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I figured I would start a thread about this topic since a lot of people have asked me about it. There will only be discussion of non-technical aspects of the job in this thread. Generalities, trivia, and UNCLASS discussion only. If it isn't on wikipedia, it probably won't be in this thread either. First of all, I'm an enlisted instructor at Nuclear Power Unit Charleston in sunny Goose Creek, South Carolina. I went through Nuclear Field Electrician A-School then Nuclear Power school in South Carolina. After that, I qualified at New York prototype in Balston Spa. After that, I served 4 years onboard a nuclear powered aircraft carrier out of Norfolk, Virginia. After that tour was complete, I applied for and was accepted to instructor duty teaching at prototype. We have nuclear reactors in the Navy? Yes. The first nuclear powered ship was the USS Nautilus in 1954. Her first underway message "Underway on nuclear power" is famous throughout the nuclear community. The first nuclear powered surface ship was the USS Long Beach in 1959. This was the first and only ship in its class. Nuclear powered cruisers have all been removed from service due to problems stemming from funding to manning. Rumors abound that "cruisers are comin back!" but I wouldn't bet on it anytime soon. The first nuclear powered aircraft carrier was the USS Enterprise commissioned in 1961. We currently have around 80 nuclear powered aircraft carriers and submarines in service. Oh God! Radiation! Atoms!!! We're nearly at 6,000 effective "reactor years" of global service with zero accidents. The average nuclear plant worker in the Navy nuclear propulsion program gets less radiation than the average airdale on the flight deck. Why? We're very safe in what we do. Since I've been alive, no Navy nuke has exceeded their safe yearly limit for zoomies. My career radiation exposure is several orders of magnitude below the amount that would cause the smallest amount of harm. So how do I join this elite fraternity of nerdshoes and WoW guildsmen? Take the ASVAB. Last I heard, the requirements were 80+ with a passing score on the NFQT (google will help you find study guides for this) or 90+ overall with the NFQT waived. If anyone has a more up to date numbers, let me know. After that, you go through boot camp. You'll probably be singled out for being a nuke candidate. This is your first taste of the hatred non-nukes have for us. It'll never go away, just get used to it. During boot camp, you'll get assigned your rate. You'll either be an electrician, electronics tech, or mechanic. You don't really get to choose. It's based entirely off of a-school class balancing for your specific class. Welcome to the Navy. What's this nuke school thing? I hear its just like college!!! Not so much. Here's a video thats shown to boot camp recruits to keep them from dropping out of boot camp: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mh-HXQ5r8a8&feature=related The best way to describe it is drinking from a fire hose while trying to eat an elephant one bite at a time. The material isn't difficult so much as the pace is extremely fast. You're expected to make decent grades or you go on a higher level of mandatory study hours. I personally was required to study 3 extra hours per day every day with a total of 25 hours of extra study a week in addition to class. If you fail too many exams, you get kicked out. A-School and power school are all theory. Prototype training is mainly technical applications and hands on training. Each segment of training is 6 months long. The culmination of your training is a final oral board where you prove your ability at operating your watchstation to a group of instructors that ask you questions for a while. Kicked out? I dont like kicking If you fail out of A-school, you can be reclassified as another rate and go through a different a-school... or you can go to the fleet as an undesignated E-3 and your life will be a living hell. If you fail out of powerschool/prototype, you will go to the fleet as an E-4 with a rate unless they mast you back to E-3 for dereliction of duty to get rid of that accelerated advancement. How's this fleet thing work? It's ok. You stand a lot of watch, do a lot of maintenance/repairs, and have a lot of training. Training never ends. Nuke working hours are typically longer than our topside counterparts. We also tend to have a much worse duty rotation in-port. Our watchbill is exponentially worse than anyone elses. Also, we have to "go underway" earlier than the rest of the ship because we have to prepare things beforehand. We also stay later after deployments are over to shut things down. First on, last off. Hooyah. On the bright side, we don't do that whole "military" thing very much. You'll almost always wear coveralls. Shiny boots are unheard of. Uniform inspections are pointless and rarely done unless you work for a person that hates you. Everyone is an E-4 or above with most people being E-5. There's not much focus on rank at all. Respect comes from knowledge and technical ability. I cannot imagine being a non-nuke. I would probably get yelled at by someone. What about the blingblingbling? Every single person I know that decided to stay within the nuclear field after they got out scored a 60-90k starting salary working much better hours. While in the Navy, we're one of the few fields that actually has reenlistment bonuses. At the time of this writing, only SEALs, nukes, and one specific breed of cryptotech were getting reenlistment bonuses. http://www.public.navy.mil/bupers-npc/reference/messages/Documents/NAVADMINS/NAV2011/NAV11142.txt posted:
KetTarma fucked around with this message at 15:49 on Sep 20, 2011 |
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Mar 24, 2010 03:13
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| # ¿ Apr 19, 2024 23:45 |
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Officers and enlisted definitely fail prototype. If they miss their graduation date, it's pretty much over. Failing the final exam or final oral board too many times is also a goodbye. There is definitely a lot of hatred for nukes out in the fleet. Fast advancement, not having to play in shipwide events, and our drills make the entire ship hot. The Thresher's reactor is still intact  The rest of the ship, however, is quite imploded. Flooding at test depth tends to do that.
