W H E N H A R O L D R A Y had en-tered the Navy in the mid-1960s, he would ride a Grey-

hound bus along the southern Californiacoast between his home and his stationedship. He was newly married and just out ofcollege, and following in some family foot-steps by at last beginning service in theNavy. Having more pressing concerns onhis mind, he hardly noticed the tangle ofcranes and earthmoving equipment on aparticular site along the Pacific Ocean as thebus sped past. The giant white, beachball-like containment dome, which would bespotted from miles away, was not yet built.Its pressurized water reactor, which alreadyhad a proven record of performance in threemajor power plants in other parts of thecountry, had not yet been lowered intoplace.

Now, nearly 40 years later, Ray runs thatsite, San Onofre nuclear generating station,as well as several others for Southern Cal-ifornia Edison, where he has worked since1970. As the 48th president of the AmericanNuclear Society, he brings the experiencethat brought him from the nuclear Navy tohis current position as executive vice pres-ident of Edison’s Generation Business Unit,where he is responsible for all of Edison’spower generating facilities. He has workedunder Admiral Rickover; met the demands,over the course of a dozen-plus years, of li-censing two nuclear power units; and thenran the units, as well as the utility’s hydro-electric and coal plants.

“I’ve been in the business for a very, verylong time,” Ray said on a spring afternoon

when asked about his interest in the ANSpresidency. “But I haven’t really had an op-portunity yet to do a great deal in terms ofsupport for those who will come along be-hind and continue the work that we began40 years ago.”

He met up with Nuclear News while on alayover during a trip to Washington, D.C.,on his way to one of a series of meetingswith the Nuclear Regulatory Commissionhe has made over the past five years on be-half of an industry group concerned withrisk-informed regulations. Dressed inkhakis and a button-down shirt, Raymunched on a green apple and often leanedback casually in his chair. At rest, his will-ful, no-nonsense personality is tempered bya laid-back manner, perhaps the result of alifetime of southern California sun. (Al-though one longtime coworker respectfullycalls him anything but easy-going.)

He said his interest in the ANS presi-dency over the next year extends to ensur-ing that its members continue to use thesociety to develop their skills. “My moti-vation in seeking the office and carrying itout is to try to help ANS be a profession-al society that provides value to its mem-bership, that makes it attractive in terms ofdeveloping and maintaining the skill setthat goes into being a nuclear profession-al,” Ray said.

Early yearsHarold Ray grew up in the same small

town where he was born just before WorldWar II—Lynwood, Calif., located justsouth of Los Angeles. With his father own-ing and running a service station and hismother working as a caterer for local ban-quets, there was no shortage of side jobs tooccupy the teenager’s time. He pumped gasand ran errands for his mother, among oth-er tasks that trickled down to him. “Fromthe earliest time I was able to, I worked. Myparents provided a lot of opportunities towork the whole time I was growing up. So,that was mostly what I did.”

With the United States having fought intwo wars before Ray reached his teenageyears, he grew up expecting to enter themilitary when he turned 18. California washost to major facilities for each of the mil-itary services, including a Naval base notfar away in Long Beach. But his experi-ence working on cars, as well as his cu-riosity in the burgeoning aerospace indus-try—which had an epicenter at the JetPropulsion Laboratory in nearby Pasade-na—had borne in him an interest in engi-neering. In 1958, Ray combined the two byjoining Naval ROTC while entering hisfreshman year at the University of Califor-nia, Los Angeles.

Southern California Edison executive vice presidentHarold Ray brings nearly four decades of nuclearindustry experience to the ANS presidency.

Continued

Ray: Portrait of an industry veteran

Profile

July 2002 N U C L E A R N E W S 27

“I didn’t have an interest in becoming alawyer because I didn’t know any lawyers,”Ray said. “There was a lot more that wasbeing done in the ’50s by way of engineer-ing. Things were being built. Particularly insouthern California, aerospace was a big,dominant part of the scene.”

