Category: Content Type (Page 8 of 36)

Newspaper: The Dickinsonian
Date: April 19, 1979
Article: “Speaking Out”
Author: Complied by Hope Muchnick

In light of the recent situation at Three Mile Island, do you believe that the power plant should be reactivated? Why?

“The Three Mile Island reactor should be reactive providing problems in the back up systems are solved. I don’t believe we can do without nuclear power in this day and age.” Robert Rabuck – ’82

“I don’t think the power plant should be reopened basically because I don’t think they understand what went wrong with it. Furthermore, the question of the storage of radioactive waste has not yet been dealt with by anyone, and they don’t have any place to safely put the waste.” Cindy Waldorn -’79

“I think that nuclear power is an inevitable area of resource, that we have to be able to use at sometime. Perhaps thay should not reopen it until they know how to control it much better. But I think that eventually the power is going to have to be used.” John Leach – ’80

“Yes. Until we can further the development of solar energy or fusion which is not for years to come, we do need nuclear energy. The way solar power looks right now, it is even more expensive and more dangerous than nuclear power. It was very serious, the Incident at Three Mile Island, but the main problem there was the management, and the way that they pushed to finish the plant to that they could declare it on their income tax. I think that the NRC should look into the plant’s problems, make sure that they get the right parts in there and the right management. I think the officials of Metropolitan Edison should be tried and probably sent to prison for the way they managed it.” Tracy Lee – ’81

Newspaper: The Dickinsonian
Date: April 26, 1979
Article: After Harrisburg nuclear incident anti-nuke campaign gains speed
Author: unknown

“Nobody needed this vote to know that Harrisburg had, in a weird way, muddled the mind of the anti-nuclear movement. This is just going to muddle it more,” said a spokeswoman for Austin (Texas) Citizens for Economical Energy. Her group had been trying to get the city out of the South Texas Nuclear Project. In February, a poll showed nearly 60 percent of the people favored the project. By the time of the April 6 vote – nine days after the March 28 Three Mile Island nuclear plant near Harrisburg began to malfunction – the race narrowed dramatically. The anti-nuclear forces eventually gathered 49 percent of the vote.

It was, of course, only a relative success for the anti-nuclear movement, and that may discourage further attempts to use the ballot to protest nuclear power. The anti-nuclear forces had been showing signs of restiveness at recent gatherings. The accident at Three Mile Island has undoubtedly weakened public confidence in nuclear power, and anti-nuclear activists seem anxious to capitalize on the advantage. The question is how.

Subsequent demonstrations have ranged from a big, relatively calm gathering in San Francisco to civil disobedience in Connecticut to sabotage in Europe.

“The really weird thing,” said the Austin spokeswoman, who requested anonymity, “is that Harrisburg should have been the best worst thing that could happen for opponents of nuclear power. But we can see here that Harrisburg has made a lot of people angrier. They want to do dramatic things now.” She defined “dramatic” as “sit-ins, mass marches, loud things.”

She also feared that “there’s a tactical split in the movement now, at least here. We’ve made steady, orderly progress toward stopping nuclear power. That more violent demonstrations can disrupt that progress – turn people against us – is a worrisome thing.”

Commercial nuclear power has been on the retreat for several years. The reactor industry measures its health by the number of reactor orders received each year. There were no orders in either 1976 or 1977, and only two in 1978. But it costs reactor builders like Westinghouse and General Atomic millions just to maintain the capacity to build reactors, whether or not orders are received.

As a result, Fortune magazine observed two weeks before Harrisburg that unless the “stalemate” between nuclear power advocates and opponents was broken, the capital costs of keeping the reactor industry alive could not be mainainted. The magazine predicted the industry would thus collapse by 1981.

The largest and best-known anti-nuclear group, the Clamshell Alliance in New England, has been coping with internal tensions over tactics since last June. Contemplating a massive demonstration at the Seabrook nuclear power plant in New Hampshire, the Alliance accepted a last-minute offer from then-Governor Meldrim Thompson to legally meet in a nearby garbage dump. But regional coordinators were furious over the executive committee’s acceptance of the compromise, and serious differences over regional autonomy and civil disobedience surfaced.

“The question of civil disobedience tactics is very real.” Clamshell spokesman Bob Hurwitz said. “One of the central questions is . . . how to maintain a direct action, nonviolent movement that insures each region’s autonomy.”

Clam member Guy Chichester adds, “There is an anarchistic element who argues that sanctity if life is more important than sanctity of property.”

“They feel each Clam should have a high degree of autonomy. Others felt there ought to be rigid guidelines. Guidelines or no guidelines, that’s one of the biggest bits of unfinished business.”

The Alliance couldn’t resolve the issue at its January conference. As a result, the plans for the summer, when all involved expected to intensify the anti nuclear campaign, are relatively uncoordinated. “There are several actions of various sorts – legal and illegal – planned by some of the state Clams,” Hurwitz noted.

The immediate aftermath of the Harrisburg accident reflected a similar disparity of tactics.

On April 7 a crowd of around 7000 peacefully listened to anti-nuclear speeches by Ralph Nader and Daniel Ellsberg in San Francisco, at a rally organized by the Abalone Alliance. Specifically the five-hour gathering was a protest against Pacific Gas & Electric’s $1.4 billion Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, which is located with 2.5 miles of the San Gregorio Hosgri earthquake fault.

