Traveling to Fort St. Vrain
---Ron Jagodinski
Fort St. Vrain is the name of what used to be a licensed nuclear power station site. When I first interviewed with General Atomic in San Diego the new reactor plant was a large chart on the wall and was, indeed, a place I knew nothing about. The Fort St. Vrain Nuclear Generating Station was to be located on the plains portion of the state of Colorado near the South Platte River just between Fort Collins, Fort Lupton, and Platteville. This was the largest reactor plant that Gulf General Atomic had constructed to date. A newcomer to the atomic power industry, GA had secured letters of intent from a number of electric utilities to purchase several larger versions of their high temperature gas cooled reactor [HTGR] and it was planned by all that this plant would be the first in the line of many.
These reactor plants were and would be large, complex, commercial electric power stations used by the world’s major utilities. GA was already considered a competitor in atomic power with the world-wide success of the TRIGA and HTGR demo plant at the Peach Bottom nuclear generating station in Pennsylvania. Fort St. Vrain was a 330 megawatt plant in the original nuclear configuration and the newer HTGR’s were going to be in the 700 to 1100 megawatt class. This means that FSV would have shaft mechanical output of around 400,000 horsepower which is enough to light about one half of a million homes.
I am going to use the term “GA” to refer to the various naming iterations of a place and an organization that is now known as General Atomics. That group of futuristic buildings on the pueblo land hilltops near John J. Hopkins Drive in picturesque La Jolla, California originally went by the name of General Dynamics -- General Atomic Division until that organization was sold to the Gulf Oil Corporation out of Pittsburg whereupon the new name became Gulf General Atomic or, at times known incorrectly as “Gulf Atomic.” Gulf Oil entered into a partnership agreement with the Royal Dutch Shell Corporation and the resulting organization was at that time simply referred to as General Atomic once again.
New owners appeared subsequent to business setbacks for GA and many other business entities in the reactor industry and the name then became “General Atomics” perhaps known best among the general public for the organization’s highly effective Predator unmanned aircraft used by the United States in Serbia, Afghanistan, and Iraq near the turn of the twenty-first century. This latest version of GA is one of the area’s largest and most successful defense contractors and is one of the many new technology organizations that are now performing defense and other scientific work in San Diego.
Back in 1972 I was invited down to La Jolla for an interview. In GA terms, I was an “aerospace rat” who was hiding nothing in my immediate desires to get out of that industry which was experiencing a bit of a slow down during the 1968-72 time periods. Graduation from San Diego State as a business & economics statistician was not met with much enthusiasm from much of anybody so I was in the process of completing grad work in economics. The prospect of any statistical analysis jobs at A. C. Neilson or Proctor & Gamble were not in the picture at that time. I was to find my way working with large corporations but they would be defense and utility oriented instead.
I had to apply my math skills to accounting back in 1968 when I was hired by Convair; another former division of General Dynamics which has now faded from existence. I became an estimator and what they called a “contract analyst” and actually learned accounting work, a subject I had avoided whenever possible back in school, at a factory that made guided missiles and airplanes. I did not think much of it at the time, but a lot of our work involved making up presentations which would be shown to others back east. This was actually all an extension of what I had been doing in school – gathering information, writing reports and presentation materials, and speaking or “pitching” the results to interested and non-interested parties. In the eyes of the people at the grad school of economics I had, as they said, “Graduated to General Dynamics” like many other promising students who would never return to academia.
I was one of the first computer geeks and computers weren’t a new thing back then but, as anybody my age will tell you, they sure were huge for what they did. Back at State some minor notoriety was gained by running a number of statistical jobs on the local IBM 360. Computer nerds were pencil-necked propeller heads who solved specific problems or were integral parts of huge operating systems: applying patches and putting on spare tires wherever necessary. Even the idea of sitting down at a platform and knocking something out like you do now did not exist. I can tell our grandkids one day that my computer related sphere of activities actually goes back to wiring boards for the old IBM 407 and pounding the keyboards of Western Union Teletype machines and uncountable different variants of keypunch machines. I never knew that all of this would come in handy in this strange new chapter in my life..
Materials, spare parts, and other partially manufactured items were everywhere; including the top of my wooden Army Air Force desk, which often had some components which were the subject of current cost proposals. Lunch was junior high-school cafeteria style Salisbury steak with canned corn and a roll with chocolate pudding – along with one of those little 1/3 quarts of milk. And scurry back after you eat! Everyone was rushing around as though we still were in the dark dawning days of World War II and the axis forces were right off of the California coast. At all of these work locations it was considered good luck if you got a temporary assignment at a field location such as Point Mugu or Vandenberg -- that would be the one thing which would get you out of the melee of the main plant. My family said that I was talking different now, a sign that I was becoming a part of something which substantially differed from my past experience – I was learning rather fast.
It’s true that the two divisions of General Dynamics and Raytheon, which were my former employers, the surroundings were late 1940’s Army Air Force leftovers with office partitions made from non-code construction junk and aircraft parts. Departmental identification plaques were hanging down 50 feet from an otherwise bare ceiling or were on stanchions in the middle of nowhere which would pass by as you were walking just like the old Burma-Shave signs. The workplaces were always clean, but everything had sort of a third-world look to it.
When I contrasted this visual snapshot with what I was seeing at GA there was a world of difference – no pocket protectors, no brush cuts, no white shirts with the sleeves rolled up, and pretty good chow in the centrally located cafeteria with a panoramic view. The swimming pool and the tennis courts said it all – you were not in the aerospace junkyard anymore. There are just a few things I know for sure but to the personnel at Convair’s Lindberg Field, Kearny Mesa, and Vandenberg Air Force Base operations and likewise to the personnel at Raytheon’s Electromagnetic Systems Division I literally owe a debt that cannot ever be repaid. To all the aerospace folks at General Dynamics and Raytheon – you gave me most of what I was to use during my career. We could almost do the impossible on any given day and often did.
I remember when we were proposing a system for a fighter airplane. It doesn’t matter what this system was. We had some little, tiny, doggone space to put the “central system main computer” which would not fit within that space given any of the current technology options. The chief engineer said that all was OK because “. . . within the 36 months of lead that we have on the program; chances are that [an electronic logic system] of this new small size can be developed.” He was right. The new stuff was developed and it went right into the plane.
That right there is a little vignette about aerospace thinking. One is always working on stuff that is not all here – or anywhere for that matter. It was not unusual for me to be working at Convair on something that may very well be completely impossible given the current level of technology. Most of everyone at the new GA workplace was from aerospace or aerospace research. Those who were not were from academia or one of the research labs in the country. Optimism regarding new technologies was regarded as the “most correct” outlook from an engineering standpoint. Contrast this for just one moment with the need to so rigorously prove concepts in large electrical switchgear components under exhaustive testing demonstrated by someone like General Electric or ASEA for their utility customers. Those old aerospace ideas regarding technological development really do have their place but you are always in a position of ‘betting on the come line’ like in some of those age old games played with dice.
During my interview for the new job, the GA people and I all went out to a UCSD college hangout called Bully’s Steak House in Del Mar. We talked about the future and what it was we were accomplishing. The guys from finance and marketing talked about the huge backlog of reactor orders that had been received by GA and by the end of that business day I had a new job –just like that. What was so impressive was the backlog of over a billion dollars. Backlog means a whole lot of different things in business and economics but in this case it is an aerospace marketing codeword. Backlog is basically orders received less sales taken – or total “to go” business. Backlog of one billion dollars was equivalent to an entire aerospace development program back then, with some left over for plenty of special studies and spares contracts. If anything, little old GA was understaffed for what it was they were trying to accomplish – as seen by my own eyes back then.
The social side of things was good too. I started off to work in the midst of almost instantaneous friends and a significantly improved work environment. For the first time in my life I actually had an office and a large central computer at my disposal. Our group was truly what one would call a “financial task team” with capabilities in mathematical modeling, financial and economic forecasting, and new reactor proposals. In the eyes of some of my Econ friends who were now doing grad work at UCSD; this was a dream position which I probably did not deserve since I never completed my course of study there -- but I had a bachelors and I was making money.
It was a busy Friday afternoon in September 1973 when I found out that I was in line to be what they called a financial representative up Fort St. Vrain. Before I knew what was happening I was over in the administrative section of GA’s Nuclear Powered Projects Division going over various letters of agreement for different durations of stays at the Colorado site. The letters of agreement were originally intended for different lengths of assignments to the Fort St. Vrain area and were GA’s way of bypassing the normally excessive long term relocation costs incurred by the parent company—specifically for buying and selling employee owned real estate.
Costs incurred wound up in Deferred HTGR Development accounts in which they had plenty of company since, unbeknownst to many, more than three-quarters of the GA organization’s costs were winding up in these same accounts. GA had a lot of experience with indeterminate term relocations from their work at Peach Bottom Unit One in Pennsylvania and the Experimental Beryllium Oxide Reactor [EBOR] which was located somewhere up in the Dakotas. These facts partially explain the organization’s resistance to incurring direct costs associated with long term relocations since they have historically been a point of contention for cost disallowals in contract audits by the United States Government.
Further recalcitrance on the part of Gulf to show actual costs incurred can be demonstrated by their reluctance to post or “cost-out” loadings for corporate office administrative and general overhead on government contracts. Gulf’s gone now, so I believe I can say that this was a deliberate attempt to draw outside auditors away from audit scopes which would have involved going through the costs of Gulf Pittsburg or Houston. By not charging anyone for relocation, overhead and administrative & general expenses, you don’t ever have to show supportive documentation or answer questions about your own costs. There was a lot more to Gulf than I was looking at here in San Diego. My many telephone conversations to the people back in Pittsburg revealed a company and culture which was not in sync with its own technological development organization on the west coast.
Gulf Oil’ attitude probably started out good when they purchased GA from General Dynamics back in 1968 but anything but that was true now. Some of the “Gulf Types” were the more stoic and well dressed members of the crowd who maybe did not know so much about reactors [let alone the power industry] but were pretty well versed in getting large efforts to be productive and on line. Presentations to the Gulf management that I made taught me that if you wanted to make the oil people salivate, you had to say something about the HTGR fuel cycle. That would get everybody in the room that had an orange disk on their business card on the edge of their seats. It was the fuel cycle, not the HTGR reactor machinery, that the great Gulf Oil Corporation was interested in [my opinion, folks].
When I was over visiting the admin section of General Atomics’ old Nuclear Powered Projects Division I should have taken to heart at the time that old management axiom “Your real boss is the person who can get you a salary increase by consulting one other person and who, consulting no one, can fire you” but these were happy and exciting times and I all too readily accepted the fact that just about everyone at GA who wore a coat and tie was my boss. Paperwork was the order of the day – that being Letters of Agreement. I got what was called a “three-to-twelve” or, a 3-12 month letter of agreement which outlined my site bennies and partial relocation parameters.
My folks had given me membership in the GA sailing club. I took the club’s night courses for a couple of weeks and was just completing their daytime sailboat training classes in San Diego bay. I thought that this would be a real easy endeavor since I had crewed on ocean racing sloops for the San Diego Handicap Fleet and had personally handled forty-plus foot craft in heavy weather off the coast of Baja and the Channel Islands
By my second time out in one of the club’s 21 foot sailing craft, I headed one of the club’s Victorys so hard up to weather that the leeward rail submerged right up to the cockpit; beating the pants off of the other student crews coming back to the dock. I nicely pivoted the 21 foot craft into irons a stones throw away before arriving at the landing and danced up to the bow to fend off like I was Gene Kelly or someone. After much consultation, the GA sailing club commodore said that I was the recipient of what he called a “double curse – denied boating privileges in the club and winding up going to a dead-end place like Fort St. Vrain.” I was good but I was too reckless.
Good and reckless was the shape of the HTGR business forecast and what was known as the Boca Raton Presentations to the Gulf brass. Our business models were at one time showing what we referred to as a “ten-plant economy” – losses on the first ten HTGR units and then gross profit turning positive many years down the line. I and others were worried about the ten-plant economy and the increasingly negative numbers that we were getting for the early projects. This story started back when Gulf bought the place from GD. My version of the story goes something like this: 1) GA is going into the commercial reactor business, 2) Fort St. Vrain has completed major construction, 3) no money will be made for the first ten units to be produced, and 4) Startup and demo of FSV will bring more HTGR orders [just as soon as that happens]. Years have now gone by and really nothing was closer than it had been back in 1968. After submitting the Boca package for 1973 I said to others that I hoped I would never see those numbers again.
The fact that I was going away from San Diego was almost good considering how deep the economic forecasting doo-doo was getting. We had not done anything that was really bad or patently false but some of our economic assumptions were dying on the vine when they were put to use in the models and I was becoming increasingly aware that some of the payment schedules that we developed were pretty airy. It was a good thing that almost at once relocation was at hand.
All the traveling ended at the college town of Boulder, Colorado where I understood that a number of the GA people lived. My ex and I went ahead and rented a place at the Remington Post apartment complex located up near 30th Street and Iris Avenue on the northeast corner of town. The place took its name from the artist Frederick Remington whose paintings and sculptures were reproduced in abundance throughout the facilities. Although these apartments were nice in outside appearances having a heated indoor olympic sized swimming pool and rather large clubhouse with a view of the Flatiron mountain range, the construction was of amazingly poor quality with paper-thin walls and numerous mechanical breakdowns were the order of the day. One would never know that walking up to the place since it looked like one of those expensive resorts reserved for the well-to-do up in Aspen or Park City.
Accordingly, the place I moved into wasn’t any good. The couple above us sounded like they were actually moving all of their furniture every night until three o’clock in the morning and then they would amazingly get up an hour later at four and make noises while using the bathroom and getting ready for work. The GA neighbors on the same floor said that the people above them were undoubtedly building a steamship right in the apartment overhead and that the situation was driving them crazy. Traveling through Boulder some twenty years later, I discovered that the Remington Post complex had completely disappeared without any traces remaining.
I had to report for work the next day. I spun the new 1973 Toyota out of the parking lot and up the Longmont Diagonal Highway, heading up to State 52 and over to the Platteville area in the blazing September morning sun. The little country roads were shaded by field upon field of eight-foot stalks of fall Midwestern corn. I squinted to see the railroad crossings with their small blinking lights in the blinding sunrise. The crossing warnings were of the small variety like in the movie Close Encounters of a Third Kind and were all supposed to go “ding-ding” before you got run over by the train coming through. And every one of those railroad freight trains would come thundering across the Platte River Valley at what looked like 120 miles an hour -- no crossing gates – only those little blinking lights. I stopped at intersections to get my bearings and in between the cornfields I could stand up on the car running boards and just see the building-block outlines of what must be Fort St. Vrain. I felt like Cary Grant’s character in North by Northwest – alone out in the middle of nowhere in these large rectangular fields going on a seemingly endless maze, the deep shadows and the sunlight of the starkly clear morning coloring the countryside.
