Three Mile Island Accident Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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The Three Mile Island (TMI) plant, located on the Susquehanna River, about 10 miles from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, was the site of what the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) calls the most serious nuclear accident in American history. Metropolitan Edison then owned the TMI facility, consisting of two reactors. The accident began at about 4:00 A.M. on March 28, 1979, in the nonnuclear section of the power plant, when the pumps that feed water to the system to create steam (which propelled the power turbines) failed. Because these pipes carry away part of the heat from the reactor, the cooling system would be required to carry the extra load. The water and steam pressure increased in the cooling system, which caused a relief valve to open. The valve was supposed to close when pressure reached a safe level, but it did not, and, unknown to controllers, pressure and water in the cooling system was lost, thereby leading to a partial meltdown of the reactor core. The NRC summarizes the situation:

As coolant flowed from the core through the [cooling water] pressurizer, the instruments available to reactor operators provided confusing information. There was no instrument that showed the level of coolant in the core. Instead, the operators judged the level of water in the core by the level in the pressurizer, and since it was high, they assumed that the core was properly covered with coolant. In addition, there was no clear signal that the pilot-operated relief valve was open. As a result, as alarms rang and warning lights flashed, the operators did not realize that the plant was experiencing a loss-of-coolant accident. They took a series of actions that made conditions worse by simply reducing the flow of coolant through the core.

This sequence of events describes what Charles Perrow calls a “normal accident” that results when redundant safety systems interact with human actors to result in unpredictable system accidents. By mid-day, the NRC, Environmental Protection Agency, and Department of Energy inspectors and scientists were at the scene. The utility’s and the agencies’ efforts appeared to be successful, but, on March 30, there was a small release of radiation due to attempts to release pressure on the coolant system. The radiation had come from an auxiliary building, not the containment, but the radiation was sufficiently worrisome to induce the governor of Pennsylvania to urge an evacuation of school-aged children and pregnant women within five miles of the reactor.

Another concern soon arose when it became evident that a bubble of hydrogen gas had appeared at the top of the containment structure; the highly flammable gas could explode and cause a small breach of the containment, thereby releasing dangerous radiation. By April 1, engineers and scientists had determined that the lack of oxygen in the containment would minimize the chance of an explosion, and, in any case, the size of the bubble had diminished.

What remained for the utility and the regulators was to secure the reactor, assess the damage, and figure out what went wrong. The accident was sufficiently serious that President Jimmy Carter created a commission, popularly known as the Kemeny Commission after its chair, to investigate what happened. The basic conclusion they reached is that the accident was partially caused by mechanical failure, but that failure was greatly compounded by human error. The commission noted that the control room technicians were poorly trained, that they failed to properly interpret the information their instruments provided, and that they did not suspect a loss of coolant accident (LOCA) until quite late in the day. It was not until late in the chain of events that the operators realized that the core was not covered by cooling water, and that a partial meltdown had taken place. The LOCA was ultimately discovered, and by 3:30, the immediate crisis had passed.

In October 1979, the NRC fined the utility $155,000 (about $440,000 in 2005 dollars), a rather small amount considering the seriousness of the accident. In 1982 during a remotely controlled television inspection of the TMI-2 reactor, engineers found that the damage to the core was much greater than anyone had expected. Since the late 1980s, the TMI-2 has been in “monitored storage.” Between 1979 and 1985, TMI unit 1 was shut down, but in 1985, the NRC granted permission to restart that unit. Many people believe that the TMI accident was the event that stopped nuclear power from becoming a more important source of energy in the United States. Under this logic, nuclear power had a bright future until TMI proved that nuclear power was too dangerous to be relied upon as an energy source.

There are other reasons for the decline in nuclear power plant construction in the United States. The first of these reasons is the reordering of the politics of nuclear power. By the early 1970s, the system of promoting and regulating nuclear power policy was beginning to break down. Congress’s Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE) was seen as too closed and too powerful. Members of Congress pressed to break up the JCAE’s responsibilities and ultimately distributed its responsibilities among several committees. The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was broken up, and its regulatory role was transferred to the new Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 1976, and its research and promotion function was transferred to the Department of Energy in 1979. Second, there was the increasing cost involved in building and getting nuclear power plants approved. This was a function of more aggressive regulation by the NRC even before the TMI accident, and of the lack of one or two industry-standard designs. Unique power plants often underwent costly design changes as knowledge of nuclear technology changed.

The third reason was the increasing strength and visibility of the antinuclear power movement in the United States and in Europe. The existence of an active and well-informed antinuclear movement was made clear in the aftermath of a 1975 accident at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA) Browns Ferry, Alabama, nuclear plant, in which an accidental fire cut off communications between the reactor and the control room. This incident motivated the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) to argue that government estimates of the safety of nuclear power plants had been inaccurate. As a result, by 1979, the NRC had fully repudiated an earlier AEC report on the very low likelihood of an accident.

In a seemingly prescient coincidence, a Hollywood movie, The China Syndrome, about a potential LOCA, was released a mere 12 days before the TMI accident. The combination of the TMI accident, interest group opposition to nuclear power, and the dramatic power of the movie helped turn public opinion against nuclear power. After TMI, the rate of reactor licensing slowed considerably, peaking at 112 units in 1990 and declining to 104 units in 2006, although actual power output has been level since 1990 at abut 99,000 million kilowatts. No new nuclear plants have been ordered in the United States since the late 1970s, and while TMI did not trigger this downturn, it most likely accelerated it. Even today, with calls for alternative, less-polluting power generation, no new nuclear plants are on the horizon, in large part because of TMI.

Bibliography:

F. Baumgartner and D. Jones, Agendas and Instability in American Politics (University of Chicago Press, 1993);
T.A. Birkland, After Disaster (Georgetown University Press, 1987);
J. Chasan, The Fall of the House of WPPSS (Sasquatch Publishing, 1985);
Nelkin, “Some Social and Political Dimensions of Nuclear Power: Examples from Three Mile Island,” American Political Science Review (v.75/1, 1981);
Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies (Princeton University Press, 1999);
Report of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island (Kemeny Commission, 1989);
Stephenson and G.R. Zachar, eds., Accidents Will Happen: The Case Against Nuclear Power (Perennial Library/Harper and Row, 1979).