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The Indiana Century Podcast
Navy Nuclear Safety Culture | Indiana Century S1E15
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The United States Navy has operated nuclear reactors for 70 years. Hundreds of submarines and aircraft carriers. Thousands of reactor years of operation. Zero reactor accidents. Zero meltdowns. Zero releases of radioactive material that caused harm to the public.
That record is not luck. It is the result of a safety culture built from scratch by Admiral Hyman Rickover, a culture so powerful that every Navy nuclear veteran carries it for life.
In this episode, host Kory sits down with Ken Hull, a fellow Navy nuclear veteran from the USS New Mexico. Ken served as a shutdown reactor operator and qualified Engineering Watch Supervisor. Today, he works as an instrumentation and controls technician at the Crane Clean Energy Center, the former Three Mile Island plant that is being restarted.
They discuss what makes Navy nuclear safety culture different. The three pillars: conservative design, relentless training, and questioning attitude. The Swiss cheese model where enough small failures lead to disaster, and why the Navy treats small things like big things so big things never happen. The containment system that protected the public even during the Three Mile Island partial meltdown. The difference between Navy and commercial nuclear. And why small modular reactors that are factory built and standardized like Navy reactors are the future.
Ken also shares his perspective on data centers, state ownership versus corporate control, and why he would love to see a nuclear reactor back in his home state of Indiana.
The featured book is "Admiral Rickover and the Nuclear Navy" by Francis Duncan, the definitive history of the man who invented the gold standard.
Show Notes
Featured Book: Admiral Rickover and the Nuclear Navy by Francis Duncan
Guest: Ken Hull, former Navy nuclear operator, USS New Mexico; Reactor I&C Tech at Crane Clean Energy Center.
Topics: Navy nuclear safety culture, small modular reactors, Three Mile Island restart, spent fuel storage, containment systems, fast reactors, state owned infrastructure, Host Community Fee, ICC Energy Corps
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Hello and welcome to the Indiana Century Podcast, hosted by Corey Easterday. Episode 15, Navy Nuclear Safety Culture. Part 1. The Unbroken
Part 1 - The Unbroken Record
Record. Seventy years. Hundreds of reactors. Thousands of reactor years of operation. Submarines underneath the ice caps. Aircraft carriers in combat zones. Young service members barely out of high school, operating equipment that could, if mishandled, cause catastrophic damage. Zero reactor accidents. Zero meltdowns, zero release of radioactive material that caused harm to the public. That's not luck or an exaggeration. That is the United States Navy's nuclear propulsion program. The Gold Standard. The only large-scale nuclear operation on Earth with a perfect safety record spanning seven decades. I know that record from the inside. But this episode isn't about me. It's about what that culture actually is, where it came from, how it works, and what Indiana can steal from it as we build our own nuclear future. Because here's the thing: small modular reactors are coming to Indiana. The TVA Coalition includes Indiana Michigan Power. Rockport Plant is a potential site. The Indiana Energy and Resilience Authority will be standing up SMR sites across the state. But reactors aren't just hardware. The thing that makes nuclear power safe is not the steel, it's the people. And the culture those people carry. So today we talk about someone who lived that culture, a fellow Navy nuke from the USS New Mexico, someone who trained in the pipeline, stood watch, qualified engineering watch supervisor, and now works as an instrumentation and controls technician at the Crane Clean Energy Center, the former Three Mile Island plant that's being restarted. But before we get to that conversation, I want to tell you about the man who built this culture from nothing. Admiral Hyman Rickover.
Part 2 - The Rickover Revolution
Part 2. The Rickover Revolution. Rickover was not an easy man. He was abrasive, relentless, impatient with excuses. He personally interviewed every single naval officer candidate for the Naval Nuclear Program for decades. He would sit them in a chair, shine a light in their face, and grill them for hours. Not to humiliate them, even though sometimes it seemed like that. It was to see if they had moral courage, to see if they would admit when they didn't know something. I don't know, but I will find out, was an acceptable answer. Bluffing was disqualifying. But Rickover understood something fundamental. Nuclear reactors are not like diesel engines. The consequences of failure are catastrophic, so the margin for error must be zero. But zero error is impossible for humans. So you must build systems that make error unlikely, detectable, and recoverable. And you must build a culture that never stops watching for the next mistake. He built three pillars that still define the nuclear navy today. The first pillar is conservative design, where we build in a margin. Don't push materials to their limits, assume the unexpected will happen, and design around it. On submarines, this means redundant systems. Multiple ways to cool the reactor, multiple ways to control it, multiple ways to shut it down. You don't rely on any single component working perfectly. The second pillar is relentless training. Operators don't just memorize procedures, they learn the actual physics, they learn why things work, they learn to diagnose before acting. The training pipeline is famously brutal. Six months of nuclear power school, forty to sixty hours of class per week, plus mandatory study, then six months on a prototype reactor, running drills, responding to casualties, learning under pressure, then years of sea duty, qualifying and re-qualifying. You never stop learning. Third pillar is questioning attitude. Every sailor is empowered to stop the plant if something doesn't look right. Rank does not override safety. Pre-job briefs before every evolution. Post-job critiques after every evolution. No punishment for honest mistakes that are caught and reported. Punishment is reserved for hiding mistakes. As my guest later puts it, the Navy teaches you to treat small things like big things. So big things never happen. If you're anal about gloves and tag outs, you're probably not letting a bigger corner get cut somewhere else. That's the culture, and it's been proven to work.
