While most 83-year-olds might take it easy and rest on their laurels, William Wachter, of Valencia, has just published a book and is still very active in the engineering consulting business he owns.

Mr. Wachter and a fellow engineer, John Nevshemal, of Denver, recently published a book about Mr. Wachter's work as a nuclear engineer and his thoughts on society.

	Bob Donaldson, Post-Gazette Retired nuclear engineer and inventor William Wachter at his home at The Arbors at St. Barnabas in Valencia. Click photo for larger image.

"It is really a message to our youth that we can't stand another 100 years of mediocrity," he said. "Everything I work with deals with common sense. We need to look at that."

Mr. Wachter was born in Ohio and raised in Beaver. "I went to Pitt on a football scholarship until I had to go to World War II," he said. After the war, Mr. Wachter returned to Pitt and completed a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering and went on to earn a master's degree in aerospace engineering at Case Institute of Technology, now Case Western Reserve University.

After undergraduate school, Mr. Wachter went to work at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

"One morning, they came in and said, 'You are going to be a nuclear engineer from now on.' That is how they did it back then," he laughed.

Over the years, Mr. Wachter worked as the head of applied physics at Brush Beryllium, and as a reactor design engineer at Westinghouse Bettis Atomic Power Lab. He started his consulting firm, Wachter and Associates, in 1967.

It is his fascinating career that is outlined in the book. Mr. Wachter tells stories of his work developing a high temperature molten metal reactor, working with nuclear subs and more.

In the book, "The Twentieth Century, The Age of Mediocrity," Mr. Wachter said, "We were part of the Polaris Project, the most successful project in the history of the Department of Defense." It was in this project, he said, that they designed a nuclear sub reactor.

Throughout this career, Mr. Wachter obtained more than 30 patents for his inventions and many more under company or government domain. "Most of my patents belong to the government," he said.

In addition to his research and design work, Mr. Wachter has served as a consultant in the aftermath of many disasters. He was called in to consult after the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl nuclear accidents and, most recently, served as a consultant after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

"The president's technical committee asked me to review what happened," he said. "I was disgusted with the way our buildings fell apart. They used five-eighths-inch bolts on the buildings and I told them, 'I wouldn't build a picnic table with those.' We were attacked, make no mistake, but we should have lost hundreds, not thousands."

Over the years, his views have made him somewhat unpopular, he said, but he speaks his mind.

"I think we need to go back in our educational system and get back to the nuts and bolts part of the job. Hard work and common sense are so important," he said.

Despite a stroke, Mr. Wachter's health is good, even though he worked with "every hazardous thing that there ever was."

He continues to write, analyze and invent.

"I keep on inventing," he said, "I have several strange things going on around here."