The plant had just been through what is called “hot flow testing” which is intended to be a complete functional test procedure for all systems related to the nuclear portion of the plant before the fuel elements are loaded.  Subsequent to the hot flow test milestone, GA was handing over systems one-by-one to Public Service Company of Colorado as they reached startup test completion.  Nuclear plants always have what is known as a nuclear and a non-nuclear side.  The nuclear side of any plant contains all systems, structures and components which prevent or mitigate serious or harmful effects of radioactive materials upon the health and safety of the public.  This is pretty much spelled out in what’s called Title 10, Part 50 of the Code of Federal Regulations [which is pronounced “ten CFR fifty” in polite conversation.  10CFR50 is the subject of many misquotes and wrong-headed interpretations.  Thus the prestressed concrete reactor vessel, everything in it, and pretty much around it were included in the nuclear portion of the plant.  It was during the hot flow testing that a number of things began to appear on the horizon.  Water was somehow leaking from inside the vessel, in all probability from the PCRV cooling system within, and out through the bottom head. 

Engineer Jack Yampolsky’s fix for this was to pump a kind of combination stop-leak and adhesive through the PCRV cooling tubes and hopefully gain a seal in that way.  The elephant in the room was that it would be real difficult to get to the PCRV cooling tubes since they were buried in more than ten feet of concrete, reinforcing steel and prestress tendons.  Happily the leaking water stopped but the issue was really a hanging sword over GA’s head.  Many years later I found out that a number of utility personnel at Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas & Electric [among others] were saying “What were you thinking?” in reference to GA’s PCRV cooling tube fix.  To all potential suppliers -- don’t think that industry personnel don’t talk to each other – because many times they do. 

Yampolsky’s input was also then used to change out what were called Pelton wheels which were an emergency backup for helium flow circulation.  Each of the four steam-driven helium circulators were intended to be driven by Pelton wheels during hot flow testing since not nearly enough steam could be generated locally for anything approaching full flow to each of the circulators’ steam wheels for normal operation.  Emergency backup was provided at FSV via having Pelton wheels on the same shaft of each of the four machines which would be driven by emergency condensate [or even the fire protection water if necessary].  Lester Allan Pelton was the original inventor of the Pelton wheel which is usually used in high-pressure hydroelectric stations for extracting power from water. 

The Pelton wheels were torn to pieces by being blasted day-after-day with high pressure water in order to achieve the design objectives of the hot flow testing.  The determination was made that not enough care and attention had been given to positioning the high-pressure nozzles so as to maximize flow in and out of the Pelton buckets and this had ultimately resulted in the demise of version one of the wheels.  Back at GA, a new HTGR selling point was that the new machines would not have the recalcitrant wheels as part of the design and would not be plagued with all of the Fort St. Vrain problems (?).  This type of spinning and politicization of design failures and shortcomings gave me the shivers about what else the management team back in San Diego was doing. 

Along these same lines, the color picture brochure that I had in my briefcase for advanced HTGR’s of the 770 MWe and 1,160 MWe class which depicted an HTGR in place inside a containment vessel with a single turbine generator in the turbine building.  Nothing wrong except that my new GE friends are telling me that the turbine generator shown is one which has one high pressure/intermediate pressure section and three low-pressure butterflies just like in a PWR!  Not much of a thermal efficiency advantage here when you are showing the T-G set that belongs to the other guys.  Undoubtedly the artist rendering the cutaway picture of the completed HTGR plant was not aware that significantly different steam conditions prevailed [or would prevail] at an HTGR plant.  My statistician’s guess is that one of the new 770’s would have a, two shaft, cross-compound TG set with one low pressure section; much like one would see at Mohave or Ormond Beach.  

Anyway it was, all of the circulators had to be changed out-- the last of which was just being buttoned up as I got to the site.  Since the circulators were normally driven by cold reheat steam; all steam lines and water lines as well had to be cut and moved aside and then the Pelton wheels had to be removed for inspection and ultimate replacement.  Not exactly an off the shelf item, each Pelton wheel was made from Inconel nickel steel alloy for extra strength and consisted of a circular line of buckets connected to a stub shaft with a Curvic coupling at the base; all of this from one piece of steel.  Strangely enough, thorough all of the testing down at GA’s Sorrento Valley test tower and the Valmont test facility up in Boulder, test engineer Len Netzel was always bothered by the lack of appropriate data was on operability parameters when running one, two, three, or four circulators on Pelton alone.   At least this is what I remember being discussed rather heatedly in the daily morning meetings.

