Navy Nuclear Power School Alumni Patch

The first class at Nuclear Power School was six officers and fourteen enlisted men, and it convened in New London, Connecticut, in January 1956. Admiral Hyman G. Rickover had established the school the year before to man the reactor plants of a nuclear Navy that barely existed yet. Every nuke since has come through some version of it. Officers arrive with calculus and calculus based physics already behind them. Enlisted sailors come straight from Nuclear Field A School, and both sit down to roughly six months of college level classroom work that has a reputation all its own.

The school left New London in 1962 for Bainbridge, Maryland, where it ran until 1976. From 1976 to 1998 it was at Naval Training Center Orlando, Florida, and Nuclear Field A School joined it there in 1986. When NTC Orlando was slated to close under BRAC, the two schools were combined as Naval Nuclear Power Training Command, which moved to Goose Creek, South Carolina, near Charleston, with the move finished in January 1999. Graduates go on to about six months at a Nuclear Power Training Unit, standing watches on a working reactor plant. From there they report to fast attack and ballistic missile submarines and to nuclear aircraft carriers as machinist's mates, electrician's mates, electronics technicians and officers.

The patch is a 4 inch circle with a gold and black rope border, cut flat to the edge. A dark blue ring carries "U.S. NAVY NUCLEAR POWER SCHOOL" around the top in white serif letters, with "ALUMNI" in gold at the bottom. In the white center is a gold atom: two crossed orbits, each with one electron, around a nucleus of four dots. Rope is the old seagoing frame, and the atom says plainly what the course was about. Nothing else is on it, which is how most nukes would want it.

Nuclear Power School has a name in the fleet because of how hard it is and how much rides on the people it turns out. Its graduates run the plants that let a submarine stay down for months and a carrier steam without stopping for fuel. The habits it drills in, procedural compliance, questioning attitude, reading the gauge and not the assumption, stay with a man long after he leaves the Navy. Plenty of alumni carried that training into commercial nuclear power, engineering and management. Two nukes who meet years later can usually name their class, their prototype and their boat within the first few minutes.

It fits a shadow box with dolphins or a ship's plaque, or the sleeve of a jacket worn to a boat reunion. It is also a good gift for a son or daughter heading to Goose Creek, from the parent who went before. It measures 4 by 4 inches with a cut edge and iron-on backing, and it can also be sewn on.