US Navy Nuclear Power School Study Materials | Hacker News Reader

US Navy Nuclear Power School Study Materials

navsea.navy.mil

84 pointsjonwachob9154 comments

I considered the nuclear navy program in 1986/1987 as a college junior, looked like an interesting opportunity. There were 3 tracks (not the official terms):

    + nuclear operator on a ship or submarine
    + nuclear school instructor
    + naval nuclear reactor program manager

I qualified for the "naval nuclear reactor program manager" and went to San Diego to tour a nuclear submarine, then a few months later flew to DC. The local university recruiter accompanied me both times. Nobody told me much what the "naval nuclear reactor program manager" work involved because they really didn't know and couldn't say. I finally had a chance in DC to talk to someone who actually did the work, and the fit didn't seem quite right at the time -- I'd be traveling a lot to GE, Westinghouse, etc., and reviewing designs, change management, etc., -- not a lot of original work. The few days before the meeting I'd been wavering every hour or so. Had they caught me a few minutes before or after, who knows, I might have decided differently. I felt sorry for the recruiter.

Of course, I was naïve at the time -- nobody, especially in nuclear, starts off with original work.

I count that as one of the four or five big forks in my own "destiny".

edit: the naïve part.

How did your life work out in the end?

Thanks for asking, and I'm not yet at "the end"!

I'll say the first big fork was deciding to forego free EE education at Universidade de Brasília and living a Brazilian life in favor of going to my family's US stomping grounds in Arizona. There were many student strikes in Brazil at the time, I didn't want to spend 8 years on a BSE, and was sure all my family would end up in the US eventually anyway. I didn't want to be so far away.

The second fork was not entering the navy nuclear program.

The next was foundering in grad school with an NSF Fellowship. I'd say social/personal issues got in the way, and though I'd try to blame grad school context, I'd lost my creative drive. My oldest brother had an "in" to early access to the Apple Newton at the time so I headed to Silicon Valley, and we tried to build something on the platform. After several months and seeing the idea/platform wouldn't pan out for our use case, I started working at SV startups.

I did the SV startup thing for 19 years, had some good experiences. My wife wanted to move ... so the next big fork was moving to North Carolina. I continued SV work (almost 3 years at one really really really crappy podunk startup), and recently moved on to a former-startup-division-in-a-large-enterprise-security-company. My current team is awesome and I learn something new every day.

Those are the big professional forks so far ... as for professional future, I don't know. I've got a couple of ideas I'd like to pursue some time. But then there's time with my daughter, relative ease of a near-SV (?) salary in NC, etc.

In all, I can't complain.

Was also a significant fork in my path! I applied to NUPOC program out of college and was accepted, although for whatever reason chose to work in the startup world instead. I still wonder what my life would be like if I had taken that path. For those curious about the process, IIRC it goes something like this (feel free to correct me, its been a long time since then): apply (at the time I applied a 3.5 GPA was required from a 4 year college although for some reason they accepted my much lower GPA). If you accept, you enter at the lowest rank (E1) and go through boot camp as any recruit would. Afterwards, you are put through several years of school (3?) to attain a degree in nuclear engineering. After that you sign on for a 5 year contract aboard a sub or aircraft carrier (the only two nuclear-powered ships in the Navy, as far as I know). During my time, pay started at $80k once you became an officer, and then $120k after four years.

Your year was the same time when I was courted by recruiters for the USN Nuclear Program. They treated me well and offered a bonus, but I went Army instead. God, how I imagine how things would've turned out had I chosen that path.

I was an enlisted nuke before going to college and getting an engineering degree. Even in the early '00s, my impression of the nuclear program manager role was very similar to yours, in that the naval officers are primarily providing oversight rather than design engineering work. However, there is still quite a bit of original work going on in the nuclear Navy. In the late 80's, you might have been involved in the Seawolf class design.

Each new ship class has been getting a new reactor plant design. The changes are very much evolutionary from one generation to the next, but it all adds up.

This raises an interesting question - what kinds of textbooks are out there already, produced by the government/military, and available for use?

Could they be expanded/adapted, published for free, and put downward pressure on the (ludicrous) price of textbooks in the US?

NASA has an e-book collection on their site: https://www.nasa.gov/connect/ebooks/

This makes a couple assumptions:

1) There's not much legitimate value in the textbooks we have now. Those who did that work don't really deserve to make money from it, and their labor would be easy to replace.