Quite suddenly, faster than I could possibly react, the roar of an engine was coming up on me from what sounded like only a short distance away. I looked up to the West only to see this orange, black, yellow and blue stunt type biplane coming what looked like straight at me up a row of corn; a cloudlike white trail coming from behind. I could see the pilot’s leather helmet and goggled face as the aircraft passed just ahead perpendicular to the road and he climbed up at the road’s edge and with a combination hammer-head and side-slip the aviator had successfully changed direction one-hundred eighty degrees in midair and was off down the next row of corn to be dusted just as easy as if he were a giant, colorful insect. The smell of aviation fuel, oil, and radial engine exhaust abounded now, temporarily shadowing the omnipresent stench of the countryside. I stood in awe of the pilot’s aerial performance for the next few minutes and just then noticed that the weather had changed from a relatively warm sunny morning to a sudden coldness forewarning the arrival of an on-rushing fall on the Colorado plains. Even the overall scent of the air had again changed dramatically and I was thus perhaps gently cautioned by nature that this perceived time was somehow running out and I needed to get moving again.
The Fort St. Vrain building looks out of place in the world it lives in. When one drives up to the station, the vision of shopping centers for the well-to-do and city plazas seem to be the more likely surroundings than circuit breakers, transformers, dead-end racks and utility transmission lines leading away. The Sargent & Lundy Engineering Corporation designed a plant that looks lean, modern, and smooth like a large Bullocks Wilshire on the Platte River plains and one thinks that an expensive pair of shoes could be purchased there with a tuxedoed gentleman playing piano music in the background.
This is a far cry from the electric generation units I’d seen in San Diego at the foot of Broadway and at South Bay that had the unmistakable look common to all nightmarish industrial enterprises like the oil refineries and steel mills or, even worse, the environmental wasteland of Terminal Island in Los Angeles where the Long Beach Generating Station is located. One of those industrial looking objects at the Fort was the twin-banked cooling tower which was in full operation at this time. A shower of ice crystals was pouring out of the cooling tower cones on top which seemed like a strange type of sparkling snow falling on my new ‘73 Toyota as I drove up amid the screaming sounds created by the circulating water pumps as they performed their many thousand of gallons per minute work from their pit at the south side of the towers. Much later I would find out that the cooling circuit was actually just on “recirc” –or constantly recirculating itself in the absence of any other operations occurring in the plant.
I saw a parking lot full of cars and so I just parked there and walked in. A personable guard from the Burns contract security organization checked me in and sent me over to the plant. Someone at the front door just inside the plant sent me upstairs to the Public Service Company of Colorado [PSCCo] site engineering offices. On the way up the steps I looked out the alternately paneled and glazed wall of the West side of the plant and saw far below a cacophony of tin shacks strung together in an apparent random fashion giving the overall impression of a shanty town. I remember roughly imagining that a bunch of the local hobos had somehow selected this site as a place to live.
One of the PSSCo engineers asked me who I was looking for. I answered smartly “John Crnich” [John’s name is actually pronounced Sernick] who was then the site project manager for GA. Without saying a word, the young engineer picked up what looked like a telephone and barked John’s name twice – the thundering echo of his voice apparently reverberating everywhere. I jumped back and looked around since this was my first experience with what was called the “GaiTronics” public address/plant communications system which was ubiquitous at this reactor site. One could immediately see that it was really impossible for anyone within the site boundaries to say that they could not hear a page from the GaiTronics system. “JOHN CRNICH -- JOHN CRNICH” the engineer barked again and that call apparently got Crnich on one of the GaiTronics machines nearest him and said that he was expecting me and yelled over the machine for me to come on down and then hung up with a huge audible “POP” from the system which echoed everywhere.
“On down” was to that same conglomerated huddle of depressing tin hobo shacks that I was just looking at from the stately plant offices. Before I left the PSCCo engineer pitched me a hardhat saying “. . . here! You’ll need this!” and then disappeared behind a hatchway. I started making my way, my new hat upon my head, down to the row of accidental tin buildings. Upon arriving I found that the insides of this apparent hovel were better than I thought. The buildings were sealed against the weather and the floors were on some type of concrete slab with linoleum tile covering in some places. One walked to the right and left while winding one’s way westward from one end to the other, around huge drafting boards, cubby holes, bull pens, people sitting in the middle of nowhere, hallways comprised of World War II style file cabinets and open areas with old metal desks and crates stacked up with doors placed on the top so they would look like desks.
There were posters of near-naked women holding pipefitting tools and obscene cartoons nailed right to the wall right alongside framed color diagrams of power stations that I had never heard of. The people looked as though they were refugees from the original nineteenth century exploration of the West who had been fitted with white hard hats. All were shuttling back and forth with bed sheet sized mechanical and electrical drawings on what they were calling “sticks.” Many of these drawings were laid out on a block work table that resembled a huge meatpacking workstation measuring about ten by thirty feet located in the center of the GA area with engineers and technicians arguing and discussing plant problems.
I did not know anyone and no one knew me or what the blazes I was doing there and no one was paying any attention anyway since far more important problems were obviously at hand. So this then was my entry into the power industry. I had been in a lot of scary places on submarines, surface ships and aircraft and probably had way too much of a cavalier attitude about what danger I was about to enter, but for right now I was just plain confused and blissfully unaware. The whole look was different. From the people to the surroundings to the problems – this was not aerospace anymore.
Crnich was in his large office with windows up in the northwest corner and this was the first time we had met. He had his face to the wall as I walked in. I told him that I was to be the new financial representative whereupon he wheeled around and stood up from his swivel chair and absolutely bellowed over the desk at me “. . . If you don’t pull your own weight around here you’ll find yourself out on the street!”
I said “uh-huh, okay Mr. Crnich.” Anyway, my new office was in one of the many office trailers outside the main shantytown connected by plywood and tin snow sheds. I remember thinking that if I stay out here, maybe Crnich won’t notice me – just like ensign Pulver in the play Mr. Roberts. I can sneak in like a phantom from the cornfields in the morning and depart stage left at night; fitted out, I imagined, in the camouflaged clothing of a local hunter. I could use the telephone down at the gas station at the 52/I-25 interchange to phone in reports to the main office back in San Diego.
The new office out in back had all the room anyone would want since I was alone at one end of a thirty foot trailer. There were old notebooks on budgets and annual operating plans from years ago and much looked as though it had not been touched for a while. Outside, the trailer was double-guyed on each corner so I would not blow away in the Colorado Plains wind. There was a general indifference to the presence of a “financial representative” – whatever that kind of person was supposed to do. My predecessor Dennis Millard had performed some great work in sorting and forming up the documentation into files and notebooks. That was great because the documentation was quite prolific and literally everywhere.
The door to the little trailer burst open suddenly and a scruffy, bearded character I had never before seen brought in a giant stack of paper right around two feet high. It was the invoice from Stearns-Roger [now known as Stearns-Catalytic] for services for the current month. Before slamming the door to my trailer the still unknown person yelled at me that I had to take care of this right away. The invoice was for almost a million dollars and I remember that I had never seen a real invoice for that much money before. At this, I simply gave up for the day and went outside to find that darkness was coming fast and the snow was starting to come down accompanied by freezing rain. As I drove the Toyota home to Boulder, the blackness of night came on in an instant just as the sun slipped behind the Rockies to the west of us and I was now in the middle of a storm.
The next morning seemed better since the Remington Post managers had taken heed of the complaints from me and my ex and had provided another apartment in a different building on the top floor which was a lot nicer. I stopped for breakfast at the Ramada Inn at the junction of the 52 and Interstate 25 and went over the stuff that I already knew that had to be done. Basically, I was the to be the local control for employee travel and expense reports, providing support needed to facilitate payment back at Accounts Payable in San Diego. In addition to this there was supposedly a petty cash account up at FSV somewhere that no one knew about which needed looking into. Lastly, I was in charge of the cost control and budget for Program Area #197 and my numbers and comments would be part of the corporate reporting that occurred each month. “Being responsible for costs” is a big area with an almost limitless scope and I questioned several San Diego financial people about what this all meant.
Dennis Millard also left a bunch of spread sheets which were the old 13 column variety and he had taken the time to post all of the tools and values for each that were currently in possession of the onsite contractor Stearns-Roger. The research on this was ongoing and it must have been real tough at times just to assemble all of this data. The tools were purchased by GA and the inventory had a substantial value. I remember at the time thinking that I would put up all of that data on the San Diego computer so a report could be generated. I never did it. I quickly went to work on racking up another spread sheet of all site personnel and the types of letters of agreement they were on and what general arrangement [if any] they were all on. This was all data belonging to the personnel or the corporation so everything got locked up when I wasn’t directly working on a piece of it. The early emphasis that I had on security would come in handy when we would load nuclear fuel.
And did we have a crazy patchwork! There were people who had been onsite at Fort St. Vrain for more than two years who were on daily reimbursement of direct expenses. There were people on 3 to 12 month letters of agreement who had been extended many times over. There were individuals on long term assignment that did not get the seven and a half percent overtime and incidental allowance. Some of the guys were driving brand new Dodge Coronets [rentals that they did not own] which were actually being gassed up daily by the construction trades. I joined the many others who were trying to get by driving their own cars and buying their own gas.
No GA employees got overtime. OT was something, as I described before, that was covered in the site allowance and was not to be addressed again – thank you very much!
There was a concrete batch plant located on the property just south of the switchyard to which had been sold to another division of Gulf for their upcoming mining work just down in the southwest portion of Colorado. It was to be their responsibility to remove the plant in its entirety which was something that GA was obligated to do anyway. This was something of a good deal for the Fort St. Vrain Project since EBASCO Services’ bid for the removal of the same was over a million dollars and the Stearns-Roger bid for the same scope was about two-thirds that. GA had to remove the thing, too, since it was such an eyesore on the horizon and the removal effort was part of some contractual obligation, according to some sources. Anyway it was it would be my job to supervise the removal of that batch plant and to get the previously agreed to forty large from Gulf Dravo.
We had two construction organizations at the Fort St. Vrain site, the both of which I knew absolutely nothing about. EBASCO Services Incorporated operated out of Manhattan Island in New York and Stearns-Roger Construction Corporation operated out of Denver. EBASCO actually stands for Equipment Bond And Surety Company and they are an old-line utility plant engineering & construction organization like Stone & Webster. They were responsible for the original construction of the plant. The photo in the Nuclear Engineering International add showing Fort St. Vrain being completed in record time in 1968 was partly PR from EBASCO – what they’re really saying is that it was only thirty-six months from groundbreaking to completion of what they called “major construction.” Louisiana born Bobby Tatum was the very capable local manager for construction for EBASCO who looked as though he came out of Central Casting in Hollywood for the part of some skipper of a schooner plying the South Seas.
Stearns-Roger was our local construction organization who had all of the labor agreements with the various construction crafts on the northern Colorado plains. It was their task to provide the labor and construction services, GA authorized materials, and tooling needed to complete the plant. A rather thorough, thoughtful, tall and lanky man from Farmington, West Virginia by the name of Jim Read was the site manager for Stearns-Roger. Jim understood a whole lot about labor relations between the site and the craft and was responsible for the project not having more labor problems than it did.
Our GA engineering people were not as gifted or sensitive: one young nameless GA engineer yelling over the GaiTronics that everyone had better get off their backsides or serious consequences would be in the offing--- [original quote not shown]. A bunch of us had to smuggle that insensitive individual off site lying down in the back of a pickup truck so the craft would not extricate immediate and violent revenge.
Even as it was, the craft expressed their dismay by walking out for the day—sprinting toward the gate with their lunchboxes at breakneck speed eight abreast, and subsequently roaring down the access road four abreast in their cars on both sides of the road in a gigantic cloud of smoke. The ever-present threat of physical violence and unauthorized labor action loomed over the site like a dark cloud. Walkouts would occur over apparently minor grievances and fights among the craft personnel were almost a daily action.
Our physical progress on Fort St. Vrain was actually accomplished by craft personnel. For most large construction jobs, hiring of the craft trades is done out of the local union hall for electricians, carpenters, boilermakers, pipefitters, and the like. The construction craft union personnel all wore red hard hats with the exception of their supervision who daily donned white versions of the same hats. With craft numbering in the three to five hundred range of personnel levels, the construction trades were a significant part of the job and, consequently, the weekly costs. The trades are extremely sensitive about what is their work – the combination of components, structures and systems believed to be their own territory. That is, setting up scaffolding is pretty clearly carpenter work and working on a boiler feed pump probably belongs to the millwrights. One simple act like meting out tasks for the morning or for the week for crews of craft could wind you up in a real-live labor dispute, the costs of which would be a walkout for one or two days. The dispute would be resolved by negotiators from Stearns-Roger; who’s labor/management skills far exceeded GA’s area of expertise. S-R’s Jim Read probably made his weight in gold in stopping, slowing down, and/or negotiating GA out of costly walkouts.
The other union personnel were the Public Service Company of Colorado maintenance and operations people who belonged to a the utility-based organization. Work rules were not as much of a problem with these people who had come from all over Public Service’s power system in Colorado. In many cases, the PSCCo people seemed more familiar with the situarion(s) than any of the GA people, including above all; myself.
Since the reactor hot flow testing was now completed, the original contractor EBASCO Services was being phased out of the picture and would not be around much longer. If one is ever in a position to ask, it’s a good thing to find out why major contractor-constructors were selected in the first place and by whom.
The Sargent & Lundy Engineering Corporation out of Chicago was the engineer of record on the plant. S&L had done some prestressed concrete work and had also had some experience with the freeze wall technique that we used in the original excavation and site preparation. During those times, GA was fighting the high water table from the South Platte and no amount of de-watering was enough. The surrounding dirt was therefore frozen with a system of liquid nitrogen tubing in order to excavate the some one hundred feet in depth needed. Subsequent to the placement of concrete foundations and vaults in those lower regions, the freeze wall was removed and the residual flooding was to be handled by sump pumps. The S&L people in Chicago considered themselves essentially out of the picture with the completion of the augmented bypass flash tanks located up near the plant’s refueling floor. They’re responsibility, after all, was for the non-nuclear balance of plant which, in their opinion, was essentially completed.
This would be the first job in which I would be dealing directly with labor forces from the various unions and it all proved to be very enlightening since dealing with field forces is a whole lot different than working around any office. It is also different from the many housing construction jobs that I was able to assist my dad on back in the late fifties and early sixties since many more craft skills were represented here.
There’s a real cultural difference between those that actually do the work and those GA personnel like me over at the shantytown. Most of us had never met people like these before. Many chewed tobacco or used snuff or smoked some kind of awful cigars. Most of us had been to some college and had generally led a life separate from anyone even resembling what we referred to as “those people.” One had to learn how to earnestly communicate in a language that could be easily understood by the craft guys without being demeaning. Some of the things that I would do that would help would be to hang out with them to eat lunch and talk about the subjects that they would talk about. A California liberal stance on gun control or a stated political conservative position on labor will probably get you hurt around here.
Locally it was believed that Crnich’s secretary had some kind of control of a petty cash account and checkbook that no one in San Diego seemed to know about. I wanted to get to the bottom of whatever was out here in the form of local cash disbursements. One of the more secret reasons for me going was the fact that Fort St. Vrain was leaking money and, unbelievably, no one really knew where it was going. Oh, yeah; -- most everybody knew the gross amount of bucks going into the program area and roughly what was being booked to the project, but these were very large numbers which did not lend themselves to explanation.
GA’s controller John Framel told me that I was responsible for corporate cost reporting and budgeting for program area 197 which included the monthly financial comments, recommendations for accruals, revisions to budgets and cost forecasts, and detail analysis of overruns to whatever budget areas the costs were touching. Everybody in other fields think that the accountants have things under control. What we had up there was a situation where the numbers were flying everywhere from a whole lot of sources.
