A Place for all the Old Timers to Get Together

 

The Pioneer's Club

The Pioneer’s Club Newsletter

Volume 5, Issue  5

May 2011

Florida Picnic

Obituary Page

We lost four individuals that I am aware of in April

They will be missed by who knew them.

 

James F. Hass - April 2, 2011, Chili, NY. He was a Navy Veteran.

 

Ulysses "Fuzzy" Jones - April 6, 2011, Rochester, NY. He worked in Electric Meter and Lab.

 

Jack R, Dennis - April 10, 2011, Irondequoit, NY, He worked in T & D Lines and retired with 38 years of service.

 

Bruce M. Schafer - April 12, 2011, Greece NY at age 67. He worked at BeeBee Station.

May Events

Here are the important dates for May:

 

May 1—May Day

May 3—National Teachers Day

May 5—Cinco de Mayo

May 8—Mother’s Day

May 21—Armed Forces Day

May 23— Victoria Day

May 30—Memorial Day

 

A very successful renewal of the annual RG&E Emeritus Florida Picnic was held on March 7, 2011.  It was a simple affair organized by Don Jeerings, Jack and Chris Klein, and Lee Harris with each attendee supplying their own food, drink and tableware.  Charcoal was provided for those that wanted to cook.  A total of 55 people signed in to record their attendance.  We suspect there may have been others that didn’t make the list.  The recorded attendees included 32 former employees representing at least 16 different departments.  Everyone had a great time renewing old friendships and exchanging war stories.  There was a short program after lunch.  It included a welcome by Lee Harris and a reminiscing period led by Don Jeerings.  A lot of fun and a number of good memories resulted.

 

Snapshots were taken throughout the day and are included for everyone’s enjoyment.  

 

Don, Jack, Chris and Lee are looking forward to organizing a similar event in 2012.  The pavilion at Lake Seminole Park has already been reserved for March 5, 2012 (the first Monday in March).  Hopefully, we will have an even arger crowd attending.

Department Get Together

Birthdays          

So here are our May babies. If you wish your birthday listed, just drop me an email.

 

Too Much Time has Gone By!!!!!

It’s Time to Catch Up with Each Other!

 

The “ Retired” RG&E Canandaigua Employee’s Present:

 

A Night Out At:

The Steamboat Landing

 

205 Lakeshore Drive

Canandaigua, NY 14424

(585) 396-7350

 

Friday, May 20th, 2011

5:30 Cocktail Hour (Cash bar)

6:30 Buffet Dinner

$28.50 per person

money/reservations due by: may 9th, 2011

contacts:

Ann Rankin: 394-3443

Rita Keefe: 398-3651

Mail checks to:

Rita Keefe

1697 New Michigan Rd.

Farmington,

Remembrance from Jim Bodine at Ginna

Hi All

 

After 40 years, I will be retiring effective May 1^st.  What can I say?  Time fly’s when you are having fun.  It all started with my first exposure (how did you like how I worked that “nuclear term” in) to Ginna was June of 1971.

 

I remember:

Driving down the same roadway you all come down today, passing the “big red barn”, the orchards of apple trees and crossing the bridge over Deer creek to “find” a parking place in the parking lot.  It was really easy back then since there was only about 100 employees on site.  It was an easy walk to the guard house, which was a small room at the south end of the “butler” building.  Back then it was manned by 2 guards and your badge was the “film” badge that the guards handed to you when you came in.  A short walk across the courtyard (the home of the new Administrative Building) and you walked in the front entrance to the plant (the home of the new Spent Fuel Cask Handling crane).  Walking down the hallway pass Charlie Platt’s office (he was the plant superintendent), the men’s room on the right (yes, that men’s room is a plant original), I got to the Chemistry Lab where I would start my career.

