Three-Mile Island

FUburn, S. Bullard, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, 

GE with its Knolls Atomic Power Lab (KAPL) had been in a keen rivalry with Westinghouse for this first propulsion power plant, as GE attempted to develop a sodium cooled reactor design. The company s sodium design had been used in the second nuclear powered submarine, the US Navy s Seawolf. Technical difficulties with the sodium reactor, however, led the Navy to convert the Seawolf to the PWR design of the Nautilus within 3 years of its initial commissioning (Polmar and Moore, 2004). Despite its shortcomings, the project had provided GE with a tremendous amount of nuclear expertise. 

While all three PWR vendors nearly duplicated the operating pressure within their NSSS, they also all preferred to employ four circulating pumps to convey the coolant water through the reactor vessel and into the steam generator. It was in the 

RECIRCULATION SUMP DRAINS MAIN FEEDWATER NOZZLE 

Reactor Pressure Vessel housing the fuel elements 

Baum A, Fleming R, Singer JE Coping with victimization by technological disaster. 

Cleary PD, Houts PS The psychological impact of the Three Mile Island incident. J Human Stress 10 28-34, 1984 

Dohrenwend BP, Dohrenwend BS, Warheit GJ, et al Stress in the community a report to the president s commission on the accident at Three Mile Island. Ann N Y Acad Sci 365 159-174, 1981 

Fabrikant JI The effects of the accident at Three Mile Island on the mental health and behavioral responses of the general population and nuclear workers. Health Phys 45 579-586, 1983 

Goldsteen R, Schorr JK, Goldsteen KS Longitudinal study of appraisal at Three Mile Island implications for life event research. Soc Sci Med 28 389-398, 1989 Hakansson CH, Lindgren M, Sulg IA EEG effects of postoperative irradiation treatment of brain tumours. Acta Radiologica Therapy, Physics and Biology 8 301-310, 1969 

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Nuclear power has achieved an excellent safety record. Exceptions are the accidents at Three Mile Island in 1979 and at Chernobyl in 1986. In the United States, safety can be attributed in part to the strict regulation provided by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which reviews proposed reactor designs, processes appHcations forUcenses to constmct and operate plants, and provides surveillance of all safety-related activities of a utiUty. The utiUties seek continued improvement in capabiUty, use procedures extensively, and analy2e any plant incidents for their root causes. Similar programs intended to ensure reactor safety are in place in other countries. 

ALWRs are expected to be deployed ia the United States and ia Asian counties. However, France will use improved versions of standard reactors, considering them to be amply safe and economical. The reactors were modified after the Three-Mile Island-2 (TMI-2) accident. The company Framatome that has built most of the reactors of France is associated with Babcock Wilcox ia the United States. The new Framatome 1500 MWe N4 PWR is an extension of the successful four-loop units of 1300 MWe originally designed by Westiaghouse. Full emphasis is givea to safety, ecoaomy, and rehabiUty. More severe design criteria than those ia the former model have beea adopted. 

The accident at the Three Mile Island (TMI) plant in Pennsylvania in 1979 led to many safety and environmental improvements (4—6). No harm from radiation resulted to TMI workers, to the pubHc, or to the environment (7,8), although the accident caused the loss of a 2 x 10 investment. The accident at the Chernobyl plant in the Ukraine in 1986, on the other hand, caused the deaths of 31 workers from high doses of radiation, increased the chance of cancer later in life for thousands of people, and led to radioactive contamination of large areas. This latter accident was unique to Soviet-sponsored nuclear power. The Soviet-designed Chemobyl-type reactors did not have the intrinsic protection against a mnaway power excursion that is requited in the test of the world, not was there a containment building (9—11). 

The Report of the President s Commission on theMccident at Three Mile Island The Needfor Change The Regag ofTMP U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., Oct. 1979. 

J. V. Rees, Hostages of Each Other. The Transformation of Nuclear Safety Since Three Mile Island, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, lU., 1994. 

The accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant clearly demonstrated that an alarm system can be counterprociuc tive. An excessive number of alarms can distract the operator s attention from the real problem that needs to be addressed. Alarms that merely tell the operator something that is already known do the same. In fac t, a very good definition of a nuisance alarm is one that informs the operator of a situation of which the operator is already aware. The only problem with applying this definition is determining what the operator already knows. 

Releases of radioactive materials from nuclear power plants have occurred, as at Three-Mile Island, Pennsylvania. In such situations, releases may be sufficient to require evacuation of residents. 

In the Three Mile Island incident, the command signal to close the reactor relief valve was displayed, not the actual position of the valve (Kletz, 1988). Since the valve was actually open, the incident was worse than otherwise. 

