It was at around this time in 1974 that my own schedule became a lot more hectic. I was flying to the San Diego offices every couple of weeks for meetings there, having my travel orders cut right there at the site. Our management control of employee expenses charged to the Fort St. Vrain project was accomplished partially through the use of travel orders which were numerically sequenced documents used to authorize any trips an individual might take from any organization. The travel orders actually had an accounting identity of their own and would not be put into effect for cost accumulation unless all signatures were present; much like a work order or sales order. This was how we and the San Diego project office ultimately kept every Tom, Dick and Harry from showing up at the Fort and charging the whole thing to us, which was exactly what was happening up until then. What gave us more impetus and leverage now was the fact that nuclear fuel was loaded and security provisions were now in place as they would be for any nuclear installation. In or around the middle of 1974, I dashed off some scary prose on the subject of cost control at the site and typed up a Telex version of the same; sending it to as many people as I could. Part of the cost control picture was this business of travel authorization.
Thanks to the lobbying efforts by some of the financial people in San Diego and, frankly, from some of my trips down there to make the point; we had a new 1974 budget which now was based on the most recent realities of problems encountered with the phased start up of the reactor. It wasn’t just the circulators, but the plant control rod drive mechanisms, the plant hydraulic power system, the seam generators [which would not dry out], and a host of other technical issues confronting us. This new budget would take us out to the fall months of the year. When you add time to a schedule it’s just like adding length to a sailboat: you always add it right at the middle and not at the ends, so each month added yielded a much larger number for costs for the year. Gulf Oil wanted to keep things under control by budgeting for one given year in what they called an operating plan which ran from December to December. The new budget was for right about thirty-two mil for FY 74 and an even higher projected amount for FY 75.
For probably the first time, I began to rack up the exactly what the total cost indicated at completion would probably be for the whole job. This included all cost incurred from previous years, current costs charged to program area 197, and my own projection of what future costs would be. I used some of the old seventy-two column worksheets that I found down at the San Diego accounting offices and began to post, plot and square balance the totals. I was astounded to find that the total projected costs at forecasted completion were now well past the point of one point six billion dollars, making our project the most expensive [costs per installed Kw} reactor in world history up to that point. For the past few months I had been making an accrual for a cost element called “backup power” about which I knew nothing. The backup power invoices were shipped directly to San Diego and judicially paid by Accounts Payable on a signature.
Beverly Butler down in San Diego would give me the numbers that were coming in for backup power for the project and I would accrue in an estimate for next month’s actual cost; to be reversed out later and the invoiced amount put in its place. On one of my San Diego trips I saw one of the invoices for the backup power from Public Service and it didn’t make any sense to me; which should have been a big red flag right away. Second of all, the invoices were getting bigger as time went on and were now approaching one million dollars a month which were actual dollars we were paying the Public Service Company of Colorado apparently for the privilege of working on one of their plants. Law department person Dick Yale was able to give me some background. The backup power agreement between GA and PSCCo was arrived at through both negotiation and contractual interpretation.
Yale was talking about a contract which he referred to as the “two party” and I immediately pulled out my copy of the main body of the contract between the then AEC, PSSCo, and GA. Dick said “No, that’s the wrong one to look at.” There were actually two major contracts involving the parties: the first he called the three party agreement which spelled out the requirements and party obligations between the then Atomic Energy Commission, the supplier [GA}, and the utility [PSCCo]. For the three party, an agreement was made as to a total cost cap of approximately so many million dollars which would be split three ways, the commission funding approximately one third, the utility a fixed one third plus some change orders, and [ostensibly] all of the remainder to be the responsibility of the then General Dynamics Corporation.
It was through this contract that what is called the “two party agreement” between GA and PSCCo was first derived. According to the two party agreement, GA was responsible for consequential damages to the PSCCo utility and would indeed be in breech if performance targets were not met by the new reactor supplier. That phrase “consequential damages” is rarely seen in contractual language; while it is usually common to see a clause for “liquidated damages” when performance targets are not met by a contractor for the delivery of an item.