 

The first steam generator inspection outage in 1972.  We had a lot of failed fuel early in life and this was a long time before automatic probe pushing was developed for doing the eddy current examination of the SG tubes.  “Jumpers” as they were known jumped into the channel heads of the steam generators and hand probed the tubes.  I was working nights during the outage and I remember I wanted to try an experiment to see if putting an acid and a base together really made salt water.  You know the formula, hydrochloric acid (HCl) and sodium hydroxide (NaOH) put together should yield NaCl and H2O.  Of course I decided to try to use nitric acid and ammonium hydroxide.  That was dumb!!  I remember “Captain” Burt asking me “what the hell was I doing!!” as the cloud of ammonia gas went up the exhaust hood.

 

Learning the hard way that you never ever park your vehicle facing north towards the lake in the winter.  Not unless you want a snow packed engine.

 

Monday morning after the new year in 1977 and seeing the steam billowing out of the plant and realizing we were not online.  I later learned that we had thrown a turbine blade in one of the low pressure turbines and we were going to be off-line until June.  Six months is a long outage and now you know why we have a spare LP rotor.

 

Working on the Equipment Environmental Qualification program when it first came out with George Wrobel.  I remember we needed to make a containment entry at full power with the NRC resident inspector to verify something regarding the steam generator level indicators.  Now I have no idea where these indicators are right now, but back then they were located near the entrance to the B loop.  In order to get there, you needed to walk past the regenerative heat exchanger and an air operated pressure relief valve.  In any event, the entry was made by the resident inspector, Gerry Snajder and myself.  I remember Gerry telling us that we needed to “move fast” passed the heat exchanger in order to reduce exposure since at power it is a pretty high radiation area.  So Gerry went first, followed by the resident inspector and finally me.  I remember just as I was going past the heat exchanger, the relief valve let out a blast of air and the light bulb above me on the primary shield wall burned out all in the same instance.  I remember thinking to myself, oh great, I am in containment and we just had a LOCA!!.  Obviously that was a little dramatic, but you never know what goes through your head when weird things happen all at the same time.

 

When the NRC issued I&E Bulletin 79-02 regarding adequate anchor bolts.  Mark Shaw and I did anchor bolt depth measurements on pipe supports in containment during the refueling outage.  Back then we had a refueling outage every year in the spring.  Of course we found inadequate depth of anchor bolts on the pipe supports by the MOV valves on the low head safety injection in the basement of containment.  After a lot of discussion, the vice president Whitey made the decision to rebuild the supports and it delayed the restart following the refueling outage by a few days.  I then remember when the NRC issued I&E Bulletin 79-14 regarding seismic design of piping systems.  It was determined that the pipe support we had just put in on the low head safety injection MOV was too rigid and in fact, the pipe support had to be removed.  So the next spring outage it was removed.  You just never know what you got until you know what you got.

 

In 1981 when Ginna became the first plant to perform a volumetric examination of the welds of the RCPs.  The RCP is made up of 4 castings and therefore has 3 circumferential welds that connect the 4 parts  Normally for welds a volumetric exam is done using an ultrasonic examination technique, but due to the grain boundaries of castings, only a radiography examination technique could be used.  Unfortunately normal sources of radiation used for radiography would not have enough “oomph” to examine these welds because the film would fog from background radiation due to the long exposure times needed to examine these welds.  In order to accomplish these exams, a special device was developed with the help of EPRI called MINAC.  It was a miniature linear accelerator and produced something on the order of 200R per minute.  RG&E developed a tripod arrangement and a manipulator to insert the MINAC into the RCP and execute the radiography.  If I remember correctly, we managed to examine 1 and 1/3 of the welds before the MINAC crapped out.  I think it was later used at Point Beach and based on these 2 plants, no indications were found and a code case was prepared which eliminated the need to perform these exams in the future for the nuclear industry.  Just an example of the many “firsts” accomplished at Ginna

 

Monday morning in January 1982.  It was the 25^th and we had our tube rupture event.  I remember spending the day in the basement of the Visitors Center (now the Training Center East) and coordinating on-site survey teams.  I left around midnight to go home.  I remember I had missed Mike’s birthday party.  He was 3 years old.  I don’t think that had a major lifetime effect on him, but then again I think it was that day that he decided he wanted to work in the nuclear industry.  I remember that after we had reached a stable condition, we decided that a containment entry was needed.  I was fortunate to be one of a four member team of Bernie Quinn, Wes Backus, Gerry Snajder and myself who made that entry.  Of course, containment was not much different than any other time I had been in there with the exception of the boric acid on the PRT up by the rupture disc.