At the time, UCLA offered a bachelor ofscience degree in general engineering,which Ray pursued. He found that he par-ticularly enjoyed his mechanical engineer-ing classes, and especially those involvingstructural engineering, which was the sub-ject of his senior thesis. A part-time jobworking for IBM as a systems engineer, inwhich he worked to convert analog, punch-card computers to digital, swayed his careerdecision away from computers. Ray said hewas more interested in “things you couldfeel and see, and would be impressive whenthey were built.”

In the NavyIn late 1963, several months after gradu-

ating from UCLA, Ray found himself in theSouth China Sea aboard the guided missilefrigate U.S.S. King. The United States wasramping up support for anti-Communistforces in southeast Asia following the mur-der of President Ngo Dinh Diem, of SouthVietnam, in a coup, to whom the UnitedStates had been supplying military equip-ment and financial aid. Ray’s crew was pro-viding naval air support from the Gulf ofTonkin to the troops on land. Less than ayear later, North Vietnamese torpedo boatswere alleged to have attacked two Ameri-can destroyers on a similar mission in theGulf of Tonkin, leading to the eponymousCongressional resolution that made way forU.S. military action in the Vietnam War.

But by that time, Ray had been whiskedfrom Subic Bay in the Philippines to 18thStreet and Constitution Avenue in Wash-ington, D.C. He was among 30 people in-terviewed one day in the late summer of1964. He and one other recruit passed theinterviews and were chosen to join the tech-nical staff of the program, a joint effort be-tween the Navy and the Atomic EnergyCommission to provide the Navy with nu-clear propulsion plants. The two young of-ficers had lasted through one of the mostnotorious experiences in the emerging eraof nuclear power: an interview with thefounder and chief of the Naval ReactorsBranch, Adm. Hyman G. Rickover. Gettingthrown out of his office was practically arite of passage.

“It was bad,” Dwight Nunn, a vice pres-ident with Southern California Edison whoworked with Ray in the 1960s at Naval Re-actors, remembered recently. “The admiralhad extremely high standards. He wouldask you questions such as, ‘Did you feellike you were wasting your time when youweren’t studying?’ He would throw you outof his office if you gave an answer he didn’t

like. You would go and sit in a room and beasked to think about your answers beforeyou gave them to the admiral. Then hewould call you back and go through the in-terview process again.”

In their 1982 biography Rickover: Con-troversy and Genius, Norman Polmar andThomas B. Allen wrote, “Stories of Rick-over’s bizarre interviews became the mostfrequently heard yarns in the wardrooms ofthe nuclear navy. Some were apocryphal.Many were basically authentic. . . . All hada common image: Rickover the sardonic,pitiless inquisitor who often spouted ob-scenities and foul insults.” One first class-man was ordered out of Rickover’soffice when he said that he was notwilling to give up his Christmas va-cation, spring vacation, and everyweekend until graduation to studyfor entering the nuclear program.Another highly qualified midship-man was rejected apparently becausehe refused to put off his wedding fora year.

Luckily, Ray had already wed bythe time he interviewed with Rick-over. That life-altering event, how-ever, managed to slip his mind whenthe admiral asked if he was married.“He got me so rattled during the in-terview that I said no,” Ray remem-

bered. “Then about a minute later, I said,‘Wait a minute, admiral. I am married.’ Hegot really mad at me then.”

Although Ray said it was coincidental,he would occupy the office next door to theadmiral for five years.

Baring a handNuclear power had revolutionized the

Navy. Following World War II, Rickoverhad convinced the service that nuclear seapower was feasible, and proceeded to di-rect the planning and construction of theworld’s first atomic-powered submarine,Nautilus, which was commissioned in

28 N U C L E A R N E W S July 2002

Sailor-to-be: The young Ray uniformedand (almost) ready for duty

July 2002 N U C L E A R N E W S 29

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1955. It was the first ship of any kind toreach the North Pole, and its maneuver-ability forever changed naval strategy andtactics. By the end of 1962, a few years be-fore Ray joined Naval Reactors, the Navyhad built a nuclear-powered aircraft carri-er, missile-armed cruiser, and large de-stroyer, to go along with some 30 nuclear-powered submarines.