We all know what “late charges” are from our basic dealings with banks and credit institutions – these late charges for performance levied by such institutions are in the category of liquidated damages. Consequential damages are entirely different. The vendor is responsible, in that case, not for some pre-agreed to “liquidated amount” but to whatever damage may be held to be of consequence to the late delivery of the item – such as loss of revenue from normal business. For a football stadium contract with a consequential damages clause, the stadium contractor would be potentially liable to the contracting parties for loss of projected revenue lost from football games not played in a six-month late job that actually went through the fall season. It’s unknown who or how this clause ever got in to the contract in the first place but many of us suspect that it was something negotiated in by PSCCo vice president Dick Walker and president Bob Persons during the contract definition phase in the mid sixties.
To solve the potential contractual breech problem caused directly by the consequential damages clause outlined above, the GA law personnel and PSCCo council came up with a formula for paying the utility for electricity not generated by the Fort St. Vrain reactor. This was in a number of parts. One part provided for the construction of two fifty megawatt gas turbines at Fort Lupton [near Platteville] and the monthly operation and maintenance costs for said gas turbines as they may be incurred by the utility. Part two was basically the gas turbine output in megawatt hours subtracted from the intended output of Fort St. Vrain and then that number multiplied by a normalized system-wide operation and maintenance per megawatt hour figure in order to calculate production cost differential. This was a little tricky since you had to back out one of the most efficient units that PSCCo was running that month plus add in a dummy amount for outside power purchases from other utilities [which have always been unregulated]; the excess being effectively billed to GA.
When you finished all of the calcs, you came up with a number that was roughly between half a million to one and a half million dollars for any given month, dependent on the operation figures for the gas turbines and the system costs for generating and buying power at Public Service Company of Colorado.
I took a lot of notes and then laid the math operations out on a chart and – subsequent to translating the math into English -- went through the calcs with management. In using the little examples I made up and one of those new HP calculators, you could easily do model cases and see how the total numbers could fluctuate up and down with minor inputs. What was immediately apparent was that the 1974 cost of distillate fuel for providing the Fort Lupton generation was beginning to go right up through the roof of the building, thus making the backup power agreement a major budget line item – many times exceeding site labor cost.
The result of all of this was that everyone, including the Gulf people from Pittsburg started to believe that I was the only person in the western world that understood the monthly billing to GA and was therefore the only person who could verify the invoice. Thanks to Jim Reader of PSCCo and a lot of other helpful personnel, I made visits to Comanche, Cherokee, Arapaho, and Valmont generating stations to see for myself where some of the numbers were coming from.
The Gulf auditors from Price Waterhouse came out to go over some of these figures and the other financial obligations prior to the partnership agreement with Royal Dutch Shell. These figures, I explained, were originally caused by people who are by now long gone at GA. They, as the senior Price Waterhouse partner explained, had never imagined that GA was indeed in the power business right along with a major utility and the consequential damages being incurred and charged would only increase as time went by.
While giving them a plant tour construction manager Bill Gould and I carefully explained to them that not only was GA in the power business, we were paying for generation sold by Public Service of Colorado and other western utilities and never receiving a penny of revenue. All of these costs were incurred by Gulf and the new to-be partner Royal Dutch Shell as a part of deferred research & development charges for making the HTGR a reality—no one apparently knew the extent that we were into the quicksand and sinking further with Public Service. The Price-Waterhouse General Partner that visited actually sat back in a meeting and said that “this situation is a whole lot worse than the Queen Mary [a re-construction and restoration project being completed by the city of Long Beach] which is not the usual deportment for the average accounting firm partner.