 

Sitting in a PORC meeting as we were discussing a repair procedure to plug tubes that had been damaged during the event and the secondary side hydro that was going to be performed to verify the tubes were plugged successfully.  The procedure discussed plugging the tubes but did not specifically discuss both the hot leg side and cold leg side, just plugging the tubes.  Needless to say, we blew it and only plugged the tubes on the hot leg side.  When the secondary side was pressurized, the tubes on the cold leg side let the non-borated water leak into the loop between the RCP and the S/G.  I then remember sitting in a meeting of the NSARB (now known as the NSRB) discussing what reactivity change could be expected when we started the RCP and that slug of non-borated water was introduced into the reactor.  Later on, Duane Filkins said to me that he was going to ask the question during the PORC meeting if the procedure should address plugging tubes on both the cold leg and hot leg, but didn’t because he thought that it was a dumb question.  That is when I learned that no question is too dumb to ask and that is probably why I ask a lot of dumb questions.

 

When we had the world’s largest mobile crane on site to replace the steam generators.  That is when we started parking in the current parking lot, although it was not paved at that time.  The crane needed to be assembled and it was put together in the old parking lot area.  It took like 3 months to put together, but when finished it was an impressive piece of machinery.  However it was not as impressive as it was when it had a full length stream generator hanging from it as they pulled them out of containment in 1 piece, again a first for the nuclear industry in America.  There are pictures around various cubicles that people have of this event and it is quite impressive.  Of course, these 2 steam generators are stored on site in the “mausoleum” on the hill west of the engineering building.

 

When RG&E told Ginna that the company was going to be getting all of the applications they had running on the mainframe computer off and the only application left was going to be CMIS.  Of course that meant that the Ginna budget was not only going to need to cover the cost of the application, but also the cost of the mainframe.  That is what lead Mark Flaherty to ask Rich Mark (aka Richie Rich) and myself to convert the CMIS application from the mainframe to a SQL Server based Visual Basic application.  Thirteen months later, on Valentine’s day 2003, we left the mainframe behind and CMIS with a modern windows interface was born.  Just as a side note, RG&E never got rid of the mainframe, rather a little more than a year later they got rid of Ginna and sold it to Constellation Energy.  Apparently, we must have really ticked them off with our CMIS application.

 

When we first introduced a windows based CMIS, most users were used to the green screen interface of a mainframe.  In order to assist the users, we decided to add tool tips to the new and different interface elements.  Tool tips are those little light yellow boxes that popup on the screen when you hover your mouse over and interface element.  Well it was a long arduous task to create all these tool tips, so for those elements that we had not defined a tool tip text for, we let the application randomly select from a list of “standard” tool tips.  Our first random list was a list of the French taunts from Monty Python’s Holy Grail movie.  You remember things like “You mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries”.  Well that didn’t go over so well, so we changed to quotes from the web site despair.com like “There are no stupid questions, but there are a LOT of inquisitive idiots” or “Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups”.  We finally finished our tool tips, but we brought a little humor to the work place for a while.

 

May of 2005 when Ginna became the first plant in the fleet to implement the new eCAP (Electronic Corrective Action Program later to be named ePIC) application.  This application eliminated about half a zillion “Barney” folders floating around the plant.  You remember those purple folders that always seemed to end up in the bottom of the pile of all the stuff laying around on your desk.

