Three Mile Island Memories
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This past weekend marked the 30th anniversary of the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island. If you are old enough you may remember where you were at that time and what it was like. I remember VERY well because I was on my way to the crippled plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Our President at the time, Jimmy Carter, was also a micro-manager and a former nuclear engineer: he wanted his own eyes and ears on the scene. Our little group eventually coalesced into the Presidental Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, led by Dartmouth College president John Kemeny, who was also the co-author of BASIC.
The lessons of Three Mile Island have been, for the most part, forgotten. The nuclear industry changed and improved somewhat, but the deep understanding of what went wrong was lost on the public in general and the real lessons that we could have learned as a society were, too. The financial mess we are experiencing right now isn’t all that different from Three Mile Island. If we’d taken better to heart the true lessons of TMI we might not be in our present jam.
I spent a year of my life coming to understand TMI and even wrote a book about it, now long out of print. I was there.
There was a partial nuclear core meltdown at TMI. We all knew what that meant because, ironically, The China Syndrome, had just swept through American movie theaters six weeks before. Years later there was a much more severe accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Soviet Union. Some people argue that TMI was actually worse than Chernobyl in terms of the actual core damage. I don’t know. There’s no doubt that Chernobyl killed a lot of people and TMI didn’t. The difference was that TMI had a concrete containment vessel and Chernobyl had none. Building nuclear power plants without containment vessels was insane and Chernobyl proved that.
Looking back at the accident with the benefit of knowing what it took to clean it up and what the workers found when they were finally able to send robots inside the containment, the TMI accident was very bad indeed. There were pressure spikes during the accident that would have cracked an average containment vessel, releasing radioactive gases into the atmosphere. Fortunately the Unit 2 containment wasn’t average. TMI-2 was built on the final approach path to Harrisburg International Airport, a former U.S. Air Force base, and was therefore beefed-up specifically to withstand the impact of a B-52 hitting the structure at 200 knots. A normal containment would have been breached.
TMI wasn’t caused by a computer failure but the accident was made vastly worse by an error of computer design. Specifically, TMI-2 had a terrible user interface.
We had a confluence of bad design decisions at TMI, some of them made by the U.S. Congress. U.S. law specifically prohibited using computers to directly control nuclear power plants. Men would do that and nearly all of those men would be former nuclear reactor operators from the U.S. Navy. Computers could be used to monitor the reactor and in fact it would probably have been close to impossible to monitor it without the help of computers. There were just too darned many valves and sensors for any team of humans to keep track of reliably, 24/7.
So the computer (there was one) monitored the plant and raised an alarm if specific parameters changed. Then a guy would flip a switch to open or close some valve, solving the problem.
Here’s how it was supposed to work. Something went wrong. The computer noticed what went wrong, set off audible and visual alarms, then sent a description of the problem to a line printer in the control room. The operator would read the print-out, check the trouble code in one of many manuals, then make the adjustment specified in the manual. Simple, eh?
Too simple, it turned out.
What happened at Unit 2 was a little more complex. A cascading series of events caused the computer to notice SEVEN HUNDRED things wrong in the first few minutes of the accident. The ONE audible alarm started ringing and stayed ringing continuously until someone turned it off as useless. The ONE visual alarm was activated and blinked for days, indicating nothing useful at all. The line printer queue quickly contained 700 error reports followed by several thousand error report updates and corrections. The printer queue was almost instantly hours behind, so the operators knew they had a problem (700 problems actually, though they couldn’t know that) but had no idea what the problem was.
So they guessed.
Not good.
U.S. Navy reactor operators, the sort who served under Jimmy Carter in the 1950s, were selected primarily for their temperament. This was a nuclear device, remember, so having trustworthy operators was most important. Besides, their Navy job – as at TMI – was to follow the manual. All knowledge was inside the book. So knowing the book was everything. Unfortunately knowing the book isn’t the same as knowing the reactor. This approach was extended to most civilian U.S. reactors, where knowing the book meant passing the test on the book NOT really understanding the guts of the machine. Civilian reactor operator training in those days was nearly all about how to pass the test, not how to operate the reactor.
