CNF-Papers-Handouts

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Is Yours a Calling

William H. Hannum

13 November 2012

Intro

When Vic called me asking if I would speak at this gathering, I asked Vic what I should talk about, and he said that I should talk about 15 minutes. Some years ago before giving a talk, I asked for a quiet office to prepare my thoughts. On the wall was a prayer: Lord, may my words be sweet and tender, for tomorrow I may have to eat them.

With such thoughts in mind, I thought long and hard as to what I might say that might be of interest to this audience. I thought about listing my accomplishments and my failures. I could list my accomplishments easily enough, but there was not enough time to try to list my failures, so I had to think of something else.

Lacking anything better, I decided to share a few thoughts on how I came to be involved in nuclear power, and a few of the things I learned along the way. Perhaps there are some lessons that are worth sharing.

Why am I involved in nuclear power?

I was raised to understand that we are each put on this earth for a purpose, and that we should try to leave the world better than it was when we got here. In high school and college, I found math to be fun, and physics to be interesting. This was the time when the secrets of the nucleus were being uncovered. Near Christmas of my senior year in college, I got to thinking about what I should do when I grew up. How could I explore the exciting world of nuclear physics, and still do something useful. The life of an academic did not appeal to me; in fact, my mother thought I should be a handy-man, because I liked to fix things. While mulling this over, I heard a voice saying nuclear power. Well, let me not be overly dramatic; the voice came from the radio. It was President Eisenhower giving his Atoms for Peace speech. That seemed to fit, so I went on to grad school, and then off to work on nuclear power, and 60 years later, I’m still involved with nuclear power.

Is this sort of work a calling? Have I been doing the Lord’s work? I hope so. I ask for the Lord’s forgiveness on a lot of things, and I will rely on his mercy if I have misunderstood what he had in mind for me. Most of you, I am sure, are familiar with the story of the three bricklayers. Susan Eisenhower made allusion to the story in her call for cathedral thinking. In the story, each of the bricklayers was asked what he was doing. The first said he was laying bricks; the second building a wall; the third, building a cathedral to the glory of God. The way I tell the story, it was the third bricklayer who was fired. He was supposed to be building a brewery. I don’t claim that a nuclear power plant is necessarily a cathedral; perhaps more like a brewery, or at least a wall; a part of something larger. Building this wall to me is a response to Jesus’ instruction to Peter: Feed my sheep.

What are some lessons I have learned along the way?

My first job was with one of Admiral Rickover’s labs. The basic mission of his labs were to design submarines and later surface war ships, but I was assigned to work on the Shippingport reactor, his demonstration that nuclear power had non-military potential as well. Aside forn learning what was involved in designing nuclear reactors (this was before the time when there were any academic nuclear engineering programs), I was impressed with the commitment of the people to accuracy and to timely completion of tasks. If you were going to present material to the admiral, you knew it had to be correct, not out of fear of his wrath, but from the realization that he might accept your work, and your mistake could be fatal for men on a submarine (or nuclear power plant). The work you did was important, and had to be correct. So you regularly sought out others who were smarter than you to check your work. I keep that commitment to accuracy and completion of tasks as symbolic of our responsibility to God, and for some of the same reasons.

This obsession with safety and accuracy has morphed into Quality Assurance and Safety Assurance, where outside reviewers try to set rules and procedures that will guarantee safety, and then they play gotch-ya games when you don’t follow the rules. Sorry, that doesn’t work. I’ve regularly found myself with safety and QA responsibilities, and have been regularly criticized for emphasizing personal responsibility, not rules and procedures.

Lesson # 1: If you are going to treat you work as a calling, you need to take the job seriously.

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Another lesson I learned fairly early in the game is that the boss doesn’t know what he is talking about. I found it surprising that I had to explain things to my boss, but was really taken aback the first time I briefed the general manager, and realized he had no idea as to how a nuclear reactor worked. In Washington, the situation is even more extreme, where your boss’s boss is a political appointee. We used to have a name for the political appointee: We referred to him as Old Digestive. We keep feeding him good ideas, and you know what is left when he is done with them.

When I moved into supervisory positions of one sort or another, I realized that this insight was still valid. I really didn’t understand what most of the people working for me were doing, but you learn to trust them, and you hope that they really are smarter than you. As the boss, the best you can do is steer and direct the work, and support and encourage those who appear to know what they are doing.