In 1965, after spending most of a year at-tending Bettis Reactor Engineering Schoolin Pittsburgh, where Naval Reactors sent re-cruits to learn the specific knowledge need-ed to work for the Naval nuclear propulsionprogram, Ray took office at the Main NavyBuilding in Washington, D.C. The mam-moth building where Naval Reactors washeadquartered at the time, with its counter-part Munitions Building, stretched alongthe length of the Reflecting Pool betweenthe Lincoln Memorial and WashingtonMonument—nearly one-third of a mile.Erected after World War I as temporary of-fice space to support the vastly expandedmilitary, the buildings held 14 000 person-nel when the fighting ended and continuedto house Navy personnel until it was final-ly torn down by presidential order in 1970.

Unlike the Pentagon and its hallways ofgold-braided uniforms, there were no visi-ble distinctions between officers and civil-ians at Main Navy. Although a lieutenantin the Navy, Ray came to his desk everyday

in plain clothes. And the days, which beganat 8 a.m., ended “at five or nine or 10 or 11or midnight or 1 a.m.,” in the words of oneof Rickover’s former secretaries.

“They were long hours,” Ray recalled. “Itwas a six-day week, and I guess about 10hours a day. It was expected because at thattime there was a war on. People who werefortunate enough to not be out fighting thewar were expected to ‘bare a hand,’ as theysay in the Navy, and work as if they were.”

While at Naval Reactors, Ray was as-signed to several projects, including theoverhaul and rebuild of U.S.S. Enterprise,the first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.(More recently, aircraft from Enterprise,stationed in waters off southwest Asia, flewnearly 700 missions in Afghanistan in theweeks following September 11.) Ray alsowas involved in the replacement of the hor-izontal steam generators at Shippingportstation, the first full-scale commercial pow-er reactor. And he participated in an earlydevelopment of loss-of-coolant code calledthe FLASH code.

Ray was also assigned to represent theNavy on the American Society of Mechan-ical Engineers’ committee on Section III ofthe Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code.ASME had first organized a special com-mittee on nuclear power in 1955, and eightyears later published the seminal Section IIIof the code, which covered nuclear compo-

Young engineer: Ray mastering the steering component of the Radio Flyer in 1947

30 N U C L E A R N E W S July 2002

nents. The next edition, published in 1971,which Ray had worked on, was much moreextensive and represented the transition ofthe code from a vessel code to one cover-ing the piping and other pressure boundarycomponents involved in the conversion ofnuclear energy to steam power. It relied onthe Navy document SDB-63 Structural De-sign Basis for Naval Reactor Equipment,first issued in 1963. “Because I was a me-chanical engineer with a structural engi-neering background, I became involved inthe application of SDB-63,” Ray said. “So,when ASME set up a committee to developSection III of the code, they took a lot ofwork that had gone into SDB-63. And I wasassigned to work on the committee on thatbasis.” Today, the section still provides re-quirements for virtually every aspect of nu-clear power reactor pressure boundary com-ponent design, construction, and inspection.

In addition, Ray was one of three me-chanical engineers who worked on the re-actor design for Nimitz-class aircraft carri-ers, which remain among the largestwarships ever built. Powered by two reac-tors and called a “floating airport,” Nimitz-class carriers can carry more than 80 air-craft and are capable of launching up to fourof them per minute off of their 4.5-acreflight deck. Although the information re-mains classified, Ray said he spent severalyears on development of the design of thereactor coolant system in the carriers, aswell as on the manner in which the reactorcoolant system is purified. He said he canstill “point to a number of things in that re-actor design that I was directly involved in.”