2) It'd be free or essentially free to "expand and adapt" military documents and make them into textbooks that are accurate, current, and suitable for educating non-military folks.

1) How did you get from "downward pressure" to "not much legitimate value"? The original statement was nuanced enough to cover this and definitely didn't make that assumption.

2) You're right, no such project has ever existed; I'd imagine it would be like an encyclopedia, full of people who donate their time to edit page about various subjects. Such a project could never stay current, definitely isn't suitable for education, and almost certainly will never surpass the accuracy or magnitude of my Microsoft Encarta CDs. [0]

[0] https://www.wikipedia.org/

Lots of military handbooks out there available to the public...612 records to be exact: do a Document ID search for MIL-HDBK using DLA's dot-mil-official search tool[1]. Roughly half are still active.

[1] http://quicksearch.dla.mil/

The NNPP doesn't distribute any high quality theoretical nuclear engineering texts. The good texts they use are targeted towards the specific systems and materials deployed on ships and submarines.

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

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

As a former operator in the mid to late 90s I was forced to study TMI. I am pretty sure every operator today has done the same study.

There are several lessons learned there but in reality it is really a case for how to do things going forward. I seriously doubt those mistakes will happen again.

My understanding is not much as an enlistee (unless you put in 20+ years and bust your ass on your own time), but you will be a nuclear engineer at the end of training if you are an officer. But I do think a fair number of nuclear engineers and operators are veterans. The training is too expensive for most organizations to train individuals, and the ones that can train you don't have the resources that the navy has for training. Serve 6 years making shit pay, get your training, transition the civilian world making 6 figures.

I had a math professor that spent 20 years as a navy nuclear operator (enlisted). At the end of his career he had 2 masters from MIT, one in Math and one in Nuclear Engineering. My understanding is that is fairly common for the best and brightest in the program.

I guess when you are in a SSBN on patrol, you have plenty of time for study!

It depends. If we were short-handed, we did 6 hours on, 6 off, which didn't allow much extra time for study.

Edit: Submarine

Been there done that. :)

At the same time I have been on 6 off 18. Oh those where great days.

Time in the military is not a constant. It completely depends on the situation and patrol you on. I did complete an economics class in 3 hours with bad grades only because I signed up for it before realizing I was going to be on one of those 6 on 6 off events.

ex Navy Submariner here. I know quite a few folks that got out (in the 2005-2010 range) and took jobs in the nuclear field. Some had degrees, some didn't.

The Navy uses Pressurized Water reactors which seem to be a fairly common design in commercial use as well (according to Wikipedia, anyway). Which means a lot of how things work would be similar, and you'd just have to learn the specific systems for how that plant operated (i.e. the designs and how the cooling, electronics, power generation, etc. worked)

I would imagine there would be a lot of overall similarities in core principles and operations, but some specific systems would work differently being on land and likely generating a lot more power + having other requirements for discharges and cooling etc, vs. a seagoing vessel.

ex Reactor Operator from the mid 90s to early 2000s as well (enlisted).

One of the things that was apparent is purpose. A commercial reactor is a profit making device whereas a Naval reactor is part of a war machine. In the former you end up with complexity designed to save cost, where the later favors simplicity and extra cost to ensure stability. That is not to say commercial is unsafe, but the motive behind design is different and hence leads to different results and design criteria.

From what I can tell, I haven't worked a commercial reactor but commercial reactors are toys in comparison to their Naval counter parts. Going back to your land based vs sea based comparison. Refueling a land based reactor is trivial compared to cutting into a hull that needs to sustain high pressure underwater. This requires extra design in poison placement and fuel placement to achieve a longer life cycle measured in decades not years. The material barely touches on this and no where near the level of detail you get in the full NNPP schooling.

Commercial plants are very well aware of the training and experience that Naval operators get. I have many friends that went commercial. In the commercial world you don't shutdown or startup a reactor very often and hence you have specialists to handle that task. In the Naval world you do this every time you pull into a port. A Naval operator with 6 years experience has most likely done a few hundred cycles compared to a civilian at the same number of years only doing startups measured in the tens. So order of magnitude difference.

Startup of a reactor is one of the most difficult controlled chaos events in which you calculate expectations, move rods, and monitor activity to make sure everything is safe. A quick study of the neutron life cycle illustrates the simple fact that you don't know the state of the reactor in current state, but only in what it might be in future state. So you guide future state with understanding of current state and what might influence that state. You have to understand the Xeon poison over the last hours of operation and when that is going to decay among other things. It's not rocket science but it does require an attention to detail.