Part 3 - Featured Book
Part three Featured Book. This episode's featured book is Admiral Rickover and the Nuclear Navy by Francis Duncan. Duncan was a historian for the Department of Energy and the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program. He had access to Rickover's papers, his correspondence, his inner circle. This is not a hagiography. Duncan shows Rickover's flaws, his abrasiveness, his unwillingness to delegate, his destructive treatment of some subordinates. But he also shows why Rickover succeeded where others failed. No book will ever come closer than this to providing an inside overview of Admiral Hyman G. Rickover's nuclear propulsion program. The author, an Atomic Energy Commission historian assigned to the Admiral's office, spent years observing the project and its controversial leader and action, and the insights he provides here reflect both his familiarity with the subject and his ability to remain an objective observer. From 1974 to the day Rickover retired in 1982, Francis Stuncan had free access to files, documents, and personnel at every level of involvement. A rare, never to be repeated opportunity that most historians dream of, but few get. And, as this book clearly shows, he took full advantage of the situation to gain a unique understanding of exactly how the program operated. The result is a thorough, balanced record of what may well be the US Navy's and the nation's most important and far-reaching project of the twentieth century. Knowing the facts and figures alone, don't tell the entire story. Duncan talked to scores of people who dealt with day-to-day operations, watched men in prototype training, and then accompanied them to sea, visited civilian and naval installations, and had close contact with Rick Over himself. He also interviewed former U.S. presidents, secretaries of the Navy, chiefs of naval operations, AEC chairmen, and legislative leaders who kept tabs on the projects but were removed from daily activities. Never once, the author says, did the Admiral attempt to interfere with his research, nor did Rickover read the manuscript. While the focus here is on the nuclear program, not the man, this book does provide fascinating insights into Rickover's personality and his efforts to maintain standards of excellence that would assure the program's safety and its ultimate success. Using one of the Admiral's favorite terms, the discipline of technology, to demonstrate the method of technological application advocated by Rickover, Duncan effectively balances technical detail with astute analysis and even drama. Filled with information not found elsewhere. His study is a valuable chronicle of the development of submarine propulsion reactors, the loss of the thresher, the struggle over the application of nuclear propulsion to surface fleet, and the use of the shipping port atomic power plant to illustrate the feasibility of a light water breeder reactor. Duncan argues that Rickover's greatest achievement was not any single reactor design, it was the culture, the training pipeline, the questioning attitude, the relentless focus on safety as the non-negotiable foundation. Here's what's striking about this book. Rickover started with nothing. No commercial nuclear industry existed, no training programs, no regulatory framework, no public trust. He had to invent all of it. He proved it could be done. Indiana doesn't have to invent from scratch. We have the Rickover model. We have the Navy's 70 years of experience. We have thousands of Navy nuclear veterans living in Indiana right now. The playbook exists. We just need to follow it. Alright, let's get to today's guest.
Part 4 - Guest Interview
Part 4. Guest interview. My guest today is Ken Hull. We serve together on the USS New Mexico. Ken is a former Hoosier, now living in Pennsylvania, where he works as an instrumentation and controls technician at the Crane Clean Energy Center, the former Three Mile Island plant that's being restarted. He was a shutdown reactor operator and qualified engineering watch supervisor on the boat. He knows this culture from the inside. Here's our conversation. I'm great, Corey. Glad to be here. Yeah, thanks for being here. So uh we used to be in the Navy together. We served on the same submarine, the USS New Mexico. Um so tell us a little bit about uh yourself and what you currently do for work. Um well I'm uh a former Hoosier. I live in Pennsylvania now, though, where where my uh significant other uh grew up, um not very far outside of Harrisburg. And currently I am an instrumentation and controls technician at Three Mile Island, the Crane Clean Energy Center, um where we're trying to do work to get the plant started back up and on the grid again. Cool. So you're saying start back up. Uh give us a quick history, like how long was it shut down? Why? Um so Three Mile Island famously um had two reactors in um you know in the 1970s. Um they had the accident on Unit 2, but Unit One Um has operated safely for 45 years until 2019. Um in 2019 uh they made the decision to shut the the plant down amid like a pretty uh competitive economic situation. Um nuclear power plants today often have two reactors on site because whenever they're shut down for refueling, um they're not making money, right? And so they'll shut down one one year to refuel, um, and then they'll shut down the other the other year. So they're so there's always one running. Yeah, so they balance out. Um but Three Mile Island only had the one unit running for 45 years. And uh towards the end of the 2010s, there was all this competition with natural gas and fracking that um kind of started to suppress energy prices and it and it cut that like profit margin closer and closer until eventually um the company decided it would be economically more beneficial to shut the plant down. Well, obviously, since then uh the AI boom, data center boom has really caused um energy prices to skyrocket and make things like um you know reopening a nuclear power plant make a lot more sense economically. Right. A lot more electrical demand. Yeah, tons of demand. It's stable base loading, it's the most reliable when it's on the grid. And there's also a lot of um you know, a lot of political pressure to uh to try to reduce carbon emissions and think about you know things like greenhouse gas emissions. And you know, nuclear doesn't produce any greenhouse gas emissions, so it it kills a lot of uh birds with a single stone, so to speak. Yeah, yeah. That is one of the one of the issues. I'd like to ask, uh, what does TMI do with their spent nuclear fuel? Well, um they do what um I understand pretty much everybody does. They have a um a storage pool on site where where hot fuel goes to cool down for a period of time to uh decay to become uh less radioactive, and then at a certain point it can be moved into uh to giant casks uh and concrete uh basically giant concrete shielded casks and then stored on site uh there too. Ideally, you know, we would have a place to put it, but it it's kind of difficult to uh to convince people to take nuclear waste. Um the good side of that is that um there is very like relative to the power output, there's very little nuclear waste. I'm pretty sure you could look on Google um Google Earth at Three Mile Island, and if you're sharp-eyed, you can find the uh place where