Barbara Bowman of the East Bay Anti-Nuclear Group, one of the Alliance’s component parts, said “our overall tactics have not changed significantly” since the Three Mile Island plant began to leak radioactive steam. Her group will continue “legal intervention” into Diablo Canyon’s procedures.

Newspaper: The Patriot
Date: March 29, 1979
Title: Event Rated Serious
Author: Richard Roberts, Staff Writer

Radioactive material continued to be released into the atmosphere late Wednesday night from Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Station in the aftermath of “one of the more serious reactor accidents in the history of commercial power operation,” according to state and federal officials.

Emergency officials in Dauphin, Cumberland, York and Lancaster counties complained that they either were not notified of the emergency or were notified too late.

Radioactive material was being vented from the plant at the rate of one millirem per hour on an indefinite basis as part of a process to cool the reactor, according to Col. Oran K. Henderson, director of the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency.

Henderson said his agency has been placed on “an advanced state of readiness” because of the continued emission of radioactive materials from the plant. He said he has advised officials in Dauphin, Cumberland, York, and Lancaster counties that the plant began venting radioactive materials at 5:00 pm.

A discharge of radioactive material also occurred between 11 a.m. and 1:30 p.m., officials said.
Readings of radioactivity had not indicated any immediate danger to the public, and there were no immediate plans to begin evacuating residents who lived near the plant, Henderson said. “It’s a standoff at the present time,” he said.

“This is one of the more serious reactor accidents to happen in the history of commercial power operation,” said Jan Strasma, a spokesman for the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

A breakdown in the cooling system at the plant about 4 a.m. Wednesday of the plant’s Unit 2 reactor, according to an NRC spokesman.

In addition to radioactive materials released into the atmosphere, radiation was beamed through the four-foot-thick, steel-lined concrete walls of the reactor dome to a distance of more than a mile, according to Edson Case, NRC deputy director of reactor regulation.

Strasma late Wednesday night said the maximum amount of radiation measured was three millirems per hour at a site about a third of a mile from the plant. At a site one mile from the plant, a reading of one millirem was measured, he said.

“We believe this is principally direct radiation coming from radioactive material in the reactor containment building, rather than the release of radioactive materials from the building,” he said.

Strasma said: “It now appears that the cause of turbine shutdown at the plant earlier today was a reduction in flow of feedwater to the steam reactors. The sequence of events which led to the release of radioactivity to the reactor containment building is not determined yet.”

Charles Callina, an NRC investigator who spent all day at the nuclear plant, said radiation was being emitted from nuclear-charged water in an auxiliary building.

“We have a serious contamination problem on site,” he said. “You might say from the breadth of the problem it’s one of the more serious. The extent makes it serious, not the breadth.”

Radiation levels inside the reactor housing were 1,000 times above normal, Case said. Radioactivity inside the reactor dome was being measured at a rate of about 6,000 Roentgens per hour, he said.

NRC spokesman Sue Gagner said a diagnostic medical X-ray would emit the equivalent of about .072 Roentgen per hour. Case said radiation levels inside the reactor dome are normally about five or six Roentgens.

George Troffer, manager of generation quality assurance for Metropolitan Edison Co. of Reading, the plant’s operator, said he thought the NRC’s figures were far too high. He said the level was perhaps 10 times more than normal.

The Problem facing TMI employees Wednesday night was to reduce the temperature and pressure inside the reactor dome and to stop radioactive gases from leaking into the atmosphere.

Case said heat-caused pressure inside the dome had risen temporarily to four or five pounds per square inch above the outside atmospheric pressure, enough to cause small amounts of leakage.

He said the leakage might have included radioactive gases from the nuclear fuel- such as iodine and xenon. But Case said pressure was not high enough to cause such heavy fuels as uranium or plutonium to leak.

Joe Fouchard, an NRC spokesman, said the only likely source of high-level radiation being detected appears to be coming from some portion of the reactor’s nuclear fuel. Officials reported earlier that the plant released radioactive steam. Fouchard said steam alone would not be strong enough to penetrate the steel-lined reactor walls.

Fouchard said control rods have been inserted to stop the nuclear reaction in the reactor core. But he said it was not known whether some part of the fuel might have been melted, evaporated, or blown out of the core before insertion of the control rods and injections of emergency cooling water.

William P. Dornsife, a nuclear engineer in the state Department of Environmental Resources’ Bureau of Radiological Health, said the reactor core had become overheated during the accident.

Met Ed spokesman Blaine Fabian said: “There is absolutely no danger of a melt-down” (in which the nuclear fuel overheats until it melts its way out of the containment vessel.)

At one point, TMI employees inside a control room temporarily were forced to put on face masks because radioactive materials leaked into the room, Case said.

Troffer said persons inside the control room were protected from the high levels of radiation inside the reactor housing by both thick walls and equipment and by the fact that radiation loses it energy quickly with distance.

About 50 to 60 of the plant’s 525 employees were in the plant when the accident occurred, according to Bill Gross, TMI public information coordinator.

“We washed them down and scrubbed them,” Gross said. “Nobody has been injured yet.”

Officials declared a state of general emergency shortly after the incident. The plant was evacuated and closed and the reactor building was sealed.

G.E. Parks, manager of Metropolitan Edison Co. consumer services, said TMI officials notified DER, NRC, and the Dauphin County Office of Emergency Preparedness. “We told them as soon as we could reach someone,” he said.

