Three decades as nuke plant liaison

Stan Ratcliff likes to joke that he’s a “real-life Homer Simpson,” but beyond their work in nuclear power plants, the comparison doesn’t hold up. The animated nuclear worker bumbles his way through his job, while Ratcliff was central to the operations of the now-defunct nuclear power plant at Satsop.

A nuclear reactor operator by training, Ratcliff has been at Satsop since 1981. He wrote more than 1,000 operations procedures for the plant while it was under construction, and when the facility transitioned to the Community Development Authority, Ratcliff underwent a transition, too: Instead of operating a nuclear reactor, he had to imagine what else could be done with the pieces and the space.

The longtime director of services for Satsop Business Park will retire at the end of the month after more than 30 years at the site, leaving it a very different place than when he arrived.

NUCLEAR REACTOR OPERATOR

Ratcliff grew up in Newport in a farming and logging family. He knew early on that that work wasn’t for him, and enlisted in the Navy in 1969 at age 19 after spending a year at Eastern Washington University.

He got just about as far from trees and farms as he could: working on a submarine.

“I thought doing submarines would be doing something with a touch of the mysterious in it, and gliding through the depths of the sea just seemed awesome,” Ratcliff recalls.

He was particularly fascinated by the nuclear power program, and made the grade through intensive technical schools to become a reactor operator on a nuclear submarine. Less than one-third of his class was ultimately certified.

A nuclear submarine at that time had three main jobs associated with the reactor: a throttleman, reactor operator and electrical operator who handled the generators powering the turbines. As a reactor operator, Ratcliff had to learn what each piece of the reactor and related systems did, as well as train and certify on the other two jobs.

Ratcliff served on submarines from 1972-1975 through several combat missions. Although he can’t discuss the circumstances under which he earned them, he received several commendations: a Navy Unit Commendation, the Navy Expeditionary Medal, the Vietnam Service medal and two Bronze Stars.

Submarine life isn’t exactly like it’s depicted in the movies, Ratcliff said. Time slips by strangely when submerged for long stretches, and the ship runs nearly silently — contrary to the soft “ping” of the sonar in just about every submarine movie.

“Nobody pings sonar, because once you ping, you’re given away,” Ratcliff explained. “You just listen.”

It takes a uniquely steady type to work on a sub, where a burst 2-inch pipe could spell disaster.

“The bomb could go off behind you and you turn around to see what it is. … Panic doesn’t do you any good,” Ratcliff said.

Several shorter test cruises precede any missions with new crews. Ratcliff said his longest stretch underwater was 57 days, and in one 150-day period he spent 127 days submerged. Sometimes people panic on the test cruises, but there isn’t a safe place to keep them on a tiny sub.

“They drug them up, put them in a bunk, wake them up once a day to use the bathroom and give them something to eat,” Ratcliff explained.

Still, at the end of it all, he says submarines are still “awesome.”

“I still have dreams about life on submarines. It’s like they say once a Marine, always a Marine — submarines pretty much haunt you all your life.“

TRANSITIONING TO LAND LIFE

Ratcliff says he wasn’t the same after his deployments.

“They were pretty stressful for the crew — we were in some pretty weird situations. So, when I came back, I was screwed up in the head a little bit,” he said.

He was sent to San Diego for more training, and while he was there he decided to search for religion. He tried out different churches, and at a potluck for a Methodist church, he was paired up with “a beautiful blonde” Catholic to discuss death. Somehow, after that discussion, the woman asked Ratcliff on a date. He and Rosemarie were married two months later, and have been together 36 years.

Ratcliff was transferred to a new ship out of Bremerton, and two years later, he left the Navy to work in the Bremerton Naval Shipyards testing nuclear reactors. He worked on testing for the six generators aboard the USS Enterprise.

The work was demanding, with nine-hour shifts and mandatory 12-hour weekend shifts. As rewarding as that job was, Ratcliff said, it took a toll on his young family. To focus more on them, in 1981 he took a job with Washington Public Power Supply System at Satsop.

WPPSS

Writing testing procedures for a specific reactor was different than what Ratcliff had done before, but his background at the shipyards and cross-training on submarine reactors prepared him well. In five years, he had written more than 1,000 procedures, but “once you’ve written one, you’ve written many,” he said.

“At a nuclear power plant, all you’re doing is boiling water. A Heinz ketchup factory is more complicated.”

Each step required a higher-up’s signature, and Ratcliff recalls one manual with more than 20,000 signatures.

In 1986, when WPPSS was transitioning to a Public Development Authority and the power plant was scrapped just shy of generating power, Ratcliff kept waiting to be the next person laid off. He even moved his family closer to Olympia to be closer to other jobs “when the ax finally fell.”

It never happened. Instead, he kept inheriting other departments and roles, eventually taking a lead role in dismantling the reactor materials, finding reselling opportunities and recruiting businesses for the Satsop Business Park.