they store it on the map there, and that's 45 years worth of fuel, essentially. Yeah, a lot of people don't understand that. They they think there's a lot of you know glowing green you know barrels sitting around. Yeah. But it's not the case. Um so you talked about one of the plants um being shut down for a while, and we know about the Three Mile Island accident. Uh a lot of people seem to think if there's a nuclear accident that the whole area is like an exclusion zone or dangerous for you know very long period of time. Um was that true for Three Mile Island? Uh that was not true for Three Mile Island. I mean, it's you know, uh a principle you and I learned in the Navy nuclear program is uh called containment, right? It's this strategy of multiple levels of basically control of any sort of radioactive material. Um, you know, we get this idea in our head because it happened at like Chernobyl and even Fukushima, which is an extreme case, there was some uncontrolled release of radioactivity to the environment in those situations. In the case of Chernobyl, they didn't use a containment facility as a few. Yeah, we covered that on this channel. They didn't even have one, right? Yeah, that's not the case in any facility in the United States. You have to build a containment facility. It's in fact one of the things that makes nuclear projects so expensive because these facilities are giant um thick concrete with reinforced steel and a tie- it's not even just poured concrete. There's very in-depth mechanisms that that make sure the integrity of that building is is as impregnable as as reasonably possible. And and so even when the Unit 2 at Three Mileand had a partial meltdown, um, they were able to contain pretty much all of the radioactive material to the site. There was a little bit of venting that was covered infamously at the time that was detectable, but it it didn't result in any amount of uh, you know, any any danger to any member of the public exceeding their annual dose uh limits. In fact, they depending on which report you read, they say it didn't even cause any member of the public to be exposed to greater than background radiation, which means effectively zero. Right. Yeah, so um seems like we learned a lesson the hard way from Chernobyl, you know, the importance of that can containment. And uh Three Mile Island is pretty good evidence that it works very well. Yeah, I would say so. Yep. So um I know in the Navy uh we both uh went through rigorous safety and continuous training programs because the name the Navy takes nuclear safety extremely serious. Yeah. So um first let's talk about what did you do in the Navy specifically? So I was a electrical maintenance all electrician's mate was the name, a nuclear electrician's mate, um, which meant that um I did maintenance on a lot of the electrical systems on board the submarine. But uh on submarines, as you know, um we were not just maintenance people, we're also the operators. So we uh we operated the nuclear power plant as well as maintained it in the Navy. Um specifically, I I was a shutdown reactor operator, so I babysat the plant when we were shut down, and eventually I was qualified engineering watch supervisor. So I was one of the the two-man team um the between the engineering watch supervisor and the engineering officer of the watch that that would manage operations. Yeah, thank you. It was it was uh one of the more uh difficult things I did in my life, and um I was proud of it. So it was it was cool to get to do that and um yeah, um you know, be in charge of the shift operating the plant when we're at sea and um then be in charge of the gooby sex and when we're shut down in court. Yeah, it's very cool. Now, what about um submarine safety in general? Because yes, we were both submariners, USS New Mexico, so I know it's not reactor safety, but uh what was your experience with just general subsafety? Between getting out of the Navy and uh and Three Mile Island reopening, um I worked for a little while for uh a group for the Navy as a civilian called NAMSE Logistics Center, specifically on um deep submergence systems, scope of certification, and subsafe systems. Uh so subsafe is a quality program that the Navy uses um to ensure first-time success of components, right? Um so the idea behind that is what can we do to give ourselves maximum reasonable assurance that this component won't break or won't fail. In terms like Subsafe, we're we're talking about like valves that if they failed, they would cause catastrophic flooding on a submarine. Right. And um, and you know, the same principle applies to any quality system, even nuclear systems have their own uh requirements, and and they're very, very, very rigorous in the Navy. I mean, the the level of detail, the level uh of you know um testing and assurance and uh documentation. Yeah, it's it's it's insane. It's it's it's it's almost obsessive, and I think it needs to be for applications like that. I've heard it been called a uh an obsessive safety culture. I think that's kind of Rick Over's whole thing. Yeah, I don't want to get into the details, but the whole subsafe system, uh, that is a lesson learned the hard way. Uh that's I believe the USS Thresher, right? Yeah, the Thresher, yeah. Right. We lost a whole submarine crew. It could have been preventable if we had that kind of program back then. So Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Now um with regards to uh reactor safety, uh what additional concerns do we have there? Well, you know, re specifically reactor safety, we've already kind of hit on containment. We don't want anything to get out. Um it's not just limited to um systems controlling um, you know, with subsafe and submarine safety, uh we're concerned about system integrity and maintaining boundaries. But on top of that, we we have additional concerns with nuclear power, like the big one is decay heat removal or uh continuous cooling of the core. Um so we add extra layers onto uh onto our systems to make sure, hey, not just is this pipe not gonna break, but are we able to move water into a reactor to cool it in the worst case uh situations? Because that's really the key. I mean, if you keep the core covered and keep the core cooled, like you're gonna avoid 90% of the worst things that can happen. Right. Um I like to use the example of I believe it I should have looked this up before, but I think it was the uh San Francisco. Were they the ones that ran into the underground mountain? Yeah, it sounds familiar. I I I don't want to Say yeah and be wrong, but I I I think you might be right. There was a submarine that ran into an under an uncharted underground mountain and it mangled the whole, you know, forward portion of that boat, but the reactor was fine. You know, there wasn't an accident, no leak of well take take for example the US Miami fire, right? Um you can watch that on the news. Yeah. She caught on fire in yeah, at at I think it was in the dry dock. And the ship, I mean, they they ended up scrapping the ship, I think, but the reactor, the entire time that that fire was engulfed on the front half of the ship, um, just overcoming everything, the reactor was safe. The operators in the aft end of the ship were safe, they were able to keep all the systems running without any effect on it. And it's pretty it's pretty