Some of our unusual behaviors on site were compared and/or contrasted with the bizarre activities of some of our predecessors of years before and it was beginning to make us start to question nearly everything. The site legendary recount of many of the actions of GA management was nearly as comical as it was bad fortune for us in the here and now. We learned for instance, what transpired prior to the decision being made to sell GA as a unit of General Dynamics. As I mentioned before, I worked for General Dynamics and I know that one of the things that they keep a strangle hold on are capital expenditures. Apparently, the old GA had managed to let enough contracts underneath the GD radar to achieve at least partial construction of Fort St. Vrain. The relationship was rather good at the time – being that GA was never one of the big corporation’s problem areas. The time had come, though, to purchase the steam turbine machine which can only be bought as a single unit on one large purchase order from General Electric.
General Electric is smart enough to know about levels of capital expenditure authorization since they’ve been dealing with power companies and governments for over one hundred years. Basically it’s “if you don’t have one of your organization’s purchase orders in hand – we don’t start work on your steam turbine” and that is as simple as that. The GA people tried to make GE a sort of “partner” in the new technology but the Large Steam Turbine Division in Schenectady did not see things entirely in this way and told him to get a purchase order from Number One Rockefeller Plaza in New York or build your plant with someone else’s turbine-generator.
Failing to secure a partnership with GE, our management was then forced to go to the president of General Dynamics, Roger Lewis, to get a company purchase order signed --or the General Electric Company in Schenectady simply would not begin work. According to many, the then current management at GA was trying to explain to Roger Lewis why they were trying to buy a commercial sized steam turbine for an experimental plant to no avail. General Atomic Division was for sale within twenty a few hours of that fateful meeting back at Number One, Rockefeller Plaza.
Lewis’s reluctance can be easily understood since he was for the first time confronted with the reality that these guys out at that fabulous country club on the west coast really were building a full scale power station in a very real world. General Dynamics had written off over a billion dollars on another San Diego organization just a few years before [see FORTUNE – General Dynamics-- How a Great Corporation Got Out of Control – circa 1962]. Back then, it’s then burgeoning Convair Division was engaged in a large commercial jet transport program [the Convair 880/990] which represented what some called an out-of-control entry into an unknown commercial market by one of their divisions. An astute CEO, Mr. Lewis was not about to enter into the electric utility business with a full-scale plant that was supposed to be a prototype [or, was that the other way around?].
By the forces of sheer coincidence and what some would call good fortune, it turns out that back in 1967 the Gulf Oil Corporation was looking for some way to get better return on its cash investment which would yield good profit in latter years. It wasn’t the HTGR itself that Gulf was really interested in at all but an inroad into electric utility operations with a unique fuel cycle. The GA entity could loose money on ten or twenty plants, but the long run was paved with gold since the fuel cycle was unique when one considers pressurized water reactors and boiling water reactors didn’t use this type of fuel and were not nearly as thermally efficient as the HTGR proposed plants in the seven hundred and eleven hundred megawatt range.
Dennis Betcher, Jim Reeg, [in San Diego] and I knew of these objectives and philosophy because we were among the ones who ran the HTGR Business Model where all of these things were intended to come together along with a projection of sales. The original business model had what was called a “ten plant economy” which showed gross profits subsequent to ten HTGR units being in service. But we had to get Fort St. Vrain running or nobody was going to buy anything.
It was summer now and my ex decided to close the University of Colorado biology department lunchroom for a couple of weeks and take a break. She managed to save enough for a vacation back to see her folks in Fairmont, West Virginia which was a real bright reward for her many efforts. Jim Read, the West Virginian from Stearns Roger and Judy had become fast friends and he gave her a pen that had “Almost Heaven- West Virginia” inscribed on the side and she took that along for good luck. She was off on an airplane from Stapleton airport from the same spot were I usually left for business trips to San Diego.
The test engineers that I had made friends with took me under their wing so I would have a place to eat dinner without going out to a restaurant to eat. I wound up working backshift with some of them and actually working on some of the things I was writing about. I watched gauges, monitored level control devices, and generally did whatever I was told as a good apprentice engineer should. Before long, I was hanging tags for clearances and walking down systems for test preparation. I started talking in power station jargon and wearing a flashlight in a holster on my hip. I had a “shift weenie” pad in my upper left shirt pocket where I would make notes of the days’ things to be done and would knock open doors with my size 13 steel-towed safety shoes.