So when a real accident happened the operators weren’t prepared to handle it. Their superiors at General Public Utilities weren’t prepared to handle it, either. Nor were the experts at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And don’t even get me started about FEMA. The outcome of Hurricane Katrina was no surprise to me.
Every level of command waited too long to ask for help at TMI. Sometimes this was because they thought they were on top of the situation, but more often it was to avoid embarrassment or – in the case of General Public Utilities – to avoid hurting the stock price. The FEMA guys were just plain stupid.
Nobody died, eventually the reactor was brought under something like control, and a lot of lessons were learned in the process. Reactor operators learned better how their reactors worked, for one. The NRC generally gave up the job of promoting atomic power that had been its primary calling as the old Atomic Energy Commission, for another. Reactor control rooms everywhere were dramatically improved and line printers banished as interface devices. And for the next 29 years we didn’t build another nuclear power plant, leaving that mainly to the French and the Japanese.
Now nuclear energy can be mighty dangerous and is not something to be messed with lightly, but another irony in this story is that nuclear power is actually pretty simple compared to many other industrial processes. The average chemical plant or oil refinery is vastly more complex than a nuclear power plant. The nuke plant heats water to run a steam turbine while a chemical plant can make thousands of complex products out of dozens of feedstocks. Their process control was totally automated 30 years ago and had an amazing level safety and interlock systems. A lot of effort was put into the management of chemical plant startup, shutdown, and maintenance. The chemical plant control system was designed to force the highest safety. So when manufacturing engineers from chemical plants looked at TMI, they were shocked to see the low-tech manner in which the reactors were controlled and monitored. To the chemical engineers it looked like an accident waiting to happen.
The folks at TMI did not really know how to manage the technology of a nuclear power plant, and that led to a huge mess. The same thing has now happened to our economy. Congress changed the banking and mortgage lending rules without regard to their purpose. Many firms bought derivative securities without the slightest thought to the math behind them or the risk they were incurring. Nuclear power plants run on a chain reaction process of atomic decay. Our government and investment community created a chain reaction of economic decay.
Chemical plants were better designed than nuclear power plants in part because Congress did not legislate how the chemical industry designed their plants. But more importantly most chemical firms of that era had CEO’s with engineering degrees. They had respect for the technology and the risk of misusing it. But that doesn’t make the chemical industry blameless. With the off-shoring of manufacturing a lot of chemical production is now being done in places where there is little respect for the dangers of technology. The chemical industry’s TMI was Bhopal. There will be more Bhopal’s coming because those companies are now being managed by bean counters, not engineers.
There is a place for nuclear power in our energy future. I say this not as a particular nuclear advocate but as a realist. The end of the Cold War has left us with a legacy of weapons grade nuclear materials that must be dealt with. Thanks to the 1950s we’re stuck with all the issues of storing this stuff no matter what Obama or any other U.S. President does. It just makes sense to me to take this stuff that used to be bombs and degrade it into something that can no longer make bombs but, oh by the way, can power millions of homes with no CO2 emissions. It seems like making lemonade to me. Yes, there are other renewable power sources that are even better than nuclear, but I seriously doubt whether they will add up to enough total watts in the time available. We’ll need all of them.
Just as we neglected the economy for the last decade or more, we have also neglected nuclear energy. We don’t have a national storage system for spent fuel. We don’t have a spent fuel recycling process. We don’t have a standard national reactor design. We add incredible costs to power plants for an amazing list of things, many of which contribute nothing.
Life doesn’t get simpler, it gets more complex. TMI led us to repudiate nuclear power as a nation – something in the long run we probably can’t afford to do. We just have to find ways to manage technology – all technologies – more responsibly. Sadly, we tend these days to put the wrong people in charge.
