OT: Three Mile Island Series on Netflix

[TheBigUglies]

I remember it when it happened as a kid but really didn't pay attention. Saw a documentary way back in the 90s that showed how bad it was with the meltdown. However, it seems that it was 30 mins from a much bigger catastrophe and went the way of the space shuttle Columbia cover up if the O-Rings. All about the money of the people hired to clean up and donating money to those in gov't.

Anyone else have stories about what happened or live thru it closer than Philly area?

 

[psuro]

I was 14 when it went down. Not close to TMI, but there was concern if anything leaked and prevailing winds would carry contamination east. My father was an electrical engineer who worked it during construction and we lived in Middletown at the time of construction, but moved in 1973. I remember him being concerned for the people he knew were still there.

 

[CvilleElksCoach]

I was a PSU at the time. My fraternity had a TMI party with Meltdown Punch and people came dressed as their favorite mutation.

 

[Ceasar]

I was a PSU Student at the time, and from Harrisburg. To this day many people in the Middletown-Royalton area attribute medical conditions, especially cancer, to the incident. I do not believe there has ever been any empirical data to back this up but nonetheless people believe it.

 

[ODShowtime]

My mother and I fled to Reading. I slept through it.

 

[PSU12046]

I was 15 at the time and I remember fishing the Susquehanna that day and joking with my fishing buddies that if we saw a green glow coming up the river, we were going to run for our lives. We're all still healthy to this day.

 

[91Joe95]

Had a professor in college who built robots to help clean it up. The incident ended up being more fear than anything else.

 

[JWB389]

I watched the series. I find Netflix has a way of turing a one hour story into a 5 hour documentary. Still interesting info, being from PA. I would recommend it to those who remember the time. It's interesting to get the back stories and learn just how close they were to a much greater disaster.

Re: linking illness to to radiation, Ceasar is correct, though it's difficult to believe the illnesses had nothing to do with radiation exposure. I think there was info that GPU had and did not release. I also think they were in over their heads.

 

[Nohow]

Partial meltdown, to be completely decommissioned by 2079. It is the most significant accident in U.S. commercial nuclear power plant history. On the seven-point International Nuclear Event Scale, it is rated Level 5 - Accident with Wider Consequences. Health effects are subjects of dispute between the NRC and the workers/local citizens.

 

[rudedude]

I was a PSU at the time. My fraternity had a TMI party with Meltdown Punch and people came dressed as their favorite mutation.

I was at PSU then too, thanks for the party invite!

 

[Woodpecker]

I was a grad student at the Hershey Med Center (8 miles away as the crow flies). We had experiments running so we didn't bug out. We had an End of the World party instead.

 

[EPC FAN]

I was a PSU at the time. My fraternity had a TMI party with Meltdown Punch and people came dressed as their favorite mutation.

Gee, that was funny.

 

[PSU Mike]

9th grade in York County maybe 17 miles away. We probably still have things boxed from that day or two in case we had to move to FL. Used my uncle who worked in nuke safety at Crystal River in FL at the time to keep the interpretation of events a little cleaner.

 

[Nitt1300]

Was working for one of the nuclear valve suppliers and happened to be in Harrisburg that morning. I called our lead PE and asked him how serious it was as I had a sister living in Camp Hill- he told me to get her out of there, at least for a few days, which I did.

People who think it wasn't serious- and damn close to catastrophic, don't know.

 

[JakkL]

I was a freshman in high school. I spent mornings at Red Land for an electronics lab and afternoons and the rest of high school at Cedar Cliff. I was in English class at RL watching the steam come out of the stacks(< 5 miles away) when the principal made the announcement about TMI. He ordered all of the doors and windows shut to protect us. I was 13 and knew that that wouldn't do anything. When the time came to bus back to CC they sent us to the auditorium. We could only leave with a parent, but we got a friends mom who was a bus driver to take us back to CC. since no one expected us to be at CC we hung out for a while and the got a ride with another friends mom back home. It was a beautiful day so we went to play basketball in front of Hillside elementary school. We then crossed the street and went into New Cumberland Middle School before returning home. My parents waited a day or 2 before driving us to my oldest brother's house in the north hills of Pittsburgh.

I will watch the show just to refresh my memory of the event itself.

 

[Aquapong]

I was a bun in the oven at the time. It explains why I so fugly.

 

[Big_O]

I was a PSU student at the time. I remember the Phi Psi 500 that year and the group in the anything goes category who dressed up as cooling towers for their costumes.

 

[Lionville]

I was working in downtown Harrisburg at the time. Didn’t miss any time in the office. I had code to write and deadlines to meet. Couldn’t let a potential nuclear meltdown get in the way.

I remember one young lady who left work and never returned.