Where I was afraid to get on the plant elevators before, I was now so bold as to scream and yell back at some of the always heckling craft labor personnel in their red hats—telling them to “Get the out of the way . . . !” For this, I gained some acceptance in the form of after hours drink and conversation at the Oasis. George T. Colgan, technical head of the GA shift supervisors and another ex-nuclear submarine fraternity man was kind enough to refer to me as a “good hand” which was one of the highest complements that he could have given me my efforts out in the plant. The probable thinking behind George’s statement was that I had on many occasions drafted memos for the shift supervisors signature and some procedures as well and had been generally helpful in moving some of the personnel interviewing and hiring process out to the Fort. Our reasoning for the latter action was to make the actual workplace a part of the interview for new engineering people. This place, after all, is more like an offshore oil rig than any business or engineering office that folks are used to working in.
We were working on what was called System 91 – a hydraulic power and control system for the plant valves when I started to make my bones. This was a 3,600 pound per square inch system which contained a total of about 900 gallons of Gulf Harmony 53 hydraulic oil. The system was a cantankerous nightmare that had the habit of extruding gaskets and “o” rings and then subsequently soaking everything down within two hundred feed with a high pressure hydraulic oil mist. We were performing pressure tests on part of the four inch lines, valves, gaskets, o-rings and so forth in one of the plant’s interior locations, lost in a maize of piping, valves and fittings. The pumps [called HydroLasers] were coming up to design pressure so we hot-wired one of the big hydraulic control valves to test for freedom of full-stroke operation to find out if we had a system. Most of us have never seen a large plant hydraulic valve and a power operator – the valve itself is huge and the operator is just about as big as my red Volkswagen and just about three times as heavy. I was sitting in amongst the hydraulic lines as we cycled the valve and when it hit the end of its stroke it felt like a larger than moderate earthquake had occurred on the pipes I was sitting on and holding on to. I had grown almost insensitive to the constant noise and mechanical contortions that were always around me so I didn’t react a whole lot, grabbing for my hard hat and slamming it on my head after wiping off my brow while sitting on my perch in the piping.
Subsequent to my shift; the HydroLasers were headed on their way to going up and up in pressure, the needles passing through 4,900 on the gauges nearest to Tommy Steller. Tommy told me a little later that at about five thousand pounds per square inch all of the needles began to oscillate and then the HydroLasers began to join the chorus by jumping up and down. Tommy said that this was all quite a spectacle since by now all of the test gauges were a blur between five and ten thousand pounds and the red–hat craft personnel were starting to move out of the area like they were cats. Some PSCCo quality assurance guy signed off on the test saying “yeah, looks like about 6,750 . . .” which was the intended target test pressure and then pulled the power to the HydroLasers and all was comparatively quiet. All of the gauges were pegged out with their needles on the other side of the peg. Glad I wasn’t there the whole time for that one. I was becoming overconfident, though. Often times I would run into scaffolding with my head while running up the grated steps heading somewhere in a hurry– not seeing [or looking] at what was to come beyond the brim of my white hardhat and slamming my neck and head pretty good. I would walk around for ten to twenty minutes saying to everyone “I’m OK, I’m OK.”
After George Sausmann from the San Onofre station decided to go back to that place on the West Coast, Dave Miklush came to be lead engineer on 91 System operational testing. Like everyone else who had worked on System 91, Sausmann had left at the wrong time. The cantankerous and messy system was still beset with problems – many stemming from the four-bolt flange design on high pressure pipe interfaces. An “O” ring was used to provide a seal against the nominal 3,600 psi pressure which would self-destruct upon encountering an even small amount of mechanical flexing or contortions in the line. In any power station, lines of all types encounter a lot of forces making them bounce around like they were all fabricated from nutty-putty and crazy rubber. Assuming static conditions for the System 91 piping was like assuming the same for a concrete batch plant or a jet fighter aircraft—it ain’t gonna happen.
