Comment by former_navy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by former_navy | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Often.

I used to run the nuclear power plant on a US Navy submarine. Back around 2006, we were sailing somewhere and Sonar reported that the propulsion plant was much, much louder than normal. A few days later we didn't need Sonar to report it, we could hear it ourselves. The whole rear half of the ship was vibrating. We pulled into our destination port, and the topside watch reported that oil pools were appearing in the water near the rear end of the ship. The ship's Engineering Officer and Engineering Department Master Chief shrugged it off and said there was no need for it to "affect ship's schedule". I was in charge of the engineering library. I had a hunch and I went and read a manual that leadership had probably never heard of. The propeller that drives the ship is enormous. It's held in place with a giant nut, but in between the nut and the propeller is a hydraulic tire, a toroidal balloon filled with hydraulic fluid. Clearly it had ruptured. The manual said the ship was supposed to immediately sail to the nearest port and the ship was not allowed to go back out to sea until the tire was replaced. I showed it to the Engineer. Several officers called me in to explain it to them. And then, nothing. Ship's Schedule was not affected, and we continued on the next several-week trip. Before we got to the next port, we had to limit the ship's top speed to avoid major damage to the entire propulsion plant. We weren't able to conduct the mission we had planned because the ship was too loud. And the multiple times I asked what the hell was going on, management literally just talked over me. When we got to the next port, we had to stay there while the propeller was removed and remachined. Management doesn't give a shit as long as it doesn't affect their next promotion.

Don't even get me started on the nuclear safety problems.

The correct answer in that case is to go to the Inspector General. That's what they're there for. Leaders sweeping shit under the rug that ends up crippling a fleet asset and preventing tasking from higher is precisely the kind of negligence and incompetence the IG is designed to root out.

And I say that as a retired officer.

How long retired? Things have gone in what can only be described as an.. incomprehensible unfathomable direction in the last decade or so. Parent post is not surprising in the least.

Politics is seeping where it doesn't belong.

I am very worried.

Tell us more... what has happened?

To a first approximation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZB7xEonjsc

Less funny in real life. Sometimes the jizzless thing falls off with impeccably bad timing. Right when things go boom. People get injured (no deaths yet). Limp home early. Allies let down. Shipping routes elongate by a sad multiple. And it even affects you directly as you pay extra for that Dragon silicon toy you ordered from China.

Just google the Red Hill failure.

The Navy's careerist, bureaucratic incompetence is staggering. No better than Putin's generals who looted the military budget and crippled his army so they couldn't even beat a military a fraction of their size.

Recently. For those who've served, it's not a surprise to see the constant drumbeat of commanding officers being relieved of command every month or so. COs are not bulletproof, and the last thing anyone in the seat wants is to end up crossways with the IG. And there are confidential ways Sailors can get in touch with them if needed.

Or with their Member of Congress, who can also go to Big Navy and ask "WTF is going on with my constituent?"

Honest question: what are the plausible outcomes for an engineer who reports this kind of issue to the IG?

I'm guessing there's a real possibility of it ending his career, at least as a member of the military.

I seriously believe what I've heard about upwards failure. Being competent seems to be an impediment, and the goons at the very top are ludicrously malformed people.

The incompetent group together, they have to in order to survive.

The competent don't group together, they don't need to. They can take care of themselves.

The former uses their power as a group against the individuals in the latter.

Basically the plot of Atlas Shrugged.

Atlas Shrugged? The book written by that demented woman who couldn't deal with her own feelings but told everyone how individualism was the answer to everything while living thanks to other people's support?

That book?

Yeah the one were people attack the author rather than the idea because they aren't competent enough to do so.

Objectivism: that fart-huffing philosophy that leads people to think everyone else is incompetent to judge it, when it's just a bunch of hateful trash that is to the right as Marxism is to the left.

That doesn't hold water.

Objectivism, like many philosophies or political beliefs, only works in an absolute vacuum.

Maybe the one person who survives the first trip to Mars can practice it.

I'm not an objectivist. My comment is the extent of the Ayn Rand beliefs I hold for my most part.

When you work on ideas instead of personalities you get to do that.

Nobody here tried to disprove my comment. Just a few people starting complaining about a dead woman whose book I mentioned in passing.

They got together and argued, incompetently. Demonstrating the effect I was attempting to illustrate.

i guess the true fate is the competent arguing amongst one another in an attempt to establish who is most competent, while the incompetent group together and bask in the real rewards. The goals of the incompetent are simple and tangible. The goals of the competent are abstract, as they seek acceptance from their fellow competent peers

The IG is an independent entity which exists to investigate misconduct and fraud/waste/abuse. There are Inspectors General at all levels from local bases up to the Secretary of Defense, and they have confidential reporting hotlines. The only thing worse for a commander than having shenanigans be substantiated at an IG investigation is to have been found to tolerate retaliation against the reporters.