Fort St. Vrain is supposed to operate as a single-pass Benson type or “once through” boiler.  Such an industrial boiler does not have a steam drum or what is sometime wrongly called a “mud drum” which normally provides for change of state from water to steam and a collection point for impurities which can be drained away and separated.  In a once-thru boiler, you can imagine the water inventory being heated continuously along a long, long tube until in comes out as steam at the other end.  Bad part is you have to really run hot and at really high pressure.  The other bad part is you have to have really clean water.  In the actual world, you have to temporarily bypass the water to what are called flash tanks to create the first steam for the power station –usually augmented by a large auxillary boiler.  Flash tanks are normally used in a number of single pass boilers to “boot up” steam conditions during startup and are used in order to have enough steam inventory to run the auxiliaries in the up-down, stair-step waltz up to full power. 

This was the basis for the HTGR’s better thermodynamic cycle; we were running at 1,000 degrees F and 2,400 psig which was way beyond any of the water reactors and thus achieving higher efficiency through better heat utilization.  Economies were further achieved by not going through the electric power conversion reduction and powering the circulators with steam right from the plant.  That’s where the vaunted thirty-nine percent came from for thermal efficiency.  Your car, good as it may be, is not much more than 25% thermally efficient – that’s right: 75% just heats the air around you.  The best pressurized water reactor in the world runs at about 36% thermal efficiency.       

Many years later I would be involved in starting up some units at another utility’s generating units in Huntington Beach, California.  Steam conditions were roughly similar at 1,000 deg F temperature and 2,400 psi main steam.  In the morning we would get all necessary rotating machinery rolling and in sinc with the sixty cycles of the greater outside power system.  Then we would mind water chemistry for the next few hours; all of the time working on getting the water spec down to the parameters where we had to be running.  When total suspended solids and total dissolved solids hit a certain number; we were starting fires.  We’d lock both turbines together electrically along with other plant equipment that had to be synchronized and we’d be rolling [if we didn’t trip the unit off line on the way up].

The engineering determination was made at some time unknown to the author that main steam bypass flash tanks had to be installed in order to augment and supplement the available steam for starting up the plant.  It was unclear if Sargent & Lundy or some other organization was responsible for this change.  When I was watching the insulators put the last of the lagging on the new bypass flash tanks, it never occurred to me to ask the question of just why were these being added by the Sargent & Lundy Engineering Corporation right now.  Had not the basic plant been in a state of completed design for some years by now?  Of these and other serious questions no one on site seemed to know.  Decisions were made on economies for the station way back during the sixties and practically all of those people were now gone.  The visiting S&L personnel did not want to answer many questions about the bypass flash tanks but then again – they didn’t have to [who’s this financial rep, anyway].

Tommy Stellar, Dan Allen, Dave Miklush, Pete Peterson, Bill Gould and I would go over to Platteville for lunch at the local bar and grill which was called “The Oasis” and bite into half-pound Oasis Cheeseburgers and inhale platefuls of heart-stopping fries.  You could go over to the Oasis at midnight and still get whatever the daily special was to eat.  I was always a fan of the one dollar enchilada plate.  Due to the three-shift operations we had at the nearby plant, the management there had accommodated to our schedule since doing so brought in more business.  I had actually stopped in for breakfast and met the people just getting off of third shift at the Oasis. 

Like the little place that aviatrix Pancho Barnes managed at the old Muroc flight test center [later: Edwards Air Force Base], the “Big O” was a great place to catch up on the rumors that were out among the different craft which were there in significant numbers subsequent to first shift.  Fights would sometime breakout but the excitement would die down in a hurry.  This wasn’t like the writer’s later experience in Arizona’s Bullhead City near the coal-fired Mohave Generating Station where people would actually be murdered as part of the nightly routine of continuous blatant and abject violence.  The craft in this part of the world were definitely tough but they were not killers.  The Oasis management gave out souvenir ball point pens to all those who wanted which were actually a prize item for those individuals going back to the San Diego offices.  “. . . only those in the know would ever notice the significance of the Big O . . .”     

