Quote:

paraphrased: We regret to inform you that your organization no longer fits within our company’s strategic plans. Therefore, your position is no longer necessary. Have a nice day.

Well -.

(I’ve been dying to use ‘-‘ in a sentence. This is not the vehicle had in mind though.)

It’s fascinating to watch the events unfold. We have 60 days until the corporate nuclear design group is dissolved. Suddenly priorities have shifted for everybody and the word “deadline” and “urgent” just disappeared from the dictionary.

Now to consider my options, stay with the company but go to a site (which are also facing severe staffing level reductions), go to a different organization (fossil, hydro, transmission, etc.), hire on with a different company or contractor, maybe work for the regulator, or choose something entirely different?

This isn't a "oh woe is me" thread. I'm set up pretty good, I've just got to choose which path to walk.

Maybe FermiLab is hiring? I know several people there, not that it helps.

Fred

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"For shame, gentlemen, pack your evidence a little better against another time."
-- John Dryden, "The Vindication of The Duke of Guise" 1684

Hey, Captain, it can be a "woe is me", it stinks any way you slice it, so feel free to complain.

I went through a similar experience over the last year. The parent corporation is closing the plant I worked at, I managed to find a position in a different company that is part of the corporation (actually in the same division). It has meant an increase in my commute from 45 minutes to 70 minutes and learning a whole new business and technology. It has not been a happy experience, but it was better than unemployment. I wish you luck.

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009

Go work for Constellation. They're accelerating their COL plans.

Or Westinghouse and build reactors for Duke Energy.

It's all go at the moment!

Or you could go work for Greenpeace and bring the gits down from the inside.

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2 good 2 need 4 engines

Hey, Captain! Sorry to hear that you're going to have to move on. Do you have good writing skills, and can you work independently? If so, you might consider hiring out as a consultant developing training materials for industry. I did this kind of work for WestVaCo (Luke MD, and Wickliffe KY), Georgia Pacific (Cedar Springs GA) MacMillan Bloedel (Pine Hill AL) and others. I started out with General Physics Corporation (Columbia MD) and freelanced afterward. The trick is, much of the training in these pulp and paper mills is on-the-job training, and much of that training is inadequate and/or unverifiable. That scares the pants off the insurance companies, since these guys are operating power boilers (usually 600-900 psi), chemical recovery boilers, turbine-generator sets, high-voltage electrical distribution equipment, etc. I quit doing this after a few years, because I got sick of airplanes, motels, and restaurants and wanted to spend more time with my wife. Made a lot of $$$ though. If you think you are cut out for training, you should give General Physics a call at least. They tend to hire lots of ex-Navy guys, especially submariners, and they have guys on staff that practically wrote the book on commercial nukes.

http://www.gpworldwide.com/

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The ether of general relativity therefore differs from that of classical mechanics or the special theory of relativity respectively, in so far as it is not 'absolute', but is determined in its locally variable properties by ponderable matter.

Albert Einstein, "On the Ether", 1924

The rumor mill was way off this time on the severity of it. Nobody had a clue it was going to be a total dissolution of an organization.

My main thing is that I want to stay fairly local, so that means it'll probably be the end of the nuclear chapter of my life. Oh well, I always intended to have good ALARA (As Low [dose] As Reasonably Achieveable) so this ought to help out there quite a bit.

My father-in-law is running a small start-up business and I've been considering working with him on it. Less pay, but then my goal in life isn't to be grossly rich.

The biggest concern is healthcare with a toddler. From what I've heard, healthcare can get expensive.

Heh, I was thinking NRC and be a bear when it comes to regulatory compliance.

Healthcare is (in my opinion) insanely expensive. One of my employees is looking at close to $1000/month for two of his kids (3 hours.day, after school) - that works out to about $18.5 per hour (18 school days- every other week, just about, is short a day)

oh, wait, that's daycare stuff.

Still, the concept is the same.. my employees pay something like three or four hundred a month for family coverage (including dental and optical).

If it's not too late, spend 4 years in the military and make sure you keep the insurance when you leave. TriWest/TriCare is wonderful (speaking from experience, by golly)

What is so idiotic is that the US public has not demanded universal health care. Why should we be captive to the insurance companies with all of their rules? My wife's empoyer recently switched providers, and the new provider has tried to nail us several times about "unauthorized" doctor's visits and tests, when our insurance coverage was supposed to have proceded without interruption. Our government is hostage to these creeps because they are paying off our elected officials. When do we eliminate this "protection racket" and join the real world?

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The ether of general relativity therefore differs from that of classical mechanics or the special theory of relativity respectively, in so far as it is not 'absolute', but is determined in its locally variable properties by ponderable matter.

Albert Einstein, "On the Ether", 1924

I have health insurance provided by the State of Washington (because of my disability), and not all providers accept it. In fact, so few do that my nightmare now-ex-shrink has a full calendar, because he will accept state medical coupons.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Captain Kidd,

Can you give your job description, and a description of your
organization, and say why it is suddenly no longer needed?
I can only guess that the organization was either not currently
producing anything, so had no actual customers at the moment,
or the customers you had decided to go elsewhere, or the
customers you had were not enough and they are now in as much
of a fix as the people in your organization.