I find it useful to listen to critics; even the professional anti-nuclears. Much of what they say is propaganda, but every now and again, there is a lesson to be learned. They frequently know what they are talking about, and it is always a mistake to underestimate their dedication.

The most interesting assignment I have had was as Director of the West Valley Demonstration Project. For those of you unfamiliar with West Valley, this was a commercial nuclear reprocessing plant some 35 miles south of Buffalo, NY. It operated some 6 years in the 1960s, but was closed as unprofitable, and plant was turned over to New York State. The State, not knowing what to do with it, left it abandoned until locals made enough noise about the contamination, leakage, and risk presented by some 700,000 gallons of high level nuclear waste, that Congress was persuaded to do something. The result was the West Valley Demonstration Project Act, whereby DOE was directed to show how to clean up such a mess. And I was put in charge. A few details helped to make the job interestin

• The waste tank had been designed for a 30 year life, was 25 years old, and not been maintained or inspected for 15 years;

• The Project was jointly sponsored by DOE and the State of New York, who had diametrically opposing views on the manner in which the project should be run.

But I had one overriding advantage: My boss, my headquarters handler, Congress, New York State; everyone wanted the problem to go away, and noone wanted their fingerprints on the problem in case things went wrong. So all I had to do was to keep the contractor focused on what we were supposed to be doing, and let them do their thing. Within a couple of years, the technology was in hand, equipment designed and built, the waste form approved, the site pretty well cleaned up, all at a cost about one quarter of the original estimates. It took few more years to actually process all the waste, but the (political) problem had gone away.

Lesson # 2: It pay to listen. As the boss, you may not know what you are talking about, but hopefully you can steer things in the right direction. Listen to those around you. They probably know more than you do, and may help you avoid making a mistake. This is almost as important as listening for guidance form your conscience and from God.

Turning to lesson number three: Even the most reasoned conclusions may not be correct. In the early years, I was involved in the studies that concluded that nuclear power was doomed by limited uranium unless the breeder was fully implemented by the year 2000. It didn’t work out that way. I observed the British make an all-out commitment to nuclear power in the 1960, but reversed course when North Sea gas and oil became available. The British are still evaluating when to expand their nuclear capacity.

In my formative years (I still consider that I am in my formative years), I ended up as a bureaucrat here in Washington. My first assignment was as Chief of the Reactor Physics Branch, Reactor Development Division. It seemed appropriate to me that if I was to direct a technology development program, I should try to figure out what the needs were, and develop a plan to address those needs. I was promptly advised by one of the more experienced bureaucrats: For god’s sake, don’t DO anything. Some years later, I finally understood what Marty was telling me. By then, I had been sent to Idaho as Deputy Director of the DOE Operations Office there, with specific instructions to finish a key safety facility (the LOFT project, for any of you who have been around as long as I have). This facility was planned as a quick, two year project to demonstrate what would happen if an LWR had a catastrophic coolant pipe break. The facility had been within a year of completion of construction for over each of the preceding 20 years. I delegated the problem to a competent man and provided him political cover. The facility was completed in a year. After doing a number of (highly significant) experiments, the job was done. The facility was no longer needed, and the Lab lost a major source of funding. Conclusion: As a bureaucrat, it does not pay to finish a job. That just leads to the termination of funding, and you have to find a new task to justify your existence.

I draw a somewhat different conclusion from these examples: Lesson # 3: Trust the most elaborate arguments, and the advice of others only if it makes sense. My wife accuses me of having selective hearing, and this is not all bad (except when listening to your wife). If we believe that the Lord provides guidance and answers prayers, it is wise to remember that Satan is also not above giving us advice (i.e., tempting us). In listening to others, I often think of what Elijah found: The Lord was not in the wind; He was not in the earthquake; He was not in the fire; but in the still small voice.

I said at the beginning that I was taught that we are put on this planet for a purpose. Now, I expect to be around for a long time yet, because I don’t think I’m doing too well in doing those things that I suspect I am supposed to have accomplished. But I do believe that by working to make nuclear power available as a safe, reliable and economic energy resource, I have been doing something that will leave the world a better place than it was when I got here. I leave it to others to decide whether this is doing the Lord’s work; but it has been interesting.

I will conclude by suggesting that, as you go to the technical sessions, or the hallway discussions, or wherever you go from here, remember to listen. You may learn something, or you may find an occasion to help someone else. We are here as a society, and our goal for today should be to learn, and to help.