By this time, both the San Diego home office and FSV were very happy about the completion of hot flow testing and arrangements were being worked out for the actual loading of nuclear fuel.  One of my Remington Post friends, Werner Astl, had an unhappy look on his face when I saw him in the early morning hours during these, my early weeks at the site.  Werner was asked to get one of the Pelton wheels down for the inspection on “B” circulator.  A large nut held the wheel in place on the helium circulator stub shaft.  On third shift the night before, Werner along with the pipefitters and millwrights attempted to remove the Pelton wheel in the normal fashion by removing the large nut and tugging at the wheel to no avail.  With orders to get the Pelton wheel out of there by first shift tomorrow morning, the shaft on “B” circulator was cut off right behind the Curvic coupling.

Sometimes it takes a while before the full impact of a decision can be made.  We were able to inspect the Pelton wheel alright, but the machine it was once a part of was now dead.  A spare circulator was down in San Diego and there was an extraordinarily long morning meeting that morning on the squawker with a rather white-faced Bill Budge, Gene O’Rourke, Jack Yampolsky and others regarding the logistics of removing the existing machine and replacing it with the one now in Sorrento Valley.  Anyway it was, B circulator had to come out and all of our plant schedules and plans were now obsolete.  We would have to line up the materials and human resources necessary to take out B circulator right now even though the holiday season was upon us and people wanted to leave for their homes in San Diego.  As a dollars & cents person, I can tell you unequivocally that changing out a circulator had a then-dollars effect of about $3 million --easy.

Excruciating pain was felt by all as we dragged our tails back to our office trailers to re-size up the situation.  Talking to management on the speaker phone in the morning meeting was always an ego-boosting thing except when all of the news conveyed is indeed bad.  We barely looked at each other all the way back to our desks.  Out of the blue, site engineer Fenton Bain came to my office with a proposal to have a party at the Remington Post clubhouse which would be called the “Fort St. Vrain First Annual Startup Party” which would be held in about a week [mid-December 1973].  I called Chuck and Eileen, the managers at the Remington Post and they said that there would be no charge for the use of the huge clubhouse and that any and all GA personnel were welcome.

Out at the Fort, the people from Gulf Dravo were out milling around the batch plant that they bought for forty grand so I dropped everything and ran out there to see if I could assist them [in getting the doggone thing away from here!].  This was a large production concrete batch plant that would be fit for a medium sized city.  There are not any drawings anywhere that we can find.  There is no manufacturer and it is not known exactly how the thing came into existence.  From the Fort St. Vrain side, I have to have everything removed down to the foundations.

The guys from Dravo with the suits and ties walked up and down the catwalks and conveyors of the plant.  I gave them hardhats so nobody was in violation.  There wasn’t much to say besides “.  .  .  well, there it is!”

The Dravo people were moving the plant down to southern Colorado where it was to be used in conjunction with an oil shale project.  They actually took the batch plant apart piece by piece and moved the parts out on flatbeds.  I watched the last flatbed leave the site with unrecognizable hardware on the bed that I really could not describe.  I have always pitied the poor [and probably young] engineer who was given the “opportunity” reconstruct the Fort St. Vrain batch plant at its new intended location.  My new Pittsburg friends in the Treasurers Department gave me the proper Gulf forms for making the transfer of monies.  At Gulf, you could move the Washington Monument to Point Loma in San Diego if you obtained the right form.

The end of the year was coming soon and the GA annual purchase orders were soon to run out so I performed a review of all.  One of the San Diego purchase orders was for GA renting ten apartments at the Remington Post which is something that I didn’t completely comprehend when I first arrived.  The ten apartments were intended for use by GA personnel who were on temporary assignment and would offset the cost of motel charges for such individuals.  A number of GA personnel on temporary assignment were currently living in the apartments.  San Diego purchasing said that it was up to me to negotiate another year of apartment rentals at the Remington Post and to modify the purchase order.  It is now that I know why Chuck and Eileen have been so accommodating and it flashes through my mind that I have tacitly accepted gratuities for being in my decision making position.  This had not happened to me before so I decided then and there that I had to be a lot more careful when dealing with vendors and potential vendors.  Just making matters a little bit worse; there were no controls on who was staying there and who was not.

It’s all subject to negotiation.  One of the other GA purchase orders was to National Car Rental up in Fort Collins for the lease of new vehicles for our site personnel on temporary assignment.  This was another cost offset for individuals coming up who would normally be on employee travel and thusly renting an automobile.  I drafted up a couple of letters, one to the Remington Post and one to National spelling out the contract number, summary terms and conditions, a detail listing of what was to be leased and associated proposed costs for 1974 with no changes from the 1973 rates.  This would modify the contract value and time scope of each of these purchase orders, if the proposed rates were agreed to by the vendors.  I sent the originals out under my signature on GA stationary and got a response by telephone the very next day.  Both the Remington Post and National were happy to continue through 1974 with the same rates as 1973.  I thru my pencil into the air and kicked back from my little desk and said to my Annapolis/hunter-killer sub roommate Doug Powell that “I wasn’t even trying.”

