What happend
In the mid-1950s, nuclear physicists confidently predicted that nuclear energy would usher in a new age for humanity. The cost of energy would be so low it would be almost too cheap to meter. They predicted that by the year 2000 there would be thousands of commercial reactors producing unlimited amounts of power. Like the horse and buggy, oil and coal would become little more than historical curiosities. With such a bright outlook for the future the engineers and scientists started to get careless. Then on March 28, 1979, an event took place that rocked the nuclear power industry so badly that it has yet to recover. That event was the partial meltdown of one of the reactor cores at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Londonderry Township, Pennsylvania. The accident at Three Mile Island was a combination of equipment failures, design problems, and human error. It was even more that though it was a complacent attitude that the industry had as a whole as Harold Denton former Nuclear Regulatory Commission official said, " We thought the plant was too well designed to have a serious accident." "It was kind of like the Titanic."(CNN) It may surprise some people to find out how close we came to a major disaster and the sh
Because of that fear peoples attitudes shifted to the not in my back yard attitude of today. Before Three Mile Island 70% of people supported nuclear power, it has since slipped to only 43% in 1997. (Donn) Since the accident the nuclear power industry has been stagnant at best. No new reactors have been ordered in the United States in the past twenty-two years. New plants have opened since Three Mile Island but they had all been planed before the incident. "Virtually on one in the industry can imagine building a plant in the foreseeable future."(Raso) Further more many reactors that were supposed to be built have come under so much political and environmental fire that they will never open. An example of this is Shoreham plant; it was a 5.5 billion plant built in Long Island. Because of fears it never opened, and it is only one of about 65 that have been canceled. This is when things start to go wrong. The back up pumps for the secondary loop had had a test run on them 42 hours before the indent. Part of this test included a valve being closed and then reopened at the end of the test. But this time the valve was not reopened after the test. The valve being closed prevented the backup system from functioning. The plant workers discovered the valve closed in about eight minutes and reopened. Once the valve was open the back up system started to work correctly. Cooling water then flowed into the steam generators. (NRC) This solved one problem but a bigger one existed. The incident Three Mile Island was the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history, but it was far from the worst in the world. "At Three Mile Island the fail safe system worked. The power station switched itself off. There was a scare but no disaster."(Raso) It was however a disaster for the power industry. By damaging the publics trust of nuclear energy it has all but halted the progress of this technology. In some European countries nuclear power provides nearly four times the power that it does in America. As Jeff Donn put it "Maybe nuclear power was fundamentally flawed; Steeped in danger and, as environmentalists sometimes suggest, the most expensive way ever devised to boil water. Maybe nuclear plants are too big and centralized to thrive in an ere of smaller is better"(Donn) The truest testament to what happened to the nuclear power industry may be the fact that AmerGen has offered to buy Three Mile Island's remaining working reactor for 100 million, it cost 400 million to build. However there was still a hydrogen bubble above the reactor core. The concern was that as pressure decreased the bubble would expand blocking the cooling water. If that were to happen the heat could rise again causing the hydrogen to explode. This was later proved to be impossible because there was not enough oxygen to support such a reaction. The hydrogen bubble was reduced over the next few days degassing the pressurizer and controlling the air and water pressure. (NRC) Later a remote controlled camera was sent in to the reactor to see how much damage was done. What the work men saw was that no meltdown had occurred in the classic sense, meaning that the reactor did not melt through the steel containment reactor vessel or the or the floor of the containment building. However a good amount of the fuel did in fact melt or disintegrate altogether. Because the secondary loop was out of commission for about eight minuets the pressure relief valve had to open. The pressure relief valve should have closed after the pressure dropped but it did not. The emergency water injection system had also come on to inject water into the primary loo
Some common words found in the essay are:
Regulatory Commission, Mile Island, , Nuclear Station, Donn Maybe, San Onofre, China Syndrome, Angeles Times, Cronkite March, mile island, pressure relief valve, relief valve, nuclear power, pressure relief, primary loop, Mile Island's, secondary loop, water primary, water primary loop, loop water, valve closed, water secondary, water secondary loop, emergency water injection, nuclear power industry,
Approximate Word count = 2456
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page double spaced)
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