Word: island
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...member commission selected by Jimmy Carter is headed by Dartmouth College President John Kemeny, an eminent mathematician and nuclear expert, and has as members a balance of leaders from the sciences, politics, labor and academe. Nuclear power proponents had hoped that an unbiased investigation would find the Three Mile Island accident such a rare and isolated sequence of equipment failures and human errors as to have no implications for the safety of the other 72 U.S. nuclear power plants or the 88 new plants for which construction permits have been granted. But the commission's report places the blame...
...Nuclear Regulatory Commission last week proposed to fine Met Ed $155,000, the maximum permitted by law, for safety violations at Three Mile Island. But the NRC itself comes in for considerable censure in the Kemeny report. Kemeny and colleagues conclude that Met Ed's training program for control room operators met regulations set by the NRC-but finds those standards ''shallow'' and ''inadequate for responding to the accident...
...itself, says the Kemeny report, reacted to the Three Mile Island mishap ''in an atmosphere of uncertainty,'' and took actions that were ''ill-defined...
...delays run up the cost of building a reactor, as does the rocketing rise in interest rates on the money that utilities must borrow to build plants. One example: the estimated cost of Long Island Lighting Co.'s Shoreham, N.Y., plant has quintupled from $300 million to $1.5 bil lion during the ten years it has been under construction. Nuclear plants now operating produce electricity more cheaply than coal-fired power stations (1.50 per kw-h for nuclear in 1978, vs. 2.30 for coal), but the cost of finishing those now under construction will be so enormous that there...
Indeed, the Three Mile Island accident has prompted some finger pointing that nonetheless indicates salutary soul searching. Says the NRC, in a report of its own: ''Everyone connected with nuclear power technology must accept as a fact that accidents can happen. Operations personnel in particular must not have a mind-set that future accidents are impossible. The experience of Three Mile Island has not been sufficient to eradicate that mind-set in all quarters, and the effects of that experience will fade with time. We have no easy answer to suggest, but attitudes must be changed...