A similar flood occurred at Three Mile Island Unit 1 in April, 1977, caused by a leak in the circulating-water system casing of one of the circulating-water pumps. However, because of the plant s layout, damage was confined to the six circulating-water pumps and did not affec y other systems (Verna, 1981). 

At the Three-Mile Island-2 (TMI-2) 880 MWe plant designed and constructed by Babcock and Wilcox on the Susquehanna... 

Show the complex iterations between government laws and regulations and the PSA response to not only comply but to protect the process industry. The real impact of the accident at the Three-Mile Island nuclear plant was not radiation, which was within regulations but financial losses to the utility and the acceptance of nuclear electrical f>ower in the United States. The effects of the Bhopal accident were in human life but it also had a profound effect on the chemical industry financially, and its acceptability and growth. Present the mathematics used in PSA in one chapter to be skipped, studied, or relerred to according to the readers needs. 

In fact, the air was not vented. The 1 -inch vent line on the air supply was choked by a wasp s nest. Although this example primarily illustrates a wrong assumption, a second factor was the inadequate indication of the state of the oxygen valve by the panel light. A similar error was a major contributor to the Three Mile Island nuclear accident. 

Nearly all major disasters provide ample evidence of the failures of organizations to learn from their own or other organizations experience. In the case of Three Mile Island for example, a similar accident had occurred some months before at the similarly designed Davis Besse plant, but correct worker intervention had averted an accident. 

The accident at Three Mile Island unfortunately tlircatened the future of nuclear power in tlie United States and called into question the safety systems... 

As described in Chapter 1, the three largest radiological accidents of the last twenty years tire tlie explosion at Chernobyl, the partial core meltdown at Three Mile Island Unit 2, tuid the mishandling of a radioactive source in Brazil. The least publicized, but perhaps tlie most appropriate of tliese accidents, witli respect to waste management, was tlie situation in Brazil. 

In 1988 producers of basic industrial chemicals, plastics, and fibers in tlie United States increased tlieir sales at least 10% to about 90 billion (exclusive of foreign subsidiaries) primarily as a result of increased demand at home and abroad. Along witli die increase of chemical production safety and accident prevendon liave become more critical and essential. Such dramadc releases of toxic chemicals as diose tliat occurred in Bhopal and at Three Mile Island have lieightened publie eoneem for die integrity of process facilities dial liandle liazardous materials. 

Public opposition to commercial nuclear power plants began with the misperception that the plants could explode like nuclear weapons. The nuclear industi-y made progress in dispelling this misperception, but suffered major setbacks when an accident occurred at the Three-Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania and at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the USSR. 

The 1970s were hard times for the nuclear industiy. The decade opened with the first Earth Day (April 22), which featured thousands of teaching events, many of them aimed at halting further nuclear power development, and ended with the accident at the Three-Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania. In... 

Viewed in this context, the Three-Mile Island (TMI) accident was the coup de grace for an already foundering industry. In spite of the fact that the hydrogen gas bubble that accumulated in Reactor 2 did not explode, although some contaminated gas escaped and that the commissions who investigated the accident faulted human error rather than equipment failure, TMI caused (as the New York Times... 

March. An accident occurs at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in New York. 

Three Mile Island, only about 50 curies of radiation were released to the environment ... 

Third law of thermodynamics A natural law that states that the entropy of a perfectly ordered, pure crystalline solid is 0 at 0 K Thomson, J. J., 25 Three Mile Island, 525-526 Threonine, 622t Tin... 

Nuclear power plants in the United States are supposed to be designed well enough to prevent accidents as serious as the one at Chernobyl. Nevertheless, the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania, an aerial view of which is shown in Figure 22-14Z). experienced a partial meltdown in 1979. This accident was caused by a malfunctioning coolant system. A small amount of radioactivity was released into the environment, but because there was no explosion, the extent of contamination was minimal. 

Aerial views of three nuclear power plants, (a) The Chernobyl nuclear power plant, site of a major nuclear accident in 1986. (b) The Three Mile Island power plant, site of a minor nuclear accident in 1979. (c) A plant in France, which has operated nuclear power plants safely for nearly 30 years. 

The accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor in March 1979 resulted in contamination of the containment and auxiliary buildings. An aerosol sample from the auxiliary building obtained by filtering about 1,4xl09 cm3 of air through a fiber glass filter for 8 days contained an estimated total transuranic actinide radioactivity of 13 Bq (350 pCi), of which 241 Am was the major contributor (Kanapilly et al. 

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