What was happening now were high pressure leaks from the ubiquitous system in which it would be raining a fine mist of Harmony 53 until inventories of oil were sufficiently down in the reservoir tank. The sight would be unbelievable -- a fine olive-oil like coating on everything from fire hoses to light bulbs, not to mention the walls and grating. All would have to be completely cleaned up using a cat-litter-like material called Sorb-All which we were beginning to get by the freight car load.
The 91 System was intended to provide a central power source for all of the main valves in the plant sans the valves associated with the steam turbine electro-hydraulic control system which [happily] had its own system which was supplied by General Electric. I’m telling the reader this because it is yet another weak link in the reactor control system since helium circulator speed control and main steam bypass were all done through 91. As I write this today in 2004 I still haven’t found a person who can believe that anyone would design a plant in this way.
Throughout the startup testing for the remainder of the plant structures, systems, and components; System 91 was kept running largely through the efforts of the young engineer Dave Miklush who was the GA person supervising the entire show for 91. Like I said before, Dave worked in his father’s gas station while going to school at UCLA and he had a better handle on all things mechanical than anybody with any PhD, I don’t care what school they came from. Under his dad’s tutelage at the service station he had learned that things have to be fixed right now and not referred to some goddam meeting or committee and thus he fit into the power station culture very well [which was quite separate from the GA culture at San Diego].
Yet another point about the 91 System is that it was another San Diego orphan. The people who performed the original spec and design were not available for comment and whenever pressed for engineering support; the San Diego offices would respond that they were busy with new reactor proposals. On-site support through visits were deliberately short and brief in nature – many engineers taking the morning plane out to Stapleton International and taking the evening plane back to their homes in beautiful San Diego [Is that all of the questions you have? . . . It’s really getting late and we’re going to have to be leaving . . . .” they would say all the while making their way to an exit]. It’s quite possibly a bad thing to motivate personnel by great places to live. Once the individual settles in, the motivation is shifted towards staying there and not going any place else.
I have to say that through all of this technical exposure and excitement that I was still was the financial representative and, accordingly, my general efforts had turned to doing an onsite audit of Stearns-Roger. I involved everyone that I could – mostly the test, watch, and nuclear engineers on the GA side who were knowledgeable enough about the different item expenditures that were coming through the monthly by-now two-foot high Stearns billing. We were able to summarily exclude thousands of dollars just by everyone questioning everything they saw and following up. I took care of the audit issue dollar amounts by obtaining credit invoicing from Stearns located in the same package as their monthly billing. In this way, credits for audit results could be obtained on site as opposed to involving someone like Fritz Weigand [a Stearns VP] in these issues. On one big issue, the application of overheads by the corporate billing department, Bill Gould and I were able to get some concessions from Mr. Weigand because of the way we presented the material.
It was Bill Gould’s idea that we had to write out a report of some kind – which was a task we performed [mostly by Bill] over the next month or so. One has to tell people what happened and about what in is you are working on in a simple and meaningful way. People don’t get on the same page with you through some kind of organizational osmosis or by reading a lot of memos and assembling the necessary ideas in their own heads. It sound old school, but a report [even a hand-written one] can become an object of reference and a focus for all concerned. The resulting typewritten report we were able to gin up wound up being the basis for what became known as the Stearns-Roger Management Audit published later by John Wilson and company out of the Gulf Oil Corporation Audits Department.
Another winter had settled in and this one was more focused and yet more subtle than the previous. The bright blue skies gave slowly away to gray and the roaring of the crop dusting aircraft had long since been silenced. Almost like the second child that I’ve heard about from many parents; the second winter seems to be less of a shock on one’s senses. We were getting ready for another gloomy fall and our moods were now as gray as the weather. The plant, it turns out, is literally riddled with both small and large design problems and we were slowly but surely becoming overwhelmed.