I’ve been thinking that nuclear power plants should be built inside of granite mountains near constantly flowing rivers that can be diverted to use in cooling them.
This is the best (perhaps the only?) way- that I can think of that would solve the HUGE security issues.
One only has to look at the 9-11 tragedy to realize that we are sitting on a major safety issue by allowing these old nuclear power plants to continue operating with their many risks.
No insurance policy insures against that, either. Read the fine print.
(blanket exemptions due to radiation, pollution, acts of war, etc.)
That’s a VERY substantial hidden cost of using nuclear power the way we do.
Look at the Chernobyl situation, now, even decades later. A huge area is a wasteland, abandoned. There have been thousands of preventable deaths from cancer and other illnesses. Thousands of deformed babies have been born, many to die agonizing deaths.
That is NOT something we want to have happen here. Thats why we should concentrate on decentralized, renewable energy for our future, and not build any new nuclear power plants above ground. We should retire the old plants that have often reached the end of their useful life.
Radiation ages things- thats a problem.
Iodine tablets are a good thing to have in case of emergency.
They are available on the net, and they last forever.
Chernobyl had proven to be far more resilient an ecosystem that we’d assumed and feared in the two decades and some years since the explosion.
It’s true there was much initial casualty. Most prominent were the force of liquidators who fought the reactor fire and desperately labored to contain the deadly debris. The first responders died. The following waves suffered latent health issues to appear weeks to years later. Residents living around Pripyat and surrounding areas largely, but not totally, escaped unhurt. Some returned to the exclusion zone and some refused to leave. There is documentation to support claims of children born in the years surrounding the disaster, especially those still living in the zone, being in poorer health than the average.
But, there are also quite a lot of healthy folks living in the zone. Many who always had and witnessed and lived in the zone straight through the disaster and its aftermath, in contravention of the government.
Perhaps most telling are the wildlife, plant and animal. These recovered extremely quickly and have enjoyed more bountiful populations now than ever. I recently watched a documentary seeking to investigate some of the new surge of biomass, which uncovered data counter to the conventional wisdom on radiation exposure. Most of the healthy populations lived with Chernobyl-spawned radionuclide levels many times that of comparable populations outside the zone. The early research is suggesting it could be the case that certain low-level radiation exposures might actually cause a protective reaction in plant and animal species, and that such exposed species start adapting and thriving quickly in this environment. Longer-than-average lifespans are being documented, and this effect is thought to be in part based upon damaged cell apoptosis mechanisms honed and made more efficient by the radiation exposure.
The reality is that we can manage the risks, and therefore make the risk/reward such that, like air travel, we couldn’t imagine not doing it. Renewed development of orphaned advanced breeder reactor concepts could pave the way to pull much more energy out of presently “spent” fuel, as well as react down stockpiles of salvaged Pu from weapons, and…leave behind a waste product much less radioactive and dangerous for much shorter timespans (like decades and fractions of centuries vs. multiple centuries, eons, and geologic time).
Renewables cannot hope to provide enough energy to afford us our present lifestyle. I doubt the earth’s photosynthetic capacity accessible to human tech is high enough to meet our present and future energy demands, while still providing us food. And growing energy as biofuels only displaces food use of scarce arable land, food we need already, globally.
In a greenie world, re-wrangling atomic power would allow us to reserve fossil fuels for air transport, were pure renewable substitutes may be a practical impossibility. It would provide a route to non-CO2 emitting electricity generation in sufficient quantities to actually serve electric car markets which would be starved for power and unable to be competitive without. And it would allow us access to energy reserves large enough to enable us to power ourselves on the same sort of time scale as the sun.
So a new nuke disaster, while very bad, would perhaps be more akin to a major volcanic event than an extremely long-dated apocalyptic dead zone. Advances in high-voltage DC grid tech could make distribution efficient enough to enable confining reactors to remote areas away from population centers for as long as needed to keep refining the tech to ever safer degrees.
