Feminae in Energia Atomica

Amici, Americani, Compatriotae,

I have worked with all manner of people in my 40+ years within the nuclear power industry - many different kinds of people from both sexes varying in race, cultural origin, religion, etc. In general the overwhelming majority were professional regardless of whatever characteristic they may have possessed, for usually the incompetent got ejected sooner or later based on their unsatisfactory work or their lack of work. I have worked with white, black, brown, red and yellow people (so far no green or purple or orange ones - ha! ha!). I have worked with Christians of all kinds of denominations, as well as Jews, Shiite and Sunni Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and atheists. I have worked with people born in America and from other countries: Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia, Britain, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Iraq, Egypt, Nigeria, Pakistan, India, China, Japan, Korea, Philippines, etc. ad nauseam. Intelligence and capability are agnostic to the wide diversity of people within the nuclear power industry.

Indeed, one of the best system engineers with whom I worked was by accident of birth a woman. Almost always she came into work early in the morning and left late. She went out into the field with the maintenance mechanics and electricians, getting her hands dirty in doing real work with the men. She was conscientious and patient and persistent. The equipment and systems under her care had never functioned so well. Then after an incident with some idiot managers, she left for a better paying position in the non-nuclear industry and sadly I never heard from her again. But I shall never ever forget her. And there are many other women like her in the nuclear power industry.

But what I cannot stand is this: hiring a eco-wacko, enviro-nazi, climate-change activist, millennial snowflake feminist with zero naval or commercial nuclear power experience into a directorship position for which she is demonstrably not qualified, or promoting an intern from Academia likewise with zero experience into a supervisory position over reactor safety analysis. First, doing this sets these women up for eventual failure; they don't have the experience to be doing what they are doing, and no hard-nosed utility executive is going to ever take them seriously because what they propose is laughably idealistic and unworkable. Second, it takes decades of experience to lose that unrealistic wide-eyed youthful brashness in order to embrace the fact that nuclear power is serious work not for the faint of heart and requires an attitude of regulatory compliance, not push-back with the kinds of dumb idiot ideas by which Leslie Dewan torpedoed her own company, Transatomic Power.

Whether you're a man or a woman in nuclear power, whether you're Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist or Hindu, whether you're American, Indian, Hispanic, African, Japanese, Chinese, or whatever, you need real-world experience, not just a degree in Academia and friends in high places. So work hard at a real nuclear power plant, and get you're hands dirty for a decade or two doing the real work that no one else wants to do. Then you'll be worthy of promotion and finally able to change the world. One of the best experiences that I had was cleaning the bilges beneath the Feedwater Regulating Valves on a nuclear submarine in the North Atlantic. That taught me the most valuable commodity of all - HUMILITY. It's about time you millennials start grabbing some before the reality of failure smashes you into the ground. And that's ironic because humility comes form the Latin word humis which means dirt. As the Book of Genesis says, from dirt we were made and to dirt we will return.