Sometimes stuff was booked that had to be reversed out and a lot of costs were booked to the project that in my own statistician’s opinion had no business being there. This was due to many factors: 1) the remote location of the project, 2) some early management confusion about exactly what costs were allowable, and 3) cost deliberately booked to get them out of the way for the new HTGR programs. This wasn’t just some assumption of mine alone and the evidence could be seen from the lack thereof – gross totals with no details or explanation, nonsensical breakdowns of distributed costs from here and there, obfuscated cost categories which didn’t evenly match from time period to time period were much of what we were dealing with.
To this day I do not know how much EBOR and Peach Bottom costs are actually in Fort St. Vrain. From the time of my arrival, I decided to take the stance of one of my Atlas Weapon System project managers back at Convair: nothing goes to the books unless it goes through me first. Where and if the accountants had not been so particular, this statistician was going to be draconian. Strangely, I was in a rather powerless but pretty much a kingbird position of being a gatekeeper of the current month costs going in. As far as current month’s actual costing; the Project Manager and I were pretty much in control of what was charged to the job out in Colorado.
I hadn’t been out in the plant much and didn’t know enough about the surroundings to assure that I wouldn’t become totally lost in the labyrinth of pumps, piping, catwalks, and components so my new office mate out in the trailer gave me a tour. Many of the GA engineers had been through the plant countless times and were also, by now, giving me a lift to work each day. Once past the main doors to the major equipment delivery side of the plant the picture changed from the Bullock’s Wilshire department store to what a power station really looks like.
There were lines upon, over, around, and through other lines -- all insulated with asbestos and silver metal lagging connected to indescribable huge machines as big as a house. The plant components were dressed incongruously in colors upon bright colors; seeming more from a child’s kindergarten playground than one would imagine in a nuclear industrial setting. There is this thing that looks like a great big green house with large pipes coming in and out of it – that’s a condenser [??]. There are silver torpedoes all located in a row up in the mezzanine – those are all feedwater heaters [??]. There are huge out-of-world machines up on the refueling floor – those are the fuel handling machine and the aux transfer cask [ok]. You can lean over the railing and look straight down the equipment hatchway to the basement at level 4704 from the refueling floor at 4881 [eyow!]. The “levels” or floors in a power station represent levels above sea level. An old hand at one of the costal stations explained to me that this system was originally for plant safety – knowing where you are with respect to sea level. Sargent & Lundy just applied that same system to this plant which happened to be nearly fife thousand feet above sea level.
The craft construction labor – the redhats – were everywhere. They were crawling all over the machinery with their tools and lunchboxes. They would gather in the hallways near the elevators waiting, swearing, scratching, spitting, etc. while an elevator was coming. The redhats’ mouths yawned open wide when the plant service elevator momentarily jolted with three foot jumps while slowing into position and for all the noise pollution I couldn’t tell if those craft personnel were openly cheering loudly or screaming for their lives.
The din of high speed rotating machinery was constant with punctuation from large reports from unknown things going right and wrong. I walked by one of the feedwater heater twenty-four inch diameter lines which was emitting the sound of medium sized boulders bouncing down right through it [“cavitation” said my GA scientist/engineer tour guide in a casual manner]. I could not help but think of what would happen to us if there were a power outage or some other type of emergency where we would have to find our way out quickly. By the time we reached the basement and had climbed up near the helium circulator penetrations, I got the sinking feeling that I could never find my own way back to daylight even if my life depended on it. Going up the vertical ladders and crawling across the hot & cold reheat piping to get to the base grating for the helium circulators was a real existential trip.
We crawled from the small area of the helium circulator penetrations on up to the expansive and industrial-modern turbine deck which was a relief to the tour team since this was an attractive, large, open space area with a reassuring aura of outside light shining in.
The GE steam turbine-generator topside was there, looking every bit like a huge grey whale and making a barely audible sound as the machine’s shaft on its turning gear motor [this would keep the large shaft from developing a bow or flat spots, we were told]. One felt that we were always going up or down stairways and catwalks; this space was shared with welding machines and other tooling necessary for the completion of the plant. There was power-plant grating everywhere so one almost always had the vision of the next couple of floors down below the one you were walking on presently. Large gaps in the grating were marked by yellow warning tape and orange safety ropes where some unknown piece of machinery was being worked on by an unknown crew.
I admit to being significantly intimidated by that first experience since and it was only with trepidation that I put on my newly acquired hard hat the next day and ventured out there by myself with as much of a determined look as I could muster; clipboard in hand as though I were still a confident young aircraft estimator on the ramp at Lindberg Field. I held my breath and went into the large plant service door looking, I thought, as out of place as a live chicken in a modern super market. I still must say that for those first few ventures into the plant I was really scared – but after daily exposure I was able to climb to any catwalk, fit through any tunnel, and/or walk any [well, almost any] steel at Fort St. Vrain. Much later, I would reflect on this time as I would walk the corridors and tight spots of other many other larger stations many miles west of here.
The new boss John Crnich is a strong man though not large, a muscular man though not stout. He has died jet-black hair and a persistent assortment of muscular ticks that keep him in constant motion as well as emitting various indescribable sounds. It’s really not disconcerting once one gets over the initial prejudice that most of us have over people who have even slight tics in their communication skill sets. I have a lot of muscular problems and tics myself, largely due to a traffic accident I had back in the sixties so I know what its like to have to live with this kind of stuff day in and day out.
Crnich has many of the qualities of my previous bosses such as a hair trigger temper, an almost permanent state of recalcitrance, a mercurial and volatile nature of a Caesar, and, at times; the petulance of a Navy officer who’s never been to sea. Sadly, I am to find that these and other various aspects of Crnich’s behavior had a not so positive effect on some; including me right now. Because now he grills me about the million dollar invoice from Stearns-Roger with questions from out of nowhere -- which are actually points well taken since he’s going to be the one to sign the document giving approval for ultimate payment by Accounts Payable way down in San Diego. I’m at my wits end when I find myself by chance re-writing a short memo that Crnich was going to ultimately sign and give to Fred Swart over at PSCCo.
That did it. Crnich comes out to my trailer [he found me!]. I grimaced for more than a few seconds while he held the memo and paced up and down my little trailer and then said “. . . this is pretty good, Jag!” and then he just turned and stomped out into the cold. I just sat still at my desk for forty-five minutes in one position. Unknowingly, I’d just promoted myself to a new job as a ghost writer. I’m deliberately being a little tough on John and his idiosyncratic behaviors but in the end I’m really saying that none of that matters when you’ve just been handed one of the grandest complements of your career one really feels the impact, especially over the years.
John was good, I rationalized, because he knew what he wanted and had no fear about saying that something was of no use to the project. I was still afraid about my future here and unsure of what was to happen. Perhaps that is the way dramatic change becomes manifest in our own heads; even when we are resistant and wanting the security of the constancy of not taking any risks. We are, after all, pretty dishonest to some extent. Like Andy Rooney said in one of his books, we all want bosses to lie to us. When I do something or write some piece that’s not very good, I actually want the boss to say “Oh . . . very good!” The aerospace musical chairs game that had played for so long was now far behind me and I realized that I had to get my feet on the ground in order to move anything forward.
The very next day John grabbed me by my right shoulder while I was sneaking in to work from my back way through the cornfields. I was heading for the snow shed passageway to my little trailer and John insisted that I sit in on a meeting with his staff. I was once again amazed. I had heard the other end of the famed “morning meetings” back at San Diego while walking down the hallway by Gene O’Rourke’s office and listening to the eerie hallway echo of his speaker-phone but I had never imagined that I would somehow be a participant.
The morning meeting was an important interface for all disciplines and all were represented – each engineer queuing up to present plant problems, startup testing and so on. The morning meeting always took place in the big conference room right next to Crnich’s office and was lined at least two-deep in personnel who all had at least a facsimile reason to be there. At the other end of the squawker in San Diego was the unmistakable voice of Gene O’Rourke and almost always one or two interested GA personnel. Conversations on our end were held to one technical subject matter at a time like “b circulator is self-turbining at 8,300 rpm, all of the rest are above ten thousand this morning, PCRV cooling water chemistry is 45 ppb total suspended solids, of the total number of system 91 hydraulic control valves, eight have been taken apart to inspect the poppets and seals, we gotta pull the Y-strainers on . . . .” and so on and so forth for about an hour.
I stopped taking notes suddenly when I was asked a direct question by Mr. O’Rourke , I offered some rather guarded comments and gave oblique references to the 1973-4 budget and operating plan [just like I knew what I was talking about]. It was just after this first meeting when just a few of the managers were left that I was asked to give some input to upcoming personnel actions for some of the individuals out there. I was flabbergasted. These private personnel decisions on people’s monthly salaries were made right there with me in the room. I had at that time crossed some kind of career rubicon but I didn’t yet understand the full meaning or consequences.
John and Dick Ayres [then site manager for quality assurance] asked if I would like to participate in tomorrow’s morning meeting. I just swallowed hard and said yes. The morning meeting, after all, was the kickoff or tailboard for each day at the site and the seats available in the small conference room were limited in number. All of the attendees were technical types representing construction, engineering, control & instrumentation, operations, and now; finance & administration. All of the day’s events, intended actions, and what they called “punch list items” were discussed with the San Diego management. With the same confident action of the other engineering and construction professionals, I scooped up copies of the plant schedule and the punch list and put them on the wall of my little construction trailer – that schedule still showing the March 1974 commercial operation date for the Fort St. Vrain Nuclear Generating Station.
I had some good company. Doug Powell was hired on as one of the GA shift supervisors and we were office mates out there in the little construction trailer that had become my home. Doug had a gold ring from his college which he called “The Academy” and had served as propulsion engineering officer on nuclear submarines. This made us friends right away since I had worked on some undersea projects back at General Dynamics and Raytheon. Powell gave me a good introduction to some of the engineering aspects of the plant: from the piping & instrumentation diagrams to the architectural drawings and actual hands-on experience out there. I came back from the morning meeting one cold day excitedly telephoning San Diego with bad news about not being able to get helium flow through the hydrogen getters. This was an essential element in the helium purification system that would severely slip the commercial operation date unless resolved. After all, the way the plant ultimately works is the transfer of heat to the helium medium which is then transferred to the feedwater in the steam generators to make steam for the turbine.
I was noticeably excited about all of this and Doug just told me to shut up and put down the telephone. He said that getting stressed out about normal everyday mechanical difficulties would eventually drive me and the people around me crazy and that if there was a real problem with the getters, we would chip them out of the concrete they were in and rip them out for repair. He backed up his words with another personally guided plant tour, pointing out just exactly how this would be accomplished if indeed this was the action needed. I would carry this new view on with me to much larger facilities many years later and I’m forever grateful for learning the relative importance of things going wrong at this early stage of life. More important for now, the hydrogen getter problems caused my involvement again as a ghost writer.
I had a hand in drafting a memo to Fritz Swart over at PSCCo which partially outlined the engineering nature of the problem along with recommended actions on the site’s part. I got to work with many of the best GA people on this action item. The problem with the hydrogen getters not permitting proper flow had to do with design operating temperatures not being met by the current method used for heating the titanium sponge inside them. After a couple of engineering fixes to heat the getter sponges to 700 plus degrees F, success was ours and normal flow was restored.
Our only problem right then was the writing. One needs to write about what’s there and the truth about what’s there. I was talking to a high school class of young people just a couple of years ago and I told them that you don’t really have to ever write with all of the flair and elegance of many of the great writers. You [and I] just have to be able to tell someone else who probably doesn’t know us from Adam what the heck happened here. More than half of writing is being able to tell some one [on paper] where we are now, how we got here, and where we’re going. If you’re good enough to talk and say all of those things, then you’re good enough to write. A lot of my writing involves trial balloons of sentences and paragraphs which are edited up and down, back and forth. Playwright Neil Simon always drafts his stuff on large 18 x 24” sheets of quadrille so he can stand back and “see the music.” I never wrote a play but I have a feeling for what Mr. Simon is talking about.
I was riding to work with the same guys and it was through the carpooling that I met more and more of the engineers working on the plant. Pete Peterson from engineering, Tommy Stellar from division chemistry, Charlie “Foxboro” [don’t know Charley’s real last name], Newt Wattis from Foster-Wheeler, Pierre Barber from Electricitie de France, and Dave Miklush, a mechanical engineer and former attendant at his dad’s service station who would eventually be on the management staff of the Diablo Canyon nuclear units on the California coast and an old friend. The engineers were patient in explaining to me all of the intricacies, eccentricities, vagaries, etc. of the plant many of which, according to my later telephone conversations, were completely unknown to the people in San Diego. I remember one of the San Diego auditors asking me why the plant had steam generators since a turbine generator was already present and a “whole lot of money” could be saved if we could eliminate the unnecessary mechanical apparatus (woe!). If you’re at a certain level of knowledge – don’t bother to ask questions – they’ll probably just confirm that you don’t know enough to be asking the questions you’re asking.
Part of the landscape for the trip out to work in the mornings was the ever-present aroma in that section of the country. Now only in the background instead of the screaming foreground, the smells of animal dung now took on different intensities and colors; and one now knew instinctively when to hold one’s breath and for how long. Another cross-country unpleasentry peculiar to this part of the world was the almost constant presence of large truck-type vehicles hauling [you guessed it] some diabolical mixture of fresh hay and excrement – undoubtedly mined locally. The trucks were loaded above the gunnels with the vile stuff which would fly off the beaten up carriers and splash on the windshield of whatever car was unlucky enough to be traveling behind. Winter season only meant that the flying smelly debris would be frozen onto your car windshield and front facing areas to the dismay of anyone who had the delegated task of cleaning the unsanitary and revolting stuff off. Many unsafe passes on the two-lane highway were attempted by irate drivers following these large and slow trucks on the highway between Longmont and Platteville.
When queried about their language expanding experiences in America at in particular at the Fort St. Vrain Generating Station; the French, Germans, and Japanese all said that one expression they would take back home with them would be “sheet trok” [always followed by “Ha, ha; Ha, ha].” One day all of the traffic from eastward was stalled on the account of an accident. Some local farmer had tried to beat the little red lights at a railroad intersection and had lost out to the oncoming speeding train. When the news reached the GA engineering block table that a railroad locomotive had taken out one of the local farm manure transfer trucks – it may sound cruel but everyone laughed. It sometimes makes me wonder about the kind and character of stories that were brought back to foreign nations from this little place on the Colorado Plains.
The plant had just been through what is called “hot flow testing” which is intended to be a complete functional test procedure for all systems related to the nuclear portion of the plant before the fuel elements are loaded. Subsequent to the hot flow test milestone, GA was handing over systems one-by-one to Public Service Company of Colorado as they reached startup test completion. Nuclear plants always have what is known as a nuclear and a non-nuclear side. The nuclear side of any plant contains all systems, structures and components which prevent or mitigate serious or harmful effects of radioactive materials upon the health and safety of the public. This is pretty much spelled out in what’s called Title 10, Part 50 of the Code of Federal Regulations [which is pronounced “ten CFR fifty” in polite conversation. 10CFR50 is the subject of many misquotes and wrong-headed interpretations. Thus the prestressed concrete reactor vessel, everything in it, and pretty much around it were included in the nuclear portion of the plant. It was during the hot flow testing that a number of things began to appear on the horizon. Water was somehow leaking from inside the vessel, in all probability from the PCRV cooling system within, and out through the bottom head.