In full disclosure my first 10 minutes on a live reactor resulted in a mental breakdown. I knew all of the formulas and what I was suppose to do, but at the first time I had to move the rods I just brain farted out of nervousness. I was not going to cause a problem or accident, but I could not flatly state what was going to happen in 10 hours if I moved the rods. After 6 years on my first in fleet real reactor I could tell you where the rods would be within a tenth of an inch 120 hours later. This is why Naval operators get jobs. They learn to become one with their reactor. This is a good thing we want people that understand what they are doing.

That's so interesting re: the number of startups and shutdowns. Makes perfect sense given the mission of "generating power" vs. getting somewhere or "poking holes in the ocean".

My dad was in the industry for ~35 years, but he wasn't a nuke. In the late 70s it was easy enough to get in with a 2 year degree (which is what he had), now an engineering degree is required. Many of my dad's coworkers were from the Navy, though at least one was a Seal rather than a nuke.

From what I got from him, its not like many people are clamoring for these jobs, or have the necessary credentials. It seems like anyone who could do them could get a job as a civilian nuclear engineer. The problem with working in nuclear is that...they only put nuclear power plants in fairly bad locations (NIMBY is a big problem), so you are either stuck with a very long commute or are living in a rural area.

interestingly enough I consider rural living an advantage and would like to be able to move to the country

There are plenty of rural locations that aren't so nice: Monroe Michigan, Pennsville New Jersey, Port Gibson Mississippi, Baton Rouge (but nowhere near the city). Heck, the nicest place we lived was Tri Cities Washington, and that didn't last long (hanford is mostly a waste dump now, but there is at least one reactor still going I think).

Ah, that was the other thing: the industry was very boom and bust. Dad made bank contracting in the late 70s and early 80s, then they stopped making new plants and it was a scramble to find any job at all around 1985-6. He didn't really want me going into it, I think, so I got into computers instead.

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

Hard to imagine a non-calculus based nuclear engineering program.

It's really not quite right to think of the Navy's program as a nuclear engineering one. With their schools to prepare sailors for the boats, they want to make sure everyone knows why and how all protection systems and procedures work, as well as instilling a respect for the severity of radiation exposure and efficacy of protective measures.

The goal isn't designing plants; someone else already did that. It's knowing enough to know why plants were designed the way they were, as well as being able to safely operate, maintain, and fix the thing.

There is some calculus, but calculus really slows things down when you're trying to work through a lot of material.

As others have said, its a nuclear engineering technology education (as an enlistee, anyway). We did use rudimentary calculus, in the form of graphical methods. Given a strip-chart of x(t), and some nonlinear ODE y' = f(x), the student is expected to be able to draw a reasonable approximation of y(t). You get quite a bit of practice with specific ODE's of interest to the power plant, too.

As others have stated calculus is not needed in operations.

I felt that my calculus training was subpar to my high school education. At the same time theory on neutron life cycle and other aspects of a reactor are more important. If I can tell you what is going to happen to the reactor in next 100+ hours then I don't need to fully understand the engineering that got us here. The basic core material here get's us close, not close enough to get to mastery.

I learned advanced Physics using Algebra and then supplemented that with Calculus. Nothing that I learned in Algebra based Physics was undone by Calculus only augmented. I was pretty good at Physics when I was 17 and got better when I was 18 understanding Calculus.

These are not mutually exclusive ideas.

I'm a veteran Nuke that didn't go into the nuclear engineering field. However, I did frequently cross paths and classes with another Navy nuke veteran who did take that path. Basically, enlisted nuke -> commercial nuclear engineering technician. As an engineering tech, there was certainly good money to be made. But, he found that there was a pretty hard ceiling on how far he could go without an engineering degree. So, he was putting himself through college full-time, while feeding a family of four on student loans (!).

What the recruiters don't tell you, is that your course work will only be accepted for credit by colleges that are not ABET-accredited. The two years of nuke school can count as nearly all of an associate's degree in nuclear engineering technology, but almost none in nuclear engineering. I had to start from scratch when I got my degree (in Mechanical Engineering) - I didn't even get PE credit! But on the flip side, because I had a working knowledge of thermo/mechanical/electrical systems as a field tech, I found that my engineering courses were much more comprehensible. I was hungry for the detailed theory at that point, and didn't mind if the particular practice problems were contrived.

these are actually Department of Energy study materials, not the actual Naval Reactors training materials used in Naval Nuclear Power School.