jarring footage if you watch it, but it is. I might insert some of that into this video. Yeah. To think that you could have that happen and still have the reactor and safety systems be basically untouched is really a testament to how you know how robust those safety systems are. Yeah, that's how you can use engineering to you know protect ourselves against these things. Now you mentioned um reactor cooling. What about radiation? Because submarines are only about 300 feet long, and you're telling me we had an entire nuclear reactor plant on on board and we were sleeping right next to it. Yeah, I mean, so I you know, radiation's an interesting thing because you can't see it, but it causes all these problems and and you you can't smell it or or anything like that. But we know how it works pretty well, and um we know what materials absorb different types of radiation, and so we we were able to strategize, and this isn't like I say we, the operators, this was all done by the time we got on the submarine. Engineers who thought about this um really well developed shielding to um to make sure that anywhere we occupied um we were protected from dose rates that that would basically um keep us under, I mean, not just under the OSHA limits. The the Navy's limits were ten times more restrictive than the OSHA requirements. So um, yeah, it wasn't an issue. We slept next to it. You we worked dosimeters to to track it, and nobody ever I'm I think I had more radiation in a summer in port from the sun or even walking across asphalt um than than I did from uh being on the sub my time on the submarine. Oh yeah, definitely. How does the uh civilian nuclear life differ from Navy nuclear life? You know, um there's a lot of similarities. Um coming back to um nuclear power on the commercial side of things, uh especially because I went to a pressurized water reactor plant, um it's it's been, you know, there's some differences, but but mostly it's very similar. The thing I'm surprised the most by are like good things that make sense to me. Like like we don't need as much um we might have like multiple level sensors in in the ship to adjust for tilt, but you don't the the you know the commercial plant doesn't move, it doesn't go anywhere. It's just sitting there. Um, those are uh more simplified. They can be more simplified in cases. They can be more complex, but but one thing that surprises me is that there's um there's a lot of really standard um equipment um that we use that um I would almost say is like off-the-shelf equipment. Um now it obviously it has to be approved by the NRC, it has to be tested, it has to be reliable, it has to meet certain standards, but like one process instrument in one plant is probably the same process instrument they use in multiple other plants. And so um once you become familiar with it, it's it's gonna be everywhere. You know, and um, once the company makes it and gets it approved, you know, the more of them they make, the more reliable they become. Yeah. More efficient production and all that, lower cost. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So I would like to share a uh a good safety-related C story, but I can't think of any. Uh are there any that you can think of? A safety-related sea story. Yeah. All mine are related to tag outs, and they're probably not that great to listen to. But a lot of them are boring. A lot of safety-related stories are just like, hey, I noticed somebody was not, you know, wearing their gloves, so I told them to wear their gloves. And I mean, you remember when we were in the Navy, they they referred to it as the Swiss cheese model, right? And um, or the light switch model, where enough little things go wrong, you end up with a path to actual harm. And the strategy they often talked about was um, you know, if we treat the small things like big things, then big things never happen, right? I don't know how true that is, but it it it's been true my you know, 20 years that I've worked in this field. Um, if you know, if you're pretty anal about the little things, then you tend to be pretty strict about the big things just naturally, because if you're not letting you know the glove issue slide, then you're probably not letting you know a bigger corner be cut somewhere. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. Um you could also call that integrity, right? That's what they harp on a lot in the Navy. So I mean, yeah, a tag out violation sounds boring, but you know, it's a real safety violation. And when you're on a submarine, you're in a reactor plant, uh, an engine room, you know, you can't you can't tolerate that kind of stuff. Right, right, exactly. So are you uh familiar with small modular reactors at all? Yeah, I I understand the concept of small modular reactors. Um I you know, I the first thing I think of is New Scale because they're they're stock tickers, literally SMR, small modular reactors. Oh, that's fine. Uh the con yeah, yeah, yeah. They uh the concept is uh there's a I mean there's a lot about them that makes sense to me. Um you know right now, basically, you know, I mean you can say that we have you know Babcock and Wilcox design reactor plant or a general electric reactor plant um or a Westinghouse, blah blah blah, right? And those are kind of standard designs. But but you know, a lot of times people refer to the commercial nuclear power fleet out there in the country as um being a you know a collection of bespoke you know construction projects. And they really are. Every site, every layout, everything is kind of done uniquely to the needs of that um place. And and it makes sense to do that that way when a project is that big, right? Because it's very difficult to standardize something that large. But if you can, if you can make a smaller reactor that can be you know made in one place uniformly, you know, continuously, and shift out to places on trains or barges, um, then you can start to benefit from things like scale and you know simplified training, um, and you know, workforce that's familiar and they don't have to learn the differences between one plant or another as much. Uh so that makes a lot of sense. I mean, and it's not it's not a foreign concept. The Navy's been doing it. Right. Every, you know, every Virginia class has an S9G reactor, every um, you know, 688 has this kind of reactor, every, you know, so like it's it's not new either. It's just new that somebody wants to bring it to the commercial world. Right. I think there was a misconception for probably several decades where they thought scale meant let's build a bigger plant that'll be more efficient in the long run. But as you're saying, it's bespoke, it's more expensive, has delays and all that. Whereas um, I don't know if you're familiar, Korea. They kind of they went the SMR route. They picked one plant and they just built it again and again all over the country with the same construction crew. And uh they just saw the the price, you know, plummet until it was cheaper than fossil colours. I didn't know they yeah, I didn't know that they did that in South Korea, but it makes a lot of sense, doesn't it? It does, yeah. It's a proven model. Um and yeah, you mentioned New Scale. Um I I don't know if you followed what happened to them. They were they had a uh contract in Idaho, I believe, and it fell through. And