 

[TiogaLion]

It was a meltdown that for reasons still unknown stopped melting down. Seriously, it shouldn't have stopped but it did and that is about the only miracle (short of the 69 Jets**) that I've witnessed. I was worried that the Chesapeake Bay would be destroyed. The Bay is the largest estuary on the East Coast and is extremely important to the ecosystem.

** I got a little football talk in this one!

 

[CVLion]

I was in elementary school out in the Boiling Springs area, scant miles west of Harrisburg. Our family had moved to PA from Chicago less than a year earlier. We went to stay with my mom’s parents on Long Island for a few days.

My dad later said that as we were leaving the driveway of our still brand new home, he was wondering if the next family members to see it might be his great-grandchildren coming to check it out someday after the area was finally decontaminated.

 

[Wex18]

I was already working in the Lehigh Valley, but my parents in York had things packed in case they had to evacuate.

The movie "The China Syndrome" came out about two weeks earlier, and the morning paper in York wrote a story speculating what could happen if there was an accident at Three Mile Island. Someone from either Met Ed or some government group wrote a scathing letter to the paper saying they were fear mongering. The letter appeared in the paper the same day as the accident.

 

[PSUHarry]

I was 14, came home from high school and my mom wouldn't let me go outside. Live about 60 miles away in Lewistown. Weird day.
I think I will definitely watch this series on Netflix.

 

[Daveb9127]

I was a grad student at the Hershey Med Center (8 miles away as the crow flies). We had experiments running so we didn't bug out. We had an End of the World party instead.

We had an end of the world party too! Abc nightly news came and taped it and put it on their news! Pretty cool. We were 3 miles away as the crow flies!

 

[step.eng69]

The disaster had a major effect on Bruce Springsteen.​

Among the artists inspired to action by the incident was Bruce Springsteen, who lived less than 100 miles from Three Mile Island. He wrote a song called “Roulette” about the incident and the ongoing debate at the time about whether the benefits of nuclear energy outweighed the potential environmental and health risks. The song, which says that "I've got a house full of things that I can't touch,

 

[[email protected]]

All that said if global warming is really that big a threat we should massively scale up the use of nuclear electricity production

 

[LionJim]

All that said if global warming is really that big a threat we should massively scale up the use of nuclear electricity production

Put me 100% in the “We absolutely, positively need to scale up nuclear energy production” camp.

 

[step.eng69]

It was a meltdown that for reasons still unknown stopped melting down. Seriously, it shouldn't have stopped but it did and that is about the only miracle (short of the 69 Jets**) that I've witnessed. I was worried that the Chesapeake Bay would be destroyed. The Bay is the largest estuary on the East Coast and is extremely important to the ecosystem.

** I got a little football talk in this one!

I was in my early 30's when this occured. I spent 10 yrs at the Salem Nuclear plant as a field engineer & surveyor constructing and troubleshooting issues within the facility. I also believed that the TMI plant was doomed with a total core meltdown that would probably involved PA residents to permanently relocate.

The Berwick ( Salem) plant is a boiling water reactor, the TMI is a pressure reactor. I was involved from the initial foundation construction to Unit 2 going on line. Prior to Unit 1 approaching on line status, I was given a top clearance, allowing me to enter any element of the facility.

I'm very familiar with the feed water pumps needed to supply the coolant to the reactor. Within months following the TMI the NRC had us remove many of the equipment, small and large piping, feed water pumps for replacement and upgrade. We also built additional 6 ft diameter, called by pass lines from the pump house to the cooling towers. This was done to redirect the boiling water generated by the reactors then routed via 8 ft diameter pipes from the steam turbines then to the pump house then to the cooling towers. The towers cooled the boiling water that was returned to the system to again supply coolant to the reactors. Coolant that is lost by evaporation in the towers is supplemented by drawing water fro the spray ponds.

Read this concerning the partial meltdown....I believe were really, really lucky in avoiding a situation similar to Chernobyl, just my opinion:

"Without a proper cooling system, the nuclear fuel in the core overheated to the point that it began to melt. Although plant personnel and the authorities did not know it at the time, slightly more than half of the core melted during the accident. It was not until 9:00 a.m., more than five hours into the accident, that the cause of the problem was identified and the emergency cooling system was turned back on. This prevented any further melting of the core. In a worst case scenario, the core would have overheated to the point that it could have melted through the floors and walls of the containment building. This would have released massive amounts of deadly radiation into the surrounding environment. This worst case scenario did not occur, however, and adequate temperatures were restored to the Unit 2 core by 8:00 p.m."

 

[Rick76]

All that said if global warming is really that big a threat we should massively scale up the use of nuclear electricity production

What about the waste heat from the nuclear process? At least 60% of the heat generated by nuclear power plants is released to the atmosphere and biosphere as waste heat. What does that do to global warming or whatever the catchphrase is these days. The basis lesson is there is no free lunch. Every form of electricity generation has some environmental impacts.

