jacksonville, Florida while on the Navy base there. There's a comment about "The Army" and I immediately took notice, looked at my wife(who was watching with me) and said "Jacksonville has a Navy Base, not an Army base".

I was also kind of annoyed at Prototype for showing F-22's and Apache Helicopters flying off on an Aircraft Carrier, for the simple reason that the Navy doesn't operate either and has more then enough of it's own aircraft to be letting anyone else use it's flight deck space(especially since there are Army and Air Force bases within striking distance of New York City).

Aircraft Carriers also don't launch aircraft from just offshore either, because:
1.) Carriers need a certain amount of wind across the flight deck to launch aircraft and often change speed and direction to catch the winds right(or to generate the equivalent lift via ships speed)
2.) Harbors tend to be crowded and colliding with other ships is a bad day for everyone. Captains get fired for crashing their multi-billion dollar taxpayer-funded ships into other things(Rocks, Reefs, Buoys, other ships, etc).
3.) They can just as easily launch aircraft from the open ocean with more safety to the carrier and with more then enough fuel to reach the target and return. We actually rarely saw our escort ships on deployment because they were always over the horizon from us and aircraft are capable of striking much further away.

It's even worse if they were made during the age of wikipedia, which means the writers couldn't be assed to spend 5 minutes fact checking.

-I want to call myself Patriotic, but about 14 years ago, being patriotic somehow turned into "America, Fuck Yeah!". I like lots of things about my Country...and dislike quite a few as well(The Xenophobic asshole "America! Love it or leave it!" Crowd among them). I certainly don't think the US is "The Greatest Country on Earth" and there are plenty of things we could learn from others and do better at. I can't listen to Alan Jackson or Toby Keith at all without wanting to vomit, or just mock them merciless("Freedom cost a buck O'five!"). I'm not sure if that answers your question or not.

-As for recruiting, it's basically sales(with HR mixed in, once someone joins). Obviously the Ad campaigns to help generate interest(the Keith David Navy commercials, if you've ever seen those). We would also do a lot of cold calling(which is like working in a call center and just as life draining) and occasionally use Facebook to try to contact people. There was always face-to-face recruiting, which always always my favorite. Essentially, I got to go walk around, go shopping, go out to eat as part of my workday(and with a government car) and look for people who might be interested in the military, try to talk to them. It also allowed me to do errands, which was nice. Even if I didn't find anyone, I at least enjoyed getting out in the open air. Sometimes I had to go to schools and set up a table, which wasn't terribly useful but at least I got to talk to new people and sometimes answer questions.

Sometimes we basically just took walk ins/call ins, which was a mixed bag because you have no idea what you are getting until you interview them. Sometimes there's people who want to join now and have nothing holding them back, and other times it's people who have a lot of issues and the only answer is "I'm sorry, there's nothing I can do to help you". Some people have to fix things(and we'd tell them what they needed to do), and of those, some of them we'd eventually get in and some we'd never see again. Then there's people who are just shopping, aka looking at all the branches and want information.

 

[EvilRoy]

So, is the Navy much different in that regard? How much money do you think the military in general could save if they were less wasteful?

It happens in the Navy too, the "If you don't spend your budget this year, obviously you didn't need it and we can give you less next year" attitude. My parents did 20 and retired and saw the same thing. A lot of people think it's wasteful but I'm not sure if anyone has a solution. Strangely, spending money on new uniform designs might be even worse(as in, each branch, the navy in particular, love to design and roll out new uniforms every few years, and that costs millions).

As for numbers, I really couldn't tell you. I'm sure someone has done the math somewhere but I don't know where to find that information.

You probably don't want to know. If it makes you feel better, it isn't a military thing - just a government thing. Even in the areas I work it happens constantly; basically the entire reason we have a public arts fund is so there is something to dump money into that people can't really ***** about too much. In case you were wondering why there are always overpriced and visibly retarded new wave art pieces in every city. Has to do with the difficulty in reasonably estimating highly variable maintenance and other things years in advance.


