A normal reactor startup is very boring. All that really actually happens is you pull the control rods out, but since it is the nuclear navy doing that rather boring thing comes with a whole bunch of paperwork and oversight and a big brief and not being allowed off the ship the night before lest you show up to work drunk or hungover, which is probably a fine state to operate a nuclear reactor in but is officially discouraged by the powers that be. So an emergency reactor startup, to a nuke, sounds like a lot of fun. It isn’t too much fun, but something that is a little fun in the nuclear world is about as good as you are going to get so people hanker for it. When nukes talk about emergency reactor startups they are usually described as like, doing a reactor startup without any of the safety stuff, but that is not really true. If the lay man were to watch one they would be bored out of their minds, but theoretically it happens a bit faster than a normal startup because you move some mostly paperwork portions to after the startup instead of during, and like, I don’t think you have quite as many independent checks of some switches or something, but overall what I am trying to say here is that despite it being a very safe and controlled procedure every nuke ever wants to do an emergency reactor startup because it sounds fun and cool and when this submarine got to do one, despite the fact they all spent three days on the edge of heat exhaustion right in the middle of waters surrounded by people who don’t necessarily like us all that much, we were all very jealous.

And then do you know what happened?! Another one of the submarines stationed in Guam did an emergency reactor startup! I don’t recall at all why they felt they had to do an emergency reactor shutdown at sea, but they got to do a startup and we were so very very jealous. I mean it is one thing when some submarine you don’t really know gets to do an emergency reactor startup, but it is a totally different thing when like people you know get to do one! No fair! No fair at all! But our time would come. I make the point that we were jealous because from my understanding there was no real reason we needed to do an emergency reactor shutdown, but it had become the hip cool thing to do so when we had even a modicum of an excuse we went for it. Though I’m not entirely sure what had happened. By this point in my time on the submarine I was thoroughly disgusted with nuclear power. After I got out of the Navy I was trying to get my Mate’s license, and this involved taking classes with a bunch of ex-Navy types. They would ask me why I got out of the Navy, and I would just reply that “nukes are a bunch of anal-retentive assholes,” and all these ex-Navy guys would just nod in agreement and there would be no further questions. So that was part of it. The other part was just like, look, being “Engineer Qualified” is a big thing in the Nuclear Navy. It literally means you are qualified to serve as an Engineer Officer, but in a more general sense it means, or is supposed to mean, that you have a deep understanding of the nuclear plant and are as qualified as anyone to decide how the thing should be operated and that you could, if called upon, run the Engineering Department. You can be in charge of a nuclear reactor! Kind of cool. Before I was Engineer Qualified, I respected the judgement of Engineer Qualified people and thought they had some deep knowledge of nuclear reactors that I lacked but would someday gain. To get Engineer Qualified you go to Prospective Nuclear Engineer Officer School and study up on nuclear stuff for like, I think it was three months? Something like that. I thought people learned stuff there but I am here to tell you: no. I mean they do, but it is all what I refer to as “nuclear trivia.” Like, interesting things about the plant, and it is probably useful to spend some time reading Reactor Plant Manuals after you probably haven’t in a year, but there weren’t any deep secrets about the nature of nuclear power revealed or hidden tomes that only those that have paid their nuclear dues were allowed to read. It was just, you know, kinda nuclear trivia. And you memorized a whole bunch of that stuff and they sent you to DC to talk to some engineers that frankly had better stuff to do that day and they called you “Engineer Qualified” and suddenly you could be an Engineer if you wanted? I immediately lost all respect for anyone who was Engineer Qualified as soon as I became Engineer Qualified. Like all the time the Engineer would think one thing and I would think another and before of course I would have deferred to the Engineer but now I was just as qualified as he was, and clearly since we disagreed he was the idiot, and who the hell put him in charge of all this? That Engineer wound up getting fired for incompetence, which was unfair, because while he was in fact a tad incompetent every new guy is and in the case of the Engineer it is the captain’s job to make him competent and our captain, like I mentioned before, got fired for sheer incompetence and so was in no position to improve the lot of our Engineer. Honestly I think everyone involved is much happier now that they are out of the Navy. But that is a different story.

To be continued…