U.S.S. Nimitz was put to sea in 1975, andthe newest Nimitz-class carrier, CVN-76Ronald Reagan, is set to be commissionednext spring. “[Nuclear-powered supercarri-ers are] definitely one of the reasons theUnited States is the sole remaining super-power,” said John Pike, head of the Alexan-

dria, Va.–based think-tank GlobalSecurity.com, in The Seattle Post-Intelligencer lastJanuary. “The U.S. and the U.S. alone hasthe capacity on a couple of weeks’ notice tohave a couple of aircraft carriers show upin your neighborhood . . . and immediatelyhave the largest and most capable air forcein that part of the world.” The tenth and lastNimitz-class ship, CVN-77, is scheduled toenter service in 2008.

Back to schoolRay, by the end of the 1960s, had gotten

sidetracked. Nearing the age of 30, one am-bition he had set for himself that he had yetto fulfill was earning a graduate degree. Tir-ing of the political climate of Washington,D.C., Ray and his wife Penny headed backto southern California in 1969 immediate-ly after Ray left Naval Reactors. “I was hap-py to get out,” Ray said. “I had no interestin remaining in the government. I was readyto go do something else.”

They moved into a house in Pasadenamade available by some in-laws, and Rayattended the California Institute of Tech-nology on an Oak Ridge National Labora-tory fellowship. He soon earned a master’sdegree in mechanical engineering, with anemphasis on nuclear engineering. Beingaway from school for nearly seven years,Ray said he struggled some with the transi-tion from the hands-onwork he did at NavalReactors to the loftymathematical course-work required at Cal-tech. “It wasn’t easy go-ing up against the topengineers that had justgotten out of their un-dergraduate programs.It was really very chal-lenging because I hadbeen away from acade-mia, particularly aspracticed there, inwhich there wasn’t apractical application atall; it was 100 percenttheoretical,” Ray said.“But I thought if I wasgoing to do any good inthe rest of my career, Ineeded to get back andget refreshed on reactortheory as practiced atCaltech.”

Because he and Pen-ny wanted to start a fam-ily, Ray canceled hisplans to pursue a doctor-ate degree. He learnedof an opening at South-ern California Edisonfrom an acquaintancewho was an executive ofthe utility and also

served on the Caltech board of trustees. Edi-son had already been one of the first utilitiesto develop nuclear power for commercialuse, by building the 75-megawatt Santa Su-sana (Sodium Reactor Experiment) powerplant in the mountains north of Los Ange-les. Ray applied for the job.

Contention on the coastThe homes, farms, and factories of south-

ern California received a surge of electric-ity on New Year’s Day in 1968 when Unit1 at San Onofre station was placed in com-mercial operation. The major reactor com-ponents were the largest yet built for anypressurized water reactor, and in some cas-es were double the size of previous units.Unit 1, which was located halfway betweenLos Angeles and San Diego (and not farfrom the summer home in San Clementethat President Richard Nixon would pur-chase the following year), had enough pow-er to meet the electrical needs of a city ofhalf a million people. At a dedication cere-mony four days later, the commissioner ofthe AEC called the event “perhaps the mostsignificant step in advancing the PowerDemonstration Reactor Program” becausesuccessful startup of the larger-sized, 450-MWe plant would lead to utilities buildinglarger plants.

Midshipman: Ray in the early 1960s whileat UCLA

Newlyweds: Ray and his wife Penny shortly after their wedding in1963

Continued

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After a bumpy start in its first year, duringwhich time the plant was shut down for sixmonths due to a minor fire and a control rodbottoming in the core, Unit 1 went on tohave a robust average capacity factor of 73percent over its first 12 years of operation.

By 1970, Southern California Edison haddecided to build two more units on the SanOnofre site. That was when Harold Ray washired on as a mechanical engineer. He wasin the initial staffing group that was to be-gin preparing the license application for SanOnofre-2 and -3. Moving up to the vicepresident in charge of all of San Onofre siteactivities by the time the two units went on-line, Ray would have his hands full for thenext decade-and-a-half.