Engineer Jack Yampolsky’s fix for this was to pump a kind of combination stop-leak and adhesive through the PCRV cooling tubes and hopefully gain a seal in that way. The elephant in the room was that it would be real difficult to get to the PCRV cooling tubes since they were buried in more than ten feet of concrete, reinforcing steel and prestress tendons. Happily the leaking water stopped but the issue was really a hanging sword over GA’s head. Many years later I found out that a number of utility personnel at Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas & Electric [among others] were saying “What were you thinking?” in reference to GA’s PCRV cooling tube fix. To all potential suppliers -- don’t think that industry personnel don’t talk to each other – because many times they do.
Yampolsky’s input was also then used to change out what were called Pelton wheels which were an emergency backup for helium flow circulation. Each of the four steam-driven helium circulators were intended to be driven by Pelton wheels during hot flow testing since not nearly enough steam could be generated locally for anything approaching full flow to each of the circulators’ steam wheels for normal operation. Emergency backup was provided at FSV via having Pelton wheels on the same shaft of each of the four machines which would be driven by emergency condensate [or even the fire protection water if necessary]. Lester Allan Pelton was the original inventor of the Pelton wheel which is usually used in high-pressure hydroelectric stations for extracting power from water.
The Pelton wheels were torn to pieces by being blasted day-after-day with high pressure water in order to achieve the design objectives of the hot flow testing. The determination was made that not enough care and attention had been given to positioning the high-pressure nozzles so as to maximize flow in and out of the Pelton buckets and this had ultimately resulted in the demise of version one of the wheels. Back at GA, a new HTGR selling point was that the new machines would not have the recalcitrant wheels as part of the design and would not be plagued with all of the Fort St. Vrain problems (?). This type of spinning and politicization of design failures and shortcomings gave me the shivers about what else the management team back in San Diego was doing.
Along these same lines, the color picture brochure that I had in my briefcase for advanced HTGR’s of the 770 MWe and 1,160 MWe class which depicted an HTGR in place inside a containment vessel with a single turbine generator in the turbine building. Nothing wrong except that my new GE friends are telling me that the turbine generator shown is one which has one high pressure/intermediate pressure section and three low-pressure butterflies just like in a PWR! Not much of a thermal efficiency advantage here when you are showing the T-G set that belongs to the other guys. Undoubtedly the artist rendering the cutaway picture of the completed HTGR plant was not aware that significantly different steam conditions prevailed [or would prevail] at an HTGR plant. My statistician’s guess is that one of the new 770’s would have a, two shaft, cross-compound TG set with one low pressure section; much like one would see at Mohave or Ormond Beach.
Anyway it was, all of the circulators had to be changed out-- the last of which was just being buttoned up as I got to the site. Since the circulators were normally driven by cold reheat steam; all steam lines and water lines as well had to be cut and moved aside and then the Pelton wheels had to be removed for inspection and ultimate replacement. Not exactly an off the shelf item, each Pelton wheel was made from Inconel nickel steel alloy for extra strength and consisted of a circular line of buckets connected to a stub shaft with a Curvic coupling at the base; all of this from one piece of steel. Strangely enough, thorough all of the testing down at GA’s Sorrento Valley test tower and the Valmont test facility up in Boulder, test engineer Len Netzel was always bothered by the lack of appropriate data was on operability parameters when running one, two, three, or four circulators on Pelton alone. At least this is what I remember being discussed rather heatedly in the daily morning meetings.
Fort St. Vrain is supposed to operate as a single-pass Benson type or “once through” boiler. Such an industrial boiler does not have a steam drum or what is sometime wrongly called a “mud drum” which normally provides for change of state from water to steam and a collection point for impurities which can be drained away and separated. In a once-thru boiler, you can imagine the water inventory being heated continuously along a long, long tube until in comes out as steam at the other end. Bad part is you have to really run hot and at really high pressure. The other bad part is you have to have really clean water. In the actual world, you have to temporarily bypass the water to what are called flash tanks to create the first steam for the power station –usually augmented by a large auxillary boiler. Flash tanks are normally used in a number of single pass boilers to “boot up” steam conditions during startup and are used in order to have enough steam inventory to run the auxiliaries in the up-down, stair-step waltz up to full power.
This was the basis for the HTGR’s better thermodynamic cycle; we were running at 1,000 degrees F and 2,400 psig which was way beyond any of the water reactors and thus achieving higher efficiency through better heat utilization. Economies were further achieved by not going through the electric power conversion reduction and powering the circulators with steam right from the plant. That’s where the vaunted thirty-nine percent came from for thermal efficiency. Your car, good as it may be, is not much more than 25% thermally efficient – that’s right: 75% just heats the air around you. The best pressurized water reactor in the world runs at about 36% thermal efficiency.
Many years later I would be involved in starting up some units at another utility’s generating units in Huntington Beach, California. Steam conditions were roughly similar at 1,000 deg F temperature and 2,400 psi main steam. In the morning we would get all necessary rotating machinery rolling and in sinc with the sixty cycles of the greater outside power system. Then we would mind water chemistry for the next few hours; all of the time working on getting the water spec down to the parameters where we had to be running. When total suspended solids and total dissolved solids hit a certain number; we were starting fires. We’d lock both turbines together electrically along with other plant equipment that had to be synchronized and we’d be rolling [if we didn’t trip the unit off line on the way up].
The engineering determination was made at some time unknown to the author that main steam bypass flash tanks had to be installed in order to augment and supplement the available steam for starting up the plant. It was unclear if Sargent & Lundy or some other organization was responsible for this change. When I was watching the insulators put the last of the lagging on the new bypass flash tanks, it never occurred to me to ask the question of just why were these being added by the Sargent & Lundy Engineering Corporation right now. Had not the basic plant been in a state of completed design for some years by now? Of these and other serious questions no one on site seemed to know. Decisions were made on economies for the station way back during the sixties and practically all of those people were now gone. The visiting S&L personnel did not want to answer many questions about the bypass flash tanks but then again – they didn’t have to [who’s this financial rep, anyway].
Tommy Stellar, Dan Allen, Dave Miklush, Pete Peterson, Bill Gould and I would go over to Platteville for lunch at the local bar and grill which was called “The Oasis” and bite into half-pound Oasis Cheeseburgers and inhale platefuls of heart-stopping fries. You could go over to the Oasis at midnight and still get whatever the daily special was to eat. I was always a fan of the one dollar enchilada plate. Due to the three-shift operations we had at the nearby plant, the management there had accommodated to our schedule since doing so brought in more business. I had actually stopped in for breakfast and met the people just getting off of third shift at the Oasis.
Like the little place that aviatrix Pancho Barnes managed at the old Muroc flight test center [later: Edwards Air Force Base], the “Big O” was a great place to catch up on the rumors that were out among the different craft which were there in significant numbers subsequent to first shift. Fights would sometime breakout but the excitement would die down in a hurry. This wasn’t like the writer’s later experience in Arizona’s Bullhead City near the coal-fired Mohave Generating Station where people would actually be murdered as part of the nightly routine of continuous blatant and abject violence. The craft in this part of the world were definitely tough but they were not killers. The Oasis management gave out souvenir ball point pens to all those who wanted which were actually a prize item for those individuals going back to the San Diego offices. “. . . only those in the know would ever notice the significance of the Big O . . .”
By this time, both the San Diego home office and FSV were very happy about the completion of hot flow testing and arrangements were being worked out for the actual loading of nuclear fuel. One of my Remington Post friends, Werner Astl, had an unhappy look on his face when I saw him in the early morning hours during these, my early weeks at the site. Werner was asked to get one of the Pelton wheels down for the inspection on “B” circulator. A large nut held the wheel in place on the helium circulator stub shaft. On third shift the night before, Werner along with the pipefitters and millwrights attempted to remove the Pelton wheel in the normal fashion by removing the large nut and tugging at the wheel to no avail. With orders to get the Pelton wheel out of there by first shift tomorrow morning, the shaft on “B” circulator was cut off right behind the Curvic coupling.
Sometimes it takes a while before the full impact of a decision can be made. We were able to inspect the Pelton wheel alright, but the machine it was once a part of was now dead. A spare circulator was down in San Diego and there was an extraordinarily long morning meeting that morning on the squawker with a rather white-faced Bill Budge, Gene O’Rourke, Jack Yampolsky and others regarding the logistics of removing the existing machine and replacing it with the one now in Sorrento Valley. Anyway it was, B circulator had to come out and all of our plant schedules and plans were now obsolete. We would have to line up the materials and human resources necessary to take out B circulator right now even though the holiday season was upon us and people wanted to leave for their homes in San Diego. As a dollars & cents person, I can tell you unequivocally that changing out a circulator had a then-dollars effect of about $3 million --easy.
Excruciating pain was felt by all as we dragged our tails back to our office trailers to re-size up the situation. Talking to management on the speaker phone in the morning meeting was always an ego-boosting thing except when all of the news conveyed is indeed bad. We barely looked at each other all the way back to our desks. Out of the blue, site engineer Fenton Bain came to my office with a proposal to have a party at the Remington Post clubhouse which would be called the “Fort St. Vrain First Annual Startup Party” which would be held in about a week [mid-December 1973]. I called Chuck and Eileen, the managers at the Remington Post and they said that there would be no charge for the use of the huge clubhouse and that any and all GA personnel were welcome.
Out at the Fort, the people from Gulf Dravo were out milling around the batch plant that they bought for forty grand so I dropped everything and ran out there to see if I could assist them [in getting the doggone thing away from here!]. This was a large production concrete batch plant that would be fit for a medium sized city. There are not any drawings anywhere that we can find. There is no manufacturer and it is not known exactly how the thing came into existence. From the Fort St. Vrain side, I have to have everything removed down to the foundations.
The guys from Dravo with the suits and ties walked up and down the catwalks and conveyors of the plant. I gave them hardhats so nobody was in violation. There wasn’t much to say besides “. . . well, there it is!”
The Dravo people were moving the plant down to southern Colorado where it was to be used in conjunction with an oil shale project. They actually took the batch plant apart piece by piece and moved the parts out on flatbeds. I watched the last flatbed leave the site with unrecognizable hardware on the bed that I really could not describe. I have always pitied the poor [and probably young] engineer who was given the “opportunity” reconstruct the Fort St. Vrain batch plant at its new intended location. My new Pittsburg friends in the Treasurers Department gave me the proper Gulf forms for making the transfer of monies. At Gulf, you could move the Washington Monument to Point Loma in San Diego if you obtained the right form.
The end of the year was coming soon and the GA annual purchase orders were soon to run out so I performed a review of all. One of the San Diego purchase orders was for GA renting ten apartments at the Remington Post which is something that I didn’t completely comprehend when I first arrived. The ten apartments were intended for use by GA personnel who were on temporary assignment and would offset the cost of motel charges for such individuals. A number of GA personnel on temporary assignment were currently living in the apartments. San Diego purchasing said that it was up to me to negotiate another year of apartment rentals at the Remington Post and to modify the purchase order. It is now that I know why Chuck and Eileen have been so accommodating and it flashes through my mind that I have tacitly accepted gratuities for being in my decision making position. This had not happened to me before so I decided then and there that I had to be a lot more careful when dealing with vendors and potential vendors. Just making matters a little bit worse; there were no controls on who was staying there and who was not.
It’s all subject to negotiation. One of the other GA purchase orders was to National Car Rental up in Fort Collins for the lease of new vehicles for our site personnel on temporary assignment. This was another cost offset for individuals coming up who would normally be on employee travel and thusly renting an automobile. I drafted up a couple of letters, one to the Remington Post and one to National spelling out the contract number, summary terms and conditions, a detail listing of what was to be leased and associated proposed costs for 1974 with no changes from the 1973 rates. This would modify the contract value and time scope of each of these purchase orders, if the proposed rates were agreed to by the vendors. I sent the originals out under my signature on GA stationary and got a response by telephone the very next day. Both the Remington Post and National were happy to continue through 1974 with the same rates as 1973. I thru my pencil into the air and kicked back from my little desk and said to my Annapolis/hunter-killer sub roommate Doug Powell that “I wasn’t even trying.”
We had a stunning party at the Remington Post with many people from Fort St. Vrain in attendance. Manager Chuck had made a huge fire in the central fireplace which looked as though you could stuff two cords of wood at a time into the thing. There was an open bar and BYOB conditions and manager Eileen and some of the wives and many others made up food for us to eat. Site supervising clerk Stevie Stapleton acted as DJ for all of the music and a better choice could not have been made. It was a good break for all of us who had been spending a lot of days at work. John Crnich was there with his lady friend at the time and one of the naïve members of the FSV cast shook her hand and said “I’m very glad to meet you, Mrs. Crnich.”
This was the life, up in the Colorado mountains on a snowy night in a fire-lit lodge with good music and friends. It occurred to me that this is just the scene that Hank Anthony in GA’s personnel department in San Diego thought was happening each and every day up at the FSV site—a gigantic non-stop party in a ski lodge like setting with beautiful women, a lot of booze, and loud music echoing across snowy landscape of Boulder Valley Baa-Boom, Baa-Boom. As financial representative though, I can truthfully testify that this was all done on a shoestring with individual contributions and no expenditure of GA dollars. I was, however, still bothered by the pervasive and sometimes uncontrolled Remington Post connection.
I did yet another rack up like the original one that I made of who was on what kind of letter of agreement so I could more readily submit expense reports for approval and eventual payment -- this one with an personnel update. Turns out that a lot of people are on one of the types of short-term arrangements and I asked Bill Gould who was then assistant manager of construction why all of these people, Crnich included, were on short term assignment when they were obviously there for the duration. Bill quipped that the financial arrangements were a whole lot better for the short term letters than the three-to-twelve month letter of agreement that I was on. What was effectively happening was that the guys were using their monthly plane ticket to San Diego for their wives coming in the other direction and staying up in the area here. It was an administrative hole in the plan that no one had ever thought of. I talked to John Wiley at GA’s project administration offices in San Diego and at some length went out to explain to him the situation we had – only to have him assure me that such a thing could not be happening. As with everything else, there’s a point at where one needs to stop arguing and just say “OK, talk to you later.”
There were other problems with the expense reports. Folks weren’t being paid their money. This was because Accounts Payable under Al Matthews was rejecting signed expense reports and sending them back to the FSV site without paying them based on some Gulf procedure or another. At times, individuals had to worry about paying their motel bills since the turnaround could be as much as two months for one expense report. I talked to Matthews on a number of occasions and it looked pretty dim as far as seeing any breakthroughs there. The rejections were for mainly trivial reasons like not posting subtotals and the Accounts Payable would continuously make a stand on policies and procedures, making the most conservative reading within those parameters and then send the expense report back to the site for “correction.” Meanwhile, the site person is trying to get by on his own money – causing an even greater impact on cash advances.
One of the most gifted senses that a person in the role of a financial representative can have is a general sense of timing. Rather than show up demanding a level playing field with the correct number of team players and the right sized ball, etc., -- go ahead and show up with 81mm mortars and 105 howitzers and blow the opposing team off the field – or better yet, don’t show up for the game at all. On the other hand, it’s really not a good idea to make enemies. If you get a funny feeling in the back of your neck because of recent actions of others, you’re probably being game played by the opposition and you need to proceed only with caution. I was going to have enough people hate my guts just by doing my job and I didn’t need any more. The only people who get along with everyone in an organization are the ones who are very good looking and say very little to anyone.
