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This gallery started as a series of e-mails and then was converted into an album on Facebook. The original introduction from the Facebook version follows (with some very minor editing). There are some additional notes at the end of this Introduction.


This is a long story.

I guess one place to start is when I retired for Washington Safety Management Solutions (WSMS) in May 2004 (added May 2011: a few years later Washington Group was purchased by URS Corporation -- this subsidary is now known as URS-SMS). This company started life as a department in a subsidiary of Westinghouse. It became a subsidiary of Washington Group thru a series of spin-offs, sales, and mergers, over a several-year period, that are too complicated to explain (and I probably don’t remember them all anyhow). Later, after I retired, Washington Group merged with URS, becoming a division of URS, a company most of us had never heard of until the merger was announced (they own the old EG&G Corporation – or part of it, at least – among other things).

After I retired, I was asked to come back to WSMS as a part-time contractor (sort of a consultant, except without the status and the big bucks) in October 2004 (a project in Livermore CA that lasted about 14 months) and also in January 2006 (a project here in Aiken that lasted about 5 months). At a Christmas/Holiday party in December 2006, Kevin O’Kula (of WSMS) asked me to come back a third time to work on a project to help prepare licensing paperwork (a Design Certification Document, or DCD) for Mitsubishi Heavy Industires’ (MHI’s) Advanced Pressurized Water Reactor (APWR) design. This DCD was later submitted to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. This is part of a plan by MHI to market their nuclear reactor design in the U.S. The MHI APWR design is basically a Westinghouse design from perhaps the 1980s with several major, but evolutionary, improvements. It is different from the more radical advanced design that Westinghouse currently markets under the name AP1000, the AP1000 has what might be termed “revolutionary” improvements.

I took this assignment because it was: (1) an interesting (and challenging) chance to work on nuclear reactors again (after about 14 years working on other stuff, except for a few-month assignment in Monroeville PA around 1999); (2) a chance to (again) work with Al Wooten, Kevin O’Kula, Ray Yeung, and Stanley Chow (all really good people to team with -- later worked with Brittney Merriweather on this, who I hadn't know prevously); and (3) fairly short-term because WSMS was trying to hire someone with more current skills to take over what Al and I would be doing (that person eventually turned out to be John McAllister). And it worked out OK, except for the short-term part (was on the project for about 10 months) – and that perhaps certain aspects were somewhat more challenging than I had anticipated.

I was originally going to focus on a portion of Chapter 15 of the DCD, which covers accident analysis (with the above-named people). Chapter 15 reports on predictions of how the reactor is designed to respond safely to certain (hopefully only) imagined accident conditions. Because of some re-arrangements of people assigned to other chapters, I also did some stuff on Chapter 6, which covers the containment building (that's when I started working wtih Dennis Gehr and Gary Dorfler). I didn’t know much about containment building analyses going into this, which is why I said certain aspects were a bit more challenging that I had anticipated.

A trip to Japan wasn’t initially part of the deal. However, that opportunity came to pass near the end of the effort, when several of us went there to review what we had produced with several representatives of the MHI customer.

The trip involved some very long days, with meetings that lasted 10 hours minimum (and probably 14-15 hours on a couple days), including Saturdays. In addition, we often had "assignments" (from during the meetings) to be completed in preparation for the next day's meeting. Despite that, I did get a few chances to take photos, and they are presented in this album.

A few months after we got back from Japan, Dennis Gehr (a co-worker who on this same trip) sent some photos from a later trip he made to Japan (he went over for several series of meetings over perhaps a 3- or 4-month time period). That motivated me to sort the photos I had made. I picked out about 95 photos and sent them to several people -- with annotations – as attachments to what eventually became a series of 13 e-mails.

This album is a subset of those ~95 photos. I initially built the album on my Facebook page. That Facebook album has been slightly enlarged in the process of converting it to this web gallery in May 2011.

When I started working on the Facebook version, I believed a Facebook album was limited to 60 photos (this seems to not actually be the case -- or perhaps is no longer the case). Several of the photos that were omitted in the Facebook version primarily featured candid shots of people who were also on the trip: John McAllister, Dennis Gehr, Gary Dorfler, and Kevin O’Kula. The descriptions included here are edited versions of the annotations in the e-mails that originally transmitted these photos. (After I realized that I could include more than 60 photos in an album, I added a few. However, it didn't seem worthwhile to try to re-construct the entire set of 95 in the series of e-mails. This is probably a case where less is more -- and I probably have too many as it is.) A few of the photos trimmed from the Facebook version have been restored for this version.