We had a stunning party at the Remington Post with many people from Fort St. Vrain in attendance.  Manager Chuck had made a huge fire in the central fireplace which looked as though you could stuff two cords of wood at a time into the thing.  There was an open bar and BYOB conditions and manager Eileen and some of the wives and many others made up food for us to eat.  Site supervising clerk Stevie Stapleton acted as DJ for all of the music and a better choice could not have been made.  It was a good break for all of us who had been spending a lot of days at work.  John Crnich was there with his lady friend at the time and one of the naïve members of the FSV cast shook her hand and said “I’m very glad to meet you, Mrs. Crnich.” 

This was the life, up in the Colorado mountains on a snowy night in a fire-lit lodge with good music and friends.  It occurred to me that this is just the scene that Hank Anthony in GA’s personnel department in San Diego thought was happening each and every day up at the FSV site—a gigantic non-stop party in a ski lodge like setting with beautiful women, a lot of booze, and loud music echoing across snowy landscape of Boulder Valley Baa-Boom, Baa-Boom.  As financial representative though, I can truthfully testify that this was all done on a shoestring with individual contributions and no expenditure of GA dollars.  I was, however, still bothered by the pervasive and sometimes uncontrolled Remington Post connection.

I did yet another rack up like the original one that I made of who was on what kind of letter of agreement so I could more readily submit expense reports for approval and eventual payment -- this one with an personnel update.  Turns out that a lot of people are on one of the types of short-term arrangements and I asked Bill Gould who was then assistant manager of construction why all of these people, Crnich included, were on short term assignment when they were obviously there for the duration.  Bill quipped that the financial arrangements were a whole lot better for the short term letters than the three-to-twelve month letter of agreement that I was on.  What was effectively happening was that the guys were using their monthly plane ticket to San Diego for their wives coming in the other direction and staying up in the area here.  It was an administrative hole in the plan that no one had ever thought of.  I talked to John Wiley at GA’s project administration offices in San Diego and at some length went out to explain to him the situation we had – only to have him assure me that such a thing could not be happening.  As with everything else, there’s a point at where one needs to stop arguing and just say “OK, talk to you later.”

There were other problems with the expense reports.  Folks weren’t being paid their money.  This was because Accounts Payable under Al Matthews was rejecting signed expense reports and sending them back to the FSV site without paying them based on some Gulf procedure or another.  At times, individuals had to worry about paying their motel bills since the turnaround could be as much as two months for one expense report.  I talked to Matthews on a number of occasions and it looked pretty dim as far as seeing any breakthroughs there.  The rejections were for mainly trivial reasons like not posting subtotals and the Accounts Payable would continuously make a stand on policies and procedures, making the most conservative reading within those parameters and then send the expense report back to the site for “correction.”  Meanwhile, the site person is trying to get by on his own money – causing an even greater impact on cash advances. 

One of the most gifted senses that a person in the role of a financial representative can have is a general sense of timing.  Rather than show up demanding a level playing field with the correct number of team players and the right sized ball, etc., -- go ahead and show up with 81mm mortars and 105 howitzers and blow the opposing team off the field – or better yet, don’t show up for the game at all.  On the other hand, it’s really not a good idea to make enemies.  If you get a funny feeling in the back of your neck because of recent actions of others, you’re probably being game played by the opposition and you need to proceed only with caution.  I was going to have enough people hate my guts just by doing my job and I didn’t need any more.  The only people who get along with everyone in an organization are the ones who are very good looking and say very little to anyone.

GA’s Accounts Payable organization had fallen into one of the many organizational pitfalls that occur with some regularity in accounting production – the people there had decided that the way to save the company money was for Accounts Payable not to pay some of the bills.  Expense reports were only symptomatic; valid and verified invoicing was being rejected at an alarming rates.  Late payments to employees may cause consternation; but late payments to outside vendors will cause an organization to loose its credit rating.  I did not know it at the time but I would see a mammoth version of this organizational dysfunction later at a large electric utility on the west coast.  Sadly, many times this problem is addressed by management often by expelling the organization of key personnel instead of convincing those same individuals that the activity could be managed better.  Many years later I would be a volunteer supervisor of elections for a day at our local poling place.  My clerks just about all thought that it was their ordained job to deny people the vote when other possibilities existed to get the voters through the process.  It got so on the morning of the election I would lecture them that “we are here to  m the public to vote.”  You see this thinking everywhere from the DMV to the city clerk’s office.  The folks just have to be re-educated with a different point of view.   

