How ‘Navy nukes’ give America’s nuclear industry a reliable workforce

BREMERTON — At any given moment, around a dozen atom-splitting nuclear reactors abut the Kitsap Peninsula.

Nuclear energy gives limitless range to aircraft carriers like the Bremerton-based USS Nimitz to traverse the world’s oceans; it also gives the 13 submarines homeported here the ability to perpetually stay under the waves on their own deployments. 

But that nuclear power stays at sea.

While it’s unlikely that power will ever come to shore in Kitsap, many of the sailors who operate those reactors go on to jobs in the nuclear industry. And “Navy nukes,” as they’re known, are a valuable commodity as nuclear power is increasingly eyed as a renewable energy source amid a climate crisis.  

“We’ve been very happy with the candidates the Navy is continuing to send us,” says Russ Long, operations manager of the Columbia Generating Station, Washington state’s lone nuclear power plant. 

Of the plant’s 900 or so workers, 70% are former military, and most of those are retired Navy nukes, Long said. That includes the plant’s CEO and Long himself. It’s a familiar story across the country at the 55 nuclear power plants that operate across 28 states. 

Long, who grew up in Tennessee, spent six years in the Navy, including being stationed at Naval Base Kitsap and helping decommission the USS Tunny, a Sturgeon-class fast-attack submarine at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. 

Some friends told him about the Energy Northwest nuclear power plant, which was recruiting for entry-level equipment operators. He hopped the Cascade Mountains and has been there ever since, rising through the ranks to become the plant’s operations manager. His Navy experience, with know-how of nuclear reactors, was invaluable. 

“When I showed up, I thought like a submariner,” he said. 

Roots of the nuclear Navy

Navy deployments on nuclear-powered subs and aircraft carriers are routine. But that fact belies just how audacious it was when pioneered under Hyman G. Rickover, the “father of the Nuclear Navy.” Rickover and his team provided the Navy with a new, seemingly limitless power source, first with the launch of the USS Nautilus in 1954. The first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the USS Enterprise, followed in 1960 with its own commissioning. 

In the time since, the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program has “safely steamed” more than 166 million miles on board dozens of vessels, overseen by more than 142,000 nuclear propulsion plant operators. 

Many, like Larry Sloan, have gone on to jobs at nuclear power plants. 

“You just cannot beat the training,” said Sloan, a Navy veteran who has worked at a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania for 35 years. “There’s just no organization, no university that can provide you the experience the nuclear reactor can.” 

The licensed reactor operator was one of the first sailors to serve on the Bangor-based USS Ohio ballistic-missile submarine. When he went to work in the civilian nuclear industry, he found himself surrounded by fellow Navy nukes in his orientation class. 

Whoops: why Western Washington is unlikely to host a nuclear power plant anytime soon

As the nation steers toward a clean energy economy, nuclear power has become a flashpoint of the climate crisis. Atomically produced energy to some is a perilous and costly risk that resurrects nightmares from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan or the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Soviet Russia. To others, it is a power savior that produces no greenhouse gas emissions (though they do make some radioactive waste).