10 ms·

In general how much does being in the Navy and working on Nuclear Powered vessels help with getting a job as a civilian Nuclear Engineer say at a power plant? I

by rdtsc 10y ago

In general how much does being in the Navy and working on Nuclear Powered vessels help with getting a job as a civilian Nuclear Engineer say at a power plant? I would imagine a full Engineering degree would be required, or is there some fast tracking option specifically geared for ex-Navy operators?

labrador 10y ago
At least in the 80's when I was in, it helped a lot. Many civilian nuke operators trained in the Navy. I have two shipmates (enlisted men) who went into operations at civilian plants. I found I like programming better and thought after 3 mile island that nuclear didn't have a bright future. We may have come full circle with global warming and the need to produce less carbon.
- normaljoe 10y ago
  As a former operator in the mid to late 90s I was forced to study TMI. I am pretty sure every operator today has done the same study. There are several lessons learned there but in reality it is really a case for how to do things going forward. I seriously doubt those mistakes will happen again.
jonwachob91 10y ago
My understanding is not much as an enlistee (unless you put in 20+ years and bust your ass on your own time), but you will be a nuclear engineer at the end of training if you are an officer. But I do think a fair number of nuclear engineers and operators are veterans. The training is too expensive for most organizations to train individuals, and the ones that can train you don't have the resources that the navy has for training. Serve 6 years making shit pay, get your training, transition the civilian world making 6 figures. I had a math professor that spent 20 years as a navy nuclear operator (enlisted). At the end of his career he had 2 masters from MIT, one in Math and one in Nuclear Engineering. My understanding is that is fairly common for the best and brightest in the program.
- gaius 10y ago
  I guess when you are in a SSBN on patrol, you have plenty of time for study!
  - labrador 10y ago
    It depends. If we were short-handed, we did 6 hours on, 6 off, which didn't allow much extra time for study. Edit: Submarine
    - normaljoe 10y ago
      Been there done that. :) At the same time I have been on 6 off 18. Oh those where great days. Time in the military is not a constant. It completely depends on the situation and patrol you on. I did complete an economics class in 3 hours with bad grades only because I signed up for it before realizing I was going to be on one of those 6 on 6 off events.
ayb 10y ago
ex Navy Submariner here. I know quite a few folks that got out (in the 2005-2010 range) and took jobs in the nuclear field. Some had degrees, some didn't. The Navy uses Pressurized Water reactors which seem to be a fairly common design in commercial use as well (according to Wikipedia, anyway). Which means a lot of how things work would be similar, and you'd just have to learn the specific systems for how that plant operated (i.e. the designs and how the cooling, electronics, power generation, etc. worked) I would imagine there would be a lot of overall similarities in core principles and operations, but some specific systems would work differently being on land and likely generating a lot more power + having other requirements for discharges and cooling etc, vs. a seagoing vessel.
- normaljoe 10y ago
  ex Reactor Operator from the mid 90s to early 2000s as well (enlisted). One of the things that was apparent is purpose. A commercial reactor is a profit making device whereas a Naval reactor is part of a war machine. In the former you end up with complexity designed to save cost, where the later favors simplicity and extra cost to ensure stability. That is not to say commercial is unsafe, but the motive behind design is different and hence leads to different results and design criteria. From what I can tell, I haven't worked a commercial reactor but commercial reactors are toys in comparison to their Naval counter parts. Going back to your land based vs sea based comparison. Refueling a land based reactor is trivial compared to cutting into a hull that needs to sustain high pressure underwater. This requires extra design in poison placement and fuel placement to achieve a longer life cycle measured in decades not years. The material barely touches on this and no where near the level of detail you get in the full NNPP schooling. Commercial plants are very well aware of the training and experience that Naval operators get. I have many friends that went commercial. In the commercial world you don't shutdown or startup a reactor very often and hence you have specialists to handle that task. In the Naval world you do this every time you pull into a port. A Naval operator with 6 years experience has most likely done a few hundred cycles compared to a civilian at the same number of years only doing startups measured in the tens. So order of magnitude difference. Startup of a reactor is one of the most difficult controlled chaos events in which you calculate expectations, move rods, and monitor activity to make sure everything is safe. A quick study of the neutron life cycle illustrates the simple fact that you don't know the state of the reactor in current state, but only in what it might be in future state. So you guide future state with understanding of current state and what might influence that state. You have to understand the Xeon poison over the last hours of operation and when that is going to decay among other things. It's not rocket science but it does require an attention to detail. In full disclosure my first 10 minutes on a live reactor resulted in a mental breakdown. I knew all of the formulas and what I was suppose to do, but at the first time I had to move the rods I just brain farted out of nervousness. I was not going to cause a problem or accident, but I could not flatly state what was going to happen in 10 hours if I moved the rods. After 6 years on my first in fleet real reactor I could tell you where the rods would be within a tenth of an inch 120 hours later. This is why Naval operators get jobs. They learn to become one with their reactor. This is a good thing we want people that understand what they are doing.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