instead of uh just closing up shop, they decided to make their reactor smaller and they're trying to get into other markets. Oh, that's interesting. I did not know that. Newscale's out there. Um another one, this one's pretty interesting. Uh um there's a company called FANCO, first American nuclear company, who's aiming to make um the United States' first fast reactor. And I know a lot of people's concern, rightfully, is the nuclear waste because it has such a long half-life. Like sometimes it's 200 to 300,000 years. Like, what are you supposed to do with that? But um a fast reactor can actually consume that spent fuel because the you know the neutrons have more energy, so they can use use that fissile material until almost all of it's gone, and it cuts the half-life down to about 200 to 300 years. What a brilliant idea, right? It becomes a manageable project at that point. And um I believe it was Norway, they just um did a deep geological repository. They just dug straight into the earth, they put all their waste in there, and then they just blow up the entrance and no one can ever get to it. So we have solutions for these things. And the cool thing about Fanco is they're headquartered in Indianapolis now. Oh, are they? I didn't know that. Uh not sure why, but they're 20 minutes from my house, so I thought that was interesting. Carmel is also the location. I don't know if the headquarters there, but I know there's a big uh hub for I think it's the Miso, the Midwest uh like grid uh operators there. Kind of like so out here it's PJM that that operates most of the East Coast grid. They're the biggest distributor of electricity. Yeah, I wonder if it has anything to do with the location of Miso offices in Carmel, Indiana, but I don't I don't know. I have no idea. Like that's the the distribution side of it's not really my wheelhouse. Yeah. It's just interesting to see like where is it gonna start picking up more because it I think it's gonna happen somewhere in the U.S. Well, I guess it already is, because the Tennessee Valley Authority, they just bought a uh GE Hitachi uh 300 megawatt unit, and they're gonna install it down in Tennessee. And they've actually contacted Indiana. I guess Indiana Michigan Power is part of this conglomerate. So they're looking at a site in Indiana to put a another reactor in. That'd be cool. I you I was talking about this in my significant other last night, actually, and um I don't I like the the fact that Indiana doesn't have nuclear is um I I don't want to say a travesty to me. I I have a special place in my heart having grown up in Indiana for Indiana, and um and man, if they had a a reactor there, like would things be different? Would I be looking for work to go back home? Yeah. Um but like as a kid in in high school, we took a field trip to Purdue University to see the research reactor there. I mean, there's not a ton of you know universities in the country that have research reactors, so it's like you have the the training, the education, you've got people who literally learned how to do it at at school in your state right there. Like so it's in my opinion, the smartest thing to do would be to the state get a reactor, like a full SMR, pick a manufacturer, you know, do your research, give it to Purdue, be like power power your campus, power Lafayette, do the research, and then we're gonna do what North Korea did, just repeat it wherever we need power to replace our aging fossil fuel plants. Yeah, that it would be such a smart thing to do. That that model is not far off. Um, you know, uh, as you might expect, a lot of Navy nukes work in commercial nuclear power, but um what I've noticed is um especially the hands-on technician people, like out here in Pennsylvania, they have technical colleges, uh, a lot more of them than I was used to seeing in Indiana. And um one of the schools that we hire uh hired a few grads from um has a a natural gas power plant on their campus. Now it's small, you know, it's rated in the kilowatts, not the megawatts, but they um but they uh the the students operate it, the students do projects on it, the the students stand watch on it, they they connect it to the grid, they parallel with the grid. Yeah, it is really it's it is great, great hands-on experience for this line of work. Um who was that again? So the college is called Williamson. I'll have to look into that. That's that's real interesting. Because yeah, I I also think about the workforce. Like I don't really like the idea of a privately owned reactor or relying on a private company to do the operation maintenance. Like I think state-owned has a lot of possibility, not for just like the workforce, but like you're saying, education, the career paths, um construction. Like you're gonna need to be building these things for decades. So why not just make a you know a strong local workforce for it? Yeah. Um, I'm assuming you heard about uh Governor Braun's letter of intent with Eli Lilly. So I was reading a little bit about that today. Um, you know, I don't keep up as much with Indiana politics since I haven't lived there since I was um, you know, going to Indiana State University where I did my undergrad at. Um but yeah, I was reading about that. It looks like they're they're committing to doing some exploration of the possibility of SMRs and uh nuclear power. I'm not really like, you know, all growing up in Indiana, um, like Eli Lilly was one of those companies where like, oh man, if you could get a job there, they're one of the best employers of the state and all this stuff. Powerhouse. Yeah, I I don't, you know, I don't know everything that their their fingers are into, so I don't know what their interest is with that. Um, but the fact that that this you know they've got state government, local government interested in investing in something, I I think is a really powerful and useful technology is cool to me, that's for sure. Yeah, and you mentioned it earlier, like nuclear just checks all the boxes because they they don't like the price variation with natural gas, especially with the war going on. Um a lot of these companies want, you know, whether they really care about it or not, you know, they they want to claim they're green or renewable, whatever, which you know it's a good thing. So might as well lean into that. So yeah, it's just a letter of intent from uh the governor, but it's a you know pretty good indication of a direction we might be traveling. Um as far as regulations, um, what kind of regulatory hurdles do you think a state that doesn't really have nuclear might face if they're trying to do a project like that? I think the trend, you know, we had kind of an ice age in nuclear uh in this country. Um the uh the accident at Three Mile Island kind of like soured the public mood on it and it slowed a lot of development down. Uh the trend, I think, used to be that this the role states would play was basically to raise funds to build or pave the way for a nuclear power plant to be built, and um whether that's you know directly from uh a utility that wants to build them or a company that wants to build them or the state managing the project and then selling to utility. But it used to be kind of a trend for a state to really spearhead the development and then hand it over to somebody who operates. Um the regulatory framework doesn't