I was a welder early on at the Shearon Harris project. I was there in 1979 working on unit two when the outer containment wall was being built and the reactor core was set. In fact, I was one of the welders who built the support structure for the reactor core. As such, I was on hand as it was lowered onto the structure… just in case something needed to be tweaked to make it fit. It was a tricky operation with the crane outside the containment wall, so the crane operator was working blind to set this multi-ton object with pin point accuracy in the hole. He had to rely on a linked chain of three guys relaying directions from one to another and then on to him to set the thing perfectly with a dozen or so bolt holes lining up. It took a most of our eight hour shift and it went off without a hitch so, as it turned out, all I had to do was stand around and watch an entertaining spectacle unfold.

I had an E7018 unlimited thickness, all position certification at Shearon Harris… which was like falling off a log compared to the open root 6G pipe certification that I had made at the Lake Hyco power plant west of Roxboro. I was a member of The American Welding Society at the time and one issue of the society’s monthly journal featured a glowing description of the Shearon Harris welding program. And they were right. It was the only job I ever worked where all the welding was impeccable to the point that you couldn’t tell, via idiosyncrasies, one man’s work from another.

That was what was fantastic about that job, but all the rest was so awful that I quit after three months and went from driving 30 miles to get to Shearon Harris back to driving 60 miles to get to Lake Hyco for the same pay. Harris had the most thieves and the worst overall morale that I have ever seen on any job. If you needed to go get a drink of water you had to take all your tools with you or, more likely than not, they wouldn’t be there when you got back.