Post on 07-Mar-2016
description
transcript
corememories WRITTEN BY Maria VV. SSnyder
Three Mile Island.
TMI.THE NNAME EEVOKES AAN AAUTOMATIC
association with the most seriousnuclear power plant accident in theUnited States. Even 30 years later,memories of those living in CentralPennsylvania during the accidentare still vivid.
The accident began in TMI-2’s plant
on Wednesday, March 28, 1979, at about
4 a.m. The main feedwater pumps stopped
running and prevented the steam
generators from cooling down. Both the
reactor and steam turbines automatically
shut off, which increased the pressure in
the system. In order to fix the problem, a
relief valve opened to decrease the water
pressure, but once the pressure decreased,
the valve failed to close. Cooling water
therefore poured from the open valve
instead of going into the reactor core.
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Although
alarms rang and
warning lights flashed,
the operators mis-
diagnosed the problem and
made it worse by reducing the
flow of water to the core. This
caused the nuclear fuel to overheat
to a point where the fuel pellets began
to melt. It was discovered later that
TMI-2 suffered a severe core meltdown
that melted 52 percent of the core. This
could have resulted in the worst-case
scenario where melting nuclear fuel would
breach the walls of the building and
release major amounts of radiation to the
atmosphere.
Luckily, experts later determined
only a negligible amount of radiation
had been released into the
atmosphere. The accident caused
no deaths or injuries to plant
workers or local residents. But
to those who lived in the
area, the incident was
an unnerving and
terrifying
experience. The lack of official
information was one of the worse aspects
of the accident. Information that was
relayed via radio and the three broadcast
networks had been confusing and
contradictory.
“It was a scary time,” remembers Dick
Morgan. He was working in Elizabethtown
when the news reached him. “It was total
panic … the rumor mill started rapidly.”
Workers wanted to leave.
Becky Greenly can remember being in
social studies class when a person entered
her middle-school classroom and
whispered to her teacher. No one said
anything to the students, but they closed
the vents and windows of the building.
“Kids were being picked up by their
parents,” Greenly said. “It was chaos for a
while. They kept calling names over the
loudspeakers.”
When she arrived home on her
family’s
egg farm in
Elizabethtown, it
was “business as usual.
We couldn’t leave the
chickens.” When Greenly
returned to school, she
remembers, “The school was empty.
It was really weird.”
Many people fled. Overall,
approximately 140,000 people vol-
untarily evacuated the area.
Over the course of the next two days,
reports from the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission varied. At one point, an NRC
spokesman reassured the public that “the
danger was over,” even though they had
failed to stabilize the plant.
On Friday, March 30, NRC went
from underestimating the damage to
overestimating the danger. The
growing uncertainty about the
condition of the plant prompted
Governor Thornburgh to
advise pregnant women
and pre-school aged
children living
within a
Left: Protesters,shown in March 1985, statingtheir opposition to the restarting ofTMI-1 reactor, whichwas to take placein October 1985.
Right: TMIpersonnel
cleaning up thecontaminated
auxiliary building.
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It was a
scary time ...
the rumor
mill started
rapidly.
“”
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President JimmyCarter touring theTMI-2 controlroom with (left toright) HaroldDenton, GovernorThornburgh, andJames Floyd,supervisor of TMI-2operations, onApril 1, 1979.
5-mile radius to leave the area. Later on
the 30th, the discovery of a large hydrogen
bubble triggered more panic.
Barb Read was attending Millersville
University during that time. She lived on
campus and had, at first, brushed off the
news. “We went out to dinner Friday
night and came back to mass hysteria,”
Read remembers. “Girls were screaming
and crying, ‘It’s gonna blow!’ The line for
the phones went down the stairs, across
the lobby, and out the front door. By
Friday night, the campus was dead
[empty].”
That night, Walter Cronkite reported,
“We are faced with the remote but very
real possibility of a nuclear meltdown at
Three Mile Island atomic power plant.”
The coincidental release of the movie
The China Syndrome, 12 days before the
accident, also helped fuel residents’ fear.
In the movie, an energy official informs
Jane Fonda’s character that an explosion
“could render an area the size of the state
of Pennsylvania permanently
uninhabitable.”
Throughout the day on Saturday,
March 31, the authorities and experts
studied the hydrogen bubble. If the bubble
burned or exploded, it could have caused
a breach of containment and released
massive amounts of radiation to the
atmosphere.
Unaware of the possible danger, Barb
Read and her roommate, Sue Ellerbrake,
stayed at school. Ellerbrake went on a
date Saturday night and Read worked on
a paper, listening to the radio. “The news
reported the bubble was growing, and I
started to get concerned.”
When Millersville issued a mandatory
campus-wide evacuation on Sunday,
April 1, Read panicked. “We called our
parents. The rumors speculated the area
could be radioactive for 500 years!” Read
now laughs at the memory. “We took
home all the important stuff—pictures,
clothes, and plants. No books!”
Dr. Werner Fetter of Elizabethtown
remembers being concerned but not afraid
about the accident. “Not until we went to
church,” he says. “There was a buzz in
the church. The rumors were wild;
everything was being blamed on TMI.
Someone said all the flies had died within
a 5-mile radius.”
The lack of trust in the media and
rumors of a cover-up all added to the
confusion. Even sensible Dr. Fetter sent
his wife and three daughters to
Shafferstown to stay with relatives. “I
stayed. I didn’t want my house looted.”
On Sunday, the experts determined the
hydrogen bubble would not burn due to
lack of oxygen. Panic finally eased after
two major events: President Jimmy Carter
and Governor Thornburgh toured the
plant, and Harold Denton, the director of
reactor regulation for the NRC, had
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Cour
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arrived to coordinate the efforts to control
the plant and coordinated communications
with the public.
“He [Denton] was the kind of person we
needed,” Dr. Fetter says. “They put him in
charge, and he was calm and didn’t flower-
coat anything.”
The accident had caught everyone off-
guard. Since then, the NRC and other
government organizations have made major
changes to policy and procedures. Yet public
fear and distrust remain, and the incident
has halted and slowed nuclear plant
construction throughout the United States,
thereby “killing the nuclear industry for 30
years,” Andrew Kadak, MIT professor of
nuclear engineering, said. Only 35 new
commercial reactors have been put online
since 1979.
Cleanup of TMI-2 lasted 12 years and
cost $973 million. Currently, the reactor is
in long-term monitored storage. TMI-1
reactor was restarted in October 1985, and
has a license to operate until 2014. In
January 2008, a license renewal application,
which would allow TMI-1 to operate until
2034, was submitted to the NRC.
Memories of fear and panic will remain
with those who lived through those five days
in 1979. Everyone would likely agree with
Dick Morgan, who says, “It’s an experience
I don’t want to go through again.” ) )) )
Three Mile Island today, withreactor TMI-1 restarted in 1985and still running on the left, andTMI-2, the location of themeltdown of 1979, currently inlong-term monitored storage.
Links for more information:
• www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/3mile-isle.html (NCR: fact
sheet on the Three Mile Island accident)
• http://americanhistory.si.edu/tmi/ (Smithsonian: National Museum of American
History – Three Mile Island: The Inside Story)
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