Word: reactors
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...B.W.R. Training Center has all the marks of a topnotch engineering school. Cutaway reactor models line its cinder-block corridors. Classrooms contain charts, overhead projectors and closed-circuit TV systems. Instructors, identified by the hand calculators in their shirt pockets, lecture on everything from nuclear physics and chemistry to radiation safety. But students look older, more intent than most collegians...
Many, like Higginbotham and Helton, have had more than five years' experience running gas, oil-or coal-fired power plants before completing the two years of training required of reactor operators. Now they are undergoing advanced training to become shift supervisors. All reactor operators must be high school graduates. Senior operators, who direct whole reactor crews, must be college graduates with degrees in engineering; many are also veterans of the Navy's nuclear training programs. All must pass NRC examinations before they can be licensed...
...typical day for Higginbotham and Helton begins with a lecture, then moves on to mathematical exercises-say, computing the rate at which heat will be produced by withdrawing control rods from the reactor's core. But the most important training is the "hands-on," or practical, instruction. The classroom is a gleaming, $3 million air-conditioned simulation of the control rooms in 42 G.E. reactors now in operation around the country. With one important difference: the training center's controls are connected to a computer, not a reactor. Jokes Instructor Jerry Maher: "We have everything but Jane Fonda...
Picking up from the previous day's noisy interruption, Higginbotham and Helton resume the tediously slow job of getting the reactor back into action. One by one they withdraw control rods, watching as the reactor temperature rises. The work must proceed with agonizing care, and the morning is nearly gone before Maher says, "O.K., guys, we're taking her up. Let's shift her onto line and make money." But Janacek stops to check his students' progress. "We've got damn good safety systems," he says. "But they're only as good...
...WATER PUMP FAILURE, STEAM-LINE RUPTURE and RELIEF-VALVE FAILURE, and presses a button. The effect is jarring. Alarms give off an almost hysterical shrill. Control-panel lights flash, and overhead lights dim. He has simulated the rupture of a 21-in.-diameter water line, which can empty the reactor of vital cooling water in less than a minute...