My question to you - I read an article that you may be aware of on Cracked, and I wanted to ask you about the truth of some of it. Particularly, do you guys seriously get constantly exterminated on procedures and stuff? Any truth to the claims of rampant cheating (don't feel the need to incriminate yourself in either case).

 

[Dalisclock]

My question to you - I read an article that you may be aware of on Cracked, and I wanted to ask you about the truth of some of it. Particularly, do you guys seriously get constantly exterminated on procedures and stuff? Any truth to the claims of rampant cheating (don't feel the need to incriminate yourself in either case).

I'm pretty sure I know what article you're talking about. Part of being a nuke was having to undergo college level exams once a month and sometimes more often(during periodic inspections). Unlike the Air Force Missiler ones, you didn't have to do perfect. 70% or better was considered passing. If you failed, you got homework where you had to show you knew the answer.

The Nuclear Navy had it's own cheating scandal around the same time, where one of our training facilities essentially did the same thing. The training instructors(Navy Nukes who were on shore duty, training the "Baby Nukes" before they hit the fleet) had to take similar exams and so did the students, but apparently some(how many, reports don't say) of the students knew what tests they were getting and asked the instructors for the cheat sheets. 34 instructors were kicked out of the Navy for violating integrity standards. What makes it disturbing is that I was a student at that same command when the cheating was going on and I sure as hell don't remember seeing or hearing anything like that, so apparently it was fairly limited at the time.

On the ship, I saw nothing like that but there was some cheating going on with the exams. It was a lot lower key. Essentially, when we did our monthly exams, everyone took them on the same day and had 2 hours to take them. There was about a 6 hours window you had to take it in because of work and watch schedules, some people who went first would finish up and go back to give everyone else "the gouge", which was pretty much "Know X,Y,Z,etc.". How much that actually helped you depends a lot on how much you knew the material anyway, because if you don't know it on the day of, you aren't going to cram it well enough in two hours. The best you could hope for was to do a quick brush up on the subjects in question before taking the test.

For us, "the gouge" was an open secret and since we weren't passing around a cheat sheet, it wasn't something anyone could prove. The fact was also that, there were only so many questions they could ask you and even with rephrasing the question, it was really only a matter of time before you've seen and answered every question multiple times and you knew what the test graders wanted to see. The fact we also did a test review a week or so later where we went over the questions and what the right answers, as well as how points were assigned pretty much meant eventually someone could pass the test through having seen it so many times.

Even if I had been involved with cheating,, at this point it wouldn't matter if I told the internet. Most of the time, things don't follow you to your next command unless it's something serious(and are documented in your service record). When you leave the military, pretty much nothing follows you except your DD-214(Discharge papers) and your evals(which your next job may or may not want to see), so if it didn't catch up to you while you were in, it's extremely rare that the DoD is gonna try to drag you back to punish you(essentially you'd have to kill or rape someone while serving and evidence showed up after you left).

 

[Strazdas]

Thanks for doing this.,

I got two rather short questions.

1. From your experience, do you think there is a push for more or less nuclear power based ships in the navy? as in, are they phasing out old nuclear ships for non-nuclear ships or the other way around?

2. After talking to some civilian nuclear engineers i was told that basically if humans suddenly for whatever reason stopped coming to work the computer there could potentially continue running the plant till it runs out of fuel and then somewhat-safely shutdown itself. Is it similar in ships? how much human care is needed to prevent failure? could the computers basically run themselves if humand suddenly dissapeared or would it lead to a meltdown/breach?

 

[Dalisclock]

Thanks for doing this.,

I got two rather short questions.

1. From your experience, do you think there is a push for more or less nuclear power based ships in the navy? as in, are they phasing out old nuclear ships for non-nuclear ships or the other way around?

2. After talking to some civilian nuclear engineers i was told that basically if humans suddenly for whatever reason stopped coming to work the computer there could potentially continue running the plant till it runs out of fuel and then somewhat-safely shutdown itself. Is it similar in ships? how much human care is needed to prevent failure? could the computers basically run themselves if humand suddenly dissapeared or would it lead to a meltdown/breach?