change for you know anybody who builds it, whether it's a state or a company. You've got to meet all the requirements that the uh the NRC you know lays out for you. I think the issue with regulation isn't so much meeting or jumping over those hurdles. It's it's just uh it is a skill set of knowing what those hurdles are. Um companies that that are already operating large fleets like the one I work for, um, they have very deep institutional knowledge of you know every little wicket and every little gotcha, every little thing that you have to do and prove. Um and that can be the biggest hurdle. If you know, taking your idea, if the state becomes more involved, um, you know, it might be surprising, you know, to learn how much they don't know about the regulation and meeting it, right? Right. Uh and my biggest can not be the biggest hurdle would probably be to just establish that institutional knowledge. No, that's a good rundown. But now as far as like um just general regulations, I know that um the GE Hitachi is already approved by the NRC, you know, as far as like the z design and safety goes. I believe New Scale applied for it recently on their smaller units. So I'm sure that helps if that's like a state chooses that kind of model. But um yeah, it's good to point out that just uh you know knowing the hurdles is a huge part of it. So it would take that that knowledge and that specialty. Like that's not really something the state could just build from the ground up or it would take forever. So you would probably want to borrow from other operating plants or government agencies, I'd say. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I would I mean if I just if I had an unlimited budget, I'd just go poach some of the top talent and build a team that already knew what to do, you know what I mean? Oh, right. Yeah. Yeah. And then uh just to like expand that, like the the whole thing of like uh my idea of like the state-owned reactors is like we would have our own academy for operators and maintenance, you know, modeled after the nuclear navy safety program. That way, you know, I think it'd be cool to have it attached to Purdue, you know, just be like a whole two to three year pipeline, kind of like the Navy. You can uh get qualified in operation or maintenance, kind of like at your plant. And then, you know, eventually we have a a plant up at uh Fort Wayne or down at Evansville. Like if that's where you're from, you can have a quality career in your hometown. It's kind of a really quality career, to be honest with you. Oh, yeah. Yeah, especially by Indiana's standards today. Yeah, yeah. But then you have all the other benefits you're talking about, the green energy, it's uh reliable, all that stuff. Mm-hmm. I also think, and this is just a personal thing here, you know, I think that the trend in the SMR direction, uh, you know, it's really pushed by companies with a lot of money to invest in data centers. That's where it comes from. They're they're the largest consumers of electricity, and they would like to have you know SMRs that they own that that they can take off the grid entirely and just feed their own power, right? And you know, talk to a political scientist about uh about this stuff. They're probably more in tune with it than I am. But like if you want people to be involved in it, support it, nurture it, right? Like they have to feel like they have some ownership. You know, it it there's a huge difference between a community saying that's our power plant and employs all our people, and it makes power for us. The electricity I make runs, you know, makes my coffee in the morning and all this stuff. Um whereas, you know, if Meta builds a data center in Brownstown or something and plops an SMR that they take off the grid, you know, the best like outcome you can hope for is well, at least they're not competing with us for electricity on our grid. Right. You know, but what what ownership do you feel as a local community? You know, I I don't know. Some people do, some people, you know, but well, I can tell you the climate right now in Indiana is uh very against these uh data centers. Yeah, I you know, and they bring their own set of of issues for sure, you know, and uh it's uh it's funny to me because I think like ten years ago, maybe a little bit longer ago, I was home on leave from the Navy and I drove through South Bend, where a lot of my father's family grew up, and on I think it was the south side of town, as we were driving out of town, we saw uh an old car manufacturing plant. I think it was an old Packard plant, if I remember right. Yeah. And it was from the days of American auto manufacturing. This thing had sat vacant for for years and years, and um and the news was all up because somebody had bought it and turned it into a data center. Like just look at that, you know, there's there's computers in there and they're doing whatever computers do for you know data centers. But but it was great to see this thing that used to be a big economic engine for the town once again being put to some use. And it seemed like the the feeling was a lot of optimism around the the potential of data centers to to do things like rejuvenate um that. And um now, ten years or more later, I'm like, yeah, well, now now we're yeah, winds are a little bit different. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's so uh like with the bra and lily thing, that that's one concern I have is like is this just gonna be like hooking Lily up, or is this gonna benefit Indianapolis or the county or anything? Um of the ideas that I have is a host community fee. So for each reactor, um it's just a four or five dollar per megawatt charge for the that electricity. So you know if you have a data center, that money um ideally by law goes to you know property tax relief, education, infrastructure, and healthcare for that county. That way it's just mandated that you know we're we've got this power, we're operating it, and it's gonna benefit our community. And that kind of stuff I think will really you know help turn public opinion towards nuclear power. But if you just have some outside company coming in saying, oh, we're gonna plant a nuclear reactor in your backyard, people aren't gonna take that very well. Yeah. You know, and it's interesting too, because I follow, uh I like to follow a lot of this stuff. Um, you know, I didn't tell you more of my background. I I I am probably the only person in the state of Pennsylvania with both an an international Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Union membership and the Pennsylvania Bar Association membership. I went I went to law school using the GI Bill. And I think a lot of many talents. Yeah, I in and which really tells you something that I choose to work in the nuclear power plant, how quality these jobs are, I think. But um I like to follow a lot of development news in in the areas, and it's so interesting to me how much power local communities have to control these kind of things when they choose to. Right? Um, warehousing's another big one. The area that I live in, there's tons of warehousing. You know, there's a huge corridor of travel between Baltimore, Washington, DC, Philadelphia area through here. And um it's a really effective tool, you know, to use things like zoning laws. Um now, I mean, on the one