NEW PURPOSE FOR A NUCLEAR POWER PLANT

“I often ask people when they come up here, ‘Did you ever imagine you’d be working in an abandoned nuclear power plant?’” Ratcliff said with a grin.

It might be his military background, but he said he doesn’t remember being angry or down about cancelling the plant.

“There’s a certain element of sadness, because right now we’re paying really high electrical rates because we’ve said we’re going to have 15 percent green power,” Ratcliff said, referring to a 2006 voter initiative mandating increased green power. “If we’d just finished two more plants, it would be a much different energy environment in the Northwest.”

Although being the director of services for a business park was a departure from his previous life as a reactor operator, he said it was the right choice for his family, especially with his kids established in area schools and active in athletics.

During the transition away from nuclear power, the PDA had to sort through all the procedures and paperwork it had generated — a sizeable portion of which Ratcliff himself had written. About 30 tons of paper was discarded from the park’s storage.

“That was the only time I thought, ‘Jeepers, when you think of all the effort that went into this …’”

Ratcliff takes great pride in his contributions to the business park. His intricate knowledge of the reactor equipment and buildings made it easier to identify which parts could be sold in what capacity.

As in-depth as his knowledge of the buildings was, transitioning nuclear silos to International Building Code standards was a huge challenge.

“The process of doing that was not smooth,” he recalled. “It took a lot of people working together to get through and there were times where everybody put up their hands.”

SATSOP BUSINESS PARK

The first business to make a home of the business park was Brown-Minneapolis Tank Northwest, a steel fabrication company.

Allan McComas, manager of business development for the coatings division, gave complete credit to Ratcliff for getting BMT into its current space because he could imagine what they could do with it. Without him, McComas said, the company would have likely left the area. Today, one of its jobs is providing steel girders for the new pontoon project.

“It was really a labor of love,” McComas said. “It was up to Stan to convince us this was the place where we could make it work.”

He added that Ratcliff was a great resource for “really esoteric stuff, like how thick is the concrete here.” Ratcliff would often know off the top of his head, but if not, he always knew where in the tons of paperwork relating to the park to find the details they were looking for.

“It’s the best industrial park I’ve ever been in,” said Rollie Irwin, vice-president of manufacturing for BMT. He first discovered the park on a motorcycle ride, and then approached Ratcliff about what could be done there.

“Stan was just invested,” Irwin said. “We probably couldn’t have done what we did without him. … He taught me a lot. He taught me patience.”

McComas said his favorite “Stan story” was when he found out that Ratcliff had to know each piece of the reactor when it was being built. McComas pointed to a tiny piece of plastic inside the scale model of the facility and jokingly asked what it did.

Ratcliff instantly rattled off a detailed explanation.

“Then with a mischievous smile, with just a hint of condescension, ‘Oh, but you were just kidding, weren’t you?’” McComas remembered with a laugh.

“We wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Stan,” said Ron Sauro, president of NWAA Labs, Inc. His company tests window insulation in a chamber of the former nuclear control room, one of the quietest places in the world, Sauro said.

“Nobody thought of a lab,” he said, but Ratcliff understood the specifications of the chamber well enough to tell Sauro it met his company’s needs.

It isn’t only businesses that use the park. Ratcliff was also involved in the formation of the Regional Education Training Center, which coordinates numerous agencies’ training needs. The Grays Harbor College’s forestry program studies the many acres of preserved forest, local fire departments train on the industrial buildings, and the Elma Wine and Seafood Festival was hosted at the RETC building for the first time this year.

Audio and video companies have done recording work in the park.

“The cooling towers and the underground pipes are some of the strangest echo chambers in the world,” Ratcliff said.

Several military branches have conducted training at the facility, taking advantage of an inactive industrial setting and the huge underground steam tunnels. Before the funding was cut for Mars missions, there was some investigation into using the tunnels for mission training.

Some U.S. Army chemical cleanup teams have trained in the tunnels to prepare for Middle East deployments. Ratcliff has set up those involved in the military training with detailed drawings of the facilities they can use to plan their exercises independently.

“They can create environments that are new even to the people who have been here many times,” Ratcliff said.

THE NEXT CHAPTER

At the end of the month, Ratcliff will leave the park with all the knowledge he’s been able to consolidate in paper form. He plans to travel with his wife through Europe, tracing various family histories, and start work coaching a swim team with his daughter, Marie.

Ratcliff won’t leave the park entirely. He also hopes to work on restoring the scale model of the nuclear facility, which was built by nine engineers to the facility’s exact specifications. The effort cost $2.5 million, but Ratcliff estimates it saved more than $60 million in design revisions. Ratcliff will also continue leading tours of the facilities, a job he inherited in 1994.

Whenever he tears himself away from the park, the relationships he has built and trails he blazed will live on after him.

“He’s awesome,” said Army Capt. Jason Poyser, whose unit trains at the park because of Ratcliff’s efforts. “It’s been great having this place as a resource and we’ll use it as long as they’ll let us.”

“He’s been more than a liaison, he’s been a friend. He’s a really great guy,” McComas said. “He’ll be missed.”