A Combat Engineer In Vietnam Becomes A Leader In Nuclear Power Back Home

Chuck was born at Walter Reed General Hospital, and grew up as the only son of an Army Doctor. He lived in Germany, Japan, Boston, San Antonio, and Washington, D.C. He studied Nuclear Engineering his senior year at West Point, and was awarded an Atomic Energy Commission Fellowship (now the Nuclear Regulatory Commission). After graduating from USMA in 1965, Chuck entered Princeton University, where he received a Masters’ in Nuclear and Civil Engineering. He attended Ranger School in 1967, and reported to his first Army assignment as a Combat Engineer Company Commander stationed in Texas, but slated to deploy to Vietnam nine months later. He commanded the company for six months in Vietnam before being assigned to the 159th Engineer Group Operations office in Long Binh. Returning to the states, he attended Airborne school before being assigned as a Research Associate at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory near San Francisco. After almost three years, he left the Army to join Carolina Power & Light Company (now Duke Power). He became the Nuclear Licensing Manager, and was one of the company’s primary spokesmen during the time of the Three Mile Island incident. He eventually became the Quality Assurance Manager for the company’s four operating nuclear power plants. He left the power company in 1993 to become the Corporate Quality Assurance Manager for a large nuclear services company in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. From then until 2007, Chuck held various management positions in Quality Assurance and Nuclear Safety, becoming one of the foremost advisors on nuclear power safety and quality assurance. Even after his retirement, he is still called upon to consult on the commercial nuclear industry and the nuclear weapons complex. During the interview, Chuck described how the nuclear power industry has changed over the past four decades, including the shifts in public opinion as a result of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and the Fukushima disasters, and offers his prognosis for nuclear power in the US and abroad.