Word: reactors
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Unfortunately for the beleaguered utility, its film may now need some editing. For the past four months, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), among others, has been looking into the causes and effects of the nation's worst commercial reactor accident. Last week, in a report that is sure to have wide repercussions, NRC staff investigators said that the most serious aspects of the mishap were almost certainly due to human error. And though they acknowledged that the radiation level was low, they said that one burst was greater than any previously revealed...
Some two inches thick and based on many hours of hearings, the NRC report will be some comfort to those who design and build reactors used to generate electricity. It states categorically that although the Pennsylvania plant was not "fail-safe," its equipment and emergency procedures "were adequate to have prevented the serious consequences of the accident, if they had been permitted to function or be carried out as planned." Trouble is, neither the equipment nor the preprogrammed safety procedures built into the Babcock & Wilcox reactor really got a chance...
...operators overrode the automatic safety systems in their attempts to correct the rapidly developing crisis that occurred when an electricity-generator turbine tripped, or shut itself down. Those actions, says the report, turned what should have been a relatively minor glitch into a potential disaster. Instead of letting the reactor's emergency core cooling system perform its safety functions, the operators paid "undue attention" to keeping the coolant from overfilling the reactor and refused to believe instruments indicating that the plant's fuel core was getting perilously...
...most Americans neither mourned nor feared Skylab's menacing death, some saw in it yet another in a series of examples of technology outracing man's means of control. A sequence of human and mechanical failures never envisioned by its builders had nearly caused the meltdown of a nuclear reactor at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island. The mysterious cracks emerging in engine mountings of the DC-10 jumbo jets had led to the grounding of the fleet and America's most tragic air disaster. Now a giant spacecraft, crippled at birth six years ago, is plunging toward a premature...
Higginbotham and Helton bring the situation under control before the lapse of that crucial minute. Then, as they would if such an accident had really happened, they begin cooling down the reactor for repairs and, momentarily at least, reflect on what might have been. Just before Janacek had pressed the button, the reactor was nearly up to full power. Now they must start all over...