To begin, the new units were to be con-siderably different from Unit 1, a Westing-house pressurized water reactor that wasbuilt as a demonstration project. SanOnofre-2 and -3 were a new generation ofCombustion Engineering design, and, at justunder 1100 MWe each, were more thantwice as large as the original reactor.“Everything was new and improved by thattime,” Ray said. In the 10 years from themid-1960s—when Unit 1 was being built—to the mid-1970s, a number of significantimprovements had been made in vital com-ponents such as reactor vessels, emergencycore cooling systems, emergency diesel gen-erators, and reactor coolant pumps.

“You wouldn’t want to replicate Unit 1.It did its thing. It operated successfully for25 years and was a good plant. But it wasnot something that you’d want to make a lotof,” he explained. “Required backfits tomeet evolving licensing requirements madeit too complicated, too difficult to operate.And the newer generation plants were moreefficient, had a lower cost per kilowatt-hour, and were a lot simpler.”

The difficulty of siting power plants onthe coast of California also became an issuein the licensing of San Onofre-2 and -3.Many power plants had been located on thePacific Ocean, where water could be used tocool condenser heat from the plants. But res-idential, recreational, and conservation in-terests, as well as the shipping and fishingindustries, also depended on the samecoastal resources. In 1972, California passedProposition 20, setting up the CaliforniaCoastal Zone Conservation Commission,which was to develop a statewide plan forprotecting the state’s coastal resources andprevent commercial buildup along theocean. Edison now had to obtain a permitfrom the commission before proceedingwith construction of the new units.

With the original startup target date forcommercial operation already slipping be-hind, construction of San Onofre-2 and -3was blocked in December 1973 when theCalifornia Coastal Zone Conservation Com-

mission refused to permit siting. The com-mission claimed the plant would both de-stroy a scenic coastal bluff and damage themarine environment with thermal pollution.

After reaching a compromise with theCoastal commission a few months later,which included plans to preserve the bluffsand canyon on the seaward side of the plant,Edison again began initial site preparationwork in March 1974. Opponents, however,then obtained a stay order on construction,and Edison was back to square one. As re-ported in NN at the time, a spokesman forEdison had “declined even to guess whenall the issues might be resolved.”

“This was a very contentious issue,” re-called Ray, who, as supervising engineer oflicensing and safety for Units 2 and 3, wasresponsible for the construction permit. “Itcame up very late in the process for us. So,in addition to NRC licensing, we had statelicensing and permitting activity to gothrough. And we had to demonstrate thatthe value of the plants was greater than thenegative impact that they were going tohave on the coast.”

Finally, in May, the California SupremeCourt denied the legal challenges to theconstruction of San Onofre-2 and -3, andEdison immediately resumed work. Theunits were now scheduled to begin com-mercial operation in 1979 and 1980, threeyears behind their original mark.

32 N U C L E A R N E W S July 2002

In training: Ray at Combustion Engineering’s plant simulator in Windsor, Conn., during the mid-1970s

At the time, Ray was also involved in anEdison undertaking to build two high-tem-perature gas-cooled reactors in the easternCalifornia desert. He worked on preparingthe Preliminary Safety Analysis Report, themultivolume document describing andevaluating the geologic, seismologic, andhydrologic conditions for the proposed site.The plant, located near Vidal Junction, wasslated to host two 770-MW HTGRs, eachsimilar in design to the Fort St. Vrain reac-tor that was under construction in Coloradoand that would begin commercial operationin 1979. Shortly after being deferred, how-ever, the Vidal project was finally canceledin the fall of 1974, for both financial rea-sons and lack of need.

Shaking the groundTo a geologist, any offset along a frac-

ture in the earth’s crust can be called a fault.Some are best determined with a satellite,others with a microscope. In the spring of1974, during routine surveillance of site ex-cavation for San Onofre-2 and -3, Edisonfound what it would report to the AEC as“geologic features” and “slight offsets.”And the scrutiny concerning the proposedreactors’ ability to withstand an earthquake,which had somehow all but evaded Unit 1,began in earnest.