seanmcdirmid 10y ago
My dad was in the industry for ~35 years, but he wasn't a nuke. In the late 70s it was easy enough to get in with a 2 year degree (which is what he had), now an engineering degree is required. Many of my dad's coworkers were from the Navy, though at least one was a Seal rather than a nuke. From what I got from him, its not like many people are clamoring for these jobs, or have the necessary credentials. It seems like anyone who could do them could get a job as a civilian nuclear engineer. The problem with working in nuclear is that...they only put nuclear power plants in fairly bad locations (NIMBY is a big problem), so you are either stuck with a very long commute or are living in a rural area.
- solotronics 10y ago
  interestingly enough I consider rural living an advantage and would like to be able to move to the country
  - seanmcdirmid 10y ago
    There are plenty of rural locations that aren't so nice: Monroe Michigan, Pennsville New Jersey, Port Gibson Mississippi, Baton Rouge (but nowhere near the city). Heck, the nicest place we lived was Tri Cities Washington, and that didn't last long (hanford is mostly a waste dump now, but there is at least one reactor still going I think). Ah, that was the other thing: the industry was very boom and bust. Dad made bank contracting in the late 70s and early 80s, then they stopped making new plants and it was a scramble to find any job at all around 1985-6. He didn't really want me going into it, I think, so I got into computers instead.
mng2 10y ago
My friend at work is a former Navy Nuke and this came up the other day. He said that he felt a little misled coming out of the service since only a small fraction of his credits were eligible to transfer to a NucE degree program, due to it not being "calculus based". (He is a EE now.) It sounds like one could get into a NucE Tech position fairly readily though.
- gydfi 10y ago
  Hard to imagine a non-calculus based nuclear engineering program.
  - tbihl 10y ago
    It's really not quite right to think of the Navy's program as a nuclear engineering one. With their schools to prepare sailors for the boats, they want to make sure everyone knows why and how all protection systems and procedures work, as well as instilling a respect for the severity of radiation exposure and efficacy of protective measures. The goal isn't designing plants; someone else already did that. It's knowing enough to know why plants were designed the way they were, as well as being able to safely operate, maintain, and fix the thing. There is some calculus, but calculus really slows things down when you're trying to work through a lot of material.
  - brandmeyer 10y ago
    As others have said, its a nuclear engineering technology education (as an enlistee, anyway). We did use rudimentary calculus, in the form of graphical methods. Given a strip-chart of x(t), and some nonlinear ODE y' = f(x), the student is expected to be able to draw a reasonable approximation of y(t). You get quite a bit of practice with specific ODE's of interest to the power plant, too.
  - normaljoe 10y ago
    As others have stated calculus is not needed in operations. I felt that my calculus training was subpar to my high school education. At the same time theory on neutron life cycle and other aspects of a reactor are more important. If I can tell you what is going to happen to the reactor in next 100+ hours then I don't need to fully understand the engineering that got us here. The basic core material here get's us close, not close enough to get to mastery. I learned advanced Physics using Algebra and then supplemented that with Calculus. Nothing that I learned in Algebra based Physics was undone by Calculus only augmented. I was pretty good at Physics when I was 17 and got better when I was 18 understanding Calculus. These are not mutually exclusive ideas.
brandmeyer 10y ago
I'm a veteran Nuke that didn't go into the nuclear engineering field. However, I did frequently cross paths and classes with another Navy nuke veteran who did take that path. Basically, enlisted nuke -> commercial nuclear engineering technician. As an engineering tech, there was certainly good money to be made. But, he found that there was a pretty hard ceiling on how far he could go without an engineering degree. So, he was putting himself through college full-time, while feeding a family of four on student loans (!). What the recruiters don't tell you, is that your course work will only be accepted for credit by colleges that are not ABET-accredited. The two years of nuke school can count as nearly all of an associate's degree in nuclear engineering technology, but almost none in nuclear engineering. I had to start from scratch when I got my degree (in Mechanical Engineering) - I didn't even get PE credit! But on the flip side, because I had a working knowledge of thermo/mechanical/electrical systems as a field tech, I found that my engineering courses were much more comprehensible. I was hungry for the detailed theory at that point, and didn't mind if the particular practice problems were contrived.

