The article, written by John Fialka, is titled Bush Seeks to Jump-Start Nuclear Power. I was especially pleased by the topic of the article, nuclear fuel recycling. I was very encouraged yesterday to find that one of its articles turned up in one of my Google news alert summaries. It looks like the Wall Street Journal is realizing that offering some of its excellent content for free might help to draw in new readers. I’ve retained it here as background material. This part used to be at the top of the post. My wonder turns to cynicism when I think about the policies that his administration imposed and the damage that they did to the growth of the industry just at a time when we most needed a vibrant new energy industry player. When I think about the 1976 campaign and the importance of the energy issue at that time, I cannot help but wonder why Jimmy Carter’s promoters made such a big deal about his nuclear expertise. He never experienced the incredible gift of being able to operate a power plant that was so clean that it could run inside a sealed submarine, so reliable that it could power that submarine even deep under the Arctic ice, and so energy dense that the submarine could operate for years without new fuel. However, the USS Nautilus did not go to sea until January 17, 1955, so there is no possibility that he ever qualified to stand watch on a nuclear powered submarine. The prototype for the USS Nautilus was completed in Idaho in May 1953, so LT Carter might have had some opportunity to see it in action before leaving the Navy. According to an old friend of mine who served as Rickover’s personnel officer at Naval Reactors, LT Carter did not complete nuclear power school because of the need to take care of business at home. He was discharged from active duty on 9 October, 1953. In July 1953, his father passed away and he resigned his commission to run the family peanut farm. He started nuclear power school (a six month course of study that leads to operator training) in March, 1953. In November 1952, he began a three month temporary duty assignment at the Naval Reactor branch. He served in a variety of billets, including engineer officer of diesel submarines and qualified to command submarines. Even if the Naval Academy had offered a majors program for his class, it is unlikely that it would have included Nuclear Engineering as a option – after all, the Manhattan Project was a dark secret for most of his time at Annapolis.Īfter graduation, Jimmy Carter served as a surface warfare officer for two years and then volunteered for the submarine force. He graduated from the US Naval Academy in June 1946 (he entered in 1943 with the class of 1947, but his class was in a war-driven accelerated 3 year program) with an undesignated bachelor of science degree. President Carter was a submarine officer, but he was not a nuclear engineer. It is definitely the right thing to do our current once-through cycle only extracts about 3-5% of the potential energy of the initial fuel loads. I enjoyed your story about new efforts to recycle nuclear fuel. The below is a letter to a Wall Street Journal writer in response to an article about used nuclear fuel recycling. He left the Navy in October 1953, about 15 months before Jan 17, 1955, the day the the world’s first nuclear submarine went to sea. It provides documented proof that Jimmy Carter was not a “nuclear engineer” and never served on a nuclear submarine. A recent conversation about the dangers of false claims of expertise stimulated me to revise and republish a nearly 11 year-old post.
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