New boss MacCormick had come out to see us to cheer us all up and to remind us that we were the cutting edge of the future for the GA organization. This, only after loosing every major plant order for future business – which was the case for almost everyone in the nuclear power market after the Brown’s Ferry incident. Tennessee Valley Authority’s Brown’s Ferry Nuclear Generating Station was the 1974 subject of conversation in reactor circles since one of the power units there came into an out-of-control regime subsequent to a large control and power cable fire which destroyed most of the electrical spaghetti going to the reactor itself. The plant was adrift for hours with only one residual heat removal pump running and everybody’s fingers were crossed in the hopes that the water level in the reactor core would not recede to the point where the fuel elements would be uncovered and subsequently melt in place.
The new subject of conversation was “separation and segregation [of major control and electrical cable] in nuclear power stations”—what would soon become what would be known as eye-triple-e two-seventy-nine [Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers standard number 279]. This meant that all commercially licensed nuclear stations had to demonstrate exactly how the control and electrical lines to key safety components were separated enough in the plant space to preclude a potential disaster in the case of a catastrophic fire. This affected everyone in the industry and some design teams frankly gave up the ghost when confronted with the problem of control and power separation and segregation. Cancellation of nuclear projects in the far future was the order of the day for many utility and design teams and the once all-too-crowded schedule for future construction of plants from one American coast to the other began to dwindle to plants that were well underway.
Brian Ng, an engineer immigrant from the Pacific Rim, was the person who was able to systemize the cable segregation sorting problem at Fort St. Vrain. Brian “computerized” the legwork required for the problem and thus provided a ready solution right there on the spot instead of some of the rest of the engineering staff back down in San Diego who could only provide a continuous stream of technical questions. I’ve seen this a lot, now. When confronted with a problem – instead of responding with an answer or an immediate path to solution – the technical person responds with a bunch of questions or statements about how if this and that were true or not true the situation would be entirely different. But [the reader sees] the situation is not different. Things are not different or how we would like them to be – they are as they are and our purpose and goal is to go on from there. Asking a lot of questions is a way of moving your mouth and not your feet when it comes to getting things done.
Brian Ng did the dog-work that a lot of engineering actually is. Like accounting and manufacturing, engineering is sometimes slugging out the results line item after line item for a seemingly endless pile of data which was never organized by anyone. You thought when you were in college that you would be making sweeping and esoteric decisions regarding major points of design – this, however, rarely happens in one’s career. Most of the time, individual effort involves the pick-and-shovel work that nobody really wants to do but has to eventually be done. The important second thing that Brian did was to be accountable and take responsibility for his actions – which in itself was and anomaly in an organization that had become all too used to saying “That’s not a GA responsibility.” This particular notion coupled with some of the more poisonous strategies of our employees from outside vendors like the one who told us that we had to literally learn to lie on paper if GA was to be an active competitor in the reactor business.
The observant reader may by now have discerned that many decisions, operations, endeavors, thinking, and management in general was being done by a bunch of kids. This to is, I am afraid, most correct. The bulk of us were in our twenties or early thirties with the bulk of our adult supervision back in San Diego; far too busy to come out and see what was happening had left us to contend with a plant that was “. . . already designed and built” and merely had to go through a short start up phase. Many of the problems that were being encountered were no different than any crew encounters on any startup and this was the chicken soup being ladled out to electric utilities on a daily basis by the whole staff of senior management heavyweights at the GA La Jolla campus from J. W. Landis on down.
I encountered the ire of the majority of these heavyweights when I took it upon myself to push for paid overtime for site individuals. Through a little bit of work, I placed the facts and figures on hours needed to perform the forecasted startup effort by task which added up to over forty percent more than the people we had. No significant input would be received from San Diego since they were already 1) in a hiring freeze and, 2) were now working on something called the Standard 1500 megawatt unit.