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Mar 24, 2010 10:08
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wikipedia posted:09:09: It is believed a brazed pipe-joint ruptures in the engine room. The crew would have attempted to stop the leak; at the same time, the engine room would be filling with a cloud of mist. Under the circumstances, Commander Harvey's likely decision would have been to order full speed, full rise on the fairwater planes, and blowing main ballast in order to surface. Due to Joule-Thomson effect, the pressurized air rapidly expanding in the pipes cools down, condensing moisture and depositing it on strainers installed in the system to protect the moving parts of the valves; in only a few seconds the moisture freezes, clogging the strainers and blocking the air flow, halting the effort to blow ballast. Water leaking from the broken pipe most likely causes short circuits leading to an automatic shutdown of the ship's reactor, causing a loss of propulsion. The Scorpion is believed to have blown up from a torpedo self-starting itself due to a short circuit. I have a book sitting on my desk talking about how it was actually blown up by the Soviets 
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Mar 26, 2010 16:07
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Torvec posted:Im pretty sure you can find NFQT study guides at major bookstores. It's not classified. It's basically what you think it is. You can volunteer for submarines. You will either be stationed on a carrier or sub. I was a sub volunteer. I was stationed on a carrier. Once you are designated as going to a sub or carrier, you are forever a submariner or surface dude. The only way to change from one to the other is to be medically DQed from submarine duty. Don't ask if there's any way around that. There isn't. No, you can't get it in your contract. You just have to hope that submarines are undermanned the week you graduate.
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Mar 27, 2010 13:14
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I really doubt that story. We shred student exams not too long after they graduate to prevent compromise of the exam question banks.
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Mar 27, 2010 17:52
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I teach at prototype. You have to be confident on watch, be willing to stand the watch and make mistakes (they'll be corrected before you turn the switch), be able to walk up to everyone and ask for a checkout and get turned down 9/10 times but still do it every day. Don't go DINQ or life will loving suck and no one will care. Don't be an annoying shithead. Don't cry, especially on watch. Do not just memorize things with no understanding. We look entirely for understanding. making GBS threads out words will not help you at all. "Can I have a checkout on fission" "How does fission work?" "blah blah neutrons" "So why does this constant change during power changes?" "blah blah" "How does that change how we operate the reactor?" "something about rods thats not really correct" "So why do we have rods made out of this material?" blank stare "Ok, well tell me what the rods are made out of" blank stare "OK, go look it up and  That's how people that just memorize get screwed. Inability to apply to practical situations.
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Apr 3, 2010 06:34
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I want to crush that person.
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Apr 5, 2010 03:51
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Why wouldn't M-Div own the HPACs? The controllers are electrical but everything else has piston things and valves and poo poo. That's definite monkey-business. So far this week I have had two students cry and one have a panic attack. 
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Apr 16, 2010 15:35
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Torvec posted:By the way, my recruiter keeps telling me that if I sign up for any other active duty job/reserves I can get it re-classed to Nuke without any issues. He's not BS'ing me is he? Yes. There is no such thing as a nuke field reservist. If you ship to bootcamp with x job, it is what you will be doing 99% of the time.
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May 4, 2010 02:51
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How would an ex navy electrician with 9 years in and a bachelors in nuke-e do? I have this terrible fear of not getting the civilian job that I want and not being ready to jump back into the nuclear operations field.
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May 4, 2010 23:40
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Manawski, I will give you a huge secret to prototype success. You can keep this secret to yourself or share it with your brothers and sisters. This is how you get ahead of the curve: Go to the boat as often as you can. During shutdowns, there are hours at a time where nothing is going on. Don't be afraid to come down and ask for checkouts. That being said, asking someone knee deep in lube oil who is covered in the blood of the fallen with wrenches in both hands and his mouth if they can give you an end of card will probably result in them telling you to gently caress yourself. Don't be discouraged, it's training for how the real navy works when you go to a real boat. On that note... Go to the boat. The forward end of the boat has a bunch of watchstanders that are often not doing anything. New students are often afraid of going there to ask. Go to the boat. 25% of your checkouts will involve the question "So where's that at?" and will result in you not getting a signature if you haven't gone to the boat and looked around. Staff get infuriated when people don't know where things are at and we know that they always hang out in the TSB and never go to the boat. Go to the boat. I'm not going to say that offcrew is a waste of time and students should just get a 30 minute orientation on how to not eat paint and where the potty is but seriously. Sitting in a classroom for 2 hours waiting for an instructor to get to you on the electronic list thing is stupid. E: Whenever people are signing your book as an EOOW student for a system checkout, ask the question "Is there anything specific you think I should know about this system that most EOOWs dont that causes them to screw up on watch?" when they say "any questions?" Itll save you headaches in the future. KetTarma fucked around with this message at 16:51 on Jun 4, 2010 |
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Jun 4, 2010 16:49
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It translates ok. Ex nukes have proven that they are trainable and at least moderately smart. I'd say most of my friends got out and got some mid level technical job of some sort.
