Jim Hardy: Nuclear Engineer — Energy Insights & Hobbies

Give us a little background on Jim Hardy

Born and raised in Miami, Florida, to parents with roots in Springfield, Missouri. So at heart I’m a small‑town Midwestern fellow. Miami was small in the 1950s, but it became cosmopolitan and outgrew me.

I spent a career working in the nuclear plant south of Miami, so I claim a vicarious kinship with Homer Simpson. His rank in the organization, however, was considerably higher than mine.

What are your favorite places in Arkansas?

Mammoth Spring, and the river that flows out of it. The brick building there is a 1920s hydropower plant, about 400 kW, that ran until 1972. The quaint old machinery is still there, including an early Woodward governor.

Eureka Springs, a popular resort town a couple of hours west of here.

The small lake behind my house, especially in summer when the grandkids visit.

The small barbershop in our town, run by the same two guys since 1960, where you catch up on the local fishing and political gossip. In the interest of a low‑pressure life they’re only open Tuesday through Thursday.

What are you doing in your avatar and what equipment is shown?

That’s a picture of the nuclear plant’s control rod drive system cabinets. Westinghouse PWR folks will recognize the power cabinet. I’m hunkered over a tester that we designed and built to exercise the system during plant shutdowns so you’re sure it will work properly at startup.

That tester enabled us to find and fix quite a few intermittent troubles, greatly improving performance. It also removed testing as a schedule bottleneck, which greatly pleased management.

How did you get interested in electrical engineering?

I had the good fortune to attend a high school that offered a course in electronics taught by a practical, old‑school merchant marine radioman. He took us boys from basic electricity through radio transmitters and receivers (both tube and solid state), and basic logic circuits. Continuing into an EE degree was a natural progression.

Tell us about your job at the nuclear power plant

FPL believed in assigning a few engineers to hands‑on support of maintenance departments in their power plants. This made the organization more well‑rounded. I worked alongside craft people troubleshooting systems, as did my counterparts with mechanical and nuclear degrees.

It’s symbiotic: helping line workers gain insight into plant systems improves their effectiveness at keeping things running. Likewise, helping engineering organizations appreciate maintenance‑friendly design creates value by avoiding built‑in design pitfalls. Design will evolve toward smoother‑running plants.

A course in Reactor Physics let me act as an interdisciplinary interface, helping nuclear engineers with electronics and helping electricals with basic nuclear terminology.

What energy technologies are you most interested in?

Fast reactors that can burn the waste my generation accumulated. We’ve sent our kids out into the world, if you’ll allow a metaphor, in a fleet of ’67 Chevys with all their old, worn‑out tires stuffed in the trunks. Not a great launch, if you ask me.

Cleaned‑up coal because it’s so plentiful.

Natural gas because it’s clean burning and lends itself to combined cycles with >50% efficiency.

You’ll observe I lean toward steam — it makes so much power in so little real estate and with so little labor.

How do you see the US energy market changing in the future?

There’s an interesting article this week in Foreign Affairs explaining that microgrids are useful for getting indigenous people connected to the internet, but to create real prosperity and lift communities out of poverty takes an industrial‑scale energy infrastructure that will support manufacturing and transport. So I do not see steam plants going away. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2016-08-30/debunking-microenergy

Wind and solar will stay with us so long as there’s a robust grid to support them. Every kWh they make is a pound of coal that can stay in the ground, and that’s a good thing. They also provide dispersed power sources that might be able to restart a blacked‑out grid following some cataclysm — a practical reason to keep wind and solar around.

There’s also the boutique appeal: people who want to can pay their utility to claim they’re not getting any kWh from fossil fuel.

I advocate solar water heating because it’s a low‑tech means of energy storage. It was popular in South Florida before electricity became so cheap in the 1950s.

If you were named Secretary of Energy tomorrow what changes would you implement?

1. I think I’d rescind mandates on utilities to acquire “X%” of energy from renewables. The grid is a machine and when politicians mess with machinery they generally do harm.
2. I’d set a practical goal for scalable thorium‑cycle power reactors to provide an energy source for the next couple of centuries. By then, someone should have fusion working.

What would you say are your favorite engineering marvels and why?

1. Model T Ford — because it was the product of an eminently practical eccentric and had profound social effect. Planetary gear transmissions in 1908?
2. The symphony orchestra. Most folks wouldn’t call it “scientific,” but watching my friend Harry rebuild violins gave me an appreciation for the science in musical instruments. The orchestra proves the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts.
3. The Apollo space program. We did it!
4. The slide rule. It got us to the moon. My sister once asked, “If aliens landed tomorrow how would you try to communicate with them?” I told her I’d show them my slide rule — it shows we count in base ten and are aware of transcendental math functions. Surely they’d respect that and we could find a way to communicate.

What got you into boating, what kind of boat do you have and what boating activities are you into?

I don’t know why, but I was always fascinated by boats and loved sea stories as a kid. Dad and I built a plywood skiff when I was in eighth grade and I explored Miami’s waterways with his little Evinrude outboard.

I used to sail quite a bit on Biscayne Bay, even sailed in one of those infamous Columbus Day regattas, and I fished on the reefs south of Miami.

Living inland now I keep just a couple of small boats and kayaks for the kids. I canoe the nearby Spring River about twenty miles once a year for nostalgia.

I enjoy fixing up old outboard motors just to hear them run again — I have probably fifteen of them, mostly from the late 1940s through about 1960.

What are some of your favorite hobbies, movies, foods and books?

My hobby of late has been keeping cars and appliances running, for myself and some neighbors too.

I still have an old telescope and enjoy occasional stargazing. As mentioned, I restore old outboards and boats, and I frequent Physics Forums.

Movies: I like light‑hearted looks at society like “Blast from the Past” and character studies like “Twelve O’Clock High” — both present useful role models.

Foods: Anything I can cook on the grill. I recently learned how good vegetables are when drenched in olive oil and garlic salt then grilled. Fair Anne makes a great shrimp Alfredo.

Books: I’m drawn to sea stories and light science. I’m a fan of Joseph Conrad for character studies. I recently finished “The Sun Kings” (history of solar astronomy and flares) and started “Pinpoint” about GPS.

Growing up and throughout your education years who were your heroes or idols?

We kids idolized TV’s Hopalong Cassidy, who always did the right thing.

I read Richard Halliburton’s tales of roaming the world and Loren Eiseley’s tales of roaming the U.S.; I admired both for drawing rich experience from modest circumstances.

In middle years I liked Kurt Vonnegut for ridiculing the establishment (“God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater”), though later I came to regard him as a sad cynic. I greatly admire Eric Hoffer, who drew from his experience as a California hobo and migrant worker — there’s a theme there.

I always admired the characters portrayed by Jimmy Stewart in films like “The Spirit of St. Louis” and “No Highway in the Sky”: plain folks who focused on what they wanted to achieve and did it without fanfare.

Now in my later years I look back at teachers who expended extreme effort for us kids — particularly my high school electronics and English teachers and a fourth‑grade teacher who got the whole class up to where we needed to be in math.

As an early product of the TV age I still offer up a few entertainers as heroes because they set examples of humility and harmless humor — Jack Benny, Red Skelton, Bob Hope, Victor Borge and Danny Kaye. We need more of that today.