There is such a thing as inherently safe (from meltdown) nuclear power: It’s called a pebble-bed reactor.
I may be just a layperson, but it is inconceivable to me that nuclear power plants are still being constructed with ridiculously unsafe fuel-rod reactors, when the pebble-bed design has existed for about as long.
This Wired article is the best introduction to pebble-bed technology that I’ve been able to find: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/china.html
[...] Three Mile Island Memories. [...]
Reprocessing spent fuel is painted by some as a rosy answer to our problems and they point to the French. Problem is, what you never hear about, are the beaches in France where the radioactivity from waste water runoff from recycling plants has increased visitor’s cancer incidence. This is not an solution, just another problem. Just think of the tourism opportunity that would spring from these kind of beaches!
Two billion gallons of water are consumed per year to operate a nuclear power plant. Is that very much? The answer depends on how much water you have. In Alabama, a nuclear plant was nearly shut down due to lack of sufficient water supply. A looming water crisis affects more and more areas around our country and the world. In the near future, we will be forced to choose between using water for power or agriculture and drinking. When forced to decide this, electrical power will loose. One aquafer in the midwest is being pumped 7-11 times faster than it naturally gets replenished. Farmers in the midwest depend on this aquafer to irrigate crops that feed millions. We don’t have the water to spare for nuclear power, or coal for that matter.
My question is why? Why nuclear, when so many alternatives exist? So many alternatives with so few potential problems. 1. Wind, Solar (electric and thermal), geothermal, tidal, ocean currents, biogas (from trash and sewage). These things may seem so much less ‘powerful’ but deployed in large enough scale, will provide ample power for all.
In other words Bob, you are saying that you have no idea why Three Mile Island happened, no idea what went wrong, no idea what actions were taken, what corrections to future designs were made, and what then or current best practices are. And that you have no inclination or interest to find out
Well, most of us knew that already Bob, but thanks for clarifying the issue.
“Look at the Chernobyl situation, now, even decades later. A huge area is a wasteland, abandoned. There have been thousands of preventable deaths from cancer and other illnesses.”
There have been 57 deaths from the accident itself.
In addition, there have been 4000 total cases of thyroid cancer in the entire population that has been exposed since the accident. This includes the background cases, but lets assume that all of these cancers were caused by the exposure to strontium and iodine in the days after Chernobyl. Thyroid cancer has a 96% long term survival rate, so that’s 160 deaths.
There has been zero increased incidence of all other types of cancer. No extra leukemia, no extra birth defects or abnormalities, no solid cancers, nothing. The biggest cause of death has actually been suicide. An entire generation, scared shitless about the radiation, has given up hope in the future.
“Two billion gallons of water are consumed per year to operate a nuclear power plant. Is that very much?”
I know that Diablo Canyon uses seawater, and that corrosion is pretty much a non-issue. The only major problem was last year when they had to take it offline for a couple of days because the intakes were being clogged with jellyfish of all things.
Most of the world’s load is on the coast so dumping heat is a non-issue. The biggest problem is convincing wealthy land owners along the coast that your low cost and passively safe lead-cooled fast reactor is reliable enough to go in their backyard. And if you’re worried about brittle power LCFR’s don’t have to be monolithic either. You could build very compact 50-500 MW distributed units wherever the load is. But in world that is still so scared of tiny amounts of radiation, how do you site them?
“I may be just a layperson, but it is inconceivable to me that nuclear power plants are still being constructed with ridiculously unsafe fuel-rod reactors, when the pebble-bed design has existed for about as long.”
Modern third gen plants like the AP1000 and the EPR aren’t terribly unsafe. All the safety systems and core cooling are completely passive and immediate onsite operator attention isn’t needed in the event of an failure. That said, they aren’t terribly efficient with their fuel usage and create far more transuranic wastes than potential fourth gen designs.