Jack Herbein, Met Ed vice president-generation, operator of the plant, said in a press conference Wednesday morning that radiation levels at the plant’s boundaries were seven millirems, about 1/10th of those which normally would be considered dangerous. The company is continuing to monitor for airborn radiation, he said.

He said the first indication of trouble came at 4 a.m., when two main feed pumps shut down. The Unit 2 reactor “tripped (shut down) on high pressure,” Herbein said. A reactor coolant drain tank overpressurized, he said.

In Unit 2, there are four reactor collant pumps, each capable of generating 9,000 horsepower.

A site emergency was declared at 6:50 a.m.,, he said. Local officials, including Middletown civil defense personnel, were not called by Dauphin County Control until 7:47a.m., nearly four hours after the incident.

Asked why it took so long to notify area authorities, Herbein said: “I don’t think there was any delay. We’re still not to (the point where) a general emergency (is declared).” He said TMI employees acted “promptly and forthrightly” in the incident.

Gross said TMI did not “have to declare an emergency. We had more radiation a couple years ago when we had fallout from the Chinese nuclear explosion.”

Some of the workers who were on duty “may have been” contaminated, but none were hospitalized, Herbein said. “No one was overexposed,” he said.

Asked to characterize the incident, he said it is “one of the most serious” to occur at Three Mile Issland but stopped short of saying it was a “close call.”

No radiation was detected in the Susquehanna River, he said. Although he said it would be “premature to say that we’ll be able to see radiation in cows’ milk,” he added, “I don’t think” the public is in danger.

He said “a very minor amount of fuel failure” occurred in the reactor core. He said perhaps ½ percent of the fuel pins among the 36, 816 rods filled with radioactive material had melted as a result of a lack of coolant. Each reactor has 177 fuel assemblies, each of them having 208 rods filled with 200 pellets of uranium.

Gary Miller, TMI station manager, released the following account of the incident: “We had a turbine trip (a shutoff) early this morning due to a feedwater problem in the secondary side of the plant.

“This caused the reactor to trip (shut off) on high pressure, which was followed by the pressurizer relief valves relieving, which resulted in a radioactive water release in the reactor building.

“Since this radioactive coolant water was released inside the reactor building, this led to the emergency plan implementation. We are presently bringing the plant down to an orderly shutdown condition.”

“To the best of our knowledge, the accident sent two or three milirems of radiation into the air,” Parks said. “One millirem is considered normal in the Middletown area.”

A special team of seven nuclear health physicists from Brookhaven National Laboratory at Upton, N.Y., armed with 10 cases of sophisticated monitoring and analysis equipment, was flown to Capital City Airport in Fairview Twp. by a Coast Guard helicopter.

The scientists landed in a Sikorsky H3 helicopter about 2:40 p.m. and immediately set up air sampling devices on a taxi way near the main terminal building.

Robert Friess, technical assistant to the area manager of the Brookhaven office of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Radiological Assistance Program, said the team received a call for assistance from state officials at 11:30 a.m.

Nathanial Greenhouse, a member of the team, said initial samples taken at the airport showed no evidence of radioactive contamination. He said samples were taken at the airport because it was downwind from Three Mild Island.

It was the first time that the team of scientists, which was formed to respond to nuclear emergencies in 11 Northeast states, had been called to a nuclear reactor mishap, he said.

Coast Guard Commander Al Baker, the helicopter pilot, said his crew took off from Otis Air Force Base on Cape Cod in Massachusetts at 10:37 a.m. to pick up the scientists at Brookhaven.

Another Energy Department team flew to Capital City Airport from Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, in a specially instrumented Hughes H-500 helicopter. Herbert F. Hahn, site manager of the Energy Department’s Eastern Measurements Office, said his team’s mission is to monitor radioactivity from the air.

Hahn established a command post in the office of Airport Manger Charles H. Hostetter. The helicopter, piloted by Jac Watson, lifted off from the airport about 3:30 p.m. on its first flight to scan the air in the Harrisburg area for radioactive materials.

A scientist aboard the helicopter uses sophisticated monitoring equipment and an on-board computer to collect the data, Hahn said. Information from the aerial monitoring will be fed into another computer that is being transported to the airport in a van from Washington, D.C., Hahn said. The computer van was expected arrive about midnight.

Hahn said his team was put into action by the NRC. Aerial monitoring was halted about 6:15 p.m., and was scheduled to resume Thursday about 7 a.m. No results of the monitoring were released.

TMI employees, waiting to be told when and where they would work, milled around outside the Three Mile Island Observation Center. Most had radiation dosometers clipped on their shirts to measure radiation in the air.

“I’m just coming off the 3 to 11 p.m. shift,” Darrell S. Kinter of Dillsburg said. “We’ve had drills for evacuation, but I know of no other time when an abrupt shutdown and evacuation of the island has happened.”

Kinter, an instrumentation technician at Unit 1, said he has worked at TMI for five years.

“I’m not scared,” Kinter said. “I don’t know what happened but they evacuated the island to be on the safe side. They don’t want us there.”

Donald E. Barry of Middletown, a TMI technical analyst in maintenance, said he works in Unit 1 and Unit 2. “I’m not apprehensive about what happened today,” he said.