by rdtsc 10y ago

labrador 10y ago

At least in the 80's when I was in, it helped a lot. Many civilian nuke operators trained in the Navy. I have two shipmates (enlisted men) who went into operations at civilian plants. I found I like programming better and thought after 3 mile island that nuclear didn't have a bright future. We may have come full circle with global warming and the need to produce less carbon.

normaljoe 10y ago
As a former operator in the mid to late 90s I was forced to study TMI. I am pretty sure every operator today has done the same study. There are several lessons learned there but in reality it is really a case for how to do things going forward. I seriously doubt those mistakes will happen again.

jonwachob91 10y ago

My understanding is not much as an enlistee (unless you put in 20+ years and bust your ass on your own time), but you will be a nuclear engineer at the end of training if you are an officer. But I do think a fair number of nuclear engineers and operators are veterans. The training is too expensive for most organizations to train individuals, and the ones that can train you don't have the resources that the navy has for training. Serve 6 years making shit pay, get your training, transition the civilian world making 6 figures. I had a math professor that spent 20 years as a navy nuclear operator (enlisted). At the end of his career he had 2 masters from MIT, one in Math and one in Nuclear Engineering. My understanding is that is fairly common for the best and brightest in the program.

gaius 10y ago
I guess when you are in a SSBN on patrol, you have plenty of time for study!
- labrador 10y ago
  It depends. If we were short-handed, we did 6 hours on, 6 off, which didn't allow much extra time for study. Edit: Submarine
  - normaljoe 10y ago
    Been there done that. :) At the same time I have been on 6 off 18. Oh those where great days. Time in the military is not a constant. It completely depends on the situation and patrol you on. I did complete an economics class in 3 hours with bad grades only because I signed up for it before realizing I was going to be on one of those 6 on 6 off events.

ayb 10y ago

ex Navy Submariner here. I know quite a few folks that got out (in the 2005-2010 range) and took jobs in the nuclear field. Some had degrees, some didn't. The Navy uses Pressurized Water reactors which seem to be a fairly common design in commercial use as well (according to Wikipedia, anyway). Which means a lot of how things work would be similar, and you'd just have to learn the specific systems for how that plant operated (i.e. the designs and how the cooling, electronics, power generation, etc. worked) I would imagine there would be a lot of overall similarities in core principles and operations, but some specific systems would work differently being on land and likely generating a lot more power + having other requirements for discharges and cooling etc, vs. a seagoing vessel.

normaljoe 10y ago
ex Reactor Operator from the mid 90s to early 2000s as well (enlisted). One of the things that was apparent is purpose. A commercial reactor is a profit making device whereas a Naval reactor is part of a war machine. In the former you end up with complexity designed to save cost, where the later favors simplicity and extra cost to ensure stability. That is not to say commercial is unsafe, but the motive behind design is different and hence leads to different results and design criteria. From what I can tell, I haven't worked a commercial reactor but commercial reactors are toys in comparison to their Naval counter parts. Going back to your land based vs sea based comparison. Refueling a land based reactor is trivial compared to cutting into a hull that needs to sustain high pressure underwater. This requires extra design in poison placement and fuel placement to achieve a longer life cycle measured in decades not years. The material barely touches on this and no where near the level of detail you get in the full NNPP schooling. Commercial plants are very well aware of the training and experience that Naval operators get. I have many friends that went commercial. In the commercial world you don't shutdown or startup a reactor very often and hence you have specialists to handle that task. In the Naval world you do this every time you pull into a port. A Naval operator with 6 years experience has most likely done a few hundred cycles compared to a civilian at the same number of years only doing startups measured in the tens. So order of magnitude difference. Startup of a reactor is one of the most difficult controlled chaos events in which you calculate expectations, move rods, and monitor activity to make sure everything is safe. A quick study of the neutron life cycle illustrates the simple fact that you don't know the state of the reactor in current state, but only in what it might be in future state. So you guide future state with understanding of current state and what might influence that state. You have to understand the Xeon poison over the last hours of operation and when that is going to decay among other things. It's not rocket science but it does require an attention to detail. In full disclosure my first 10 minutes on a live reactor resulted in a mental breakdown. I knew all of the formulas and what I was suppose to do, but at the first time I had to move the rods I just brain farted out of nervousness. I was not going to cause a problem or accident, but I could not flatly state what was going to happen in 10 hours if I moved the rods. After 6 years on my first in fleet real reactor I could tell you where the rods would be within a tenth of an inch 120 hours later. This is why Naval operators get jobs. They learn to become one with their reactor. This is a good thing we want people that understand what they are doing.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

