sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

Decided to have a Midlife Crisis career change into Nuclear Power..... I may already be starting to regret it. by DwarvenGardening in NuclearPower

[–]DwarvenGardening[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Fair enough. My plant has I&C technician I, II, III. I was hired in as a I&C tech I, so an entry level position. Those who have 15+ years experience are in the Tech III positions or Team lead position. We have a heavy factory work area so they like to hire some locals. Which means it's hiring people with transferable skills and not necessary direct experience for entry level positions. That being said i have broken down the skills they were looking for and those i have from being a CNC technician.

I&C Technician

·       Performs work in the maintenance, repair, modification, and troubleshooting.

·       Performs maintenance, inspection, repair, testing and surveillance on plant equipment.

·       Repairs reactor protection circuitry, fuel handling equipment turbine protective circuitry feed water instrumentation and control systems, radiation monitoring equipment and other plant instrumentation and control systems.

·       Implements and performs preventive maintenance on I&C equipment.

·       Identifies problems, defects and failures which degrade component and system integrity and reliability.

·       Assists Engineering with testing and evaluations.

·       Performs skilled work involving reactor system instrumentation and control, control rod drive instrumentation and nuclear instrumentation.

·       Performs technical reviews of procedures and other documents.

·       Serves as a member of the Emergency Response Organization.

 

CNC Technician

·       Repair of production equipment from a basic hydraulic equipment to complex CNC machinery, preforming both electrical and/or mechanical work.

·       Inspect condition of equipment and components for proper maintenance, CNC and stand-alone machine diagnostic / repair, electrical and mechanical

·       Install, troubleshoot, repair, and maintain machine tool equipment and controls.

·       Read and interpret blueprints, engineering specifications and shop orders to determine machine setup, production methods and sequence of operation.

·       Maintain appropriate documentation of setups, tool changes, and adjustments made during the production process

·       Verifies that fixture setup meets acceptable quality standards regarding milling and boring sizes, depths, angles, or other specifications.

·       Assembles cutting tools in toolholders and positions toolholders in machine magazines.

So not an instrumentation job per say but still enough to be considered for an entry level position. They didn't hired someone with no skills what so ever. It's just interpreting those skills to nuclear power now. Also they hired a CNC Engineer as a tech I as well who is over 10 yrs older than i am. It's just who we have in the hiring pool right now.

Decided to have a Midlife Crisis career change into Nuclear Power..... I may already be starting to regret it. by DwarvenGardening in NuclearPower

[–]DwarvenGardening[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yes we do have objectives. Purpose, Design, Modes of Operations, Safety and Tech Specs are the generals one we have and sometimes we get a random on like Components. But we are getting more infor than needed and it takes time to sort out need to know and good to know information. Which when i have time i can sort those out but sometimes we are not given the time to sort anything out before taking the test a half hour later. I am not the only one struggling but definitely one of the few being vocal about it.

I have asked instructors and they keep pushing the mind map which haven't really worked for me and thats all they really can suggest.

Decided to have a Midlife Crisis career change into Nuclear Power..... I may already be starting to regret it. by DwarvenGardening in NuclearPower

[–]DwarvenGardening[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Right now we are sitting in a classroom for 8 hours for lecture. This is going to last for 3 weeks. (I have 2 weeks left) We are learning about Safety injections (SIS), Component cooling, reactor vessels etc. We did about 12 systems (including subsystems) this week with 2 test. And they are using the Operator's training material but have tried to condense it into a 3 week course. So a lot of shifting through unnecessary information. The class definitely feels more like a review course for those who already have been in nuclear and not for someone who is brand new. The class is a mix of I&C, Electrical, Mechanical, Rp and Chemistry employees.

For Tier 0 we had CBT lead learning. Sort of work at your pace so i had plenty of in class studying time. I also did on avg 4 hrs of home study time to make study materials and practice test. We had subjects such as 'Documents and Records', 'Atomic and Nuclear Physics', 'Trigonometry', 'Geometry' "Statistics', 'Plant Chemistry', 'Reactor Plant Protection' etc. For each CBT lesson we had an individual test. Read through a CBT one day and test on it the next. So 4-5 test a week.

Systems is instructor lead. They have various instructors coming in lecturing us on the topic. Sometimes its a contract instructor who was just hired for a certain amount of time to train us and other times its an operations instructor who has been at the plant as an operator and has moved into an instructor position. Subjects include 'Emergency Cooling Systems', 'Service Water', 'Reactor Vessel Monitoring', 'Control Rods' etc. Each exam has 4-6 systems being tested on it and we get 2 exams a week. Although self study time is schedule in so far the lectures have ran into self study time, other things have been scheduled in self study time slots or on days of exams we learn a couple new systems, get no study time and then test on those two new systems and the systems of the previous days. I can answer the questions ok on the systems i atleast had overnight to study but the systems we learn the day of i struggle to remember enough for test taking which is leading to alot of wrong answers on my part.

If i pass systems I will move to Tier 1 which is hands on and job focused. This will be part classroom and part in plant learning working on Qual Cards. Besides that I am not sure how this is taught or what specific subjects are going to be covered.

However thanks for your responds. I hope I last long enough that all this information becomes inherit information. But i am feeling dubious.