Both of those are true, but it's worth noting that actual training manuals are also DoE. Naval Reactors occupies a unique space, due to a couple things:

1. the Navy is the only service that didn't get their nuclear 'toys' taken away from them for being irresponsible.

2. Rickover was an incredible pain in the ass to everyone who got in his way for the better part of four decades.

These are not the materials we studied at Naval Nuclear Power School in the 80's, which were considerably greater in depth (6 mo course)

I'm fairly certain this material was designed more as a prep-work for completion prior to A-School.

This stuff just scratches the surface. They wouldn't post official training materials that went in depth on how ship specific systems work (even for older systems that may no longer be in use).

This is not the material used in the enlisted program when I went through it.

I specifically recall reading about quarks and spin in the physics text book because they were not in the notes or TGOs even though they influence decay. Quarks are not in the linked page pdfs.

What are the pre-requisite knowledge requirements?

Most nukes I knew were college dropouts with a math/science orientation. The only requirements in the early 80's when I qualified were high scores on Navy science and math aptitude tests. I dropped out of U.C.Berkeley after a year and a half of physics/math - couldn't pass English.

Nukes have been and probably will always be the best underachievers you have ever known.

Killed a scholarship, check. Didn't get the scholarship check.

They tend to be smart and marginally good. The thing is though going through that program tends to right ships and get them in the right place. I have seen this with so many of my friends and with my self. We get back on the right track and get everything else in order. I am now at a 6 figure income and support most of my family. I would never be there without the support of such a program. I can say I pissed away my upbringing, but in reality I learned to be the man I am with that help.

High ASVAB scores really is about it, and even that is waivable. After they go through boot camp, they will generally get filtered out through attrition at their respective A-School (training school), which is why the requirements can be waived, and they go to a new job.

Very much unlike college admissions (where it's relatively hard to get in, and also hard to flunk out of), it is relatively easy to get into and and also easy to flunk out of the enlisted nuclear program. In my class, the failure rate was about 60% overall, and I think that's pretty typical. They start the failure process pretty early, too, starting with the first round of exams. The Navy is happy to find you another job that isn't quite as demanding. Most of the non-nuclear submariners I worked with were "failed" nukes. In college, it seems like folks are more likely to fail out completely then they are to fail into a less demanding degree that they could still succeed in.

Usually something above 90 on the ASVAB, with exceptions for people who score 80s but take a special math and physics test.

ASVAB grading isn't a fixed scoring system. If you score s 90 it means you beat 90% of the people who took the test. Which means that 99 is the max score. The question pool is also massive usually starting at Jr High difficulty questions ramping up to college and down to kindergarten depending on which questions you get right. Testing Math/science/reading for your primary grade with secondary grades for things like mechanics, table reading, and similar which can be used to qualify you for some other jobs or similar.

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Nukes are great for employers that know to target them when they get out. The whole program could be considered a trial by fire. Training starts with 3-4 years of college shoved into a year and a half. Actual work is a constant fight between being undermanned, leadership, continuous training/testing, responsibilities above their rank and red tape.

Got out after 6 years as a nuke.

>>responsibilities above their rank

Yep do a task once, superiors start presenting you as the expert. I always hated that.

ASVAB is for enlisted - you don't take that if you are going officer (NUPOC) for NUPOC you need like a 3-3.5 in some kind of stem thing and maybe other stuff like recommendations ... and you need to pass an interview too I believe with an admiral.

got all 99s on ASVAB and had some interesting interviews with the nuke people when I was younger

Leads to many of 404 errors.

All the PDF within the page:

    http://www.navsea.navy.mil/Portals/103/Documents/NNPTC/Math/math_assign.pdf
    http://www.navsea.navy.mil/Portals/103/Documents/NNPTC/Physics/physics_assign.pdf
    http://www.navsea.navy.mil/Portals/103/Documents/NNPTC/Radiation/rf_assign.pdf
    http://www.navsea.navy.mil/Portals/103/Documents/NNPTC/Chemistry/chem_assign.pdf
    http://www.navsea.navy.mil/Portals/103/Documents/NNPTC/Math/math_quest.pdf
    http://www.navsea.navy.mil/Portals/103/Documents/NNPTC/Physics/physics_quest.pdf
    http://www.navsea.navy.mil/Portals/103/Documents/NNPTC/Radiation/rf_quest.pdf
    http://www.navsea.navy.mil/Portals/103/Documents/NNPTC/Chemistry/chem_quest.pdf
    http://www.navsea.navy.mil/Portals/103/Documents/NNPTC/Math/math_sol.pdf
    http://www.navsea.navy.mil/Portals/103/Documents/NNPTC/Physics/physics_sol.pdf
    http://www.navsea.navy.mil/Portals/103/Documents/NNPTC/Radiation/rf_sol.pdf
    http://www.navsea.navy.mil/Portals/103/Documents/NNPTC/Chemistry/chem_sol.pdf
    http://www.navsea.navy.mil/Portals/103/Documents/NNPTC/Math/doe_math_v1.pdf
    http://www.navsea.navy.mil/Portals/103/Documents/NNPTC/Physics/doe_phys.pdf
    http://www.navsea.navy.mil/Portals/103/Documents/NNPTC/Radiation/doe_radiological_training.pdf
    http://www.navsea.navy.mil/Portals/103/Documents/NNPTC/Chemistry/doe_chemistry_v1.pdf
    http://www.navsea.navy.mil/Portals/103/Documents/NNPTC/Math/doe_math_v2.pdf
    http://www.navsea.navy.mil/Portals/103/Documents/NNPTC/Physics/doe_phys_nuc.pdf
    http://www.navsea.navy.mil/Portals/103/Documents/NNPTC/Radiation/doe_reactor_theory_v1.pdf
    http://www.navsea.navy.mil/Portals/103/Documents/NNPTC/Electrical%20Eng/ee_assign.pdf
    http://www.navsea.navy.mil/Portals/103/Documents/NNPTC/Thermo/thermo_assign.pdf
    http://www.navsea.navy.mil/Portals/103/Documents/NNPTC/RD/rd_assign.pdf
    http://www.navsea.navy.mil/Portals/103/Documents/NNPTC/Electrical%20Eng/ee_quest.pdf
    http://www.navsea.navy.mil/Portals/103/Documents/NNPTC/Thermo/thermo_quest.pdf
    http://www.navsea.navy.mil/Portals/103/Documents/NNPTC/RD/rd_quest.pdf
    http://www.navsea.navy.mil/Portals/103/Documents/NNPTC/Electrical%20Eng/ee_sol.pdf
    http://www.navsea.navy.mil/Portals/103/Documents/NNPTC/Thermo/thermo_sol.pdf
    http://www.navsea.navy.mil/Portals/103/Documents/NNPTC/RD/rd_sol.pdf
    http://www.navsea.navy.mil/Portals/103/Documents/NNPTC/Electrical%20Eng/applied_ee_v1.pdf
    http://www.navsea.navy.mil/Portals/103/Documents/NNPTC/Thermo/doe_htff_v1.pdf
    http://www.navsea.navy.mil/Portals/103/Documents/NNPTC/RD/doe_rx_theory_v2.pdf

Considering how unsurprisingly shallow the material is, I'm guessing this is enlisted training material...you know, the type that's quickly forgotten shortly after A school.

No. After A school, you will still have to qualify on the boat.

The nuke track is: After A school (Electrician, Electronic, or Mechanical) you go to Naval Nuclear Power School. From there you go to land-based prototype training on an actual reactor. From there you go to a boat to try to qualify.

I stand corrected: the type that's quickly forgotten after qualifying on a boat.

If you forget it, it'll come back to haunt you. Nukes are constantly being tested and requalifying. The NAVY does an outstanding job of punishing a nuke that does horribly at either of those.

So. You know those whiteboard interviews that software engineers love to gripe about? In software engineering, you only have to take those once before you're hired, and then you can start forgetting them.

In the Navy, you take those continuously, and they are somewhat more extensive. You have them at the end of your practical training phase on land, you have them at every individual job you qualify for on the ship, Naval Reactors comes and gives them to the entire crew every year, and so on. In my six year tour, I must have gone through at least 150 oral interviews of one kind or another.

On top of the constant interviewing, there's also continuous written exams, and various engineering casualty drills (eg, model that something breaks, and observe the crew respond to the failure).

If you're lucky enough to get stationed on a 17-year old boat, then you get to constantly exercise the fundamentals, too. As various pieces of equipment fail in new and novel ways, the troubleshooting process drives you to constantly construct, support, and/or refute hypothesis as to why it broke and just what must be done to fix it.

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