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!

Traveling to Fort St. Vrain

Part 1