The National Weather Service at Harrisburg said winds from 4 a.m. until 10 a.m. Wednesday were light and variable. After 10 a.m., the winds were blowing to the northwest at from four to 14 miles an hour. Late Wednesday night, winds were reported blowing to the northwest at 12 mph.

Winds Thursday are expected to blow north to the northeast at 10-20 mph.

Unit 2, a 900-megawatt system, cost about $700 million and was placed into commercial service on Dec. 30. It had been operating at nearly full capacity- 98 percent- for about four or five weeks, according to William R. Gross, a Met Ed spokesman.

Unit 1, an 800-megawatt reactor system, had been shut down for routine refueling and is expected to be placed back into service next week, Herbein said.

The cost to Met-Ed of having to rely on other, coal-fired generating stations to produce electricity is about $500,000 a day, Herbein said. It will be “weeks” before Unit 2 can resume operation, he said.
The plant is owned by General Public Utilities Corp., a consortium of Med Ed, Jersey Central Power & Light Co. and Pennsylvania Electric Co.

Newspaper: The Patriot
Date: March 29, 1979
Title: Radiation’s Two Sides: Boon, Bane
Author: The Associated Press

Radiation can be as familiar as the sun’s rays or as frightening as the mushroom cloud of a nuclear bomb.

It is a simple concept with complex effects- effects which even today are not fully understood.

The problems of weighing the benefits of radiation against its potential for danger were highlighted Wednesday when a small amount of radioactive steam escaped from a nuclear power plant near Harrisburg, PA.

Radiation is defined as energy moving through space as invisible waves. The frequency of the waves determines the characteristics of the radiation and their effect on the human body.

THERE ARE two types of radiation: ionizing and non-ionizing. Ionizing radiation- the kind involved in Wednesday’s accident- creates electrically charged ions which can disrupt body processes, including life. Nuclear weapons produce ionizing radiation: so do X-rays and some television sets.

Non-ionizing radiation- produced by microwaves, light and sound- lacks the ability to create ions. It can, however, disrupt body processes. Too much of it generally causes sickness rather than death, but exposure to massive doses can be fatal.

All persons are exposed to radiation every day; most of it is low-level radiation that poses a minor but continual risk.

The Food and Drug Administration says: “We do not know definitely whether there is an amount of radiation below which injurious effects will not occur.”

Radiation emissions are measured in roentgens or milliroentgens. (there are 1,000 milliroentgens in a roentgen.) A dental X-ray emits about 200 milliroentgens; by law, TV sets may not emit more than half a milliroentgen an hour.

BUT WHEN scientists talk about danger, they talk about rems- or millirems- which refer to the amount of radiation energy absorbed by the body. The average American gets about 100 to 120 millirems a year from background radiation- most of it coming from diagnostic X-rays. The amount of radiation absorbed by the body from a dental X-ray, for example, is generally around 10 to 20 millirems.

Bill Dornsife, a nuclear engineer with the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Resources, said the amount of radiation involved in the escape of radioactive steam at the Three Mile Island plant on Wednesday was equivalent to one millirem per hour.

How dangerous is the radiation of modern life?

“You have to put (the danger) in perspective as to what society really wants,” says Dr. Solomon Michaelson of the University of Rochester Medical Center. “We’re always surrounded by radiant energy. Heat and light are examples. They can be very beneficial.”

Allan McGowan of the Scientists Institute for Public Information says the key factor making radiation dangerous is its ability to penetrate the body. Radiation from infrared and ultraviolet rays of the sun can be particularly dangerous because you absorb it in the surface layer of the skin. “Any increase in exposure to radiation increases the chance that something will happen,” he says.

Newspaper: The Patriot
Date: March 29, 1979
Title: Nuclear Plant Accidents Chronicled
Author: Unknown

NEW YORK (AP) – Accidents involving nuclear plants or the radioactive fuel that powers them have been infrequent, but not unheard of.

While the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in Washington said it had no ready records on accidents similar to the one that affected a nuclear plant Wednesday in Harrisburg, PA, a check by The Associated Press turned up 10 nuclear mishaps here and abroad during the last several years. Some resulted in injuries.

– September 1978: a radioactive leak at a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in Tokaimura, Japan, forced suspension of operations of the facility.
– April 1978: Two workers at the Trojan nuclear plant near Rainer, Oregon, were exposed to high doses of radiation. The government found six safety violations and fined Portland General Electric Co, $20,500.
– April 1978: A Georgia state report found that an abandoned nuclear reactor site along the Etowah River was dangerously radioactive while the public camped and picnicked on it.
– March 1978: An explosion occurred at the Vermont Yankee power plant in Vernon, Vt., the second at the plant in four months. No release of radiation or injuries were reported.
– December 1977: Four workers received small doses of radiation while working at a reactor on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Richland, Wash.
A month earlier, the Hanford reactor was shut down temporarily after some radioactive water leaked into the Columbia River. Authorities said it wasn’t enough to endanger human or animal life.
– December 1977: In Waterford, Conn., an explosion at the Millstone nuclear
power plant left one employee seriously contaminated from radioactive grains
of sand. The plant’s two reactors were shut down.
– September 1977: About 42,000 pounds of radioactive uranium powder scattered on a highway near Springfield, Colo., after the truck carrying the material overturned.
– August 1977: An accident at an Illinois Power CO. plant outside Clinton, Ill., exposed several workers to direct radiation.
– September 1976: One person was killed and six were injured after being exposed to poisonous but non-radioactive argon gas at the Donald C. Cook nuclear power plant in Bridgman, Mich.