hand, you you end up with like things like NIMBYism. We talked about the issue with storing you know nuclear waste. It is an issue. And the big issue is NIMBYism. It's not in my backyard. We gotta do something, we want all these benefits, I just don't want to deal with it near me, right? And if you don't understand it and you don't understand the risks or the safety, you know, of it, then it's hard to weigh that. And I I understand not wanting it there, right? Right. But on the flip side, like you can really exercise things like zoning laws, which are entirely local government you know tools, and you can leverage those to get some concessions from from you know data centers or warehousing or even power plants. You come in, hey, we want to use this site, it's a great site to build at. We've got the water, we've got the connection to the grid, we've got customers in line. It would be great to build in this site, and you go, we'd we'd love to have jobs here, but we have a pretty broad level of authority, and this site's not zoned for it. So what what kind of deal can we make to change that? You know, uh a local, a pretty small local government is equipped with a a lot of power to negotiate those things. Um I think that people should realize that and and exercise. I think they really are. So that um reminds me of the it just happened yesterday, or I guess today. Um they're trying to build a data center down in Jefferson County near Madison, and their town hall was over it was overcrowded. They they had to cut people off, you know, their capacity. People were upset, and without even like giving time to discuss or anything, like overnight the council approved it. So now the data center is going through. So but that you know that activates people, it gets them paying attention, you know. But to bring it back to the whole uh like the power grid thing, like I I don't really want to incentivize data centers coming here in general, but if you have a reliable, robust power source like nuclear power, then that is a stable platform that's really appealing to them. If they you know they say Indiana's gonna let us move in and when they have all the power we need and it's green, you know, that's uh that's a good spot to be in. It doesn't have to be a data center, it could be a a steel mill or a hospital or hospital or something. You don't and you know, you don't want to be I'm pretty centrist on a lot of issues, and I think that the best answers often lie in some sort of compromise in the middle, right? And if the trend of the economy and and you know some of the highest quality jobs that we have today are coming from data centers and some of the utilities that support them, like I would be hesitant to like close the door to that entirely. But you want to find some middle ground where you can get the benefits of it, you can do it the way that your community is happy with or can be proud of, and not miss the wave of prosperity it could bring, you know, and it's uh it's a hard needle thread. Yeah, that's a good point. And um, I think that's actually a strength of this kind of plan because uh something that Indiana has seen a lot throughout the past is you know big industry coming in. I mean, just look at Gar Gary, Indiana, and then it's flourishes for a decade or two and then just moves, and now everyone's you know um not doing so well up there. So, you know, that same could happen if like uh if Lily's not a great example, but if like a data center moved in and's like, hey, we have our own reactor, we'll power your county with it. It might seem appealing at first, but if the AI bubble bursts or they move out of town, then you know the community's not going to benefit from that. It's probably gonna be a drag on them for who knows how long. Yeah, yeah. Side note, just you talk of a scenario like that, and that's just another thing I think, and I again I I have to read more about SMRs before you take me as any sort of authority. But if you know, if a if a small modular reactor is designed to be largely self-contained and you know, to be able to be transported to and from, you know, worst case scenario, you have something like you described. Uh somebody comes in, builds a data center, plops an SMR in it to power it, and then you know, a bubble bursts, right? One, you you have power there. There's other industries that that want that power. You might be able to take advantage of it. But two, if you brought it in easily because it was mobile, you can move it out easily because it's mobile, right? Yeah, that's a good point. It's a lot smaller, so it's you know, automatically easier. Yep. You can't just, you know, that's one of the issues with um unit two, right, at at Three Mile Island, uh where I work, is that you know, it's it's a big site. Once you decide to decommission it, it's a slow, long uh process that that you have a lot of concerns uh of safety. And so you have to do everything right, you have to take your time, and and cleanup can take a very, very long time. Right. Um the whole time you've got this thing there that you know, like, well, what's it doing? You know, it's doing for us. So I guess I didn't really complete my train of thought though. So if the state owns the reactor and a big customer moves away, you know, it's easy to scale down production. Like you still have the assets the state does, the community does. Um you can just lower the power output, you know, to whatever the demand is. So uh you're not in that situation like you're talking about where you have to worry about moving it or cleaning it up, shutting it down, it can still be productive. Yeah. I'm pretty I I I mean, you know, I I work in the industry, I'm a biased party, but uh I'm pretty pro-data centers and pro, you know, a lot of these jobs. Um I'll also say I work I this part of Pennsylvania I've lived in for seven, almost eight years now. And um the warehousing is like the big thing here. Um and uh data centers are starting to pop up too. And like comparing one to the other, data centers are way better. The jobs are higher quality, there's not as many of them. That is like it takes a surprisingly small number of people to run data centers. Um, but the jobs that do have are much higher quality, the impact on the local community, better and worse, right? Um, better uh because you know, traffic, I mean, traffic is way, way less bad on a data center. The traffic comes in over power lines or uh over data lines and goes out over data lines. Um uh and then the negative side is you know they're competing for public resources. They're they're you know driving up uh gas and uh water uh prices, but yeah, I think that's the struggle right now, just the amount of water and electricity they they require. Um I don't know if you saw the big project out in Utah, the data center that's causing the Kevin Leary, right? I think somehow he's connected to it. Yeah, he's one of the two leaders. Sounds like it's gonna be uh the size of Manhattan. It's gonna take more power than the whole state. Like uh at some point, it's like what are we doing? It's yeah, I you know it is something, you know. They and uh they consume a lot of water um because they use open cooling systems, right? You can have closed cooling systems. One of the concerns out there is it's gonna cause so much condensation in the desert area, it's