GA’s Accounts Payable organization had fallen into one of the many organizational pitfalls that occur with some regularity in accounting production – the people there had decided that the way to save the company money was for Accounts Payable not to pay some of the bills. Expense reports were only symptomatic; valid and verified invoicing was being rejected at an alarming rates. Late payments to employees may cause consternation; but late payments to outside vendors will cause an organization to loose its credit rating. I did not know it at the time but I would see a mammoth version of this organizational dysfunction later at a large electric utility on the west coast. Sadly, many times this problem is addressed by management often by expelling the organization of key personnel instead of convincing those same individuals that the activity could be managed better. Many years later I would be a volunteer supervisor of elections for a day at our local poling place. My clerks just about all thought that it was their ordained job to deny people the vote when other possibilities existed to get the voters through the process. It got so on the morning of the election I would lecture them that “we are here to m the public to vote.” You see this thinking everywhere from the DMV to the city clerk’s office. The folks just have to be re-educated with a different point of view.
Expense reports were not the only troubles we were having with San Diego. I had taken the petty cash fund from Cheryl Morgan who had virtually no records regarding expenditures except a pocket sized check register which was marked with hand-written text and figures. I called Ed Watson who represented the treasurer’s department in San Diego and subsequent to hearing that we had an active checking account with the Gulf name on it he went absolutely ballistic. At first, he threatened to report all of this to his to his superiors in Pittsburg but after I explained that the account located up in Greeley had been open for about ten years under the old GA division of General Dynamics he calmed down a lot.
I said not to worry – and that I would fix everything and hopped [befittingly] into Al Habush’s old car. Al’s car was actually a GA owned item in the form of a 1967 Ford which only a few of us could make run. Anyway, after a half-hour of warming up – I sputtered and leaped off to Greeley and closed the account taking the balance out as a cashiers check and then barely making it back since the car ran so bad.
I added the cashiers check to the money in the cash box and the receipts for expenditures and all was in balance: three hundred dollars even. I got on the phone to Gulf Oil Pittsburg and transferred around until I was talking to Mike Kennerly, one of the assistant treasurers of the corporation. Mike listened for a long time to me about the problems we were having out here and thought it was ridiculous that we could not even have a checking account. He said “I’m sending you out some Gulf Oil forms which you will need to have signed by the participating financial organizations and notarized by someone with a Colorado seal” and further that Pittsburg would print my name at the top which would read “The Gulf Oil Corporation – Ronald H. Jagodinski Special.” I got the forms two days later and they looked more like my college degree than any form I’d ever seen before, actually old english writing printed on parchment-like paper.
Pittsburg also said that it might be a good thing to avoid some of the Accounts Payable problems I was having with expense reports by arranging for them to be paid out at the site and just the paperwork sent back to San Diego. I said that I didn’t have enough money and Pittsburg shot back “that’s no problem; how much do you need.” We agreed to a temporary figure of ten thousand dollars – right there on the telephone. I still had to open a commercial bank account in Gulf’s name and mine and I did that over at the Bank of Boulder with the help of the new accounts person Cathy, the latter who would become Mrs. David B. Miklush some years later. The account checks were large, commercial size with an accompanying check register; and I worked out a disbursement control number sequence in order to apply for re-imbursement just like in a textbook petty cash account. I had purchased the Accounting text by the authors Meigs and Johnson as a used book some years ago back in school – I used the managerial accounting textbook often in setting up one thing or another.
We had an old Western Union Telex machine which allowed one to send printed messages to another location via the telephone lines just as long as they had a like machine at the other end [sound familiar?]. I began to use this machine since I had a lot of experience with the old GE time share computer terminals which are essentially the same thing. I would Telex [TWX] messages all over the continental US not knowing that this was a precursor of a lot of larger things to come. I began to use the Telex machine to TWX the detail re-imbursement requests to the San Diego offices with control numbers and individual amounts adding to a total request which would be backed up by a controlled and signed memo for mailing.
In this way the associated backup was then sent to San Diego via regular first class post and the funds would be transferred to the Gulf Oil account in Boulder in the meantime. This shortened the process by light-years and we were processing every expense report at the FSV location within a day. I had the teamsters get me a six inch square stamp on one of their runs to Denver which said “PAID – FSV Site Financial Officer” in red which I would use on the face of each expense report in order to preclude double payment by us and then possibly San Diego.
It should be emphasized here that this all was still within the confines of a site petty cash fund. I wasn’t trying to create a de facto accounts payable department up at Fort St. Vrain. We still used the purchase order systems already in operation at GA and Stearns-Roger each with their normal approval cycles and other controls. Despite being outwardly cavalier about many things, the negative relationships that I was building with some of the San Diego people were now starting to worry me. I was often too abrasive and impatient -- I fact that know all too well now.
GA Treasury department’s Ed Watson had found out what I did with the Gulf Oil treasurers office by this time and had now called my former supervisor Bill Weber who was on a plane out to see me that very next week [this was early in 1974]. Although I no longer worked for Bill, he wanted to both council and caution me about taking on too much and making too many enemies. That seemed to make good sense and his points about being careful about being the one who’s taking in and dispensing monies were of universal value. When you are in a position such as the one I had acquired, one need to be exceedingly careful about the attendant explanations regarding funds coming in and leaving. Bill adroitly related to me all of the inherent dangers in doing something like using the cash I may take in up here from the sale of miscellaneous items for the direct replenishment of the petty cash account; and thusly becoming my own financial center with no checks and balances but my own good looks.
Accordingly, I never did pollute the site petty cash fund with outside monies from anywhere. Subsequent to our morning discussion we took a plant tour. I took Bill to some of the most inaccessible places that were at the plant and he stayed right with me in his suit and tie and dress shoes. I had forgotten that Bill was an accomplished climber and hiker and the places I took him were probably no more consequential than a large rockpile. It was good to see someone like Bill Weber all this long way from the San Diego offices and I was sad to see him go at the end of that day.
I was now driving Al Habush’s old car, the white ’67 Ford. This was because Dennis the equipment operator from the local trailer town of Frederick, Dave Miklush and I were the only ones on site who knew or cared enough about the car to change out the carburetor and otherwise fix the thing so it would run even on eight cylinders for more than 30 seconds.
The car was treated as total junk up until then and Dennis the operator, Dave and I were the only people with guts enough to drive it anywhere. By bringing Habush’s car back from the dead, as it were, we were able to have one more car going to and from Boulder and not have it be rented or leased. As it worked out, either me or Miklush would drive the Ford affectionately re-christened now as “The White Tornado” back and forth from Boulder to work with two to four other folks. The car had a new life now that all of the carburetion, automatic choke, spotty ignition, and other problems were now gone and the new Holly four barrel on the basic 289 engine was more powerful than any of the new leased Dodges as the any of the site engineers would find out if they tried to race any of us over the country roads to the Big-O at lunchtime.
People were knocking on the door of my office wanting their equipment. GA management personnel had decided to sell a number of major items and pieces of equipment to the general public back in 1973 and so a sale was held with bids. The people who had won the bidding wanted their stuff. This included the huge Grove self-propelled crane, a gigantic ten yard front end loader, the 1968 white Ford that I had been driving, and [believe it or not] the entire inventory of pipe, valves and fittings in the warehouse. Trouble was, we were still using all of this stuff. The order from GA management had come down as hot flow test was coming to an end – so who needs all of this stuff; right?
Like most of the San Diego management maneuvers, everyone had made damn sure that this one had other people’s fingerprints on it. Those canny folks had someone sign all of the documents related to the material and equipment sales and provided nothing in writing that he or anyone else in management was ever involved. This whole thing did not look good to me but I wasn’t about to take on the management of the Company. I took it upon myself to sit down at the typewriter and pound out letters to the lucky bidders saying that all of these sales were hereby terminated since no consideration was ever received and significant wear and tear had been incurred on the machinery so the original prices bid were not fair or valid. In closing, we would announce a time in the future when such bidding and sales could take place and that they would be at the top of our list. That was that for the most part.
One persistent bidder was Tom Tunnell who owned Louisiana Valve & Fitting. Tom was the one who purchased all of the pipe, valves, and fittings for the plant and he had already made two pickups with one of his flatbed trucks. I called Tom and told him that the deal on anything more was off and we would wait until after commercial operation to sell anything more. When he asked me why we were not selling any more pipes, valves and fittings, I just referred to 10CFR 50 Appendix B without any further attribution. Research by purchasing agent Marv Miller down at the Stearns-Roger offices indicated that the site had actually re-purchased nuclear class valves back from Louisiana Valve & Fitting at the going rates for new stuff. I learned later that this was another “nuclear valve scam” where spare parts dealers purchase inventories from unknowledgeable persons at a nuclear power station and then re-pedigree the item with the proper QA certifications and then re-sell them to nuclear utilities. This is not illegal and just amounts to bad decisions on everyone’s part.
My predecessor Dennis Millard was wrongly blamed for the whole material & equipment sale near-fiasco; again which was entirely due to the Byzantine efforts of unseen San Diego management personnel. Readers beware; don’t ever put your good name to something that you know to be a wrong action – saying “orders are orders” buys you absolutely nothing with a hierarchy who could be practicing slightly less than rigorous honesty.
But there was trouble now up on the top head of the reactor. The very young engineer Harry Yip was complaining to Stellar, Miklush, and the rest of us that he was having trouble pulling down a vacuum on the low temperature adsorber [don’t look this up -- it’s spelled right] or as everybody else called it; the LTA.
“How long have you been pulling down, Harry?”
“About three days.”
Harry had vacuum pumps attached to a machine that wasn’t more than 125 cubic feet in volume and he wasn’t getting anything near a vacuum after three days. The low temperature adsorber is part of the helium purification train and is a necessary item for plant operation. It really looked like there might be a hole somewhere in the LTA. We needed to extract the long, cylindrical LTA from it’s liar within the prestressed concrete reactor vessel and, subsequent to the morning meeting, a number of intelligent persons from the engineering division back in San Diego worked out a couple of ways to do it. One of the suggestions coming up the next morning was to use a three foot wide device that would look like an inside caliper to secure the outer shell of the LTA at several points and then use the overhead reactor building crane and a dynamometer [a scale] to measure the lifting effort of the crane.
GA mechanical engineer John Lake was up on the top head that very evening and all of the solutions sounded too complicated, expensive and time consuming to him. He and a couple of crafts personnel measured the outer shell diameter of the LTA and its liner and found that it matched up pretty well with the wheels on one of the cars parked in the parking lot; a Corvair. Lake and craftsmen took the tire up to the top head, deflated it, attached it to the reactor building crane, placed the tire in the PCRV orifice for the LTA within the outer shell, and extracted the entire unit within a few minuets.
George Block was the GA engineer in charge of plant testing at the site and George Colgan was the engineer in charge of operations. The two Georges were up in arms about this entire affair since procedures were not written, there was no OK from San Diego, there was no sign-off from PSCCo, and there was no NRC notification to ask if such a procedure was alright. Crnich overruled them bellowing out that “somebody got some kinda’ ’ problem with this? We got the thing out, didn’t we? End of any visible argument from the two Georges.
Block and Colgan were what anyone would call real nuclear types. George Block from the commercial/government side and George Colgan from the United States Navy. I would learn to rely and listen carefully to both of these men.
But right now we had a real problem on our hands or, in a literal sense, hanging from the building crane. The LTA was crushed and there wasn’t a spare one back in Sorrento Valley like there was for . I got out of that morning meeting and immediately went down to see Jim Reader and Dick Dawes at Stearns-Roger. I told Jim and Dick that we had to separate and segregate the costs associated with the LTA and document all charges associated with the extraction and eventual shipping to Sorrento Valley. I then called Jeff Rigsby and asked him if he could set up charge numbers for the coming fix on the LTA. All parties agreed enthusiastically and we were well on our way to making our first claim for a mechanical engineering accident to our industrial all-risk builder’s insurance carrier – the H. K. Ferguson Company.
I knew something about this from my subcontract audit work back at Raytheon. GA was carrying a builder’s risk insurance policy for major accidents involving major items of equipment and the low temperature adsorber accident fit the language in the insurance policy almost exactly. It was an accident since an improper valve lineup was done before Harry started pulling down with the vacuum pumps which caused the LTA to be crushed. The valve lineup was prepped by Werner Astl on graveyard shift. Werner had been associated with too many accidents and mishaps which wound up costing too much money and time. Werner was a favorite of Crnich and a friend to all, but nothing could save him now. He was sent back rather unceremoniously to the San Diego offices and we never saw him again.
On an airplane not too far behind Werner’s was the LTA on its way to San Diego for repair. I also hopped on a plane to assure all cost collection tools, documentation, and charge numbers were in place which was redundant because Bill Weber, Bill Davidson, and Jeff Rigsby had already done a good job at doing all of that. By the time the repair and reinstallation was complete we had collected close to $425,000 and the H. K. Ferguson people offered us up an offer of just over $100k; basing their decision on the contractual language ‘replacement cost(s) in kind’ which brought their exposure down quite a bit. After a little administrative hand-waving; GA’s legal representative Dick Yale said to “take that check out of their hands – and CASH it” meaning to get the money in a Gulf account as soon as possible. Ultimately, the H. K. Ferguson check was hand-carried to San Diego by me and given to one of the controller John Framel’s senior managers, Dean Enterline for deposit and booking to the correct GA account. The foregoing illustrates an important principle in gambling – make sure you pick up the chips that people put in front of you and argue about the rules of the game later. It also underlines Bill Weber’s old axiom for keeping cash and costing segregated and separated from what we would call normal plant budget items. Such things lend themselves better to explanation in latter years. I could have really used the money from the transaction for a number of the things going on out there – but I would be making myself a cost center and a separate area of responsibility, not to mention severely muddying the waters regarding my own transactions.
“b” circulator was being buttoned up and it snowed asbestos down there from all of the insulation work in the area we called the “bottom head” which was where the four circulator penetrations and the bottom access penetrations were. To access this area one had to take the catwalks down to the basement and climb back up inside the bottom head on a thirty foot steel ladder and then jump between the hot and cold reheat steam pipes which were angling out horizontal to the bottom face of the PCRV. The place still had a closed-in, nightmarish feel with lots of temporary lighting, dust, people crawling over one another, and the sounds of machinery winning and roaring giving one the impression that this could easily be an added scene to Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis.”
I had grown comfortable with the plant by now and I was giving tours to visiting dignitaries; we were loading fuel and it seemed we were on the last lap of a long race. John Crnich’s job was completed and he was leaving for San Diego for good and QA manager Dick Ayres would take his place as our new project manager. John Crnich, Bill Budge, George Brown and I plus all of our associated ladies went over to Central City to dance and celebrate for half the night. Crnich and my ex were particularly good dancers and it was fun for the rest of us to watch them in this old western bar setting. Right above the bar was a no-nonsense notice for all patrons to be so kind as to “CHECK YOUR WEPONS AT THE BAR” which gave one a start when walking in to the place for the first time.