The AEC and U.S. Geological Surveygeologists, who routinely inspected po-tential nuclear sites in California, con-firmed that the offsets indicated possiblefaulting. The geologists also said, howev-er, that the features were formed at least100 000 years previous, if not millions ofyears ago, and were not likely to besources of seismic activity.

Ray, who specialized in structural engi-neering at UCLA, was intrigued by the re-lationship of seismicity and nuclear powerplants. “That was most interesting becauseit was new,” he explained. “Trying to un-derstand how the earth imparts forces tosomething as mammoth as a reactor con-tainment building, and how that motion isthen translated into all of the things that areinside . . . was a very new and developingarea of engineering.”

Once the potential of the onsite fault hadbeen dismissed, safety concerns emergedover some more distant and not-so-distantones. San Onofre station lies within 60miles of four active faults, defined as suchwhen they have moved within the past11 000 years. A 1981 study determined thatan earthquake along the nearest of those—the Newport-Inglewood-Rose Canyon faultsystem, which is five miles from the site—would have the greatest potential forground-shaking the plant. The most recentof three recorded earthquakes from that sys-tem, and the only one that can accurately beassigned a magnitude, occurred in 1933 andmeasured 6.4 on the Richter scale. The oth-er two, from the 1800s, are estimated tohave had magnitudes of 6.5.

“It was an evolving technology at thattime, which is basically, in the engineeringworld, field dynamics,” Ray said of the ef-fort to equip a plant to withstand an earth-quake. “How to model the interaction be-tween the reactor building and the ground,as well as, in the case of a very large earth-quake, what the ground motion is reallylike: All of that was being developed. Seis-mic analytics, analytic techniques . . . wewere quite active in all of that at the time.”

When San Onofre-2 and -3 went com-mercial in 1983 and 1984, they were even-tually built to withstand, with wide safetymargins, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake alongthe Newport-Inglewood-Rose Canyon faultsystem.

Today’s challengesToday, Ray is responsible not just for

Edison’s power generation, but also thecompany’s buying and selling of power atthe wholesale level. Because of California’straumatic experience with deregulationover the past several years, he has beenthrust into the debate over how a wholesaleelectric market should be designed in orderto allow competition among generators.

“Because the California marketplacewent through a dysfunctional meltdown asa result of deregulation and restructuring,I’ve been spending most of my time onthat,” Ray said. “If the special circum-stance that’s gone on for the last two orthree years were not the case, I would bemore involved than I am right now in ournuclear plants and our coal plant and ourhydro plants. All of that would normally bewhat I would be spending most of my timeon, in addition to what should be a routinefunction of buying and selling power in themarketplace.”

Working with the Nuclear Energy Insti-tute, Ray has also been meeting for the pastfive years with NRC commissioners andstaff to encourage the use of risk modelsand risk insights in the regulatory process.

When not traveling to Washington, D.C.,Ray makes his home with his wife Pennyin San Marino, Calif., a small communitynear Pasadena. The couple, who will cele-brate their 40th wedding anniversary nextyear, own a house up north in the SierraMountains, where Ray said they try to es-cape to once a month for a long weekendof skiing. They have two grown daugh-ters—Claire, who is a schoolteacher, andJill, a patent attorney.

Although he is old enough to retire, Raysaid he keeps working because he still en-joys his work and the people surroundinghim at Edison. “I think what I enjoy the mostabout my job today is the people I have anopportunity to work with, and I don’t meanthat glibly,” Ray said. “I think also the chal-lenges of restructuring the electric industryare sufficiently interesting. That motivatesme to continue to be interested.”

The once gleaming-domed Unit 1 of SanOnofre nuclear generating station was forcedto shut down prematurely in 1992 for finan-cial reasons. It did, however, end its near 25-year career with a unit record run of 377 con-tinuous power-producing days. In hisintroduction to a book on the history of Unit1, Ray wrote that it “went out like a cham-pion.” With washes of silver now appearingin his hair and trim moustache, Ray will belooking to do the same.—Patrick Sinco

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Snowed in: Ray indulging a favorite pastime at Utah’s Brian Head ski resort