Expense reports were not the only troubles we were having with San Diego.  I had taken the petty cash fund from Cheryl Morgan who had virtually no records regarding expenditures except a pocket sized check register which was marked with hand-written text and figures.  I called Ed Watson who represented the treasurer’s department in San Diego and subsequent to hearing that we had an active checking account with the Gulf name on it he went absolutely ballistic.  At first, he threatened to report all of this to his to his superiors in Pittsburg but after I explained that the account located up in Greeley had been open for about ten years under the old GA division of General Dynamics he calmed down a lot. 

I said not to worry – and that I would fix everything and hopped [befittingly] into Al Habush’s old car.  Al’s car was actually a GA owned item in the form of a 1967 Ford which only a few of us could make run.  Anyway, after a half-hour of warming up – I sputtered and leaped off to Greeley and closed the account taking the balance out as a cashiers check and then barely making it back since the car ran so bad. 

I added the cashiers check to the money in the cash box and the receipts for expenditures and all was in balance: three hundred dollars even.  I got on the phone to Gulf Oil Pittsburg and transferred around until I was talking to Mike Kennerly, one of the assistant treasurers of the corporation.  Mike listened for a long time to me about the problems we were having out here and thought it was ridiculous that we could not even have a checking account.  He said “I’m sending you out some Gulf Oil forms which you will need to have signed by the participating financial organizations and notarized by someone with a Colorado seal” and further that Pittsburg would print my name at the top which would read “The Gulf Oil Corporation – Ronald H. Jagodinski Special.”  I got the forms two days later and they looked more like my college degree than any form I’d ever seen before, actually old english writing printed on parchment-like paper.

Pittsburg also said that it might be a good thing to avoid some of the Accounts Payable problems I was having with expense reports by arranging for them to be paid out at the site and just the paperwork sent back to San Diego.  I said that I didn’t have enough money and Pittsburg shot back “that’s no problem; how much do you need.”  We agreed to a temporary figure of ten thousand dollars – right there on the telephone.  I still had to open a commercial bank account in Gulf’s name and mine and I did that over at the Bank of Boulder with the help of the new accounts person Cathy, the latter who would become Mrs. David B. Miklush some years later.  The account checks were large, commercial size with an accompanying check register; and I worked out a disbursement control number sequence in order to apply for re-imbursement just like in a textbook petty cash account.  I had purchased the Accounting text by the authors Meigs and Johnson as a used book some years ago back in school – I used the managerial accounting textbook often in setting up one thing or another. 

We had an old Western Union Telex machine which allowed one to send printed messages to another location via the telephone lines just as long as they had a like machine at the other end [sound familiar?].   I began to use this machine since I had a lot of experience with the old GE time share computer terminals which are essentially the same thing.  I would Telex [TWX] messages all over the continental US not knowing that this was a precursor of a lot of larger things to come.  I began to use the Telex machine to TWX the detail re-imbursement requests to the San Diego offices with control numbers and individual amounts adding to a total request which would be backed up by a controlled and signed memo for mailing. 

In this way the associated backup was then sent to San Diego via regular first class post and the funds would be transferred to the Gulf Oil account in Boulder in the meantime.  This shortened the process by light-years and we were processing every expense report at the FSV location within a day.  I had the teamsters get me a six inch square stamp on one of their runs to Denver which said “PAID – FSV Site Financial Officer” in red which I would use on the face of each expense report in order to preclude double payment by us and then possibly San Diego. 

It should be emphasized here that this all was still within the confines of a site petty cash fund.  I wasn’t trying to create a de facto accounts payable department up at Fort St. Vrain.  We still used the purchase order systems already in operation at GA and Stearns-Roger each with their normal approval cycles and other controls.  Despite being outwardly cavalier about many things, the negative relationships that I was building with some of the San Diego people were now starting to worry me.  I was often too abrasive and impatient -- I fact that know all too well now.

