Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Quote of the Day: Admiral Hyman G. Rickover
“One can delegate authority; one cannot delegate responsibility.” Pithy, succinct; that’s the man who’s long been called “the father of the nuclear Navy.” The Rickover quote is from a taciturn genius with a brutally effective management style and a cold, nasty streak. You could compare him with Steve Jobs; he didn’t invent the technology that he’d forever be associated with, but his incredibly strict standards made a successful final product possible. Creating an atomic submarine wasn’t a simple process.
Using the waste heat of atomic decay to power submarines was a known possibility even 15 years earlier. In fact, it was the only one of the US’s WWII atomic research programs that the Nazis found out about. There was no possibility of putting a seagoing reactor to work during that war, and the immediate political climate in the first couple of years after the war didn’t encourage expensive experiments. But by 1950, the quest for a suitable power reactor was in full swing.
America had every reason to be proud of its engineers. And of Walt Disney, who followed the real Nautilus closely with the fictional Jules Verne version on screen, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
Rickover’s next role was criticizing the country’s educational establishment. At the time, as a ten-year-old, he seemed to be an unwelcome advocate for making us all work a lot harder in school. Now, of course, I can see he had a point.
Like Jobs, in our own era, there was a question then and now as to whether Rickover had to be such a rude, obnoxious jerk to get the results he got. Today’s quote shows that, at the very least, he never spared himself from the impossibly high standards he demanded from subordinates.
This post is part of the Quote of the Day series, ably helmed by @arahant.
Published in General
Thanks, Gary. You’re really powering up the Quote of the Day.
If you have a quotation rattling around in your head, would like to celebrate a particular date in history, or would just like to start a conversation on Ricochet, the Quote of the Day Series can be the easiest way to do it. Sign up today. We have openings as soon as tomorrow.
I lived about 25 miles East of a nuke plant that was basically the same design as what Rickover used in the Navy. It was in Shippingport Pa on the Ohio River . It was actually built from a core built from a cancelled aircraft carrier. It was the first civilian use of nuclear power. It was built by Westinghouse Electric. Some seventy years later I am paying on my monthly bill for a failed attempt by Westinghouse to build a nuclear plant in my adopted state of South Carolina. Of course Westinghouse was owned by the Japanese by then.
A guy in our community is a retired Rear Admiral who commanded a nuclear sub. He has some good Rickover stories.
Not to be a nitpicker, but . . . (taking a deep breath)
It’s the self-sustaining chain reaction that produces most of a reactor’s power. However, fission product decay produces about 7% of the total output (at equilibrium). This is a significant chuck of heat production and it doesn’t go away right after you shut the reactor down. It takes a while, which is why you need to continue cooling the reactor. It’s also why we have emergency cooling systems as backup, just in case the primary cooling systems go belly-up.
If you are going to be nit picked, it is always best to have a picker who knows his nits!
Rickover understood the physics of management. Unlike mass and energy, there is no conservation of responsibility.
I’d bet that guy has some good stories, period.
I havent always been so clear that Rickover was a good guy. His conflict with Alvin Weinberg effectively ended his career and doomed the US Nuclear energy industry with uranium/plutonium boiling water plants. (that the rest of the world followed suit on) Alvin Weinberg (even in the 1950s) had experiments and designs for Molten Salt Thorium Reactors, that could be much smaller, lighter and safer than the nuclear plants Rickover favored.
Had he allowed Weinberg’s designs to be researched, The US (and the world at large) could have a fleet of nuclear reactors providing nearly limitless clean energy from thorium.
Every nuke officer Rickover interviewed has a good story – especially the end of the interview.
He took some of us on a bus trip to the Norfolk shipyard, where we got to tour a destroyer and a nuclear sub. It was quite a trip, especially some of our group (over 55ers) trying to climb out of the sub. Also, him being “piped” aboard the destroyer was neat.
He wasn’t. He had a nasty temper, probably gotten from being one of the few (or only) jews at the Naval Academy. I had a great uncle who at at the Academy when Rickover was there. He wasn’t treated well. He told me a story someone once pulled the old bucket of water over the door trick on Rickover. Rickover spent over a year tryibng to track down who did it. My uncle didn’t know if he found the guy or not.
Rickover insisted his cores remained covered with coolant and wanted to avoid departure from nucleate boiling – no boiling in his rfeactor vessel. He did use to experiment with different designs. The original Seawolf had a liquid sodium cooled reactor to begin with. However, it was difficult to maintain, so he replaced it with a PWR as soon as he could.
Submarines make a lot of drastic attitude changes during operation. He and the designers figured the “angles and dangles” of a sub coulld potentially uncover a BWR core. In addition, having a steam system separate from the primary cooling system meant water chemistry could be optimized for both enviromental operating conditions.
Do you remember which sub?
