Meltdown: A Race Against Nuclear Disaster at Three Mile Island: A Reporter's Story Hardcover - 2001 - 1st Edition

Excerpt

The trouble had started around 4 a.m. two days earlier, on Wednesday, March 28. Two workers named Craig Faust and Ed Frederick were nearing the end of what had been a quiet and uneventful overnight shift in the brand-new Unit No. 2 reactor at the Metropolitan Edison nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island, on the Susquehanna River. They had just carried out a routine check of the panels monitoring the reactor, and everything was working normally.
Suddenly warning lights began to flash in the control room and an alarm shrieked. Faust and Frederick raced to see what was wrong. Blinking red lights on one of the panels told them that two water pumps had failed. Without a constant flow of water to cool the reactor, heat was rapidly building up inside it.
This was a serious problem, but it was not a cause for panic. There was an emergency backup water flow built into the plant to take over in case of such malfunctions and keep the reactor cool. However, those first warning lights and siren were only the beginning of what became a dangerous situation in less than
a minute.
Fifteen seconds after the primary water pumps failed, a valve became stuck in the open position. Radioactive steam and water began to spill into one of the reactor’s tanks, draining off the water needed to cool the fuel rods in the core. Fifteen seconds after that, the emergency backup water system that would cool the unit failed because the maintenance crew that had gone off duty earlier had forgotten to open three other, hand-operated valves.
With water leaking out through the open valve and the emergency water flow being blocked by the closed valves, no water was reaching the fuel rods, which are supposed to be covered in water at all times. And no one in the control room realized the fuel rods were uncovered.
Faust and Frederick were racing around the control room trying to figure out from an array of hundreds of lights—red, green, white, blue, yellow, all blinking like a Christmas tree—what the main problem was and what they should do to fix it.
A lot more went wrong in very quick order. Between human error and equipment malfunctions, Three Mile Island was rapidly building into the worst nuclear crisis the country had ever faced. But in the first hours, the power company that owned the plant, Metropolitan Edison (known locally as Met Ed), failed to alert any state or federal official that anything was wrong, hoping that their technicians could fix whatever was going on inside the reactor.
It wasn’t long before the technicians realized that radiation was leaking out of the reactor. Events were spinning out of control. Unit No. 2 was in big trouble.
One of the people Hoop had talked to on that first day was John Callahan, a construction worker at the plant. Callahan had come to work shortly after 6 a.m. that morning and had been admitted into Unit No. 2 as usual. No one told him that anything was wrong.
Callahan had been on the job for about half an hour when he and another worker noticed a puddle of water on the floor. There should not have been any water on the floor, and they were trying to figure out how it came to be there when one of the senior technicians came running through the building waving his hands and shouting, "Get out! Get your stuff and get out!"
The water Callahan had seen on the floor was radioactive.
By 7 a.m., it had become clear that not only was the alarming buildup of radiation escaping from the reactor but some of it might even be leaking outside the plant. They could not keep the accident a secret any longer.
Gary Miller was Met Ed’s station manager for Three Mile Island. When he arrived in the control room at Unit No. 2, at approximately 7:15 a.m., there were about sixty people shouting and running back and forth as technicians tried to keep pace with the torrent of bad news coming from the instruments on the control panel.
Miller spent about five minutes listening to reports and studying data that confirmed fears that radiation levels were steadily increasing and radiation was spilling outside. At 7:24 a.m. he formally declared a "state of general emergency," the first ever at a nuclear power plant in the United States.
Met Ed finally began to telephone state and federal authorities to advise them of the situation. Even then, Met Ed tried to minimize the danger to the local population. As the governor, federal officials, and reporters began to ask questions about the emergency, Met Ed kept changing its story. At first spokesmen said it was a broken water pump, then a stuck valve, then a clogged filter. In fact, it was all of those things and a lot more.
Even as they were assuring Governor Dick Thornburgh and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in Washington, D.C., that there was "no danger to public safety" from radioactive emissions, Met Ed officials knew that radioactive material was seeping outside the plant. They just didn’t know how much.
Because of the radioactive water and gas within the containment building, no one was able to go back inside Unit No. 2 to make an assessment of the damage. All they had to go on was information transmitted from instruments that might have been damaged by the accident.


Meltdown. Copyright (c) 2001 Wilborn Hampton. Candlewick Press, Inc., Cambridge, MA