“As Some Day It May Happen”
As some day it may happen that a victim must be found,
I’ve got a little list - I’ve got a little list
Of society offenders who might well be underground,
And who never would be missed - who never would be missed.
{Music and lyrics by Arthur Sullivan and W.S. Gilbert}
We all have a “little list”: who’s on yours?
Those TV chefs who fling the pots and cuss like drunk marines,
They’re on my little list, I’m writing up my list
Cooking ain’t neuroscience, yet they strut and vent their spleens
I’m balling up my fist, their faces have a tryst
While they bully kitchen drudges as they slice the aubergines.
They’re permanently pissed, I’m sure you get my gist
Just dish the bloody grub up and spare me “behind the scenes”
They’ll none of them be missed - they never will be missed.
Buncha fraggin’ ingrates… one last bump:
Mendacious politicians prosecuting unjust wars:
We’ll claim they “hate our freedom” and they pose a massive threat,
Invade for their petroleum and call it a just cause
Those tools of mass destruction? We just haven’t found 'em yet.
{Are you a terrorist? You might be on our list…}
If it doesn’t have to be the Mikado, I did, while I was in the Navy, rewrite “A Policeman’s Lot is Not an 'appy One.”
When the thermalizing neutrons are a-flying
and the Hafnium has been pulled out of the core,
we love to hear the proof of atoms dying
in the Geiger-counter’s roar.
As average coolant temperature rises,
and pressure in the boilers start to build
we wonder why we must open up steam stops
and risk getting ourselves killed.
When we’re on shore and talking with our brothers
we tell them things that they don’t care to hear:
Oooh, take one consideration with another,
a reactor plant is not a thing to fear!
(From there things got very, very gory, describing all the ways that the steam plant could kill or maim operators.
I wasn’t allowed to sing it during drills. :mad: )
I have a physics prof friend who totally wants to hear the rest of this. Lay it on us, brother!
I’m afraid I only remember the next verse. 
It’s been at least fifteen years since I came up with this…
When the time has come to bypass steam valves,
we hope and pray the packing is still tight -
for Navy medicine knows no salve
to restore a burned and bleeding sense of sight.
As we heat up piping in the steam plant
we wonder if the valves are flanged with brass
Just like it happened on Iwo Jima*
so for a few minutes we’ll really cook with gas.
Chorus
From here the calamities included flooded TG sumps, leading to turbine particulate in the atmosphere; the jacking gear on the mains still being engaged, leading to an out of control top spinning through the engineroom, shooting fireballs out where the motor was burning up; having the ‘boot’ on the main condenser intakes burst because of failed vacuum on the main condenser, and flooding the whole engineroom; and at least one more allusion to a general steam leak into the steam plant. I don’t think I actually worked in the USS Dhalgren fire from the same time frame.
*If you’re not former Navy engineering this might not make sense to you - but back during the Gulf War, the USS Iwo Jima had to have some maintenance done on her steam plant. The contractor doing the work, when it came to replace the steam valve on one of the turbines, through a miscommunication, used brass bolts to flange the valve to the pipe - which would carry 700 PSIG, 800 F steam. When they tested the valve, the brass failed, the valve fell off the steam pipe, and well… every body in the engineroom died.
ETA: I did the All-Hands Radcon training for our ship for the last two years I was on it. And invariably someone in every new personnel draft would ask whether working on a reactor scared me. Like the song says, the reactor wasn’t scary. The only time I’d ever nearly pissed my pants in terror was when I heard a loud BANG and saw the lower level of the engineroom start to fill with steam. And then saw my buddy running out of the steam cloud.
It turned out it was only a steam relief lifting on a low-pressure steam trunk, but…