The image number that my digital camera assigned is included the "long description" of each individual photo (in addition to a letter sequence indicator I added in a few cases where I edited the photo (such as by cropping it, or where I included a duplicate version, such as for this "introduction page").

As you can see from these image numbers, I took LOTS of photos. Contact me if you want to see others (but you don’t REALLY want to see all of the others). I’ve also generally included the date in the description (using local time – I didn’t realize until we got back that I SHOULD have reset the clock/calendar on my digital camera – it “time-stamped” all of the photos with the South Carolina time -- and the South Carolina date).

Four of us (John, Dennis, Gary, and I) left South Carolina on 26 Oct 2007 (a Friday morning). We flew business class (VERY expensive tickets). I was surprised (and grateful) WSMS sent me business class, as they did the others, even though I was a contractor. I did have one brief scare. When I got my ticket at the airport, it was for seat in Row 75, which, at first, sounded like the back of the plane (not business class). Turns out, however, that seats on Northwest flights to Japan in Row 70 and higher are actually on the upper deck of a Boeing 747 – VERY MUCH business class.

We had a few-hour layover in Detroit – in the first/business class lounge -- before getting on Northwest Airlines flights to Japan (John and I to Tokyo's Narita Airport and Dennis and Gary to Kobe – Kevin flew over a couple days later, if I recall correctly – I believe he went directly to Kobe). MHI has part of their reactor design/analysis organization in Kobe and part of it in Tokyo. John and I later went to Kobe too – and I later went back to Tokyo, and then back to Kobe again, eventually leaving out of what is essentially Osaka's international airport. {One of these Tokyo/Kobe trips was part of the original plan for the trip. However, those original plans changed as various meetings were rescheduled and new meetings were added. On several days the 5 of us were split up to attend 2 parallel meetings held in parallel (and one day there were three, I believe) and on at least two days those parallel meetings were going on in different cities. My memory is that each of the 5 of us ended up returning to the U.S. on a different day (and when John left, he essentially traveled directly to Washington DC -- where MHI has another office -- for a different series of meetings).}

John and I arrived in Tokyo late on Saturday (local time). We had planned this to give ourselves a day of rest/acclimatization prior to meeting with the MHI customer on Monday at 8 am.

That sort of leads into the first photo in the album in this gallery .....

I will add that I put this together (the Facebook version -- around 2009) primarily (1) to practice using the Facebook photo option and (2) because I had sort of a head start on the work (since I'd put selected the photos and did most work on preparing annotations a few months earlier when sending the photos out attached to e-mails). This trip wasn't a life-changing experience for me or anything like that (at least not that I know of).


Added when adapting this for the XenonSheepdog.org web site:

The earlier versions used small versions of the image files -- versions intended for attachments to e-mails. In this version, I've gone back and located the original images, which are not super-large. These were taken with my first digital camera (4 Meg, I believe). The way Shozam works, those original versions show up only when the user selects "Original". Otherwise, you see images that Shozam has reduced insize (number of pixels) in order to speed browser operations.

Looks like back in the days when the e-mail and Facebook versions were put up, I did not do much editing, cropping, etc. In recent years, I tried to do things such as make horizons horizontal. That doesn't seem to have been done here.

The ISO doesn't seem to show up in the information about each image. Perhaps my older camera does not record that (or does not have a variable ISO capability).

The dates and times from the information associated with the image (from the metadata recorded by the camera along with the digital image) probably represents the date and time in South Carolina when the photograph was taken. I do not remember changing the setting on the camera -- and usually don't change them).

This was the first time I used the technique of trying to tell a "story" by means of a set of annotated photos. And wanting to maintain that "story telling" ability was the reason why I chose Shoam for my gallery software (after testing several others).

To the best of my knowledge, this "story" so longer exists on Facebook -- at least not in its original form. As best I have been able to determine, The various Facebook design/format changes (such as going to "Timeline") have greatly perturbed the "album" I put on Facebook that contians these photos and accompanying text.






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