After commissioning, my submarine eventually got transferred from Groton to Norfolk. We didn’t actually pipe brass on board, but we had a dinger that sounded like a bell. Our engineer was married to one of COMSUBLANT’s daughters (that’s Commander, Submarine Forces, Atlantic). All hell broke loose whenever he would drop in unannounced to visit his “favorite” son-in-law. The topside watch would get on the 1MC, and in a nervous voice announce, “COMSUBLANT, arriving” then start ringing the dinger. Below decks, it was elbows and ******** before the last “ding” sounded (eight bells, IIRC). After that first visit, we started to refer to him as COMSUB Daddy-In-Law – among ourselves, of course . . .
That’s true. It’s a cautionary tale I try to remember when people argue for military research as a driver of civilian technology.
Nope, it’s been about 5 years. The destroyer we toured was the Gravely. They were both in for maintenance/repairs. We were allowed to take pictures on the Gravely, but not anywhere near the sub.
I am sure he was a right proper dick, but I meant good guy in the larger context of “good guy-ism” … You know the right side of history stuff.
I can only imagine the nightmare a liquid sodium reactor could cause in an accident at sea. (or even in port) In reality, the US government should have had a multi point research effort in the late 50s – 70s to produce large land based reactors for civil power generation (based on the thorium fuel cycle) and smaller reactors based on the uranium/plutonium cycles for naval power and propulsion applications. In short there should have been application driven research, instead of a reactor shoehorned into any possible application.
Thanks for the knowledgeable comments! I’ve always been interested in Rickover but never bothered to do a deep drill-down. You guys did my work for me!
That’s the great thing about starting a conversation on Ricochet.
We had a fast attack submariner come to our unit. Why assign a submariner to a Special Operations unit? No idea. It was a “Joint Billet” though, which these days everyone needs in order to get promoted. He had a silver license plate liner that said, “No Slack In Fast Attack!” Dude, we don’t do license plate liners or bumper stickers, here. It took him a little bit (and some very convivial coaching up) to get him to realize, “You come to work in mufti, looking like a bum. You change into uniform at your cage. You leave work in mufti, looking like a bum.” I think he kinda/sorta got hives from that.
I loved this guy. He was a no-kidding 50 pound brain, and was all about checklists and synchronization matrixes and planning weights and measures. I guess on a nuclear sub, you don’t really screw around much.
We used to drive him crazy. “What do you mean, you don’t know what we’ll do? This is the most dangerous part of the op!”
“Yeah, we’ll figure it out when the boys are there, hooking and jabbing.”
I can still hear the sweet harmonics of him gnashing his teeth.
Even the outside? I got pictures of my boat tied up in Puerto Rico . . .
It’s what we’re here for!
Shhh. What’re you, crazy? You’re last name ain’t Clinton, pal.
The boomer sub (ballistic missile) motto is, “Hide with pride.” Fast attack subs refer to themselves as SEKOD – Steely-Eyed Killers Of the Deep.
If a boomer hears a noise in the ocean, they turn away from the source to remain hidden. It’s their mission. If a fast attack sub hears a noise in the ocean, it turns toward the noise to find out what it is. Both types are vital to our nation’s defense.
I was on a fast attack . . .
Had to turn in our phones/cameras at the dock gate.
I had a friend who graduated from GA Tech with a nuclear engineering degree in the early 80s and joined that man’s Navy. There was not an officer who stepped onboard one of his boats without being personally interviewed by him. My friend said it was like being interviewed by God.
This is the key, and we continue to suffer from that prior shortsightedness now; it is the rough equivalent now of the Cato and Reason types these days trying to kill nuclear electricity generation and mothball power plants because of “federal subsidies”. The error was allowing Rickover to drive the effort and optimize it for his singular purpose, then trying to piggyback that special purpose optimized design for completely different environments. Meanwhile, today China and Russia are charging full steam ahead on the next generation of cheap, cookie-cutter modular reactors while the US listens to its Green Nude Eel wind farm subsidy rent-seekers.
Security today is a lot tighter than when I was in.
I hope you don’t mind my slight change . . .
This is a real travesty. Small modular reactors (SMRs) are the way to go. Because we’ve limited ourselves to large capacity designs (typically in the 1000 MW range), they are extremely exspensive, require years to build, and utilities have to fudge their projected growth numbers just to get a proposal to build on the table.
If my former employer had done some research on SMRs at my site (Savannah River Site), I might not have retired when I did:
https://www.energy.gov/ne/nuclear-reactor-technologies/small-modular-nuclear-reactors
Yes, this is the problem. They should count carbon taxes and other efforts to make carbon fuels more expensive to create a competitive advantage for solar and wind as a subsidy to renewable energy. In reality the only renewable energy that works is hydro-electric. But considering the damage it does its not particularly green.
Perhaps we need a nuclear research park, maybe in conjunction with the National Laboratories, where companies could build their experimental reactor designs and gain some operation experience with the design.
I ran into a diesel submariner, reading the patches on his jacket, at a cardiology clinic. I asked and he answered. He had nothing good to say about Rickover, who killed off the diesel program, seeing it as a threat to his vision. We would probably be best served with the right mix of strategic nuclear subs and operational/tactical super-quiet modern diesel/fuel cell subs.