The description of your organization: What does it do? How
does it do that? How many people in what kinds of jobs?
How much and in what ways did your organization depend on
the parent corporation?

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

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http://www.FreeMars.org/jeff/

"I find astronomy very interesting, but I wouldn't if I thought we
were just going to sit here and look." -- "Van Rijn"

"The other planets? Well, they just happen to be there, but the
point of rockets is to explore them!" -- Kai Yeves

Well, here’s the short answer: it was decided that with a 6th reactor coming online next year and a serious study initiated into finishing one of the remaining, never completed reactors, the company should realign from doing major design modifications in-house, shop that out to an A&E firm, and only focus on critical keep-them-running mods.

Our group was the central capital project group. The one that did the tens of thousands to multi-million dollar jobs. The division between small and large projects is kind of vague; a simple job can become extremely complex when a codes issue becomes involved.

It basically came down to where the company wants to be in the next few years, that and one other thing that I’ll get to later. We were proven to be far cheaper than any of the A&E firms looked at. That never was the issue, nor are any of your conjectures. I hadn’t supplied enough information about the situation, so that’s understandable. The company has decided that they don’t want to deal with the big projects, period. They’d rather pay more to let an outside firm handle it. The focus for the in-house groups is to keep the units running to generate electricity. Anything else will be done elsewhere as the needs require.

The other thing is keeping “standard.” It has been determined that we are the only company in the US nuclear industry with both central and on-site design groups; everybody else is one or the other. Therefore, to be “leaders in the industry,” we’re going to be like everybody else. I'm not making this up either, the announcement said both that we want to be the leading company and that we need to be standard with the industry.

Thus, “those disgusting corporate types” (I have had those words spoken directly to me) were the ones sacrificed. We've been the redheaded stepchild since the conception of the group. So its death is no big surprise.

In particular, you didn't mention in the original post that you
work for a power production company. I gather now that you do.

It hadn't occurred to me that a power company would ever
have the staff to design its own facilities, and especially
not reactors and associated equipment. I assumed that overall
plant design would always be by architectural and engineering
(I'm guessing that is your "A&E") firms, and the reactors are
designed by Westinghouse or GE or whoever.

It probably should have occurred to me, though, since my dad
was the architect who designed the first twenty-some Target
stores, after which Target formed their own architectural
design group and has done everything in-house since then.

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

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http://www.FreeMars.org/jeff/

"I find astronomy very interesting, but I wouldn't if I thought we
were just going to sit here and look." -- "Van Rijn"

"The other planets? Well, they just happen to be there, but the
point of rockets is to explore them!" -- Kai Yeves

Ah, yeah, that is a bit of an important piece of info. Yes, it's a power company I'm with.

To further clarify the situation and design group job description, here's an example. One of my recent jobs was to replace some ASME code valves. Their function and way they operate didn't change. Just some changes to their basic design and to the process piping since the new valves were about an inch longer than the existing. That's considered a design group job. I've done other replacement only jobs. I've also rerouted piping, a bit more design intensive.

What you're thinking of: new buildings, new reactors, etc., always went outside.

Because I like my income taxes to be <30%, thank you very much. You get what you can afford, and I'm comfortable with that. Especially since my company pays for my full ride as one of the perks.

That's great for you, but pretty lousy for the 45 million Americans without insurance--including about half of all people with chronic medical conditions. (Including, until very recently, me.)

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

My sympathies, at the same time, you're telling me there's a logical and defensible reason I should have to pay for someone else's health care?

This should be absolutely fascinating to read.

"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few."?

The simple selfish one is: it could be you in a week.

The other is that without the ensurance companies skimming profit off the money payed, more money will be available overall for the actual medical stuff, but since that's an argument based on the idea of optimising the average good for everyone, rather than optimising what's good for you specifically, I can see how that might fail to convince you.

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And the "driving on the freeway on a scooter" analogy still holds true because the pilots are sitting in 7 to 30 ton aircraft o' doom and you are running around them in your very own Meatbody, Mark I. Beep, beep.
Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

Nevermind. My response was too political. I would just suggest that something which doesn't work on average specifically, won't work on average overall.

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http://amssolarempire.blogspot.com

Epidemics.

The uninsured are far less likely to seek health care when they are sick (for some mysterious reason), and diseases spread far more rapidly in any population without access to adequate health care. This means that, when diseases strike, they strike the poor first and become endemic before they move on to those with health care.

As to how all those poor people dying affects you, think for a moment about all the services you receive every single day provided by people who don't get benefits and can't afford health care on their own. Think food service. Think retail. Besides which, once an epidemic starts, it then pretty much inevitably starts taking down those who can afford proper health care, because the system becomes swamped. It is in your best interests to keep the lower classes healthy, because what hurts them will inevitably hurt you somehow.

Besides, it's basic human decency.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say,