GA Treasury department’s Ed Watson had found out what I did with the Gulf Oil treasurers office by this time and had now called my former supervisor Bill Weber who was on a plane out to see me that very next week [this was early in 1974].  Although I no longer worked for Bill, he wanted to both council and caution me about taking on too much and making too many enemies.  That seemed to make good sense and his points about being careful about being the one who’s taking in and dispensing monies were of universal value.  When you are in a position such as the one I had acquired, one need to be exceedingly careful about the attendant explanations regarding funds coming in and leaving.  Bill adroitly related to me all of the inherent dangers in doing something like using the cash I may take in up here from the sale of miscellaneous items for the direct replenishment of the petty cash account; and thusly becoming my own financial center with no checks and balances but my own good looks. 

Accordingly, I never did pollute the site petty cash fund with outside monies from anywhere.  Subsequent to our morning discussion we took a plant tour.  I took Bill to some of the most inaccessible places that were at the plant and he stayed right with me in his suit and tie and dress shoes.  I had forgotten that Bill was an accomplished climber and hiker and the places I took him were probably no more consequential than a large rockpile.  It was good to see someone like Bill Weber all this long way from the San Diego offices and I was sad to see him go at the end of that day. 

I was now driving Al Habush’s old car, the white ’67 Ford.   This was because Dennis the equipment operator from the local trailer town of Frederick, Dave Miklush and I were the only ones on site who knew or cared enough about the car to change out the carburetor and otherwise fix the thing so it would run even on eight cylinders for more than 30 seconds. 

The car was treated as total junk up until then and Dennis the operator, Dave and I were the only people with guts enough to drive it anywhere.  By bringing Habush’s car back from the dead, as it were, we were able to have one more car going to and from Boulder and not have it be rented or leased.  As it worked out, either me or Miklush would drive the Ford affectionately re-christened now as “The White Tornado” back and forth from Boulder to work with two to four other folks.  The car had a new life now that all of the carburetion, automatic choke, spotty ignition, and other problems were now gone and the new Holly four barrel on the basic 289 engine was more powerful than any of the new leased Dodges as the any of the site engineers would find out if they tried to race any of us over the country roads to the Big-O at lunchtime.

People were knocking on the door of my office wanting their equipment.  GA management personnel had decided to sell a number of major items and pieces of equipment to the general public back in 1973 and so a sale was held with bids.  The people who had won the bidding wanted their stuff.  This included the huge Grove self-propelled crane, a gigantic ten yard front end loader, the 1968 white Ford that I had been driving, and [believe it or not] the entire inventory of pipe, valves and fittings in the warehouse.  Trouble was, we were still using all of this stuff.  The order from GA management had come down as hot flow test was coming to an end – so who needs all of this stuff; right? 

Like most of the San Diego management maneuvers, everyone had made damn sure that this one had other people’s fingerprints on it.  Those canny folks had someone sign all of the documents related to the material and equipment sales and provided nothing in writing that he or anyone else in management was ever involved.  This whole thing did not look good to me but I wasn’t about to take on the management of the Company.  I took it upon myself to sit down at the typewriter and pound out letters to the lucky bidders saying that all of these sales were hereby terminated since no consideration was ever received and significant wear and tear had been incurred on the machinery so the original prices bid were not fair or valid.  In closing, we would announce a time in the future when such bidding and sales could take place and that they would be at the top of our list.  That was that for the most part.

One persistent bidder was Tom Tunnell who owned Louisiana Valve & Fitting.  Tom was the one who purchased all of the pipe, valves, and fittings for the plant and he had already made two pickups with one of his flatbed trucks.  I called Tom and told him that the deal on anything more was off and we would wait until after commercial operation to sell anything more.  When he asked me why we were not selling any more pipes, valves and fittings, I just referred to 10CFR 50 Appendix B without any further attribution.  Research by purchasing agent Marv Miller down at the Stearns-Roger offices indicated that the site had actually re-purchased nuclear class valves back from Louisiana Valve & Fitting at the going rates for new stuff.  I learned later that this was another “nuclear valve scam” where spare parts dealers purchase inventories from unknowledgeable persons at a nuclear power station and then re-pedigree the item with the proper QA certifications and then re-sell them to nuclear utilities.  This is not illegal and just amounts to bad decisions on everyone’s part.

My predecessor Dennis Millard was wrongly blamed for the whole material & equipment sale near-fiasco; again which was entirely due to the Byzantine efforts of unseen San Diego management personnel.  Readers beware; don’t ever put your good name to something that you know to be a wrong action – saying “orders are orders” buys you absolutely nothing with a hierarchy who could be practicing slightly less than rigorous honesty.   

 

Traveling to Fort St. Vrain

Part 3