 

November of 2008 when I started working on the FCMS (Fleet Configuration Management System) project.  That is when I started appearing less and less at Ginna and more and more at Candler Street, Calvert Cliffs and Nine Mile Point.  I also lost my dual 23 inch monitors and my cubicle at Ginna.  One thing I didn’t lose, was my place in the Ginna Golf League and my attendance at the numerous golf outings planned by Gregg Joss (aka the Pool Manager).  I remember what a great team we had on this project and the successes of installing the interim FCMS at Ginna first in March of 2009, followed by the “final” version at Calvert in May of 2009, Nine Mile Point in July of 2009 and finally Ginna in October of 2009.  As with any software, the final version is never really the final version, and as such, a new version with engineering workflow was rolled out in October of 2010.

 

 

Yep, 40 years has brought me great memories of Ginna.  But more importantly, it has allowed me to cross paths with a great number of people who have educated me, inspired me and enlightened me.  Many are no longer with us and have gone to that great “control room” in the sky, but all of them I will always remember as “my friends”.  As I make my last walk out of the guard house and to my car, I want to thank everyone I have ever came into contact with for all of the great times these past 40 years and to wish all of you continued health and success in the future.

 

Thanks again for all the memories and until we meet again…

 

JCB

 

Remembrance from Rudy Forgensi Jr. at Ginna

After 29 & ½ years I did the math, literally and figuratively, and it’s time for me to go. I had always figured I’d be leaving Ginna a little more gracefully and with more planning, but “it is what it is.” I’m trying to avoid distracting anyone right now, and I’m sure I’ll see most of you at Hooligans or on the golf course in the near future as I’m not planning on moving anywhere. My family, and my wife’s family are all still living in this area, and similar to my life at Ginna, that would be difficult for me to leave behind. The only real plans we have are to hitch our new camper to the back of the truck, jump into it with our dog, and explore this continent.

 

Emily has challenged me to share some memories similar to the way Jim Bodine did. As it turns out I probably enjoyed writing this more than you will reading it.

 

Here are some of my recollections, happy, sad, good & bad (I like Dr. Seuss):

· Being hired by Ken Schneider of RG&E in 1981: I showed up at a job fair after playing a game of football at Clarkson College. I was muddy & sweaty with long tangled hair. RG&E had a booth & Ken ignored me until I mentioned I was from Webster NY. Afterwards he went home and asked his daughter about me. I was hired because I had worked in the kitchen of the Glen Edith restaurant with his daughter. Good thing we didn’t date or anything similar to that!

· John Walden and I watching a radioactive cloud pass overhead during the Ginna Steam Generator Tube Rupture: We had been hired about 6 months earlier, heard all the noises from the plant shutting down and releasing steam. We went outside to see what was going on and didn’t know it was a radioactive release at the time.

· The first time I was in an Emergency Diesel Generator room when it started. If you put this on your “to do” list, bring an extra pair of shorts.

· Holding the record for the number “Duty Days” worked in one month: After STA’s worked on shift for a short period of time, Ginna adopted a Duty Day rotation. The STA had to stay within 10 minutes of the control room per an NRC requirement. We had the STA’s stay on site for 24 hours, with a place to sleep at night. Initially there was a couch/bed in the Main Conference room. Eventually we made a small room with a TV, Microwave, recliner, and bed. This enabled the STA’s to work in many other organizations on site while fulfilling the STA role. I believe the record was 4 weekdays, 2 weekends, and 1 holiday in one month.

· Celebrating (actually not celebrating) my birthday during the outage every year from 1983 to 1996.

· Celebrating Carm Collini’s mother’s birthday during the outage every year from 1983 to 1996. This can be repeated for many other occasions such as Easter, etc…..

· Jumping Steam Generators with Greg Jones and many others: The dose rate was measured in R, not mR, and the stay time was measured in minutes and seconds.

· Hiding a playboy bunny on the cover of the outage reports from 1984 until we stopped producing the reports. This may have had something to do with why we stopped producing the reports.

· Scaring Dan Berry as many times as possible during an outage with a life sized rubber rat.