Newspaper: The Patriot
Date: March 29, 1979
Title: N-Plant Gone Haywire: Good Idea for Movie, But Real-Life Quandary
Author: Robert Gillette

At the end of “The China Syndrome”- a film not about China but about a defective nuclear power plant that threatens to melt in that general direction- the usual disclaimer rolls by on the screen declaring any similarities to real people and events to be “coincidental.”

Not true. And because it’s not true, “China Syndrome” has become embroiled in a nationwide controversy over the accuracy with which it portrays nuclear technology. The film and the controversy will no doubt find fertile ground in France, West Germany, and Sedan as well, where the nuclear debate is on high simmer. The only certain beneficiaries of this spreading dispute, however, are likely to be the stockholders of Columbia Pictures.

The film is a tale of suspense wrapped around a sophisticated pastiche of real mishaps and defects drawn from the operating history of U.S. nuclear power plants since 1970.

Contributing to the film were three apostate nuclear engineers who resigned from General Electric Co. in San Jose, Calif., under a flurry of publicity in 1976 to join the ranks of nuclear critics. Gregory C. Minor, Richard B. Hubbard, and Dale Bridenbaugh are identified in the screen credits only as MHB Technical Associates, a consulting firm that they’ve established in Palo Alto, Calif.

AS WITH ALL such docudramas, this one raises two questions: Where does the documentary end and the drama begin? And does it matter?

If verisimilitude were the only objective or if the story centered on a cracking dam or defective aircraft, the boundaries of fact might not matter. None, after all, is talking about banning dams or airplanes. But nuclear power is a case apart. And this film comes at an especially sensitive time. The U.S. nuclear industry is four years into an economic slump, its product remains an intensely emotional subject here and in Western Europe, and the industry is keenly aware from its own polls that a large body of America opinion- perhaps 40 percent of all adults- still hasn’t decided whether the benefits are worth the risks.

Under the circumstances then, the boundaries of fact and fiction would seem to matter here. In an effort to define them. The Los Angeles Times discussed the film with Minor and a variety of other nuclear critics and viewed it in the company of four nuclear advocates: a spokesman and an engineer with Southern California Edison, a professor of engineering at UCLA and an engineer from the Bechtel Power Corp., which builds nuclear plants.

THE PERSPECTIVES of pro and con are almost impossible to reconcile, for they bring very different value judgments to bear on issues of risk and benefit. It seems fair to say, however, that “China Syndrome” succeeds as a documentary with small deviations in portraying possibilities by drawing on real safety problems that have plagued the industry. But it fails to provide a sense of probability for accidents serious enough to jeopardize the public.

Thus the film raises the central issue of nuclear safety while doing nothing to clarify it.

Is the possibility of an extremely large accident made acceptable by an extremely low probability? And if so, what probability?

Accident probabilities can’t be defined with any precision. It is widely accepted, however, that the chance of any one reactor suffering a core melt-down and releasing harmful amounts or radiation (sufficient to cause several hundred latent cancer deaths) is about one in 60,000.

Probabilities decrease with the severity of potential accidents; the likelihood of the worst case accident, involving 1,000 or more immediate deaths, might be one in a million each year if 100 power reactors were operating.

IN A WAY, the film redeems its evasion of this issue by merely suggesting that the China Syndrome could happen, without actually depicting it. It is not giving away too much to reveal that the fictional “Ventana” nuclear power plant suffers damage but doesn’t melt down and destroy Los Angeles. This is not the nuclear version of “Towering Inferno.” In the end, the nuclear profession’s motto is vindicated- “Defense in depth: Back up systems to backup systems to backup systems.”

The plot turns on a near accident at “Ventana,” where a faulty relay starts a chain of events leading toward but stopping short of a meltdown. A TV crew on the scene to do a feature, films the incident surreptitiously, then pressures mount to suppress the film.

A control room supervisor, portrayed by Jack Lemmon, later probes the cause of a mysterious shudder that he felt during the episode, uncovers a dangerous structural weakness (defective welds in a pump support) that one of the utility’s contractors has covered up with fraudulent X-rays and documents.
Running scared, Lemmon seizes the control room and threatens to “flood the containment with radiation” unless he’s allowed to expose the flaws, but after an hour’s standoff the utility thwarts him by shutting down the reactor from outside.

COULD IT HAPPEN? Parts of it have happened at different times and places over the last decade. Combining disparate events, though, puts a different gloss on the significance of each.

Most of the near-accident in the movie is based on a June 5, 1970, episode at Commonwealth Edison’s Dresden II nuclear plant near Chicago. Here, a turbine trip caused the reactor to shut down, blowing large amounts of radioactive cooling water into a doughnut-shaped receptacle called a torus (designed for that purpose) around the reactor’s base.

Operators inadvertently overfilled the reactor with cooling water- the reverse of events in “China Syndrome” – in an effort to cool the still-hot core of uranium. At no time in the two-hour episode was there a danger of a melt-down or a release of harmful amounts of radioactivity into the environment.
In both the Dresden incident and the movie, the high pressure emergency cooling system is down for repairs and out of commission. And in both the real and fictional incidents, a stuck pen recorder misleads reactor operators seeking to keep the reactor core covered with water.

THE LOW-WATER problem in the fictional reactor is drawn from the Browns Ferry reactor fire in Alabama on March 22, 1975.

