Posted on 05/04/2022 4:11:16 PM PDT by nickcarraway
I remember that day vividly. I was in high school, it was mid-morning, and I skipped class. As I walked across the field to the nearby shopping center, the school freak run up to me and blabbered on and on about how the world had ended. He was very excited about it.
I wished him luck and went to the buy myself a ham on rye. I don’t think I missed much in class, anyway.
I’m watching the last episode of this doc right now.
Don’t waste your time.
IT SUCKS.
Should we get Rodney Dangerfield to come on and explain it to you?
Safe nuclear power is possible. Look at the U S Navy with a nearly 70 year safety record. The French have also operated nuclear power plants for decades. The problem in the US is a lack of standardized design and operation. The disaster at Three Mile Island also stymied the development of better reactor technology. Totally contained nuclear plants have now been developed that run unattended with a failsafe design. Sadly we are investing so.much funding in green energy boondoggles like wind farms that have no realistic potential to provide reliable uninterrupted power.
All you need to know is that with everything that happened at TMI, containment was held and no one was injured or killed. A disaster it was not...the plant ultimately worked as designed.
I worked for Bechtel then and was part of the group sent in after the incident for, at that time, the recovery. Much was made of nothing.
The reactor internals and fuel rods ended up looking like rip rap laying in the bottom of the reactor.
Even with that extreme there was no danger of what was left of the core melting though the 4” wall of the vessel.
Exactly. Nothing was going to go wrong. Nor did it.
There were several chapters to TMI alien to even locals. The scale of the accident, the corruption of the utility, the incompetence of their control room operators, the lies/cover up, the influence of Bechtel, and the possible disaster which could have occurred during cleanup are unknown to most Americans.
ONE man made a difference between catastrophe [dumb luck that he was there at all], and what we now know as history. The difference was mere hours, buoyed by a tremendous ethical standard and incredible cajones.
I support nuclear power in the modern sense; I do not support 'too big to fail' corrupt corporations and politicians/NRC bureaucrats at their beck & call. I am HIGHLY CRITICAL of multiple administrations for permitting the relicensing of antique nuclear power generating facilities in the absence of budgets for new facilities, leading to our current (and worsening) power crisis.
One quote from the TMI fallout stands out:
"All I know is that I've always been an advocate of nuclear power. I still am, but I'm not an advocate of that type of management system."He was naively ignorant of the institutional problems at NRC.
The article is half-baked, and the documentary is informative, but badly produced. Anyone who wants to watch it should just watch the last 2 episodes for the meat of the scandal (and then give it a thumbs-down).
The problems exposed at TMI were a harbinger of things to come for innumerous events which followed, including TWA800 and the Boeing 737MAX scandal. The list is long, and Conservatives have a responsibility to know how deeply Bechtel was embedded with the Reagan administration. Most of us know about Cheney/Bush; others have their heads in the sand about it and/or in denial about the reality of 20 years of war & current events in Ukraine.
Institutional incompetence & bureaucratic corruption were fueled by the mad dash to develop nuclear in the wake of Oil Embargo; we are witness to multiple events of similar scale, the most recent being 'COVID'.
"I don't think those illnesses [multiple cancers of TMI vicinity residents] had anything to do with Three Mile Island."All this defective documentary did was remind me that Lake Barrett is still alive and escaped a brutal beating (among others). Ironically, he reminds me of Anthony Fauci with his lies and mannerisms.
"What the [nuclear] industry learned from this is that you can lie, cheat, falsify documents, intimidate, and harass workers, be convicted of a crime, and you can get a license to operate a nuclear reactor."'Deep state' was alive & well long before it was given a name.
More hysteria to block the wise use of nuclear.
Anti-nuke crowd ramping up against building nuclear power plants, rehashes old news to scare Gen Z and assorted Snowflakes.
I remember driving by Three Mile Island shortly after the incident.
EXCEPT when the core melted, it slumped apart, not together as the doomMovies all foretell. Great job, Metallurgists! THANK YOU!
The lessons learned at TMI made a sea change in the way the so-called nuclear industry operated.
Because of the obvious issues with the inability of the operators to understand what was happening during the incident, the NRC mandated that every utility with a nuclear power plant have a control room simulator to use for training operators.
A simulator is used to train operators on situations that because of safety and other reasons the actual plant systems cannot be subjected. Westinghouse’s Nuclear Service Integration Division built many of those.
The final product was a control room that was an identical copy of the plant’s control room down to the floor tile, telephone, etc. All of the cabinets, instrumentation, recorders ... everything was the same with one exception.
All of that was driven by a Gould computer which was somewhat similar to the big VAX computers of that era.
One of the other changes was a mandated information exchange database that the utilities used to list every component issue that occurred. As an example if a valve failed all of the information associated with that valve was included.
The detail included the manufacturer and lot number. Beyond that the material traceability down to and including certifications of material used in the valve was included.
That means one could go back to the steel heat and follow that steel which may have been used for other products used in nuclear power plants.
The items included in the reports generated were mandated as action items by all utilities.
There was a vast number of equipment changes and modifications that utilities had to incorporate. One was the way hydrogen that escaped was removed.
Utilities also had to develop and use a five year maintenance plan that was submitted to the NRC for approval and then tracked.
Nuclear power plant operations got a lot more rigorous with much more intensive oversight.
Right ON!
Netflix is desperate to get viewers. And they LOVE disasters.
You think they would be satisfied with the Pedo Joe administration.
How about a show about the 2020 Election.
I, for one of a few, am aware.
It is interesting that you ignored every aspect of my comment except the citation of incompetence in the control room.
Again, I - for one - understand. I support & advocate nuclear, but something about the nuclear regime needs to change (and spanning >50 years it merits a Led Zeppelin cliche’).
The info is appreciative, but it does not change the fact that your comment smacks of Straw man; merits some self-analysis so that your comments are not erroneously flagged assuming, of course, that you are not being defensive of the regime itself (albeit merely the technology).
More people died in Ted Kennedy’s car than from Three Mile Island.
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