Those GA managers are what one might refer to as “complicated heroes” – the twentieth century is literally full of complicated heroes. Frank Lloyd Wright, Charles A. Lindberg, Douglas Macarthur, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton are all twentieth century complicated heroes. John, Bill, and George were all from one of the GA competitors called the General Electric Company and they brought their life-long construction and startup experience with them. The shape and priorities of the startup program was largely their doing and they were not alone. GA had quite a number of personnel from the larger reactor and/or component companies which was no surprise for a young rising star on the commercial horizon. True, GA had invented [or almost invented] the better mousetrap with its thirty-nine percent thermal efficiency rating which was higher than any pressurized or boiling water reactor by a number of percentage points. Just about all of us showed no doubt about the theory of increased production efficiency with the HTGR type of machine. It was rumored heavily that subsequent to turbine roll and commercial operation at Fort St. Vrain; GA would start in on a Naderesque campaign [remember, it’s the ‘70s] against the competition. From then looking forward we had the world by the tail and it was us on the frontier of a new technology [whew]. Understandably, the focus was now on running the Fort St. Vrain Nuclear Generating Station or all would be lost.
Dick Ayres was a much more low key type of fellow and was real appreciative of good work on all of our parts. Dick haled from aerospace [Aerojet General] so we had a similar background in management and administration philosophy. When Crnich left for good I received orders to keep his new LTD and the White Tornado was back to being a full time Boulder pool car under the stewardship of startup engineer Dave Miklush.
The daily updated punch list served as an inspiration for me to create the Fort St. Vrain Financial Action Items Punch List which all things pending were listed out with an explanation of their status and date of completion. The crude hands-on financial systems I had devised were actually working rather smoothly and we had hired a local clerical person named Andy [who actually reported to Steve Stapleton] to handle the high volume of expense report approval and payments all subject to my periodic audit about once or twice a week. It was fitting that some of the repetitive tasks be spread out since I was slowly and deliberately creating new hands-on management systems which ultimately gave senior personnel and auditors more visibility and accountability. I kept on inventing these little systems and procedures and going on to the next problem area.
Another Convair financial management training program person like myself was hired who would become one of the chief accountants and eventually comptroller. I remember that John Driscoll was always helpful in explaining some rather difficult accounting practices and procedures in a very straightforward and simplified manner. I never told him directly, but John’s explanation of the operation of accrual accounts and their effect on current month total costs was the subject of an engineering review meeting at the site where I conveyed this to the technical personnel using the blackboard. Many of the engineers expressed a keen interest into how the money was being counted and how we were being scored by the people back home in San Diego and they inadvertently became experts in the booking of accruals.
The petty cash account now had a value of twenty thousand dollars and Pittsburg changed my signing authority to five million dollars so I could sign off on invoices. I could also authorize the opening of any purchase order or modification for $2 million. Comptroller John Framel declared in an open meeting on the squawker that I was one of his “division controllers” which amounted to quite a promotion – without any paperwork or any money.
I was still getting negative responses from San Diego. I put in for some GA business cards to be printed with my name and “Financial Representative” for job title and my number out in Platteville and down in Boulder. Undisclosed people in the San Diego office tried to block the printing of my cards stating that I didn’t need anything like that. Like most everything else, we just found a local vendor and cut a purchase order to print those and other cards up at the Fort. It seemed that some of the people in San Diego had nothing better to do. “CS games are all they’re good at, Jag . . .” Quipped one FSV startup engineer.
We certainly had problems getting personnel from San Diego up there to work. Everyone was working furiously on what was known as the reference design or Standard Plant HTGR – which is management-ese for future business. One person from the Bechtel Corporation told me that what you want are workers who are primarily motivated by money. The one’s who are motivated by place of work [like La Jolla] are basically through being motivated once you move them there. That person was right because most of the GA personnel wanted nothing more than to stay right there in America’s Favorite City and not become involved in some far-off adventure up in remote and inhospitable Colorado. We often referred to the San Diego personnel as the “Invaders” which was in direct reference to a then-popular television show about space aliens who had to be “recharged” in order to stay on their present assignment on earth – the San Diego people many times wanting to take the first plane out.
Up at the Fort, these were easy days, though. It seemed as though startup was assured once hot physics testing was completed and now that fuel had been loaded successfully. In one of the Boulder carpools, we were riding to work with chemical engineer Tommy Stellar along the South Platte looking at the birds. Tommy is a bird watcher and, all in all, we counted about seventeen species of ducks right on that one stretch of the South Platte never thinking once that we were acting in a bizarre fashion. I remember thinking that to predict that I would be bird watching on the South Platte River would have been a real stretch back when I was in college. The area here is known as the “Bob Persons gun club” – Persons being the then president of PSCCo. The privately held land behind the plant was rich in all species of duck and one could shoot one’s limit in a very short period of time.
Ronny Fawcet, Paul Turmane, and Bobby Tatum, construction managers all, had also left --leaving another young person, William R. Gould, Jr. to complete the dwindling number of action items on the FSV punch list. There were opportunities elsewhere in the industry now. Paul was traveling up to northeast Colorado where they were building a set of twin 440’s [coal fired stations, like most of the west] way up in Craig, Colorado where we heard that there were only two seasons: winter and the fourth of July. Bobby Tatum and his gal Dale were headed for the next big job at the EBASCO Services corporate offices in Manhattan where they would be able to rent an apartment large enough for their beds and their bikes.
It’s hard to convey in any sort of proper and adequate fashion to anyone now, but the power industry was really booming in this the early nineteen seventies. The resources actually did not exist to fill the resource plans of the electric utilities out there and nuclear power was a sure thing that was here to stay. The load growth forecasts for practically all utility entity decision makers were indicating growth patterns of ten percent per annum onward to infinity; analogues to the internet and telecom growth forecasts which would mislead almost everyone at the end of the twentieth century. We all felt by now that barring any major professional gaff we would all have careers past retirement age – which was the exact opposite of what was happening in the aerospace industry.
It’s no secret that guns of all types are a part of life in this part of the world. The new construction manager Bill Gould asked me along for some lunch time trap shooting with the rest of the guys. The fellows would go grab a quick bite to go and go to one of the many secluded areas along the South Platte for shooting at clay targets lofted into the air by a launching device as though they were small frisbees. We were allowed twenty launches where each of us would try to “powder” the clay pigeon and were scored accordingly. I became a good sixteen shooter, never being able to match the more accurate marksmen such as my good friend Bill. This was completely new to me since my family never had any guns at home and that night I was over to Crossroads Center in Boulder to buy some more boxes of twelve gauge trap load [as opposed to field load] shotgun shells. Many of the shotgunners did their own reloads at home and were eager to pick up all of my empty shells, and I would give them a hand. Bill Gould did reloads which were peculiar to him – having more recoil kick than the biggest field load ammo and I remember getting black and blue marks on my left shoulder as a result of the recoil snap from squeezing off “Gould Rounds.”
Carol Gould and the kids went down from their little house in Longmont to visit my ex-wife Judy at the University of Colorado lunchroom and those two women became fast friends. Everybody was really happy to have Carol and the little ones there and they all seemed to fit right in the university atmosphere. Bill and I were real happy about this since we were now working a lot together on a number of action items and the prospects of some social life away from the plant with our respective families proved to be of good value. Systems engineer Dave Miklush and wife-to-be Cathy were close friends also. We would sometimes all go on picnics up to Estes Park or have dinner and one or another’s house and I’m happy to say that these have been friendships that has lasted for the last thirty years which originally came about because of that original encounter with an electrical generating station out there on the Colorado plains. Like service people at a remote military base we tended to stay together for social activities which were many and often.
The whole bunch of us took up horseback riding and we would go out on Sunday mornings in the greenbelt around Boulder and wind up somewhere eating somewhere nice for Sunday brunch. Dave’s wife Cathy and some of the others were by far the better riders since they had a lot of previous experience and Dave Miklush and I were just along for the ride. The rolling hills of the greenbelt with the backdrop of the Flatiron Range were like something out of a 70 millimeter cinemascope movie and the colors of just about all of the seasons including winter were astounding. This was the life, I was thinking, and the idea of permanent assignment to the Fort St. Vrain area was playing on my mind more and more. The point here is, though, that lifetime relationships among these individuals and myself were established and we would communicate on many matters over the future years of our lives.
Like the Colorado weather though, things were about to dramatically change. In the morning meeting it was reported by the shift supervisors that we couldn’t get actuation pressure on the bellows seal on b circulator. This meant that the bellows was not extending and the seal between the circulator machine and the interior of the vessel could not be made. It was a maddening fact that we had to get the “b” machine down in a hurry to in order to see what was happening. The important part about this juncture in the story of Fort St. Vrain is that this was no accident or error in judgment; this was a bona fide engineering design problem which never should have been there to begin with. This unpleasant fact did not hit us right away but the gravity of the situation hit me as much as anyone else since [by now] I was able to understand every technical word and expression in any of the meetings we had.
One needs to at least partially understand the tremendously complicated nature of the helium circulators. The helium circulator is designed to provide for the flow of helium from the reactor core to one of the two primary circuits or loops, as they are called, thus transferring the heat from the reactor fuel elements to the shell side of the steam generators. The four circulators at Fort St. Vrain are steam driven from 100 per cent of the cold reheat steam modulated by the four circulator speed control valves with water drive backup from Pelton wheels which are located on the same shaft. The ends of each circulator shaft are marked by a buffer area called a labyrinth seal, which is a complex toung-and-groove slotting in the material just like you would see on any steam turbine. The shaft ends have a set of blades that are halfway between being a fan and a compressor – hence the name “circulator” which is a technically a more precise description since the delta pressure [difference in pressure in vs. pressure out] was relatively low.
Engineers and physicists feared the possibility of an accidental incursion of lubricants into the reactor vessel so the circulators were designed to ride on a water bearing rather than the usual oil-based product that one sees in high-speed rotating machinery. Water is also a smaller molecule than most oil-based lubricants so there’s a bit of a mechanical advantage there, too. Bottom line, though, engineers and physicists were worried of a repeat of what happened at the EBOR site when the lubricants for the circulation system accidentally filled up the primary loop and got into the core. All of this is why there is a complicated system of drains and separators for steam, water, and helium. When the proper balance of variables was achieved, the circulator would “float” on the water bearing in a condition that came to be called “self-turbining” – the buffer helium system carrying away the water which would try to mix with the gas flow at one end of the shaft and the steam water separators carrying away the residuals at the other end.
There was design and licensing pressure at the time to have the circs located within the primary pressure boundary along with the steam generators and other auxiliary plant equipment so that’s how the four machines wound up being located within the prestressed concrete reactor vessel. Many people [even the Price Waterhouse accounting partners] wondered why such mechanically delicate machines were sealed far and away inside the concrete vessel. This thinking comes from the original idea of avoiding the cost of a containment building by stating that the primary boundary for the nuclear fuel was the fuel kernel itself, the secondary was the each graphite fuel element, and the third was the pressure boundary within the PCRV liner. That idea gained acceptance back in 1965 when partial funding was obtained from the then AEC to build and license Fort St. Vrain without a containment building around the nuclear stuff (?) but, as was seen later, all future orders unambiguously included a vessel for containment in the proposal. The Fulton Nuclear Generating Station for Philadelphia Electric, the Vidal Nuclear Generating Station for Southern California Edison, and the single 770 MWe plant for Delmarva all had modern reactor plant containment buildings just like the PWR’s.
Anyway, back to the circulators. The brake and seal system consisted of 1) a helium actuated plunger type brake and, 2) a bellows seal which would seal the circulator from the rest of the reactor vessel and 3) all associated nuclear-class pipe, valves and fittings. The piping & instrumentation diagrams of the helium circulators located on the site stick files were very complicated and only the one engineer Irv Mayer, who had been with the machines since the test tower days, really knew where everything really was.
When one of the new engineers pulled the P&I diagram for the helium circs, literal amazement and instantaneous humility could be seen in the face of the uninitiated individual. It was as if never had anyone anywhere seen such a complex diagram of lines, drains, check valves, throttle valves, strainers, separators, seals, bypass and isolation systems, gauges and other measurement devices, and a mountain of miscellaneous hardware for every imaginable mechanical engineering purpose. Never in anyone’s experience had anything like this been seen before; not in engineering school, not in experimental reactors, not in nuclear submarines, not in a complicated process factory [i.e., a dogfood plant], and not in any other commercial nuclear power station on the face of the planet.
After a couple days of cutting and hacking, we brought down b circ on the Rucker Unit. The Rucker Unit was a high-powered hydraulic ram device which could be positioned in any quadrant of the basement for the installation and/or removal of major plant equipment. My friend from the little town of Frederick, Dennis the operator, would stand inside the Rucker Unit and operate the beast on direction from others, much as one would do with a crane. The first ten times that I visited the “bottom head” of the reactor vessel I thought that the hydraulic device was a fixed piece of plant equipment: much like one of the boiler feed pumps. I was surprised to find out that the thing was articulated and actually moved in many directions and was the focus of activity as the primary tool for working on large pieces of equipment in the bottom head area.
When we had problems with the Rucker Unit and the plant hydraulic power system we went to an engineer named Will Childs. Will is one of those engineers who, although small in stature and soft spoken in tone, everyone in the room listens to. It was really amazing when Will would sit down in the engineering bull-pen and just begin to talk. All working papers would be briskly put aside, all telephones would be quickly hung up, all conversations would cease, and all technical heads would turn to listen to this one knowledgeable man talking. This engineer never once made claim to being any sort of expert, never made mention that he knew probably than the whole collective of FSV experience on the subject, never got into an argument; he just talked an all would listen.
Anyway, b circ was down and folks back at GA’s Sorrento Valley facility wanted to inspect and evaluate the bellows on the helium wheel end. It turned out that the metal bellows had become de-formed and axial cracking had resulted in a materials failure in the form of a slit opening along one of the volutes where all of the helium was leaking through. The Sorrento Valley people would disassemble the circulator [which looked to be about the size and form of a jet engine] and form a further evaluation on the bellows seal and other mechanical components as well. Meanwhile, back at the Fort, copious quantities of water were pouring out of the penetration which once was the home of b circulator at a rate of over 20 gallons per minute.
A number of us went down to the basement, crawled up the catwalk ladder, and made the transition over, around and through the cold reheat steam pipes to the circulator maintenance deck; the scene made all the more ethereal by the view down almost four stories through the rather transparent power plant grating. I remember thinking that I used to be afraid of heights but there wasn’t time for that now. Bill Gould and I hung from two of the reheat lines while trying to look up for the source of the cascading water, obviously coming from the reactor internals. Tommy Stellar acrobatically hung him self out by one arm and got a 500 milliliter flask under the stream of water for chemical analysis. He later said that this can’t be correct since all of the metal in the liner and penetrations was indeed mild steel which would undoubtedly suffer the effects of corrosion which could have untold consequences.
Plant manager Fritz Swart’s office at PSCCo was a swarm of engineers and one financial person. One conclusion voiced early was that the water must be from the PCRV cooling system since there was no presence of the chemical hydrazine in the collected samples and that was a normal additive to the helium circulator bearing water makup. Hydrazine always acts as an oxygen scavenger in closed systems. Knowing a little something about chemistry, Fritz yelled that all of the [*#*] hydrazine would be GONE after the first few seconds of exposure to ambient atmosphere so the bearing water was still probably the cause and culprit. He was right. The seals which were intended to stop this from happening weren’t working properly and bearing water was going into the reactor internals. How many times had this happened when no one knew because the liner was sealed? – no one yet knows today.