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Jun 10, 2010 13:10
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flux_core posted:I just spoke to a DoD employed engineer who told me, predictably, to be a contractor. Very accurate statement. That being said, "babysitting" and "maintaining" it are actually highly complex events that require massive amounts of training to understand what you're doing. flux_core posted:Ouch. This is also a very accurate statement describing the program flux_core posted:Is there any actual R&D done by the military itself anymore? Haha. No.
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Jun 17, 2010 05:15
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If you say you are thinking of hurting yourself, you are removed permanently from the nuclear field. Also, being a nuke is soul-crushing. So... yes.
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Jun 24, 2010 06:22
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Sandler311 posted:For shore duty, which training facility is normally set by how well you did in the pipeline. Smart kids go to the easy life and dumb kids go to the hard life. If you were in the top 25%, qualified EWS/PPWS on your ship, made 1st class early, have EP evals, and held a major leadership position were the requirement to be considered for teaching at NNPTC when I was thinking about it. Turns out, every nuke in the Navy wants to go teach there as it is our only good shore duty that isn't career ending.
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Jun 24, 2010 15:20
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Your school rankings don't really matter for going back to prototype. Prototype is always undermanned as gently caress because prototype duty is miserable. Prototype duty is actually sometimes used as a punishment. "You can either go to mast or volunteer for prototype duty" is something that is not unheard of. As far as horror stories... honestly, the things that happen in the fleet overshadow anything that babby nukes could dream up. You have your standard compliment of furries, vampires, Neo, and disgusting neckbeards that any college would have. The best I have is when I was a student, we had some guys get busted for having a meth lab in their barracks room.
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Jun 27, 2010 15:50
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Students seem to feel that it gets easier once you get on crew. Maybe they just say that to suck up to me though. Coming back to prototype as a shift eng is an absolutely terrible idea. It's like a DIVO tour all over again.
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Jul 2, 2010 22:39
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... We have students?
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Jul 20, 2010 03:39
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Manawski posted:So how much do you expect us to suck on our first watch? I got RO, so I'm probably hosed As I told a LTJG yesterday: I pretty much just expect you to say "Oh, so that's what this watchstation is for. Golly gee those enlisted sure are smart." at the end. For enlisted, it's a whole other story.
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Aug 1, 2010 23:45
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Howd you manage that? Today was totally awesome. Standing AEA during a sustained loss of air conditioning and having to open MS-1 because my (male) student wasnt strong enough to turn the valve.
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Aug 3, 2010 14:47
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You have no idea how much trouble that guy is going to be in  Take whatever youre imagining, magnify it by an order of magnitude. That'll be closer to the volume of poo poo he's in.
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Aug 4, 2010 15:58
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In the navy, there are qualification books that everyone has. They're really thick. I've never bothered to count. You have to get signatures in these books. Here, I'll make a page for qualifying to be a something awful troll:code:What happened was someone qualified to supervise "the plant" and "operate the reactor" signed for something that needed "supervise the control room." That's called a signature violation. Each signature code has a page that says "Signatures 13521212.12 through 13521212.15 can be signed by anyone qualified as whatever." The person in question either forgot to check or thought he didn't need to check if he could sign it. It's treated somewhere between "oops, dont let it happen again" to "You are gundecking qualcards and have violated the core tenants of the program. Get your dress uniform ready, son" depending on the severity and how often we've had these violates of late. I say the dude is hosed because of "the next loving guy [that does this is getting hosed] clause"
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Aug 5, 2010 03:09
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Ive been an instructor for about a year and a half. I will accept any facebook requests from any students that have graduated. That's as far as I'll take it. I chat with some occassionally.
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Aug 31, 2010 23:05
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Most people on nukeworker.com are older and have a nostalgic view of the navy nuclear field. It's a good source of knowledge but keep in mind that the large majority of navy nukes will not stay in nuclear power. Honestly though, there's probably more active duty nukes in this thread than on that forum. I became an instructor around early 2009 I think. Um. As far as sailor-to-sailor contact: That's strictly forbidden with students. That being said, I'd hug a student if I felt the urge I guess? We're not supposed to have sex with students if that's what you're offering.