seanmcdirmid 10y ago

My dad was in the industry for ~35 years, but he wasn't a nuke. In the late 70s it was easy enough to get in with a 2 year degree (which is what he had), now an engineering degree is required. Many of my dad's coworkers were from the Navy, though at least one was a Seal rather than a nuke. From what I got from him, its not like many people are clamoring for these jobs, or have the necessary credentials. It seems like anyone who could do them could get a job as a civilian nuclear engineer. The problem with working in nuclear is that...they only put nuclear power plants in fairly bad locations (NIMBY is a big problem), so you are either stuck with a very long commute or are living in a rural area.

solotronics 10y ago
interestingly enough I consider rural living an advantage and would like to be able to move to the country
- seanmcdirmid 10y ago
  There are plenty of rural locations that aren't so nice: Monroe Michigan, Pennsville New Jersey, Port Gibson Mississippi, Baton Rouge (but nowhere near the city). Heck, the nicest place we lived was Tri Cities Washington, and that didn't last long (hanford is mostly a waste dump now, but there is at least one reactor still going I think). Ah, that was the other thing: the industry was very boom and bust. Dad made bank contracting in the late 70s and early 80s, then they stopped making new plants and it was a scramble to find any job at all around 1985-6. He didn't really want me going into it, I think, so I got into computers instead.

mng2 10y ago

My friend at work is a former Navy Nuke and this came up the other day. He said that he felt a little misled coming out of the service since only a small fraction of his credits were eligible to transfer to a NucE degree program, due to it not being "calculus based". (He is a EE now.) It sounds like one could get into a NucE Tech position fairly readily though.

gydfi 10y ago
Hard to imagine a non-calculus based nuclear engineering program.
- tbihl 10y ago
  It's really not quite right to think of the Navy's program as a nuclear engineering one. With their schools to prepare sailors for the boats, they want to make sure everyone knows why and how all protection systems and procedures work, as well as instilling a respect for the severity of radiation exposure and efficacy of protective measures. The goal isn't designing plants; someone else already did that. It's knowing enough to know why plants were designed the way they were, as well as being able to safely operate, maintain, and fix the thing. There is some calculus, but calculus really slows things down when you're trying to work through a lot of material.
- brandmeyer 10y ago
  As others have said, its a nuclear engineering technology education (as an enlistee, anyway). We did use rudimentary calculus, in the form of graphical methods. Given a strip-chart of x(t), and some nonlinear ODE y' = f(x), the student is expected to be able to draw a reasonable approximation of y(t). You get quite a bit of practice with specific ODE's of interest to the power plant, too.
- normaljoe 10y ago
  As others have stated calculus is not needed in operations. I felt that my calculus training was subpar to my high school education. At the same time theory on neutron life cycle and other aspects of a reactor are more important. If I can tell you what is going to happen to the reactor in next 100+ hours then I don't need to fully understand the engineering that got us here. The basic core material here get's us close, not close enough to get to mastery. I learned advanced Physics using Algebra and then supplemented that with Calculus. Nothing that I learned in Algebra based Physics was undone by Calculus only augmented. I was pretty good at Physics when I was 17 and got better when I was 18 understanding Calculus. These are not mutually exclusive ideas.

brandmeyer 10y ago

I'm a veteran Nuke that didn't go into the nuclear engineering field. However, I did frequently cross paths and classes with another Navy nuke veteran who did take that path. Basically, enlisted nuke -> commercial nuclear engineering technician. As an engineering tech, there was certainly good money to be made. But, he found that there was a pretty hard ceiling on how far he could go without an engineering degree. So, he was putting himself through college full-time, while feeding a family of four on student loans (!). What the recruiters don't tell you, is that your course work will only be accepted for credit by colleges that are not ABET-accredited. The two years of nuke school can count as nearly all of an associate's degree in nuclear engineering technology, but almost none in nuclear engineering. I had to start from scratch when I got my degree (in Mechanical Engineering) - I didn't even get PE credit! But on the flip side, because I had a working knowledge of thermo/mechanical/electrical systems as a field tech, I found that my engineering courses were much more comprehensible. I was hungry for the detailed theory at that point, and didn't mind if the particular practice problems were contrived.