 

[Keyser Soze 16802]

PSU alum Steven Fink was a key player on Gov. Thornburgh's crisis management team during this incident

In 2011, Fink offered his help to Penn State for free

They declined

https://www.stevenfink.com/bio.htm

 

[Rick76]

Nuclear engineer here. I was a reactor engineer at Susquehanna duriing the construction phase. On the day of the accident, I was part of a team of nuclear fuel and reactor engineers from Susquehanna/PP&L visiting Carolina Power & LIght in Raleigh, NC and Southern Company in Birmingham, AL to discuss plant process computers and nuclear fuel when the accident occurred. Information was sketchy until we got back to PA.

On the way back, I stopped in to see my grandmother who lived in Mechanicsburg - about 15 air miles from TMI. She asked what she should do. I told her to just stay inside for a few days. Very little radiation escaped from the containment or other facilities, so unless things went really bad, there was very little danger to the public.

All the long term health effects studies have shown that there was no increase in serious disease in the 30 years following the accident.

The reactor vessel held the melted fuel (just like it was supposed to do in an accident scenario) and the containment held the airborne/waterborne radiation. There were enough redundant safety systems in place so that despite screw ups by the operators and management, the threat to the public was minimal.

I've read several reports on the TMI accident in the last 30 years and they seem to come to different conclusions about root causes. It seems that the root cause is a combination of reactor design (Babcock & Wilcox designed it), training, balance of plant design, inexperienced management, inability to see what the issues were, and regulatory.

Here's one cause that is rarely discussed: GPU/Met Ed were in a huge hurry to get TMI-2 on line by the end of 1978 so they could get it into the rate base in 1978 and collect revenues based on it being in the rate base. They probably rushed it and paid the price in March of 1979. They declared TMI-2 to be in commercial operation on December 31, 1978.

For those who want to build more nukes, well, you can do it in China. China put four Westinghouse AP1000 units on line in the last several years with an average construction time of about 9 years - even with a slowdown due to the Fukushima (Japan) incident.

On the other hand, I worked on the AP1000 units being built in Georgia and South Carolina. We started work on these units in 2008. The first unit in Georgia might come on line in 2023 (maybe). The second unit may come on line 2024. The two units in South Carolina were halted when the owner (South Carolina Electric and Gas) filed for bankruptcy because they ran out of money to fund the project.

One other thing to consider is that much of the world's uranium is controlled by Russia.

 

[Rick76]

I was in my early 30's when this occured. I spent 10 yrs at the Salem Nuclear plant as a field engineer & surveyor constructing and troubleshooting issues within the facility. I also believed that the TMI plant was doomed with a total core meltdown that would probably involved PA residents to permanently relocate.

The Berwick ( Salem) plant is a boiling water reactor, the TMI is a pressure reactor. I was involved from the initial foundation construction to Unit 2 going on line. Prior to Unit 1 approaching on line status, I was given a top clearance, allowing me to enter any element of the facility.

I'm very familiar with the feed water pumps needed to supply the coolant to the reactor. Within months following the TMI the NRC had us remove many of the equipment, small and large piping, feed water pumps for replacement and upgrade. We also built additional 6 ft diameter, called by pass lines from the pump house to the cooling towers. This was done to redirect the boiling water generated by the reactors then routed via 8 ft diameter pipes to the steam generators then to the pump house then to the cooling towers. The towers cooled the boiling water that was returned to the system to again supply coolant to the reactors. Coolant that is lost by evaporation in the towers is supplemented by drawing water fro the spray ponds.

Read this concerning the partial meltdown....I believe were really, really lucky in avoiding a situation similar to Chernobyl, just my opinion:

"Without a proper cooling system, the nuclear fuel in the core overheated to the point that it began to melt. Although plant personnel and the authorities did not know it at the time, slightly more than half of the core melted during the accident. It was not until 9:00 a.m., more than five hours into the accident, that the cause of the problem was identified and the emergency cooling system was turned back on. This prevented any further melting of the core. In a worst case scenario, the core would have overheated to the point that it could have melted through the floors and walls of the containment building. This would have released massive amounts of deadly radiation into the surrounding environment. This worst case scenario did not occur, however, and adequate temperatures were restored to the Unit 2 core by 8:00 p.m."

One of the things I've read is that the reason the ECCS was turned off is that the pressurizer went solid with water. The pressurizer is designed so that there is always a steam bubble in it. One of the major no-no's is to not let the pressurizer go solid. The operator training was to turn off the ECCS if the pressurizer went solid. Later analysis showed that the reason the pressurizer went solid was that the safety valves or relief valves stuck open and water was escaping from the RCS through the relief/safety valves. So by turning off the ECCS, they allowed the water level to drop in the reactor vessel and the fuel melted.