Generally about every month or two, a Navy commanding officer gets canned for "loss of confidence in his/her ability to command." They aren't bulletproof, quite the opposite. And leaving out cases of alcohol misuse and/or sexual misconduct, other common causes are things within the IG's purview.

It sounds like a certain commercial aircraft manufacturer that starts with a B and ends with an oeing could really use an effective Inspector General system.

Probably. The biggest blind spot internal auditors have is things that didn't leave a paper trail.

It is too common that such investigations don't even start because there is just one connecting piece of evidence missing.

Leave a paper trail people!

Much more realistically:

Individual A reports a unique or rare problem. Everyone knows it is reported by person A.

Nothing is done.

Person A reports the problem "anonymously" to some third party, which raises a stink about the problem.

Now everyone knows that person A reported the problem to the third party.

This is why I (almost) never blow the whistle. It's an automatic career-ending move, and any protections are make-believe at best.

Then Person A needs to haul their butt to the Defense Service Office, call their Member of Congress, and tell the "anonymous" hotline that they've been retaliated against.

I'm not pretending this is some magic ticket to puppy-rainbow-fairy land where retaliation never occurs, but ultimately, how much do you care about your shipmates? I had a CPO once as one of my direct reports committing major misconduct and threatening my shop with retaliation if they reported it. I could have helped crush the bastard if someone had come forward to me, but no one ever did until I'd turned over the division to someone else, after which it blew up. Sure, he eventually got found out, but still. He was a great con artist and he pulled the wool over my eyes, but all I'd have needed is one person cluing me in to that snake.

Speaking from the senior officer level, we're not all some cabal trying to sweep shit under the rug. And the IGs, as much as they're feared, aren't out to nail people to the wall who haven't legitimately done bad things. I'm sorry you've had the experience you've had, but that doesn't mean that everyone above you was some big blue wall willing to protect folks who've done wrong.

heck, you're in the ship too. I'll take all the retalitation if I get to keep breathing. If they wanna kick me out over saving my own skin, fine. Saves me from deserting.

The US Navy has over 300k active-duty personnel. I suppose it's easier to just go somewhere else where no-one knows who you are.

The person ignoring their subordinate’s reports to protect their own next promotion has entered the chat.

> Don't even get me started on the nuclear safety problems.

I want to be pro-nuclear energy, but I just don't think I can trust the majority of human institutions to handle nuclear plants.

What do you think about the idea of replacing all global power production with nuclear, given that it would require many hundreds of thousands of loosely-supervised people running nuclear plants?

Considering that 1 Chernobyl scale accident per year would kill fewer people than global coal power does, I personally would be for it.

It was a tremendous effort and sacrifice paid so that half of Europe wasnt poisoned by that 1 Chernobyl.

Given the scale of people killed by coal every year, I feel relatively confident that had that effort not been undertaken, it would still be true.

And of course that's ignoring the fact that I also feel relatively confident that a Chernobyl scale accident every year is in no way likely, even if the entire world was 100% on nuclear

I don't think the scale of coal is 200m+ people a year. That's taking artistic liberties or is too hyperbolic to entertain.

>I also feel relatively confident that a Chernobyl scale accident every year is in no way likely, even if the entire world was 100% on nuclear

I don't. Einstein's quote rings alarms in my head here. Imagine all the inane incompetencies you've seen with current energies in your house, or at a mechanic, or simply flickering lights at a resaurant. Now imagine that these people now manage small fusion/fission bombs powering such devices.

we need to value labor a lot more to trust that sort of maintanance. And the US alone isn't too good at that. Let alone most of Asia and EMEA.

> 200m+

Were are you getting this from?

In any case if we look at the actual data nuclear has been extremely safe compared to burning fossil fuels. Add up all the nuclear disasters that have ever happened and adjusted by MWh generated it’s a few magnitudes safer than coal.

> Now imagine that these people now manage small fusion/fission bombs powering such devices.

Sure, they’ll have to be trained to the same standards as current nuclear engineers. Not trivial but obviously not exactly an unsolvable problem..

> Let alone most of Asia and EMEA.

Sorry but you’re just saying random things at this point..

You do know that as good as it might have been that TV show was still mostly fictional?

Does coal kill rich people? Nuclear meltdown does.

> Does coal kill rich people?

Certainly, they still breathe the same air, don’t they?

> Nuclear meltdown does.

I’m pretty sure that nuclear meltdowns are much, much easier to avoid. Even in Chernobyl almost all the casualties (shortterm and longterm) were amongst people directly handling and trying to contain a disaster. If you’re rich you’re unlikely to be a fireman..