But what was even worse was in photographs the Valley made of the Curvic coupling where the Pelton wheels were mated to the main shaft. “Insipient cracking” was present indicating a materials situation with the existing Pelton wheels. All of these problems were of a basic engineering nature calling into examination all of the previous research and testing. The highlighted photograph of the Curvic coupling at a depressed angle showed the cracks as gleaming fissures indicating materials failure in a primary article of safety equipment. The reactor could not be cooled in the case of loss of reheat steam combined with the loss of the Pelton wheels.
What’s more; the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission was on board and looking at these same photos. Making things even more noticeable than they already were, GA San Diego presented a paper called “Insipient Cracking in Pelton Wheel Curvic Couplings” to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Now everyone in the known Western world knew that we had “insipient management problems” at GA. The doctors are sitting around a large table talking about the rather remarkable condition of their common patient who is suffering a number of ills – all that the can remark on is “how very interesting this all is” as they prepare their papers for the next AMA conference. Meanwhile, the patient is dying.
Since those days I’ve often compared and contrasted other organizations’ response to specific technical problem. At both utility organizations and in the aircraft industry I’ve noticed and inherent longing to talk about and solve technical problems. Not so in other industries like the automotive industry – seems like one or two of the American auto manufacturing people can’t get enough shoe leather between themselves and the latest outrageous and costly problem created by one or more of their stable of denizens. The guys taking a close look at the Pelton wheel Curvic couplings were only trying to be better engineers and scientists and to help our understanding of the situation. The nuclear industry certainly doesn’t need some kind of a representative from one of the courageous domestic automobile producers telling them to not look at things because of the potential product liability.
The leaky seals, cracked Curvic couplings and other circulator woes caused the unanimous decision to be made to extract the rest of the circulators and change out the troublesome items with other re-manufactured components hopefully better suited to the task of running in the plant for a number of years. For the first 1974 circulator change-out; Bill Gould, construction manager for GA and his immediate staff would be in charge. This would be a big order for twenty-eight year young Bill but he had some excellent assistance. Brian Tarrent was an immigrant from England who was a master machinist and welder in his quite vast previous experience. Brian once offered to fabricate a bicycle frame for me from the various exotic materials that he had at his home – an idea that I never took him up on and probably should have. Also on the team was Dick Evilsizor who was of similar experience quality. Dick was one of the company divers who pulled the pilot of the Convair XF2Y-1 Sea Dart out of the cockpit after the airplane exploded and crashed into San Diego bay back in 1954. No construction team can be complete without a scheduler so Mike Manion was sent up from San Diego; actually flying up to the site in his Piper Tri-Pacer. Mike was to scheduling what a fellow named Disney was to cartooning.
It was with a strong team in place that the first a, b, c, and d circulator change out began and was carried through. Detailed shift by shift scheduling and coordination with specific craft labor elements such as pipefitters, millwrights, insulators, as well as carpenters, electricians, and laborers acted to prevent the usual interferences and jurisdiction problems and kept the critical path in a controllable position. By the second week in, it was clear to everyone at Fort St. Vrain and to the management at the GA offices in San Diego that the circulator change out effort was going so well that indeed other off-site tasks may well become the critical items. Bill Gould and all the aforementioned others on the new construction team were more in contact with the day to day efforts and problems that the craft were themselves experiencing and were thusly able to direct and control the work with focus placed on the proper areas.
I have found over the years that there usually is a palatable resistance on the part of construction management to be involved with the direct supervision of labor forces. Management wishes to be separated by many degrees from the workers by office doors, complicated organization charts, and even physical distance; if possible. The way to success is often through the sometimes clumsy and complicated art of communication. For those who are looking for pointers on how to handle a segment of a construction/mechanical repair job on a large scale – dig up the records and find out exactly what these aforementioned intelligent personnel did to achieve a three week turnaround on what could easily be estimated to be a three to six month job.
It was at around this time in 1974 that my own schedule became a lot more hectic. I was flying to the San Diego offices every couple of weeks for meetings there, having my travel orders cut right there at the site. Our management control of employee expenses charged to the Fort St. Vrain project was accomplished partially through the use of travel orders which were numerically sequenced documents used to authorize any trips an individual might take from any organization. The travel orders actually had an accounting identity of their own and would not be put into effect for cost accumulation unless all signatures were present; much like a work order or sales order. This was how we and the San Diego project office ultimately kept every Tom, Dick and Harry from showing up at the Fort and charging the whole thing to us, which was exactly what was happening up until then. What gave us more impetus and leverage now was the fact that nuclear fuel was loaded and security provisions were now in place as they would be for any nuclear installation. In or around the middle of 1974, I dashed off some scary prose on the subject of cost control at the site and typed up a Telex version of the same; sending it to as many people as I could. Part of the cost control picture was this business of travel authorization.
Thanks to the lobbying efforts by some of the financial people in San Diego and, frankly, from some of my trips down there to make the point; we had a new 1974 budget which now was based on the most recent realities of problems encountered with the phased start up of the reactor. It wasn’t just the circulators, but the plant control rod drive mechanisms, the plant hydraulic power system, the seam generators [which would not dry out], and a host of other technical issues confronting us. This new budget would take us out to the fall months of the year. When you add time to a schedule it’s just like adding length to a sailboat: you always add it right at the middle and not at the ends, so each month added yielded a much larger number for costs for the year. Gulf Oil wanted to keep things under control by budgeting for one given year in what they called an operating plan which ran from December to December. The new budget was for right about thirty-two mil for FY 74 and an even higher projected amount for FY 75.
For probably the first time, I began to rack up the exactly what the total cost indicated at completion would probably be for the whole job. This included all cost incurred from previous years, current costs charged to program area 197, and my own projection of what future costs would be. I used some of the old seventy-two column worksheets that I found down at the San Diego accounting offices and began to post, plot and square balance the totals. I was astounded to find that the total projected costs at forecasted completion were now well past the point of one point six billion dollars, making our project the most expensive [costs per installed Kw} reactor in world history up to that point. For the past few months I had been making an accrual for a cost element called “backup power” about which I knew nothing. The backup power invoices were shipped directly to San Diego and judicially paid by Accounts Payable on a signature.
Beverly Butler down in San Diego would give me the numbers that were coming in for backup power for the project and I would accrue in an estimate for next month’s actual cost; to be reversed out later and the invoiced amount put in its place. On one of my San Diego trips I saw one of the invoices for the backup power from Public Service and it didn’t make any sense to me; which should have been a big red flag right away. Second of all, the invoices were getting bigger as time went on and were now approaching one million dollars a month which were actual dollars we were paying the Public Service Company of Colorado apparently for the privilege of working on one of their plants. Law department person Dick Yale was able to give me some background. The backup power agreement between GA and PSCCo was arrived at through both negotiation and contractual interpretation.
Yale was talking about a contract which he referred to as the “two party” and I immediately pulled out my copy of the main body of the contract between the then AEC, PSSCo, and GA. Dick said “No, that’s the wrong one to look at.” There were actually two major contracts involving the parties: the first he called the three party agreement which spelled out the requirements and party obligations between the then Atomic Energy Commission, the supplier [GA}, and the utility [PSCCo]. For the three party, an agreement was made as to a total cost cap of approximately so many million dollars which would be split three ways, the commission funding approximately one third, the utility a fixed one third plus some change orders, and [ostensibly] all of the remainder to be the responsibility of the then General Dynamics Corporation.
It was through this contract that what is called the “two party agreement” between GA and PSCCo was first derived. According to the two party agreement, GA was responsible for consequential damages to the PSCCo utility and would indeed be in breech if performance targets were not met by the new reactor supplier. That phrase “consequential damages” is rarely seen in contractual language; while it is usually common to see a clause for “liquidated damages” when performance targets are not met by a contractor for the delivery of an item.
We all know what “late charges” are from our basic dealings with banks and credit institutions – these late charges for performance levied by such institutions are in the category of liquidated damages. Consequential damages are entirely different. The vendor is responsible, in that case, not for some pre-agreed to “liquidated amount” but to whatever damage may be held to be of consequence to the late delivery of the item – such as loss of revenue from normal business. For a football stadium contract with a consequential damages clause, the stadium contractor would be potentially liable to the contracting parties for loss of projected revenue lost from football games not played in a six-month late job that actually went through the fall season. It’s unknown who or how this clause ever got in to the contract in the first place but many of us suspect that it was something negotiated in by PSCCo vice president Dick Walker and president Bob Persons during the contract definition phase in the mid sixties.
To solve the potential contractual breech problem caused directly by the consequential damages clause outlined above, the GA law personnel and PSCCo council came up with a formula for paying the utility for electricity not generated by the Fort St. Vrain reactor. This was in a number of parts. One part provided for the construction of two fifty megawatt gas turbines at Fort Lupton [near Platteville] and the monthly operation and maintenance costs for said gas turbines as they may be incurred by the utility. Part two was basically the gas turbine output in megawatt hours subtracted from the intended output of Fort St. Vrain and then that number multiplied by a normalized system-wide operation and maintenance per megawatt hour figure in order to calculate production cost differential. This was a little tricky since you had to back out one of the most efficient units that PSCCo was running that month plus add in a dummy amount for outside power purchases from other utilities [which have always been unregulated]; the excess being effectively billed to GA.
When you finished all of the calcs, you came up with a number that was roughly between half a million to one and a half million dollars for any given month, dependent on the operation figures for the gas turbines and the system costs for generating and buying power at Public Service Company of Colorado.
I took a lot of notes and then laid the math operations out on a chart and – subsequent to translating the math into English -- went through the calcs with management. In using the little examples I made up and one of those new HP calculators, you could easily do model cases and see how the total numbers could fluctuate up and down with minor inputs. What was immediately apparent was that the 1974 cost of distillate fuel for providing the Fort Lupton generation was beginning to go right up through the roof of the building, thus making the backup power agreement a major budget line item – many times exceeding site labor cost.
The result of all of this was that everyone, including the Gulf people from Pittsburg started to believe that I was the only person in the western world that understood the monthly billing to GA and was therefore the only person who could verify the invoice. Thanks to Jim Reader of PSCCo and a lot of other helpful personnel, I made visits to Comanche, Cherokee, Arapaho, and Valmont generating stations to see for myself where some of the numbers were coming from.
The Gulf auditors from Price Waterhouse came out to go over some of these figures and the other financial obligations prior to the partnership agreement with Royal Dutch Shell. These figures, I explained, were originally caused by people who are by now long gone at GA. They, as the senior Price Waterhouse partner explained, had never imagined that GA was indeed in the power business right along with a major utility and the consequential damages being incurred and charged would only increase as time went by.
While giving them a plant tour construction manager Bill Gould and I carefully explained to them that not only was GA in the power business, we were paying for generation sold by Public Service of Colorado and other western utilities and never receiving a penny of revenue. All of these costs were incurred by Gulf and the new to-be partner Royal Dutch Shell as a part of deferred research & development charges for making the HTGR a reality—no one apparently knew the extent that we were into the quicksand and sinking further with Public Service. The Price-Waterhouse General Partner that visited actually sat back in a meeting and said that “this situation is a whole lot worse than the Queen Mary [a re-construction and restoration project being completed by the city of Long Beach] which is not the usual deportment for the average accounting firm partner.
Some of our unusual behaviors on site were compared and/or contrasted with the bizarre activities of some of our predecessors of years before and it was beginning to make us start to question nearly everything. The site legendary recount of many of the actions of GA management was nearly as comical as it was bad fortune for us in the here and now. We learned for instance, what transpired prior to the decision being made to sell GA as a unit of General Dynamics. As I mentioned before, I worked for General Dynamics and I know that one of the things that they keep a strangle hold on are capital expenditures. Apparently, the old GA had managed to let enough contracts underneath the GD radar to achieve at least partial construction of Fort St. Vrain. The relationship was rather good at the time – being that GA was never one of the big corporation’s problem areas. The time had come, though, to purchase the steam turbine machine which can only be bought as a single unit on one large purchase order from General Electric.
General Electric is smart enough to know about levels of capital expenditure authorization since they’ve been dealing with power companies and governments for over one hundred years. Basically it’s “if you don’t have one of your organization’s purchase orders in hand – we don’t start work on your steam turbine” and that is as simple as that. The GA people tried to make GE a sort of “partner” in the new technology but the Large Steam Turbine Division in Schenectady did not see things entirely in this way and told him to get a purchase order from Number One Rockefeller Plaza in New York or build your plant with someone else’s turbine-generator.
Failing to secure a partnership with GE, our management was then forced to go to the president of General Dynamics, Roger Lewis, to get a company purchase order signed --or the General Electric Company in Schenectady simply would not begin work. According to many, the then current management at GA was trying to explain to Roger Lewis why they were trying to buy a commercial sized steam turbine for an experimental plant to no avail. General Atomic Division was for sale within twenty a few hours of that fateful meeting back at Number One, Rockefeller Plaza.
Lewis’s reluctance can be easily understood since he was for the first time confronted with the reality that these guys out at that fabulous country club on the west coast really were building a full scale power station in a very real world. General Dynamics had written off over a billion dollars on another San Diego organization just a few years before [see FORTUNE – General Dynamics-- How a Great Corporation Got Out of Control – circa 1962]. Back then, it’s then burgeoning Convair Division was engaged in a large commercial jet transport program [the Convair 880/990] which represented what some called an out-of-control entry into an unknown commercial market by one of their divisions. An astute CEO, Mr. Lewis was not about to enter into the electric utility business with a full-scale plant that was supposed to be a prototype [or, was that the other way around?].
By the forces of sheer coincidence and what some would call good fortune, it turns out that back in 1967 the Gulf Oil Corporation was looking for some way to get better return on its cash investment which would yield good profit in latter years. It wasn’t the HTGR itself that Gulf was really interested in at all but an inroad into electric utility operations with a unique fuel cycle. The GA entity could loose money on ten or twenty plants, but the long run was paved with gold since the fuel cycle was unique when one considers pressurized water reactors and boiling water reactors didn’t use this type of fuel and were not nearly as thermally efficient as the HTGR proposed plants in the seven hundred and eleven hundred megawatt range.
Dennis Betcher, Jim Reeg, [in San Diego] and I knew of these objectives and philosophy because we were among the ones who ran the HTGR Business Model where all of these things were intended to come together along with a projection of sales. The original business model had what was called a “ten plant economy” which showed gross profits subsequent to ten HTGR units being in service. But we had to get Fort St. Vrain running or nobody was going to buy anything.
It was summer now and my ex decided to close the University of Colorado biology department lunchroom for a couple of weeks and take a break. She managed to save enough for a vacation back to see her folks in Fairmont, West Virginia which was a real bright reward for her many efforts. Jim Read, the West Virginian from Stearns Roger and Judy had become fast friends and he gave her a pen that had “Almost Heaven- West Virginia” inscribed on the side and she took that along for good luck. She was off on an airplane from Stapleton airport from the same spot were I usually left for business trips to San Diego.
The test engineers that I had made friends with took me under their wing so I would have a place to eat dinner without going out to a restaurant to eat. I wound up working backshift with some of them and actually working on some of the things I was writing about. I watched gauges, monitored level control devices, and generally did whatever I was told as a good apprentice engineer should. Before long, I was hanging tags for clearances and walking down systems for test preparation. I started talking in power station jargon and wearing a flashlight in a holster on my hip. I had a “shift weenie” pad in my upper left shirt pocket where I would make notes of the days’ things to be done and would knock open doors with my size 13 steel-towed safety shoes.
