People having bills is irrelevant to consumers. If your product pricing relies on pitching a sob story about how you're a small indy developer, you've failed.
Have you worked with any recruiting agencies? I'm a big fan of Mondo - the folks there are great and have been incredibly helpful and responsive. Feel free to drop me a line if you want an intro. (I mainly work in Rails but I'm sure they can help you find something in Python.)
(There are a lot of great technical recruiters, but I've personally only used Mondo. I'm sure others have some they love as well.)
Yes, I've worked with some. They have gotten me some of my interviews with companies where I have been a finalist. I will check out Mondo, thanks for the tip!
This stuff just scratches the surface. They wouldn't post official training materials that went in depth on how ship specific systems work (even for older systems that may no longer be in use).
ex Navy Submariner here. I know quite a few folks that got out (in the 2005-2010 range) and took jobs in the nuclear field. Some had degrees, some didn't.
The Navy uses Pressurized Water reactors which seem to be a fairly common design in commercial use as well (according to Wikipedia, anyway). Which means a lot of how things work would be similar, and you'd just have to learn the specific systems for how that plant operated (i.e. the designs and how the cooling, electronics, power generation, etc. worked)
I would imagine there would be a lot of overall similarities in core principles and operations, but some specific systems would work differently being on land and likely generating a lot more power + having other requirements for discharges and cooling etc, vs. a seagoing vessel.
ex Reactor Operator from the mid 90s to early 2000s as well (enlisted).
One of the things that was apparent is purpose. A commercial reactor is a profit making device whereas a Naval reactor is part of a war machine. In the former you end up with complexity designed to save cost, where the later favors simplicity and extra cost to ensure stability. That is not to say commercial is unsafe, but the motive behind design is different and hence leads to different results and design criteria.
From what I can tell, I haven't worked a commercial reactor but commercial reactors are toys in comparison to their Naval counter parts. Going back to your land based vs sea based comparison. Refueling a land based reactor is trivial compared to cutting into a hull that needs to sustain high pressure underwater. This requires extra design in poison placement and fuel placement to achieve a longer life cycle measured in decades not years. The material barely touches on this and no where near the level of detail you get in the full NNPP schooling.
Commercial plants are very well aware of the training and experience that Naval operators get. I have many friends that went commercial. In the commercial world you don't shutdown or startup a reactor very often and hence you have specialists to handle that task. In the Naval world you do this every time you pull into a port. A Naval operator with 6 years experience has most likely done a few hundred cycles compared to a civilian at the same number of years only doing startups measured in the tens. So order of magnitude difference.
Startup of a reactor is one of the most difficult controlled chaos events in which you calculate expectations, move rods, and monitor activity to make sure everything is safe. A quick study of the neutron life cycle illustrates the simple fact that you don't know the state of the reactor in current state, but only in what it might be in future state. So you guide future state with understanding of current state and what might influence that state. You have to understand the Xeon poison over the last hours of operation and when that is going to decay among other things. It's not rocket science but it does require an attention to detail.
In full disclosure my first 10 minutes on a live reactor resulted in a mental breakdown. I knew all of the formulas and what I was suppose to do, but at the first time I had to move the rods I just brain farted out of nervousness. I was not going to cause a problem or accident, but I could not flatly state what was going to happen in 10 hours if I moved the rods. After 6 years on my first in fleet real reactor I could tell you where the rods would be within a tenth of an inch 120 hours later. This is why Naval operators get jobs. They learn to become one with their reactor. This is a good thing we want people that understand what they are doing.
That's so interesting re: the number of startups and shutdowns. Makes perfect sense given the mission of "generating power" vs. getting somewhere or "poking holes in the ocean".
Most of the actual machine specs (i.e. processor and max RAM) have barely changed in 5 years. I put 16 Gb in my laptop 5 years ago and it's still the most you can squeeze into a 13" MacBook Pro.
It's sad (and somewhat telling) that Apple has not packed more power into this form factor over the past 5 years.