I also like the simplicity of the PBMR, but they aren’t efficient with fuel, create a larger volume of waste (although roughly the same amount of radioactive material) than other third gen plants, the graphite coating on the fuel elements is potentially combustable if the silicon carbide coating cracks (yikes!), and the coating makes the fuel elements almost impossible to recycle.
The style of writing is very familiar . Have you written guest posts for other bloggers?
After reading this article, I feel that I need more info. Can you share some resources please?
any time you live “by the cookbook,” you will eventually get cooked.
in the case of computers, it’s the botherds.
in the case of nuke plants, it’s lighting up the dark by walking into the room.
I find it absolutely, positively, incomprehensible that Our Beloved Government, having collected a fuel tax on nukes since the 1960s with promises of having a nuclear fuel disposal system in place “in ten years now, just you watch,” has done precisely freakin’ nothing. the regal We punched through a single disposal site that would hold about 15% of present material at Yucca Mountain. and sure enough, a year before it goes into operation, a new administration shuts it down.
we ought to put a bucket of rod scraps under the desk of every bureaucrat at DOE until they get their thumbs out and stop lying like murderers with blood dripping off their noses.
Robert,
You had me at Accidental Empires.
However, I find your advocacy for the construction of additional nuclear power plants unpersuasive. They are economically uncompetitive, are not less harmful with respect to global warming and carry the all too real potential for catastrophic failure. That the Chernobyl accident has been the worst to date is only a matter of luck.
My first and second assertions are argued eloquently in a January 2009 publication by the Rocky Mountain Institute entitled “The Nuclear Illusion”:http://www.rmi.org/images/PDFs/Energy/E09-01_NuclPwrClimFixFolly1i09.pdf It is a summary of a more extensively documented peer reviewed paper written for Ambio, the journal of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, published in May of 2008. It “summarizes why nuclear power cannot in principle deliver the economic benefit, climate-protection or energy-security and reliability benefits claimed for it.
My third assertion with respect to the suspect safety record of the nuclear power industry is supported by the book, Normal Accidents, published in 1984. It is a five year effort on the part of Charles Perrow, a Yale professor of sociology, and a team of graduate students, who analyzed the human and organizational dimensions of complex high risk technologies. The book includes extensively documented, detailed case studies of the two accident types cited in your piece: nuclear power plants (specifically Three Mile Island and Chernobyl—incidentally explaining why they are located proximal to population centers and abundant water supplies) and chemical plants (which he found not as safe as you imply). TMI and Chernobyl were system failures, not operator failures. Chernobyl occurred during a safety exercise after all. He concluded that accidents in such complex coupled systems are inevitable no matter how well conceived or operated. The is no such thing as a foolproof nuclear power plant.
In summary, the economic argument for commercial nuclear power is and will forever be nonexistent given the alternative replacements for fossil fuel, i.e., coal. Further, the cost of a massively catastrophic unconfined breach of containment in property, morbidity and mortality would be too much to bear.
Please maintain the flow of thoughtful missives.
[...] A look back at Three-Mile Island: or, UI design failure in the nuclear power industry. [...]
[...] is capable of using fuels that are 100-1000 times as abundant as current practice. Instead we get this: We had a confluence of bad design decisions at TMI, some of them made by the U.S. Congress. U.S. [...]
Domestic Solar Power…
I am happy that I found a post related to micro wind turbine here….
[...] 3 Mile island reflections. [...]
[...] I, Cringely » Blog Archive » Three Mile Island Memories – Cringely on technology. [...]
Hello, I just thought I’d drop you a line and let you know your blogs layout is really messed up on the Firefox browser. Seems to work fine in Internet Explorer though. Anyhow keep up the great work.
Good post. You’re in RSS now so I can read more from you later.
FEMA was established as an independent agency only a few days before TMI’s partial meltdown. It’s not surprising that there were problems (do you find any organizations that operate effectively right after a reorg?)