Where I was afraid to get on the plant elevators before, I was now so bold as to scream and yell back at some of the always heckling craft labor personnel in their red hats—telling them to “Get the out of the way . . . !” For this, I gained some acceptance in the form of after hours drink and conversation at the Oasis. George T. Colgan, technical head of the GA shift supervisors and another ex-nuclear submarine fraternity man was kind enough to refer to me as a “good hand” which was one of the highest complements that he could have given me my efforts out in the plant. The probable thinking behind George’s statement was that I had on many occasions drafted memos for the shift supervisors signature and some procedures as well and had been generally helpful in moving some of the personnel interviewing and hiring process out to the Fort. Our reasoning for the latter action was to make the actual workplace a part of the interview for new engineering people. This place, after all, is more like an offshore oil rig than any business or engineering office that folks are used to working in.
We were working on what was called System 91 – a hydraulic power and control system for the plant valves when I started to make my bones. This was a 3,600 pound per square inch system which contained a total of about 900 gallons of Gulf Harmony 53 hydraulic oil. The system was a cantankerous nightmare that had the habit of extruding gaskets and “o” rings and then subsequently soaking everything down within two hundred feed with a high pressure hydraulic oil mist. We were performing pressure tests on part of the four inch lines, valves, gaskets, o-rings and so forth in one of the plant’s interior locations, lost in a maize of piping, valves and fittings. The pumps [called HydroLasers] were coming up to design pressure so we hot-wired one of the big hydraulic control valves to test for freedom of full-stroke operation to find out if we had a system. Most of us have never seen a large plant hydraulic valve and a power operator – the valve itself is huge and the operator is just about as big as my red Volkswagen and just about three times as heavy. I was sitting in amongst the hydraulic lines as we cycled the valve and when it hit the end of its stroke it felt like a larger than moderate earthquake had occurred on the pipes I was sitting on and holding on to. I had grown almost insensitive to the constant noise and mechanical contortions that were always around me so I didn’t react a whole lot, grabbing for my hard hat and slamming it on my head after wiping off my brow while sitting on my perch in the piping.
Subsequent to my shift; the HydroLasers were headed on their way to going up and up in pressure, the needles passing through 4,900 on the gauges nearest to Tommy Steller. Tommy told me a little later that at about five thousand pounds per square inch all of the needles began to oscillate and then the HydroLasers began to join the chorus by jumping up and down. Tommy said that this was all quite a spectacle since by now all of the test gauges were a blur between five and ten thousand pounds and the red–hat craft personnel were starting to move out of the area like they were cats. Some PSCCo quality assurance guy signed off on the test saying “yeah, looks like about 6,750 . . .” which was the intended target test pressure and then pulled the power to the HydroLasers and all was comparatively quiet. All of the gauges were pegged out with their needles on the other side of the peg. Glad I wasn’t there the whole time for that one. I was becoming overconfident, though. Often times I would run into scaffolding with my head while running up the grated steps heading somewhere in a hurry– not seeing [or looking] at what was to come beyond the brim of my white hardhat and slamming my neck and head pretty good. I would walk around for ten to twenty minutes saying to everyone “I’m OK, I’m OK.”
After George Sausmann from the San Onofre station decided to go back to that place on the West Coast, Dave Miklush came to be lead engineer on 91 System operational testing. Like everyone else who had worked on System 91, Sausmann had left at the wrong time. The cantankerous and messy system was still beset with problems – many stemming from the four-bolt flange design on high pressure pipe interfaces. An “O” ring was used to provide a seal against the nominal 3,600 psi pressure which would self-destruct upon encountering an even small amount of mechanical flexing or contortions in the line. In any power station, lines of all types encounter a lot of forces making them bounce around like they were all fabricated from nutty-putty and crazy rubber. Assuming static conditions for the System 91 piping was like assuming the same for a concrete batch plant or a jet fighter aircraft—it ain’t gonna happen.
What was happening now were high pressure leaks from the ubiquitous system in which it would be raining a fine mist of Harmony 53 until inventories of oil were sufficiently down in the reservoir tank. The sight would be unbelievable -- a fine olive-oil like coating on everything from fire hoses to light bulbs, not to mention the walls and grating. All would have to be completely cleaned up using a cat-litter-like material called Sorb-All which we were beginning to get by the freight car load.
The 91 System was intended to provide a central power source for all of the main valves in the plant sans the valves associated with the steam turbine electro-hydraulic control system which [happily] had its own system which was supplied by General Electric. I’m telling the reader this because it is yet another weak link in the reactor control system since helium circulator speed control and main steam bypass were all done through 91. As I write this today in 2004 I still haven’t found a person who can believe that anyone would design a plant in this way.
Throughout the startup testing for the remainder of the plant structures, systems, and components; System 91 was kept running largely through the efforts of the young engineer Dave Miklush who was the GA person supervising the entire show for 91. Like I said before, Dave worked in his father’s gas station while going to school at UCLA and he had a better handle on all things mechanical than anybody with any PhD, I don’t care what school they came from. Under his dad’s tutelage at the service station he had learned that things have to be fixed right now and not referred to some goddam meeting or committee and thus he fit into the power station culture very well [which was quite separate from the GA culture at San Diego].
Yet another point about the 91 System is that it was another San Diego orphan. The people who performed the original spec and design were not available for comment and whenever pressed for engineering support; the San Diego offices would respond that they were busy with new reactor proposals. On-site support through visits were deliberately short and brief in nature – many engineers taking the morning plane out to Stapleton International and taking the evening plane back to their homes in beautiful San Diego [Is that all of the questions you have? . . . It’s really getting late and we’re going to have to be leaving . . . .” they would say all the while making their way to an exit]. It’s quite possibly a bad thing to motivate personnel by great places to live. Once the individual settles in, the motivation is shifted towards staying there and not going any place else.
I have to say that through all of this technical exposure and excitement that I was still was the financial representative and, accordingly, my general efforts had turned to doing an onsite audit of Stearns-Roger. I involved everyone that I could – mostly the test, watch, and nuclear engineers on the GA side who were knowledgeable enough about the different item expenditures that were coming through the monthly by-now two-foot high Stearns billing. We were able to summarily exclude thousands of dollars just by everyone questioning everything they saw and following up. I took care of the audit issue dollar amounts by obtaining credit invoicing from Stearns located in the same package as their monthly billing. In this way, credits for audit results could be obtained on site as opposed to involving someone like Fritz Weigand [a Stearns VP] in these issues. On one big issue, the application of overheads by the corporate billing department, Bill Gould and I were able to get some concessions from Mr. Weigand because of the way we presented the material.
It was Bill Gould’s idea that we had to write out a report of some kind – which was a task we performed [mostly by Bill] over the next month or so. One has to tell people what happened and about what in is you are working on in a simple and meaningful way. People don’t get on the same page with you through some kind of organizational osmosis or by reading a lot of memos and assembling the necessary ideas in their own heads. It sound old school, but a report [even a hand-written one] can become an object of reference and a focus for all concerned. The resulting typewritten report we were able to gin up wound up being the basis for what became known as the Stearns-Roger Management Audit published later by John Wilson and company out of the Gulf Oil Corporation Audits Department.
Another winter had settled in and this one was more focused and yet more subtle than the previous. The bright blue skies gave slowly away to gray and the roaring of the crop dusting aircraft had long since been silenced. Almost like the second child that I’ve heard about from many parents; the second winter seems to be less of a shock on one’s senses. We were getting ready for another gloomy fall and our moods were now as gray as the weather. The plant, it turns out, is literally riddled with both small and large design problems and we were slowly but surely becoming overwhelmed.
New boss MacCormick had come out to see us to cheer us all up and to remind us that we were the cutting edge of the future for the GA organization. This, only after loosing every major plant order for future business – which was the case for almost everyone in the nuclear power market after the Brown’s Ferry incident. Tennessee Valley Authority’s Brown’s Ferry Nuclear Generating Station was the 1974 subject of conversation in reactor circles since one of the power units there came into an out-of-control regime subsequent to a large control and power cable fire which destroyed most of the electrical spaghetti going to the reactor itself. The plant was adrift for hours with only one residual heat removal pump running and everybody’s fingers were crossed in the hopes that the water level in the reactor core would not recede to the point where the fuel elements would be uncovered and subsequently melt in place.
The new subject of conversation was “separation and segregation [of major control and electrical cable] in nuclear power stations”—what would soon become what would be known as eye-triple-e two-seventy-nine [Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers standard number 279]. This meant that all commercially licensed nuclear stations had to demonstrate exactly how the control and electrical lines to key safety components were separated enough in the plant space to preclude a potential disaster in the case of a catastrophic fire. This affected everyone in the industry and some design teams frankly gave up the ghost when confronted with the problem of control and power separation and segregation. Cancellation of nuclear projects in the far future was the order of the day for many utility and design teams and the once all-too-crowded schedule for future construction of plants from one American coast to the other began to dwindle to plants that were well underway.
Brian Ng, an engineer immigrant from the Pacific Rim, was the person who was able to systemize the cable segregation sorting problem at Fort St. Vrain. Brian “computerized” the legwork required for the problem and thus provided a ready solution right there on the spot instead of some of the rest of the engineering staff back down in San Diego who could only provide a continuous stream of technical questions. I’ve seen this a lot, now. When confronted with a problem – instead of responding with an answer or an immediate path to solution – the technical person responds with a bunch of questions or statements about how if this and that were true or not true the situation would be entirely different. But [the reader sees] the situation is not different. Things are not different or how we would like them to be – they are as they are and our purpose and goal is to go on from there. Asking a lot of questions is a way of moving your mouth and not your feet when it comes to getting things done.
Brian Ng did the dog-work that a lot of engineering actually is. Like accounting and manufacturing, engineering is sometimes slugging out the results line item after line item for a seemingly endless pile of data which was never organized by anyone. You thought when you were in college that you would be making sweeping and esoteric decisions regarding major points of design – this, however, rarely happens in one’s career. Most of the time, individual effort involves the pick-and-shovel work that nobody really wants to do but has to eventually be done. The important second thing that Brian did was to be accountable and take responsibility for his actions – which in itself was and anomaly in an organization that had become all too used to saying “That’s not a GA responsibility.” This particular notion coupled with some of the more poisonous strategies of our employees from outside vendors like the one who told us that we had to literally learn to lie on paper if GA was to be an active competitor in the reactor business.
The observant reader may by now have discerned that many decisions, operations, endeavors, thinking, and management in general was being done by a bunch of kids. This to is, I am afraid, most correct. The bulk of us were in our twenties or early thirties with the bulk of our adult supervision back in San Diego; far too busy to come out and see what was happening had left us to contend with a plant that was “. . . already designed and built” and merely had to go through a short start up phase. Many of the problems that were being encountered were no different than any crew encounters on any startup and this was the chicken soup being ladled out to electric utilities on a daily basis by the whole staff of senior management heavyweights at the GA La Jolla campus from J. W. Landis on down.
I encountered the ire of the majority of these heavyweights when I took it upon myself to push for paid overtime for site individuals. Through a little bit of work, I placed the facts and figures on hours needed to perform the forecasted startup effort by task which added up to over forty percent more than the people we had. No significant input would be received from San Diego since they were already 1) in a hiring freeze and, 2) were now working on something called the Standard 1500 megawatt unit.
This meant overtime for everybody, the only thing missing being the pay. The question was how and when we were going to be paid. Hank Anthony made his feelings known when he stated over the squawker that “all of you are on nothing but a big fat ski vacation, anyway [Ha, Ha]” -- which was about all I needed since personally intervening to thwart efforts by site personnel to fly down to San Diego and demolish Accounts Payable along with a few other GA buildings and bulldoze the debris down into Sorrento Valley. We wanted compensation for time worked –not really any for myself but for most everyone out there who were giving up a significant portion of their lives for the startup effort. After many analyses, a number of presentations, much cajoling, and even some threats of informing the press; we got the compensation for overtime hours worked – which I have to say is one of my grandest and heartfelt accomplishments even after all of these years.
It seems like whenever one is sufficiently up on what is going on and has created or copied financial systems which are up and running rather smoothly, some unforeseen element of change comes into the picture. This for me was an offer from the utility Southern California Edison out in Los Angeles to come work for them in their organization. The work that I had accomplished had made an impact elsewhere in the power industry and I had succeeded in making a reputation that I did not even know about. Financial Manager Al Eberhardt and Audits Manager John Wilson came out to Colorado to [among a lot of other things] ask me to stay with the Gulf organization; but to no avail. In the space of one month, my wife and I were traveling across the desert – heading to a city in which we had said on many occasions that we would never live: Los Angeles.
The plant was still in SUT or start up testing phases, and it would remain so for a number of years in the future. Royal Dutch Shell would back out of their partnership with Gulf Oil and the surviving partner would pay untold sums in additional reimbursement to the Colorado utility to free themselves of the obligations incurred by unwittingly getting themselves into the power business. One of the original Seven Sisters, Gulf itself would be acquired by Standard Oil of California and all of the people that I come to know in Pittsburgh and Houston would be disbursed throughout the nation.
Most of the GA people from Fort St. Vrain would be go on to be contributors at one of the many reactor construction and operation sites that exist throughout the world. Those PSCCo guys that I talked so well of before deserved all of my admiration since it was they, not us, who ran Fort St. Vrain at one-hundred percent -- full commercial power. The site itself would ultimately undergo dramatic change by having the entire nuclear portion of the plant demolished and removed-- becoming a gas-fired power station. The large concrete PCRV would be cut up into manageable cheese cake slices using what is called “diamond wire” technology. Public Service Company of Colorado would join with Southwest Public Service and become New Centuries Energies and then merge into a Minnisota organization called Xcel Energy and thus would also be no more.
For the Southern California Edison Company I would be a boiler mechanic, a contract administrator, a multi-media producer and an auditor. Fort St. Vrain would be one of the smaller of plants that I would ever see from then on; Huntington Beach, Mohave, Hoover, Ormond Beach, San Onofre and Alamitos power stations all being in the one to two thousand megawatt range. Quite a number of us were spread across the US in different power jobs here and there, the personnel department at GA always complaining [although never in writing] that we were not supposed to quit and then subsequently move over to an electric utility or to any organization which may be a potential customer. I would spend the remainder of my career working for the Los Angeles based power company. As the generation capability drifted away from the major electric utilities, I was able to retire with a whole lot of others from the power business for good. There are only a handful of individuals located at GA now who were stationed at Fort St. Vrain.
As I said up at the beginning, you’ll get differing stories from different sources about that onetime nuclear plant up in Colorado and this isn’t really a story anyway since it has no ending. My tale is how a very young man in his twenties grew up a little bit. Some of our youth inspired decisions really did wind up counting and perhaps provided others with more focus and clarity along the way. It’s possible that even this short piece will one day become a semi-official chapter in a story anthology which may someday be assembled. Nobody knows the real whole story. In a way, you probably all see that it is perhaps the lucky ones among us who are always growing, always searching, trying to reach out. In my opinion, most of the current and former General Atomics people are in a perpetual state of journeying to their dreams and goals as we all were once during our travels to a place called Fort St. Vrain.
---Ronald H. Jagodinski
April, 2008