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Sep 1, 2010 10:57
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I hug grown up nukes all the time. I'll dare say that I greet most of my coworkers with hugs. We're a very cuddly crew. Hey Mana, heard anything about the hurricane survival mooring? I really dont want to go out and buy my own frozen dinners to bring to work since I'm on the list of people to man the submarine if we have to float it downriver. When I joined, I thought nukes were something like missile techs.
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Sep 1, 2010 18:42
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Tonedeff posted:My recruiter told me something today about Nuke-A and Nuke-B. She says the difference is that A's autoqualify for nuke (according to ASVAB scores) while B's didn't. But for the life of me i can't find any info on this anywhere. I just want to know if this is BS or not because, according to this recruiter, the navy isn't accepting Nuke-B's which sucks for me :/ What belt said. Considering how undermanned nuke always is, I find it hard to believe that they aren't accepting people. Although, there -is- a pretty long graduation hold between schools due to so many people backed up in the pipeline.
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Oct 13, 2010 22:40
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gcroix posted:Started out a nuke, flunked out of prototype. Was bitter about it for about two years, then realized that it was a good thing. I only met two or three nukes that really enjoyed it. Wound up working in cryogenics, liked it. Were you on the Carl Vinson? If so, I think I stood watch with you sometimes.
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Nov 15, 2010 00:15
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Tests are done on green paper. Test answer keys are neon pink. The more you know!
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Dec 18, 2010 22:04
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Carriers: 6-10 months at sea, 6 months not, some months of shipyard, some months of periodic sea, repeat. FYI, shipyard sucks horribly for nukes. Attack Submarines: Above except generally no more than 6 months straight at sea. I think. Boomers: 3 months out, 3 months in, repeat forever.
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Jan 13, 2011 08:32
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Volunteering for submarines is kind of like selecting "Insane" difficulty instead of "Hard" At least you get a point multiplier for helping make top score (submarine pay) See, nerd jokes in a nuke thread. Also, instructors are supposed to encourage people to volunteer for submarine duty to make it easier for the detailers so they can send you to any open spot instead of just surface spots. Also, specifically not supposed to badtalk subs vs surface. Just saying.
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Feb 16, 2011 12:30
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In case you guys have missed me, I've been at work a lot lately. Today is either day 8 or day 14 of my workweek (if you dont count a day of special liberty to go move out of my old apartment) with a short day being 10 hours. Yes, nuclear shore duty.
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Feb 17, 2011 12:32
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I will chime in to say that shore duty at prototype is considerably more difficult than sea duty and you pretty much get volunteered to go to prototype if they don't have good manning when you're up for orders (they never have good manning)
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Mar 5, 2011 12:20
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Nukes arguing about who has it worse itt. Moker, most sub guys I work with are happy when they go back out to the fleet and most will say that day to day life was easier on the sub. Take that for what you will. Also, you are totally full of poo poo if you think RCOH is a more desirable duty when compared to a regular sea-going carrier. gently caress the yards.
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Mar 6, 2011 00:25
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Well, Grover said it way better than I was going to. 100mRem/hour is pretty tame. You wouldnt want to hang out there for longer than you had to but it's nothing scary.
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Mar 13, 2011 15:00
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http://nei.org/newsandevents/information-on-the-japanese-earthquake-and-reactors-in-that-region/ Read this.
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Mar 14, 2011 02:52
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The vented primary plant gasses that are radioactive do not create "fallout" as no residue is left behind. Also, it will disperse throughout the entire planet to be completely, completely harmless. Same idea as how people in Japan cant smell your fart.
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Mar 16, 2011 23:14
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I'm going to give you the best piece of advice I can give to an offcrew student: go to the boat as often as possible. Offcrew is a complete waste of time. You'll report to crew and have no clue where any equipment is located, where the meters/gages are, where the valve to turn or button to push is, etc and will fail watches as a result.
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Mar 20, 2011 19:36
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TheShazbot posted:If you haven't added something about needing Top Secret clearance to be even considered to be a nuke to your post (I did not see it) I would recommend doing so. I tried going in to be a nuke around 2009, had the qualifying ASVAB score (91), but due to my poor financial outlook, the whole reason I was going in (I'm a civilian nuke engineering student now), they denied me because I could not pass the "financial" side of things. You do not have to screen for a top secret clearance. Also, the DOE requires clearances for civilian nuke (research "q" clearances) too.
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Apr 1, 2011 15:17
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You have to screen for secret due to submarines. If you don't end up on a sub, you downgrade to confidential/rd/nnpi.
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Apr 2, 2011 01:09
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| # ¿ Apr 19, 2024 23:45 |
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Today was sucky. I worked on the battery today at the start of my watch and got a little diluted acid on me. The potable water system is down due to e. coli contamination. I sat on watch for 8 hours with an awesome itching sensation without being able to wash myself off.
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May 8, 2011 22:24
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