Here, a workman with a candle started an electrical fire that damaged 1,600 control cables (680 of them involving safety systems) for two operating reactors. More than eight hours were required to stabilize water supplies in one reactor; operators were forced to rely on backup pumps not intended for emergencies.

Whether the Browns Ferry reactor came close to melt-down or not depends on whom one asks. Nuclear critics consider it a close call. However, a special review group for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission concluded that while a melt-down was possible, and the availability of emergency systems would have been “comforting,” destruction of the reactor was “rather easily forestalled.”

The three engineers who viewed the film with a Times reporter said they found it moderately entertaining and a generally realistic, if eclectic, portrayal of terminology and technology. But at several points, they said, it veered from reality to sustain the storyline.

FOR INSTANCE, Eugene N. Cramer, of Southern California Edison, said that most, if not all, reactors operating today have redundant high-pressure emergency core cooling systems. If one were down for maintenance, as in the movie, others would have automatically discharged to keep the water level up, thereby undercutting the drama, Cramer said.

The engineers also took issue with the ease and speed seemingly implicit in the film with which a turbine shutdown could lead to a reactor melt-down: “A turbine trip is a once-a-year event in a power plant,” said William E. Kastenberg, a professor of engineering at UCLA, “there are many causes. It’s a normal event.”

Though he and others agreed that it’s possible for small mishaps to lead to large ones, they said the chain of events in between is long and improbable and requires a number of coincidental mechanical failures or operating errors. Cramer estimated that a large melt-down would take at least 60 hours to proceed, allowing time for evacuating areas around the reactor.

Even then, he said, it was likely that the massive concrete containment around the reactor- the last line of defense- would retain most or all of the radioactivity in the molten fuel.

CRAMER NOTED that over the years several partial reactor melt-downs have occurred (only one in a commercial plant) with no release of radiation harmful to the public. The most serious incident, in October 1966, melted four uranium fuel assemblies in Detroit Edison’s Enrico Fermi reactor, an early and unsuccessful breeder reactor. The reactor subsequently was repaired, operated again briefly, then mothballed.

Could one man take over a control room and cause a reactor accident? It hasn’t happened, and industry experts insist that a reactor could be shut down in much less than the hour consumed in the film.

Gregory Minor agreed: “In the film, that is stretched a bit for the story. I agree that in reality you could probably find something to trip it in a hurry.”

Could X-rays of a nuclear plant’s welds be falsified successfully? “We have had instances of falsification of records,” an NRC spokesman said. “In many cases, employees involved in the work, but not the documentation, have come to us with allegations. Most of the allegations have turned out to be false, but a few have not.”

IN AUGUST 1975, for instance, Boston Edison paid the NRC a $12,000 fine for allowing a contractor employee to falsify routine weld inspections in the utility’s Pilgrim 1 reactor. An investigation showed no weakness in the welds, however, “and hence there is no safety problem,” the NRC said at the time.

Whether safety succeeds in the nuclear industry depends, of course, as much on enforcement by the commission as on clever technology. Probably nothing illustrates the gulf between advocates and opponents of nuclear power as their perceptions of the film’s portrayal of the NRC: The industry engineers said the “China Syndrome” incorrectly depicted the NRC as a weak and superficial agency that licenses reactors like an automaton, whereas in reality the NRC sometimes shuts plants down precipitously.

Nuclear critics, on the other hand, think the film gives too much credit to the NRC for a determination to root out and solve safety problems.

“If the movie is misleading, the only respect is the impression that the NRC investigation is going to do some good,” says Robert Pollard, a former NRC engineer who is now a full-time critic of the industry and the agency.

Newspaper: The Patriot
Date: March 29, 1979
Title: ‘I Can’t Think of a Worse Time for This to Happen’ – Nuclear Plant Proponents See Fuel for Critics
Author: Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) – Supporters of nuclear energy said Wednesday that an accident at a Pennsylvania nuclear power plant could not have come at a worse time because nuclear power already is under severe criticism.

Meanwhile, some nuclear power critics complained that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission should have closed down the Three Mile Island plant near Harrisburg, saying it had a history of problems although it is only a year old.

But officials of Metropolitan Edison, the utility operating the plant, claimed the earlier problems were not related to nuclear safety.

“I can’t think of a worse time for this to happen- coincidental with the China Syndrome” a recently released movie about an accident at a nuclear power plant, said an electric utility official, who asked not to be identified.

NUCLEAR POWER, once considered an answer to the country’s energy needs, has had a succession of setbacks in recent years including increased public concern about nuclear waste and the prospects of nuclear plant accidents or sabotage.

Earlier this month five East Coast atomic power plants were ordered shut down by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission so that studies could be made to determine whether they had design faults which might make them susceptible to earthquakes.

The Union of Concerned Scientists, an anti-nuclear power group, called Wednesday for government examination of all the nation’s nuclear power plants to determine whether essential cooling pipes and fittings are strong enough to withstand an earthquake.

Company officials said a valve blew out a water pump at Three Mild Island. Government officials said the accident filled the nuclear reactor containment shell with radiation and released some radioactive material into the atmosphere.

While nuclear power industry spokesmen made optimistic statements, they conceded that no matter what the final outcome of the Three Mile Island accident, it will provide a rallying point for opponents of atomic power.