· Being on shift with Dewey Horning the first time Ginna experienced a decreased screen house level due to frazzle ice: Cables that run through the intake tunnel from Lake Ontario became detached and balled up inside the tunnel one winter. This restricted flow which basically made it seem like Lake Ontario was disappearing. This occurred before any procedures for this event were created. To everyone’s credit on shift, the procedure we now have is pretty much identical to the actions taken that night.

· Hiding in a dark space in the middle of the night in order to scare the ____ out of someone else on shift passing by.

· Asking Doug Peterson to shut off all core cooling and CCW one outage in order for Roy Gillow to dress in a chemical suit and manually back seat an MOV that was spraying CCW all over the Auxiliary Building.

· Destroying a microwave in the Butler building: The older microwaves did not cook popcorn very well unless you elevated it an inch or two off the bottom during cooking. I used an old plate to do this until it disappeared on me. That night I tried a stack of paper napkins.......   About ½ way through cooking I noticed my eyes burning and the smoke coming from the microwave. After shutting off the microwave I grabbed the smoldering napkins by the corner, trying to get them to the bathroom and some water. Walking these napkins down the hallway was in effect fanning them. I got about 10 feet before they burst into flames and I dropped them on the floor. I was able to grab a garbage can and smother the fire before the entire building went up in flames. As you can tell STA’s weren’t Fire Brigade qualified. The next morning I confessed to Tom Plantz at turnover, explained why the window was open in the bunk room, and apologized for the smoky smell in his sleeping quarters that night. Tom turned over to Ron Ploof the next day and did not explain the smoke filled room. Ron noticed a smoky smell that night and traced it to the microwave, thought it was defective, tore the door off of it, and threw it away. That’s how the STA’s upgraded their microwave. The last time I looked, the burnt spot on the floor of the Butler Building is still there.

· Being in the right place at the right time: STA’s used to do a plant tour on weekends. One Saturday I was in the west condenser pit and noticed a few drops of water on the floor. I traced it to some piping on the top floor between the HP and LP turbines. An AO and I removed some grating to investigate where it was coming from and found a small steam leak. From there I went to the control room to notify the shift, look up the piping and any isolation valves on prints. By the time we found out it was isolable and came out of the control room, the steam leak was so bad you couldn’t get near the area. Luckily it hadn’t spread such that we could still get to the isolation valve. We isolated the piping (gland sealing steam) and made the repairs on line.

· Lori Stavalone’s desk surrounded by purple folders.

· Green Eggs and Spam.

Maximo implementation at Ginna Station: Working 850 hours of overtime in one year with a very talented and hard working team of Constellation employee’s (really led by Jean Hodge). Ginna was the first site in the fleet to implement Maximo. This is not exactly an honor, it’s more like walking the plank. Three weeks after implementation we were planning as many packages per week as we did prior to implementation. This is a testament to the design, implementation and training that the team did.

 

Believe it or not, I did try to keep this short. And I apologize for all the inside jokes, but they were unavoidable. I hope you end up with as many wonderful memories as I did (just not the scary ones). God bless and good luck,

        Rudy

 

United Way

Denny Gent dropped me an email about this year’s United Way. He asked if I had received a donation form for 2011.

 

I found that since 2010 United Way solicited RG&E Retirees via a direct mailing from United Way not RG&E.

 

We did get a response from United Way. I suggest if you did not receive a donation request contact them.

 

Good morning:

 

Thanks so much to Laurie and Mr. Clegg for forwarding Mr. Gent’s email inquiry to us. Mr. Gent we greatly appreciate your continued interest in supporting the United Way and apologize that for some reason we overlooked contacting you for our 2011 campaign.  

 

By way of copying Clark King, I’ll ask him to please contact you and provide the appropriate pledge document so that you can make a pledge.

 

The fine support we receive from RG&E, its employees and retirees makes a significant difference in the lives of so many in need in our community.

 

Thanks again to all and best regards,

 

Joe

 

Joe Hicks
Account Executive
United Way of Greater Rochester
75 College Ave.
Rochester, NY 14607
tel.585.242.6465
fax 585.242.5475
email joe.hicks@uwrochester.org

 

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