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Report on Nuclear Fellowship Events at the 2013 Winter ANS Conference at the Omni Shoreham in Washington, DC

The Christian Nuclear Fellowship (CNF) met in mid-November at the Winter Meeting of the American Nuclear Society (ANS) at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, DC. Once again, it was a joy to gather as Christian professional colleagues to discuss our work in light of Christ's Lordship over our lives, and to encourage one another in our witness for Christ within our profession. The CNF is one of many Christian groups in many different professional fields that work to help professioanls integrate their work abd their faith.

In keeping with the special theme of the conference, i.e., celebrating the 75th anniversary of the discovery of nuclear fission and the 60th anniversary of President Eisenhower's "Atoms for Peace" talk at the United Nations, the topics discussed at the CNF events in Washington reflected on these significant milestones in the field of nuclear energy, from a uniquely Christian perspective.

(1) God's Sovereignty the Focus of CNF Roundtable Discussion Group - The CNF group had a stimulating discussion on the topic, "Have scientific discoveries over the centuries come about merely through human efforts, or have they been planned and directed by a sovereign God?" We reflected on the rich biblical teaching concerning God's sovereignty over all that happens in His creation and acknowledged also that noted theologians have pointed out persuasively that the many scientific advances following the Reformation grew out of (and were stimulated directly by) the biblical world view that was articulated during the Reformation period. That biblical world view affirms that the universe is totally under God's control and that therefore natural phenomena always follow certain "laws" established by the Creator; it also affirms that all of history has a purpose and direction determined by a sovereign God, a direction God has had in mind since before the world was created. In other words, history, in all its many aspects, is His Story. History is an unfolding of God's master plan for His created universe.

The Bible makes it clear that it is God who determines the boundaries of all nations and raises up rulers and puts them down. In other words, He rules sovereignly over the geopolitical events of this world, as history unfolds with time. Similarly, he rules over the events of "nature." Thus, we can logically conclude that the discovery of nuclear fission in 1938 did not happen accidentally, without God's involvement. Rather, it is reasonable to assume that it occurred according to God's master plan at precisely the point in history that God saw fit to reveal this aspect of His creation to mankind.

Therefore, we should thank God for this discovery, and for the many benefits of nuclear fission that have been a blessing to mankind since its discovery in 1938. Of course, as with all technologies, nuclear technology can be used by sinful humans for good or for bad. We came away from the discussion group also with a renewed sense of our vocational "calling" (from God) to study and to work in the field of nuclear science and engineering....for His glory....and for the good of mankind. As has been our long tradition, at the close of the evening we had a time of spontaneous prayer for our industry and for various needs made known by those present. (The attached handout prepared by Bob Wilson of the DOE was distributed to participants.)

(2) Dr. Bill Hannum Focused on Our "Calling" at the CNF Prayer Breakfast - At the CNF Power Breakfast, Dr. Bill Hannum of the Science Council for Global Initiatives, gave a talk in which he reflected further on our God-given calling to work in the field of nuclear technology. Dr. Hannum was inspired to work in the nuclear field when as a college student he heard on the radio President Eisenhower's "Atoms for Peace" talk in 1953. God used that talk, as well as several other influences, to lead Dr. Hannum to pursue a career in nuclear technology. Hannum shared in a very personal way how he has had a sense of "calling" to be engaged in the nuclear field ever since his college days. Many of us share that sense of calling as well, and we thank God for reminding us of this through Dr. Hannum.

Dr. Hannum also reminded us that the work we have been called to do is extremely important work. Therefore we must, especially as Christians, give our absolute best to the work God has called us to do. As we thank God for His good gift of nuclear energy and for the many ways it has benefited mankind since its discovery 75 years ago, let's remember that we must always perform our work for God's glory, with the utmost diligence and care, as we work as stewards of this amazing technology that God has blessed us with.

An additional note about our speaker: Dr. Hannum is a globally respected senior nuclear technology expert, educated at Princeton and Yale, who has held key management positions with the Department of Energy, served as Deputy Director General of the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency in Paris, and as Director of the West Valley Project (high level nuclear waste processing). He is a Fellow of the American Nuclear Society. We were honored to have Dr. Hannum as our speaker.

We hope to see you at other national meetings of the ANS in the future. In the meantime:

"Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ." - Colossians 3:23

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