“The system worked, the system shut itself down. There was no catastrophic accident as all the critics said there would be. I can be very positive in that vein,” said Ron Bianchi, a spokesman for the Atomic Industrial Forum, a nuclear industry group.

ANOTHER FORUM official, who asked not to be identified, conceded that “whether or not the public sees it that way is another question.”

Richard Pollock, head of consumer advocate Ralph Nader’s antinuclear organization Critical Mass, said the Three Mild Island plant demonstrates the dangers of nuclear power.

“The nuclear program has 72 nuclear plants licensed to operate and they produce 3 percent of the energy,” Pollock said. “The question is should this country assume those kinds of risks because of 3 percent. We contend the answer is no.”

Pollock said that the Three Mile Island plant had repeated problems since it began its shakedown stage a year ago and had been shut down for five of those months. The plant opened for commercial use December 30, 1978.

“There was a red flag waving that this was a trouble plant,” declared Pollock.

Officials of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said problems during a plant’s shakedown stage are not unusual.

Dick Klingaman, a Metropolitan Edison spokesman, confirming the plant had been shut down for five months, said the earlier problems were related to pressure release valves in the secondary system driving the plant’s turbine and not “safety problems associated with the reactor core.”

Newspaper: The Patriot
Date: March 29, 1979
Title: Melt-Down Most Feared of Accidents
Author: Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP)-Cooling systems, such as the one that failed at a nuclear plant near Harrisburg, Pa., Wednesday, are the critical key to safety in nuclear power.

The accident most feared by environmentalists and scientists alike is the breakdown of the elaborate coolant apparatus which keeps nuclear reactors from overheating, erupting, and releasing deadly radiation into the atmosphere.

Less than two weeks ago, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission ordered the shutdown of five large nuclear power plants because of questions about whether their cooling systems could withstand earthquakes.

In the Harrisburg accident, a water pump used to cool the reactor at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant broke down, resulting in the release of some radiated steam into the atmosphere. Authorities said, however, that there were no injuries and the radiation outside was not considered dangerous.

The cooling system is critical in a nuclear plant because of the intense temperatures at which a nuclear reaction occurs. If the nuclear fuel should overheat, it could melt and burn its way through the protective enclosure, ultimately releasing radioactivity to the outside.

Reactor core melt-down would occur at a temperature of about 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, the approximate melting point for the nuclear fuel.

Normally the operating temperature inside a reactor core is about 500 to 600 degrees Fahrenheit and the cooling water is pressurized at some 1,000 to 2,000 per square inch to prevent it from boiling into steam.

The NRC, however, requires that the primary and emergency cooling systems work well enough to prevent the temperature of any part of the nuclear fuel from ever going beyond 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit, less than half the estimated melting point.

Scientists generally agree that a break in a pipe carrying cooling water is one of the most threatening accidents, risking dispersion of radioactive materials.

To prevent such a catastrophe plants have backup cooling systems, to rush cooling water to the core casing if the primary system fails.

Newspaper: The Patriot
Date: March 29, 1979
Title: Protest Filed Over Delaying Announcement
Author: Associated Press

YORK-The York County civil preparedness defense director said Wednesday he is “burned up” about the failure of officials at the Three Mile Island nuclear generating station to report a water pump malfunction immediately after it was discovered.

The pump is used to cool a station reactor.

Leslie Jackson, who is director of the York County Emergency Radio Network, said his office first was notified of the emergency at 7:27 a.m. Wednesday. The reactor broke down at 4 a.m., according to authorities.

“We are to be notified immediately of a malfunction and failure to notify me immediately is a violation of the regulations handed down by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Resources,” Jackson said.

He said he has lodged an official protest with the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency.

“I informed the state director, Col. Oran Henderson, of the displeasure of the York County Board of Commissioners and myself about the three-hour delay,” Jackson said. “It was inexcusable.”

The incident marks the second time in two years that an area plant failed to immediately notify York County civil defense officials of equipment malfunctions.

“A couple of years ago, the Peach Bottom Atomic Plant waited several hours to report a problem and the commissioners and myself were angry with the plant officials,” Jackson said.

The Peach Bottom plant is located along the Susquehanna River in Southern York County near the Maryland state line. There were no radiation leaks or injuries during the Peach Bottom incident.

York County civil defense officials and the county’s emergency radio network have an established plan to follow when an emergency occurs at either of the nuclear energy stations.

“Residents of the two areas are immediately notified of possible dangers and evacuation plans are set in motion,” Jackson said.

At 7:27 a.m. Wednesday, he said, the plan was put into operation.

“That plan should have been initiated shortly after the malfunction was discovered at 4 a.m., not three hours later,” Jackson said.

Newspaper: The Patriot
Date: March 29, 1979
Title: Three Mile Island: Legacy of Trouble
Author: Barker Howland, Staff Writer

The Unit 2 reactor at Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station has been a center of controversy both before and after its dedication Sept. 19, 1978.

Construction on the island began in 1967 and the first 800-megawatt unit was placed in operation in 1974. The construction of Unit 2 began in 1970, but delay after delay, protest after protest, hearing after hearing followed each other causing temporary setbacks in getting it ready for operation. Added to all this, there was a minor fire, a labor dispute and an incident which caused some doubts about security.

Hearings on the application by Metropolitan Edison Co., Jersey Central Power and Light Co. and Pennsylvania Electric Co (whose consortium owns the nuclear facility) to operate Unit 2-Unit 1 was already in operation-first were held by the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board in April 1977 at Harrisburg’s Federal Building.