One other thing rarely discussed is the hydrogen explosion. There is always free hydrogen floating around in containments - most of it formed by radiolysis of water (i.e. radiation hits water and it splits into hydrogen and oxygen). That's why reactor containments have hydrogren recombiners in them. At any rate, the hydrogen recombiner in the TMI-2 containment either became inoperable or it was overwhelmed and free hydrogen built up to the point where it reached a combustible mass and BOOM. (This was not a hydrogen bomb - that's a nuclear fusion event. This was just rapid burning of hydrogen). So the containment not only held all the fission products, it also withstood a hydrogen explosion.

 

[step.eng69]

One of the things I've read is that the reason the ECCS was turned off is that the pressurizer went solid with water. The pressurizer is designed so that there is always a steam bubble in it. One of the major no-no's is to not let the pressurizer go solid. The operator training was to turn off the ECCS if the pressurizer went solid. Later analysis showed that the reason the pressurizer went solid was that the safety valves or relief valves stuck open and water was escaping from the RCS through the relief/safety valves. So by turning off the ECCS, they allowed the water level to drop in the reactor vessel and the fuel melted.

One other thing rarely discussed is the hydrogen explosion. There is always free hydrogen floating around in containments - most of it formed by radiolysis of water (i.e. radiation hits water and it splits into hydrogen and oxygen). That's why reactor containments have hydrogren recombiners in them. At any rate, the hydrogen recombiner in the TMI-2 containment either became inoperable or it was overwhelmed and free hydrogen built up to the point where it reached a combustible mass and BOOM. (This was not a hydrogen bomb - that's a nuclear fusion event. This was just rapid burning of hydrogen). So the containment not only held all the fission products, it also withstood a hydrogen explosion.

I definitely remember a few mentions back in time concerning a 'hydrogen' build up that could lead to exploding.
And here I always thought the cause for this accident was due to an operator upsetting his cup of Pepsicolo on the computer keyboard.
'The Pepsi Syndrome'

 

[BobPSU92]

PSU alum Steven Fink was a key player on Gov. Thornburgh's crisis management team during this incident

In 2011, Fink offered his help to Penn State for free

They declined

https://www.stevenfink.com/bio.htm

From his web site, about his book:

”Moreover, that book forever changed the way businesses look at and deal with crises by giving a tangible feel to an otherwise intangible subject. It showed managers and executives that they no longer had to be the hapless and unwitting victims of the capriciousness of a crisis. They could gain control and manage a crisis, should one occur, from a position of power and control, thereby taking a proactive role in shaping the event’s direction, duration and destiny.”

Nah, PSU didn’t need him.

 

[[email protected]]

What about the waste heat from the nuclear process? At least 60% of the heat generated by nuclear power plants is released to the atmosphere and biosphere as waste heat. What does that do to global warming or whatever the catchphrase is these days. The basis lesson is there is no free lunch. Every form of electricity generation has some environmental impacts.

how much waste heat is released from fossil fuel power plants?

 

[Rick76]

how much waste heat is released from fossil fuel power plants?

Pretty much the same amount. Fossil fuel (fuel oil and coal) plants are generally more efficient (i.e. more electricty generated from the same amount of heat). Nat. gas plants are more efficient (like up to 45%). Combined cycle plants can get up to 60% efficient.

 

[[email protected]]

ok then, huge net win for nuclear

 

[Pennstatel0]

I was a grad student at the Hershey Med Center (8 miles away as the crow flies). We had experiments running so we didn't bug out. We had an End of the World party instead.

Huh. I started school at Hershey in 1979. Our ultimate frisbee team was “The Nukes”. And our band was the Rads. Guess we weren’t too worried at the time.

 

[Rick76]

ok then, huge net win for nuclear

Not really.

A 1,000 MW thermal plant produces the following amounts of electricity:

Nuke - 380 MW electric
Fossil Fuel (oil/coal) - 400 MW electric
Nat Gas/Combined Cycle - 450 - 600 MW electric.

 

[[email protected]]

Not really.

A 1,000 MW thermal plant produces the following amounts of electricity:

Nuke - 380 MW electric
Fossil Fuel (oil/coal) - 400 MW electric
Nat Gas/Combined Cycle - 450 - 600 MW electric.

zero co2 emissions for nuke

also just spitballing, but I am guessing that all the waste heat from all power plants is negligible compared to the excess heat produced by greenhouse gasses

 

[91Joe95]

Not really.

A 1,000 MW thermal plant produces the following amounts of electricity:

Nuke - 380 MW electric
Fossil Fuel (oil/coal) - 400 MW electric
Nat Gas/Combined Cycle - 450 - 600 MW electric.

A little off topic, but a quick question. I once heard that the spent rods were still ~98% "active", but it wasn't worth it to re-purify the remaining uranium into new rods. Does that sound about right to you?