There's also the issue of force majeure - war, terrorism, natural disasters, and so on. Increase the number of these and not only can you not really maintain the same level of diligence, but you also increase the odds of them ending up in an unfortunate location or event.

There's also the issue of the uranium. Breeder reactors can help increase efficiency, but they bump up all the complexities/risks greatly. Relatively affordable uranium is a limited resource. We have vast quantities of it in the ocean, but it's not really feasible to extract. It's at something like 3.3 parts per billion by mass. So you'd need to filter a billion kg of ocean water to get 3.3kg of uranium. Outside of cost/complexity, you also run into ecological issues at that scale.

Same. Its blatantly obvious the humanity is not up to the task.

So far nuclear has been extremely safe compared to some other energy sources (especially coal).

There was no hunch there about a problem, it was very obvious there was a problem. Management willing to risk worker's lives for promotions should be fired immediately unless they jump into the fire only by themselves. No life is worth someone's convenience.

If you're EB, why replace a hydraulic bushing when you can wait, and replace it but also have to repair a bunch of damage and make yourself a nice big extra chunk of change off Uncle Sam?

If you're ship's captain...why not help secure a nice 'consulting' 'job' at EB after retiring from the navy by helping EB make millions, and count on your officers to not say a peep to fleet command that the mess was preventable?

That sounds EXACTLY like something Fat Leonard might have done...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Leonard_scandal

My brother has loads of ghese stories related to fighter jets.

Stuff like pilots taking off with no working nav, "I'll follow the guy in front of me".

Is this a different phenomenon though? It seems that there's a difference between an informed risk assessment and not giving a fuck or letting the bureaucratic gears turn and not feeling responsible. Like there's a difference between Challenger and Chernobyl.

But, maybe someone can make a case that it's fundamentally the same thing?

I would make the case that it's fundamentally the same thing.

In both cases, there were people who cared primarily about the technical truth, and those people were overruled by people who cared primarily about their own lifestyle (social status, reputation, career, opportunities, loyalties, personal obligations, etc.) In Allan McDonald's book "Truth, Lies, and O-Rings" he outlines how Morton Thiokol was having a contract renewal held over their head while NASA Marshall tried to maneuver the Solid Rocket Booster production contract to a second source, which would have seriously affect MT's bottom line and profit margins. There's a strong implication that Morton Thiokol was not able to adhere to proper technical rationale and push back on their customer (NASA) because if they had they would have given too much ammunition to NASA to argue for a second-source for the SRB contracts. (In short: "you guys delayed launches over issues in your hardware, so we're only going to buy 30 SRB flight sets from you over the next 5 years instead of 60 as we initially promised."

I have worked as a NASA contractor on similar issues, although much less directly impacting the crews than the SRBs. You are not free to pursue the smartest, most technically accurate, quickest method for fixing problems; if you introduce delays that your NASA contacts and managers don't like, they will likely ding your contract and redirect some of your company's work to your direct competitors, who you're often working with on your projects.

What’s the alternative? Being able to shift to a competitor when a producer is letting you down is the entire point of private contracts; without that, you might as well remove the whole assemblage of profit and just nationalize the whole thing.

That's EXACTLY the alternative.

Strictly speaking, you're correct, so I don't disagree with your comment. However, assuming MvDonald's recollections are correct and his explanation of the story is accurate, Morton Thiokol was doing an excellent job. The O-Ring seal issue was on track to be solved as they switched to a lighter-weight filament-wound case. According to McDonald, Morton Thiokol was receiving high marks on their contract evaluations, and Marshall was trying to move the contract to a company that had a lot of ex-Marshall employees.

I think it can be thought from this angle: if the customer is corrupt and the contractor ethical, the project can be unsafe. If the customer is ethical and the contractor corrupt, the project also can be unsafe.

Okay so it sounds like you're saying that they are fundamentally the same, but only because the Challenger wasn't in the "informed risk assessment" category after all.

Yeah, that's what I think. In both cases the technical decisions were made by people who were not technical experts and were completely ignoring the input of the technical experts because of social pressures. Based on McDonald's retelling, the decision to launch the Challenger was anything but an informed risk decision; none of the managers said "we acknowledge Morton Thiokol's concerns about O-Ring temperatures and are committing to launch anyway, with the following rationale: ..." They just didn't bring up the temperature issue at the flight director level and recommended a launch, backed by no data.

In Chernobyl, they scheduled a safety test to satisfy schedules imposed by central command. The plant engineers either weren't informed or couldn't push back because to go against management meant consequences for your career and family, administered by the Soviet authorities or the KGB.

Both scenarios had engineers who were not empowered to disclose or escalate issues to the highest level because of implied threats against them by non-technical authorities.

>Like there's a difference between Challenger and Chernobyl.

not in year, incidentally

Reply on news.ycombinator.com