The hearings were held as a result of a petition by the Citizens for a Safe Environment and the York Committee for a Safe Environment. The petitioners requested that the board withhold an operating license for Unit 2 until emergency and evacuation plans were shown to be workable through live tests. The petitioners contended that the evacuation plans were “inadequate and unworkable.”

AT THE hearings, the staff of the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission presented an estimate that it might require three to six hours to evacuate a 45-degree area stretching out five miles from Three Mile Island.

A mass demonstration against licensing of the reactor was held on May 31, 1977, when about 100 residents of the Goldsboro area released hundreds of helium-filled balloons bearing tags calling attention to the danger of nuclear fallout.

Those who found the balloons were asked to write on the tags where the balloons landed and mail the tags to Citizens for a Safe Environment, a Harrisburg-based organization. It was noted on the message tags that “fallout from a nuclear accident may travel this far.”

Sponsors of the protest were Harrisburg Friends Meeting, Harrisburg Area Community College Association for Peace, Unitarian Church of Harrisburg, Harrisburg Center for Peace and Justice, and Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.

Two days after the demonstration, the hearings resumed in the federal building and during this round eight area residents testified against licensing of the reactor on grounds that there was no “knowledgeable method of evacuation” for residents near Three Mile Island, that rural residents could not be evacuated and that many of the residents had “not been informed as to dangers and hazards of radiological fallout.”

While these hearings were taking place, a controversy arose over the security of the island. Metropolitan Edison contended that any small group attempting to enter the island would be repelled.

In August 1977, to add to the woes of the nuclear plant’s management, there was a labor demonstration by about 100 workers at the entrance of the station.

MEMBERS OF Local 520 of the Plumbers and Pipe Fitters Union charged that a New Jersey Firm which was installing meters and gauges on Unit 2 had not hired local pipe fitters.

Then on Sept. 4, 1977, a fire in Unit 2 caused minor damage to scaffolding used in cleaning pipes. The fire was extinguished by the plant fire crew and did not affect Unit 1.

Early in 1978, there was a scare. Metropolitan Edison announced that increased concentrations of radioactivity were found in sediment in the Susquehanna River about a mile south of the island.

However, an official of the state’s Bureau of Radiological Health said that no health hazard to the public had been posed.

Fallout from an atmospheric weapons test conducted by China the preceding September and a small amount of legal discharge were responsible for the increased radioactivity, the bureau said.

On Jan. 16, 1978, about 30 “concerned citizens” met in the Middletown borough hall to hear a plan for the evacuation of the area surrounding Three Mile Island should it be necessary.

On Feb. 10, it was announced that the NRC had granted an operating license for Unit 2. In response to the commission’s announcement, John G. Herbein, vice president of Metropolitan Edison, said that with the license “we can begin fuel loading immediately and then proceed to an extensive series of tests which are required for initial operation of a reactor. After these tests, we will increase to 100 percent electrical output.”

But on March 1, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, at the request of two citizen’s groups, ordered activation of the new reactor temporarily halted.

Dr. Chauncey R. Kepford of State College, representing the Harrisburg Citizens for a Safe Environment and York Committee for a Safe Environment, in a brief charged that the NRC failed to notify the groups that a license had been granted to Unit 2, thereby forfeiting the groups’ right to challenge action through NRC administrative channels. It also was charged that the failure to notify was “deliberate and intentional.”

UNDER THE court order, Met Ed was allowed to continue testing of the unit but could not initiate a sustained nuclear reaction until further notice.

Seven days later, and by a 2-1 decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington rejected the request of Kepford for a permanent injunction against the NRC to halt the operation. Kepford had argued that seepage of radon 222 gases from “tailings” or waste left over from the mining and milling of uranium posed a health hazard. He contended that the NRC failed to consider adequately the hazard in its environmental impact statement on Unit 2.

Towards the end of March, Kepford and his group asked the Atomic Safety Licensing and Appeal Board to halt initial operation of Unit 2.

Kepford told the board that aircraft operations in the nuclear plant’s neighborhood pose an unknown threat, emergency evacuation plans are inadequate and “the largest single source of radioactive emission in the fuel cycle has been ignored by the NRC.”

However, within a week the board came back with an answer and that answer was a refusal to rule on the motion to suspend operations. Instead, the objection was sent to a NRC licensing board for “further proceedings.”

There were troubles, too, in getting the reactor to full operation. There was an unplanned generation stoppage April 23, 1978, although Unit 2 had become initially radioactive March 28. And then in July 1978, another challenge by foes of the reactor was turned down by the NRC appeal panel although it did decide to order further study of aircraft crash possibilities.

This decision on the part of NRC prompted a risk appeal from the safe environment group and a charge by Kepford that Unit 2 “is an accident just waiting to happen, and when it does, the glib assurances that the public health and safety are being protected will not suffice.”

There were some red faces on the island regarding its security last July, when Francis Mummert had to go searching for help after climbing a fence and not being noticed. He and his companions had coasted to the island in their disabled boat.

Sept. 19 saw the dedication ceremony for Unit 2 with a few protesters present.

But this did not end the controversy over the operation of the reactor. A third round of federal hearings to examine hazards posed by airline flights over Three Mile Island will be held Monday at the Federal Building.