gonna basically destroy that the ecosystem there. So I don't know. I think there's a more uh responsible way to go about this, just like with nuclear power. There's a responsible, safe way to do it. Yeah. Well, side note, right? Not to I mean, not to get off. I you know, this is I'm starting to talk outside of my pay grade, outside of my field. Yeah, you're good. But my under my understanding is that, you know, a data center is a service, right? A company that operates a data center is selling computational services to other customers. Right. And so the access to reliable power can make the difference between whether your customer your primary customer is um Etsy or Charles Schwab. And not that you know, I love Etsy, but like the if if your if your computing services are not quite as reliable or more susceptible to some sort of power outage, it it may not cause as much chaos to uh you know a small marketplace or a bespoke marketplace as it will to you know like the banking information world. Or you know, the you know, computing services that that a tech company like Microsoft might sell to the US military, right? And so your proximity to reliable power is a is a selling point. And it can also kind of be an if you build it, they will come sort of situation, right? Like if you can if you build nuclear power and you say, hey, we have a 98% reliability uptime. We are the most reliable power that you can possibly be connected to. And we've got junctions and distribution right here. You can build you know across the street, you can build on the same complex as us, um, then you open the doors to a lot of business. Now, again, you know, some people don't love that kind of business, but that's a that's a a different a different discussion. Yeah, that's how a lot of projects fail, is they uh they build first and then they worry about infrastructure later. If uh you know you play the long game and build a premium platform that you know could be the next boom in that region. Yeah. In my opinion. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, Ken, it was nice chatting with you. It was great chatting with you again, Corey. Yeah, thanks for your time, and uh catch you later. Catch you later, Corey. That was Navy Nuclear Veteran Ken Hull. Let me pull out three things from that conversation that matter for Indiana's future. First, safety culture is not a slogan. It is a system. Ken talked about the Swiss cheese model. Enough little things go wrong, and you end up with a path to actual harm. The Navy's strategy is to treat every little thing like it could be the one that causes disaster. That means pre-job briefs, post-job critiques, stop work authority, no retaliation for reporting mistakes. We're not talking about bureaucratic overhead, even though it might sound like it. What we're talking about is the machinery of reliability. Ken also made a point about containment. At Three Mile Island, even with a partial meltdown on Unit Two, the containment building worked. There was no danger to the public. The Navy's obsessive safety culture isn't just about procedures. It's about engineering systems that don't fail. Second, we talked about how training is everything. Ken describe the difference between Navy and commercial nuclear. The Navy pipeline is brutal for a reason, but he also pointed out that commercial plants benefit from standardization in ways the Navy already figured out. Every Virginia class submarine has the same reactor. Every 688 has the same reactor. That is the small modular reactor model. Same design, same training workforce, repeated over and over again throughout the state. He also noted that Pennsylvania has technical colleges with actual power plants on campus that students operate. Williamson College has a natural gas plant where students stand watch, do projects, and connect to the grid. Imagine that with a small modular reactor at Purdue. That is what the Indiana Century Corps Energy Corps intends to do. Third, ownership matters. Ken made a really sharp point about data centers and local communities. If Meta or Google builds a data center with its own small modular reactor, what ownership does the community feel? Compare that to a state-owned reactor that employs local people, powers local homes, and pays into a host community fee for schools and infrastructure. He said something I want to repeat. If you want people to be involved in it, support it, nurture it, they have to feel like they have some ownership. There's a huge difference between a community saying that's our power plant and it employs all our people and makes power for us versus, well, at least they're not competing with us for electricity on our grid. End quote. That, in essence, is the sovereignty argument. It's not left versus right, it is owner versus renter. Part six,
Part 5 - What this means for Indiana
what this means for Indiana and the ICC. So what does this mean for Indiana? First, the Indiana Century Corps Energy Corps must build a Navy-style training pipeline. Two years minimum, learning physics, not just procedures, drills that simulate failure and put people under pressure, qualification standards that are hard. If you can't pass, you can't operate. The Navy would rather fail someone in training than have them fail in the fleet. The ICC needs the same mindset. Second, Indiana's Navy nuclear veterans are not a pool of potential employees. They are the foundation. Put them in the instructor roles, put them in leadership roles, let them train the next generation. Ken made a point about institutional knowledge. Knowing the regulatory hurdles, knowing the NRC and INPO requirements, that knowledge lives inside people who have done this before. We need to poach them, pay them what they're worth, and build the project around that knowledge. Third, state ownership changes the equation. If Indiana owns the reactors, the workforce stays, the revenue stays, the host community fee stays. When Ken talked about the Packard plant in South Bend becoming a data center, it was a win at the time. But the wins have changed. The state-owned reactor doesn't leave. It doesn't get sold to private equity. It is a permanent asset that benefits Hoosiers. The Navy has proved that safe nuclear operation is possible. Seventy years putting nuclear reactors on submarines, aircraft carriers, putting them in some of the most dangerous places on earth, and they've had zero accidents. That is not a miracle. That is a system designed to be safe. Indiana can build a similar system. We have the model, we have the veterans, and we have the will. We just need to start building. Part 7. Conclusion and preview.
Part 6 - Conclusion & Preview
Before we go, a quick note on the book. I will put a link to it down in the show notes. Next week on episode 16, Indiana's Geology for Nuclear. Where can we put these reactors? What about the waste? What does the ground under our feet tell us about what's possible? We talk about siding, geology, and the quiet advantage Indiana doesn't know it has. Before we get there, do me a favor. If you are a Navy nuclear veteran living in Indiana, please reach out. I will put a contact email in the show notes. I want to hear your story, and I'd love for you to be a part of this. I'm Corey, this is the Indiana Century Podcast. And remember, sovereignty isn't given, it is built!