This meant overtime for everybody, the only thing missing being the pay. The question was how and when we were going to be paid. Hank Anthony made his feelings known when he stated over the squawker that “all of you are on nothing but a big fat ski vacation, anyway [Ha, Ha]” -- which was about all I needed since personally intervening to thwart efforts by site personnel to fly down to San Diego and demolish Accounts Payable along with a few other GA buildings and bulldoze the debris down into Sorrento Valley. We wanted compensation for time worked –not really any for myself but for most everyone out there who were giving up a significant portion of their lives for the startup effort. After many analyses, a number of presentations, much cajoling, and even some threats of informing the press; we got the compensation for overtime hours worked – which I have to say is one of my grandest and heartfelt accomplishments even after all of these years.
It seems like whenever one is sufficiently up on what is going on and has created or copied financial systems which are up and running rather smoothly, some unforeseen element of change comes into the picture. This for me was an offer from the utility Southern California Edison out in Los Angeles to come work for them in their organization. The work that I had accomplished had made an impact elsewhere in the power industry and I had succeeded in making a reputation that I did not even know about. Financial Manager Al Eberhardt and Audits Manager John Wilson came out to Colorado to [among a lot of other things] ask me to stay with the Gulf organization; but to no avail. In the space of one month, my wife and I were traveling across the desert – heading to a city in which we had said on many occasions that we would never live: Los Angeles.
The plant was still in SUT or start up testing phases, and it would remain so for a number of years in the future. Royal Dutch Shell would back out of their partnership with Gulf Oil and the surviving partner would pay untold sums in additional reimbursement to the Colorado utility to free themselves of the obligations incurred by unwittingly getting themselves into the power business. One of the original Seven Sisters, Gulf itself would be acquired by Standard Oil of California and all of the people that I come to know in Pittsburgh and Houston would be disbursed throughout the nation.
Most of the GA people from Fort St. Vrain would be go on to be contributors at one of the many reactor construction and operation sites that exist throughout the world. Those PSCCo guys that I talked so well of before deserved all of my admiration since it was they, not us, who ran Fort St. Vrain at one-hundred percent -- full commercial power. The site itself would ultimately undergo dramatic change by having the entire nuclear portion of the plant demolished and removed-- becoming a gas-fired power station. The large concrete PCRV would be cut up into manageable cheese cake slices using what is called “diamond wire” technology. Public Service Company of Colorado would join with Southwest Public Service and become New Centuries Energies and then merge into a Minnisota organization called Xcel Energy and thus would also be no more.
For the Southern California Edison Company I would be a boiler mechanic, a contract administrator, a multi-media producer and an auditor. Fort St. Vrain would be one of the smaller of plants that I would ever see from then on; Huntington Beach, Mohave, Hoover, Ormond Beach, San Onofre and Alamitos power stations all being in the one to two thousand megawatt range. Quite a number of us were spread across the US in different power jobs here and there, the personnel department at GA always complaining [although never in writing] that we were not supposed to quit and then subsequently move over to an electric utility or to any organization which may be a potential customer. I would spend the remainder of my career working for the Los Angeles based power company. As the generation capability drifted away from the major electric utilities, I was able to retire with a whole lot of others from the power business for good. There are only a handful of individuals located at GA now who were stationed at Fort St. Vrain.
As I said up at the beginning, you’ll get differing stories from different sources about that onetime nuclear plant up in Colorado and this isn’t really a story anyway since it has no ending. My tale is how a very young man in his twenties grew up a little bit. Some of our youth inspired decisions really did wind up counting and perhaps provided others with more focus and clarity along the way. It’s possible that even this short piece will one day become a semi-official chapter in a story anthology which may someday be assembled. Nobody knows the real whole story. In a way, you probably all see that it is perhaps the lucky ones among us who are always growing, always searching, trying to reach out. In my opinion, most of the current and former General Atomics people are in a perpetual state of journeying to their dreams and goals as we all were once during our travels to a place called Fort St. Vrain.
---Ronald H. JagodinskiApril, 2008
Traveling to Fort St. Vrain
Part 5
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