airejtlij

This forum seems to be filled with (comments by) people who love the "there's no perfect solution so we shouldn't try because trying might infringe on my libertarian liberties". I need to stop reading the comments.

I was a NASA federal employee in 2017 at Johnson Space Center and I saw this exactly. There were people like me who joined to be a part of a particular project and who maybe would follow that project when it got separated and sold off to some contractor, and there were the die-hard NASA fanboys (and girls) who just wanted to "be a part of NASA" and who maybe spent years singularly focused on getting hired and displayed little concern about which role they inhabited. Project-level managers up through department heads appeared to be people who started in the first group and slowly transitioned to the second group.

Yeah, I'm wondering about that as well. Did this exact design take 12 months previously? Or did a 30ft-wide BWR vessel take 12 months? That would be a pretty significant difference.

I did a small amount of nuclear-grade welding myself and it was always one hour of welding, one or more days of testing. So if they could replace many small passes with one all-the-way-through pass, that would vastly decrease production time. But even then, testing a weld that spans the length or circumference of a vessel is still going to take a very long time. Since they don't mention any massive, profound, fundamental improvements in post-weld testing methods, I'm guessing they just left that out of their "24hr" claim, which makes it very misleading.