I spent 30 years running big tankers. It's a wild business with precipitous ups and downs. But there was one thing you could always count on. When things did not go well, the crew got blamed. In most tanker casualties, the crew made one or more mistakes. The investigation always focused on those mistakes. And then stopped. A crew screw up means we don't have to look into the culpability of the owner that provided the under-sized crew with a lousy, poorly maintained ship. Often we blamed the victim, rather that the perp.
Why did nuke availability increase dramatically after TMI. It was not because we figured out the system. We simply improved performance. It took cooperation and dedicated management. Plant availability went from 6x% to over 90 %. The only regulation after TMI that helped was the Maintenance Rule.
I used to work for Combustion Engineering. It was not a seamless switch over from coal to nuclear. The nuclear shop needed a 14,000 ton press to bend 12” thick plate for the pressure vessel. That press has been sold for scrap.
I am sorry that didn’t answer your question. All I know is that there were two different shops. I don’t know if this was a conscious by Combustion Engineering or if it was a requirement of the NRC. The marine business was a small faction of the utility business and after years of operation there were a few failures of the superheater in the utility boilers, especially the coal fired ones.
CE has been bought and sold since the heydays of the 70’s. It is not the manufacturing giant it once was. More to the point the skilled work force (fossil or nuclear) is not there anymore., at least in Chattanooga, TN.
Why did nuke availability increase dramatically after TMI. It was not because we figured out the system. We simply improved performance. It took cooperation and dedicated management. Plant availability went from 6x% to over 90 %. The only regulation after TMI that helped was the Maintenance Rule.
I used to work for Combustion Engineering. It was not a seamless switch over from coal to nuclear. The nuclear shop needed a 14,000 ton press to bend 12” thick plate for the pressure vessel. That press has been sold for scrap.
I am sorry that didn’t answer your question. All I know is that there were two different shops. I don’t know if this was a conscious by Combustion Engineering or if it was a requirement of the NRC. The marine business was a small faction of the utility business and after years of operation there were a few failures of the superheater in the utility boilers, especially the coal fired ones.
CE has been bought and sold since the heydays of the 70’s. It is not the manufacturing giant it once was. More to the point the skilled work force (fossil or nuclear) is not there anymore., at least in Chattanooga, TN.
There is piece of trivia you might like to know.
In the 1960’s and later the upper management of CE was known as “the Kings Point” mafia. They were all graduates of the Merchant Marine Academy.