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58 IDAHO FALLS MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER2019 Editor's note: In honor of Idaho National Laboratory's 70th anniversary, the lab has been collecting and publishing each month stories of eastern Idaho families and their multigenerational experiences in jobs or careers at INL. There are enough families and enough stories to fill a book. In selecting families, the intent has been to get as wide a representation as possible. Read more family profiles at inl.gov/family-ties/. Little did Darrell Pfannenstiel know when he came to work at Argonne National Laboratory-West in 1977 that after retiring in 2010 he would one day see his young- est son, Kevin – who had not yet even been born in 1977 – working there. Forty years later, it made for some interesting after-work conversations. Was it necessary to drill a sample from the Experimental Breeder Reactor-II contain- ment dome to determine its makeup, as the younger Pfannenstiel's crew did? "I could have told you what it was," said the father. Sometimes a job chooses a person as much as the person chooses it. For Darrell, who grew up on a ranch near Longmont, Colorado, it was the U.S. Navy that brought him to Idaho Falls in 1970. The job and place agreed with him – finding his bride, Pauline Charbonneau, didn't hurt – so when he was discharged from the Navy in 1977, he was happy to hear ANL-West was hiring. "You had to be physically present to get an interview," he said. Given the experience he had operating reactors on submarines and as a trainer, it looked like a good bet. So with his wife and toddler son, Casey, and $800, the family piled into their Pontiac LeMans and left Charleston, South Carolina, for Idaho. Hired as a nuclear power plant operator, Pfannenstiel arrived in the heyday of EBR- II, which operated from 1964 to 1994. For two years of training, he immersed himself in the details of the power generation plant and nuclear fuel handling systems, gaining qualification in 1979 as a senior operator. In the Navy, his work had been with light water reactors. EBR-II, a sodium-cooled breeder reactor, was a completely differ- ent animal. "I learned so much about fast reactor technology," he said. By the early '90s, he'd been promoted to the role of lead reactor operations shift supervisor, oversee- ing the day-to-day activities of the alternate shift supervisor, the shift foreman, and 10 power plant operators. In 1994, however, EBR-II and the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) program it sup- ported had its funding cut and received shutdown orders. Darrell Pfannenstiel's duties shifted to the termination and defu- eling activities, and the startup and opera- tion of the Sodium Process Facility. By 1998, he was operations manager at the EBR-II/SPF Complex. Darrell Pfannenstiel was as invested as anyone in the culture of ANL-West, which he summed up with the sentence, "We depended on people knowing what they were doing." All the while, he and Pauline were busy raising four children: Casey, Christine, Kenny and Kevin. Did he talk about work at home? "All the time," said Casey, who is a project manager in INL's National & Homeland Security directorate. That career decision came after 20 years in the U.S. Army as a Blackhawk helicopter pilot and trainer. After serving in Iraq, Afghanistan, Family ties run through historic Idaho reactor BYPAUL MENSER FORINLPUBLICAFFAIRSANDSTRATEGICCOMMUNICATIONS Fordecades,thesilvercontainmentdome ofExperimentalBreederReactor-IIhas beenalandmarkontheeasternIdaho desert.Thereactorwasinoperationfrom 1964to1994beforeitwasshutdown.At thattime,DarrellPfannenstielhadreached thepositionofleadreactoroperations shiftsupervisor.In2017,DOE'sOfficeof NuclearEnergy(DOE-NE)becameits landlord,takingoverfromtheOfficeof EnvironmentalManagement(DOE-EM).