Frank Munger’s Atomic City Underground, a blog by our sister paper the Knoxville News Sentinel, uncovered some previously undiscovered photos of then-Capt. Hyman Rickover, before he became father of the nuclear Navy. The paper obtained the photo at left, likely taken in fall of 1946, from Tim Gawne, who found it in the archives of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Munger writes that most surviving photos of Rickover were taken after the launching of the first nuclear-powered submarine Nautilus in 1954. This rare photo, which escaped being destroyed with a batch of others, was taken while Rickover was the senior officer stationed…
Browsing: Nuclear power school
With female officers reporting for duty this month to the submarine force, news stories have hailed these trailblazers as the first female submariners. While that may be true, they’re not without forebears, one reader told Navy Times. In the early 1980s, roughly 120 women were recruited into the nuclear Navy to join the submarine force, according to Jane Reoch, a former machinist’s mate first class who joined the Navy in 1979 as part of this effort. “Our mission was to get qualified so that we could stand engineering watches at the various ports where submarines were stationed,” Reoch said, adding…