For 1, I would say it's more or less holding steady. All of our Carriers and submarines are designed around Nuclear Power and that's probably not gonna change anytime soon. As mentioned before, every so often there's a push to make Nuclear Powered Destroyers/Cruisers(which seems to change depending on which proposal it is) but that only last until oil prices drop and apparently it would only be worth it if oil prices go sky high and stay there. Even then, it takes nearly a decade and a couple hundred million from "This would be a cool idea" to "First Operational ship in a class with others being built", especially with nuclear power. Hell, it takes a long time for pretty much any new military weapons system but ships in particular due to scale involved.

That doesn't prelude building more ships of a type(more carriers/submarines) to meet operational needs but the upper limit(aside from money and to some extent production facilities, because only one shipyard on Earth is capable of building and refueling Nimitz/Ford class aircraft carriers ) is the aforementioned staffing issue of being able to recruit enough nuclear operators(which is hard) and convincing them to stay past the first decade of service(which is much harder).

2.One of those answers I have to be careful about because of National Security, etc. In theory, this is true of Naval Reactors as well. Once we had our plants up and running(and startup was probably the trickiest operation we had to do on a regular basis because there was a very specific sequence of events that had to happen in order, in some cases with a rather narrow window), the plant was pretty stable without human interaction. The reactor was designed to have some self correcting ability, where a rise in power would cause the nuclear reaction to slow in response(and a drop in power would cause the reaction to increase), which basically meant the reactor would under normal circumstances return to a steady power level by itself after power went up and down.

To clarify why this is important,by contrast, Chernobyl(and some boiling water reactors) are designed the other way, where an increase or decrease in power would cause a feedback reaction which causes a greater increase/decrease in power, which apparently is good when you have a large reactor that needs to handle large loads(like a city). As Chernobyl showed us, the price you pay for that is if you aren't on the ball, you could get a reaction you can't control and bad things happen. To be fair, the Chernobyl disaster was also caused by automatic safeties being turned off and repeated deviations from established operating procedures(designed to prevent that sort of thing). They were operating in unknown territory that nobody had presumably even simulated(Some of the after reports said that they didn't think it could happen because so many unlikely events would have to come into play at the exact same time) and they found out firsthand what happened.

Anyway, digression aside, the plant can do normal steaming operation for a while without human interaction, possibly for days depending on circumstances. However, a small problem unchecked could become a big problem, which would likely trigger an automatic SCRAM, which is a quick reactor shutdown. Though depending on what went first, other pieces of equipment might break before that happened, causing further damage independent of the reactor shutting down(And as much as I'd like to say what a likely scenario might be, I suspect that might be too sensitive to put on an open forum).

The rub lies in the fact that even after a reactor shuts down, the nuclear fuel is still fissioning and decaying(albeit at a drastically reduced rate) and the amount is small but not insubstantial. Just after shut down, this decay heat is about 10% or so what is normally produced and it will slowly reduce over time, but until that point it still has the capability of melting down if not cooled. We had plenty of ways to establish decay heat removal but none of them were automatic and without human interaction, that decay heat would eventually cause bad things to happen(independent of anything else that might be broken up to this point).

Case in point, Fukishimi successfully SCRAMed their reactors early during the disaster. That wasn't the issue. The issue was that due to the power being knocked out and the emergency power systems being kaput(for several stupid reasons, most of which being "Emergency Equipment costs money!"), there was no way to perform decay heat removal and thus, that little bit of decay heat added up and boiled away the water that was still covering the fuel. Ironically, a similar plant(same type and owned by the same company) a couple miles away had no problems at all, because it's emergency power system wasn't taken down by the Tsunami and it's fuel was kept cool after it shutdown.

Power plants in the US might have more automation then we did, because they spent more on equipment instead of going with "We have nukes who are on call 24/7, we'll just wake people up to do it" that the Navy does. However, I don't know if that's true or not.