Claim: Dams are major driver of global environmental change

Well, not so much. He was more highly qualified asa USN officer than I thought, but most definitely NOT as a nuclear engineer, nor as a nuclear power plant operator/engineer/designer.
This from a letter relating the details:

Dear Mr. Fialka ..
One myth correction, however. President Carter was a submarine officer, but he was not a nuclear engineer.
He graduated from the US Naval Academy in June 1946 (he entered in 1943 with the class of 1947, but his class was in a war-driven accelerated 3 year program) with an undesignated bachelor of science degree. Even if the Naval Academy had offered a majors program for his class, it is unlikely that it would have included Nuclear Engineering as a option – after all, the Manhattan Project was a dark secret for most of his time at Annapolis.
After graduation, Jimmy Carter served as a surface warfare officer for a two years and then volunteered for the submarine force. He served in a variety of billets, including engineer officer of diesel submarines and qualified to command submarines.
In November 1952, he began a three month temporary duty assignment at the Naval Reactor branch. He started nuclear power school (a six month course of study that leads to operator training) in March, 1953. In July 1953, his father passed away and he resigned his commission to run the family peanut farm. He was discharged from active duty on 9 October, 1953. According to an old friend of mine who served as Rickover’s personnel officer at Naval Reactors, LT Carter did not complete nuclear power school because of the need to take care of business at home.
The prototype for the USS Nautilus was completed in Idaho in May 1953, so LT Carter might have had some opportunity to see it in action before leaving the Navy. However, the USS Nautilus did not go to sea until January 17, 1955, so there is no possibility that he ever qualified to stand watch on a nuclear powered submarine.
He never experienced the incredible gift of being able to operate a power plant that was so clean that it could run inside a sealed submarine, so reliable that it could power that submarine even deep under the Arctic ice, and so energy dense that the submarine could operate for years without new fuel.
When I think about the 1976 campaign and the importance of the energy issue at that time, I cannot help but wonder why Jimmy Carter’s promoters made such a big deal about his nuclear expertise. My wonder turns to cynicism when I think about the policies that his administration imposed and the damage that they did to the growth of the industry just at a time when we most needed a vibrant new energy industry player.
Best regards,
Rod Adams
Editor, Atomic Insights
http://www.atomicinsights.com

https://atomicinsights.com/picking-on-the-jimmy-carter-myth/
And some more details on Carter’s “enhanced resume” as a “nuclear engineer” …
https://seekerblog.com/2009/08/27/resume-inflation-how-a-peanut-farmer-became-a-nuclear-engineer/

It is embarrassing how much rubbish we acquire that accumulates the varnish of truth. Until I read Rod Adams today I carried around the belief that Pres. Jimmy Carter was a Navy-trained nuclear engineer and a former nuclear officer. He was neither. What is dangerous about this sort of resume-buffing and credentials-inflation is that Carter was able to destroy the entire US nuclear industry – in part because people thought he “must know about that nuclear stuff”.
If Lovins’s article did influence the 1976 election, it helped to elevate another man whose resume has received some inflation. That inflation may have been done by political handlers, but there is something slightly questionable about allowing someone to create a life story that is simply not true. I would guess that somewhere north of 90% of the people who know who Jimmy Carter is would tell you that he was a nuclear submarine officer. Some who have watched a PBS show called The Presidents: Jimmy Carter might even say that he served as the engineer officer of the USS Seawolf, the second US nuclear submarine. If the person being questioned is a real buff who has taken a Pentagon tour and seen the wall displays that celebrate the presidents who have served as Naval Officers, he might even tell you that President Carter received a Master of Science in Nuclear Engineering from Union College in Schenectady, New York.
The problem with each of those descriptions of Jimmy Carter’s nuclear experience is that they are wrong, something one can figure out with a calendar that has accurate historical dates.
Jimmy Carter could not have been a nuclear engineer based on his college degree program; he graduated from the US Naval Academy in 1946 with a general Bachelor of Science, before that school offered any designated degree programs.
According to the Naval Historical Center, LT Carter was honorably discharged from the US Navy on October 8, 1953 so that he could return home to care for the family farm. He had only started his nuclear power training on March 1, 1953. The training, in those very early days of the Navy’s nuclear program before the start up of Navy training courses, was conducted at civilian colleges, and Union College was one of the locations. However, it was definitely not a place where one could earn a master’s degree in nuclear engineering in just 7 months. That is especially true when you understand a bit about the Navy and realize that LT Carter probably did not do too much studying after he found out that his father had passed away in July 1953. (Leaving the Navy is not as simple as walking out the door.)
The PBS documentary is quite misleading with regard to Carter’s service, since it states that he served as the engineer of the USS Seawolf, the second US nuclear submarine. That statement is made with a backdrop of the USS Seawolf in operation. Unfortunately, that would have been impossible. The keel laying for the Seawolf took place in September 1953. That means that the construction process started just one month before Carter left the Navy to return to Plains. His service record indicates that he was assigned to the crew that would eventually man the USS Seawolf, but that is certainly not the same as serving as the engineering officer of an operating submarine in terms of the opportunity to absorb nuclear technical knowledge.
It is possible, but unlikely that LT Carter ever watched a nuclear plant in operation. S1W, the prototype for the USS Nautilus, the first nuclear propulsion plant that the Navy constructed, started operating in March 1953, but it would be unusual to have nuclear power school students visiting the prototype during their first six months of training. After Carter left the Navy, there is no evidence of his having had any nuclear related employment; he was too busy growing and selling peanuts and serving as a Georgia state senator and later as Georgia’s governor.
President Carter’s exaggeration of his nuclear experience had an impact on the way that the public viewed his cautious statements about nuclear energy and the way that political leaders accepted his efforts to restrict its growth. When he issued an energy policy that emphasized the use of coal as a way to reduce American dependence on foreign oil, there were many who expressed the view that he must know what he is doing, after all, he was a “nuclear engineer”