Lies, Damned Lies & Zombies
From WGAL Susquehanna Valley news:
30th Anniversary of TMI Accident This Month -
"On March 28, 1979, a water pump in the non-nuclear part of the plant failed. Cooling water contaminated with radiation drained into other buildings in the facility. The reactor's core overheated to more than 4,000 degrees -- just 1,000 degrees short of a meltdown."
Well, there you have it. After 30 years, numerous official and unofficial investigations, scores of lawsuits, a stack of criminal convictions, hundreds of quiet settlements and a class action lawsuit with more than 2,000 plaintiffs that went on for years, we get three innocuous little sound-byte sentences. A failed water pump, some contaminated cooling water and not even close to a meltdown. Wow.
We're all familiar with 'the usual' pros and cons of nuclear, most of us know where we stand. What I'd like to highlight here are the falsehoods contained in that first little three-sentence bolded paragraph above, which is how the accident at TMI-2 is described for a generation to whom it's just a historical curiosity.
I was at the time a "local" within the 50-mile radius of concern. I was also a recovery worker during the month following the accident - and have investigated the details from internal documents, work reports, decommissioning projects and other investigation reports. I do know a few things about it, so here you go...
Sentence one:
"On March 28, 1979, a water pump in the non-nuclear part of the plant failed."
Well, that's just silly. Even the Kemeny Commission detailed things quite a bit worse than this, and it was an official whitewash! First and foremost, there's no such thing as a "non-nuclear" part of a nuclear power plant. The secondary system - heat exchange and power generation - is supposed to be non-contaminated by radioactive fission products, but that's never worked out well due to the design of the heat exchangers (which inevitably leak). They just put a limit on HOW contaminated the secondary system is allowed to be, but in an accident situation those limits don't count.
See, TMI-2's 3-month old core had some issues from the beginning. Seems the fuel pellets were prone to crumbling and the cladding welds were sub-standard. On the early morning of March 28, 1979, a work crew was attempting to dislodge a clogged resin transfer line in the secondary system's demineralizers, which had managed to pick up a load of what was later identified as uranium - fuel. Obviously, the core's fuel failure rate was serious and increasing, and the leaks in the steam generators were sending it straight into the unshielded secondary system in the turbine building.
So some brilliant workman decided they should try to dislodge this clog with a high pressure water hose, as it wasn't budging. He forgot to isolate the polishers [in line with the demineralizers] before trying it. Oops.
Water got sucked into the instrumentation air supply, and this caused the entire secondary system to crash. The main feedwater system tripped, and the emergency feedwater system could not get past the failed-shut polisher bypass valves. Suddenly there was no heat exchange at all, the turbine and generator tripped off, eight seconds later reactor scram was initiated. Within two minutes the steam generators had boiled dry, water hammers shook the monstrous piping and busted support bolts. It took 15 minutes to access the polisher bypass valve so emergency feedwater could be sent to the steam generators. They were located in what Kemeny's TATF reported was "a physically awkward position."
Without heat removal, the reactor pressure and temperature continued to rise precipitously even after scram. Seems that rod group 8 surrounding the center of the core failed to fall when the scram signal was received. Fission continued, exacerbating other issues.
Sentence 2:
"Cooling water contaminated with radiation drained into other buildings in the facility."
Reactor water was boiling as pressure went down and heat continued to rise. It flashed to steam, separating into hydrogen and oxygen via radiolysis and exiting the reactor pressurizer's relief valve faster than fresh water could be pumped in. The containment building sump pumps came on and began sending it into storage tanks in the aux building basement, but those tanks had previously failed so the water flooded out. Eventually more than a million gallons of reactor water ended up on the floor.
The auxiliary building, like the turbine building, is outside containment and is unshielded. It vents to the atmosphere. All station radiation alarms turbine side and aux side pegged and stayed pegged.
Sentence 3:
"The reactor's core overheated to more than 4,000 degrees -- just 1,000 degrees short of a meltdown."
Met-Ed, GPU, NRC, DOE and everyone else admitted early on the damned thing melted (about half). It either gets hot enough to melt or it does not. If the temperature is 1,000 degrees too low, nothing melts. How hard is that to understand?
In 1982, after they finally got into containment and got a robot camera look at the core, they discovered a 'void' at the center. Tons of melted slag at the bottom of the vessel, and during decommissioning they discovered cracks in the vessel's thickest steel (at the bottom). At least 20 tons of core central remains MIA to this day. It went somewhere. It was not in the aux building basement, it was not in the secondary system's supposedly "clean" loop. It was not on the containment floor, it was not in the vessel, any of the piping, or the makeup and letdown tanks.
Now, obviously there's a whole heck of a lot of technical detail missing here, including the 30+ psig hydrogen explosion of containment atmosphere 16 hours after the start of the accident. But it should be clear to anyone with a half pint of interest that the accident at TMI-2 was a whole lot worse than this glib little paragraph describes. Public health officials documented a doubling of stillbirths in the 9 months following the accident. Residents displayed actual symptoms of radiation poisoning - metallic taste, hair loss, nausea. Thyroid, kidney, lung, bone and other cancers came in "clusters" wherever the plume touched down. Leukemias struck young and old alike. Pets and livestock dropped dead, were born deformed, or not born at all. The Hershey candy company just up the road documented iodine in milk from suppliers as far as 250 miles away - they freeze dried it so it could decay before they made more kisses...
All of this is documented. All of it has been investigated and testified to in courts and hearings through the years. Yet still, here are the shills to tell us it was just a minor blip, no big deal, everything worked out fine. Is there a better word for that than "Obscene?"
Now, NRC tells us that everything got fixed (even though nothing needed fixing but the operators, according to them), these sort of problems don't happen anymore. Of course, we haven't built one of these antiquated monstrosities for more than 30 years [though one for Georgia has been approved], and we don't talk publicly about accidents anymore because that just stresses that public and makes them develop cancer years down the line (since radiation from nuclear accidents doesn't cause cancer, they say). They've got newer, better designs now, they tell us. But they can't show us, because there aren't any of those either. I do take particular giggles from their modular "pebble" design though. Graphite moderated, no containment! You've gotta be kidding me... but alas, nope.
Now, "done right" nuclear power could have been a real boon. Problem is, we can't afford it done right. On a commercial scale nuclear "done right" is just plain beyond our means. The government has a lousy record of compliance all by itself, so if it were in charge we could expect no better that the commercial industry ever gave us, possibly worse. There must be a better way to get our trons, folks. Do we really need that many of 'em? Decentralization and on-site generation (multi-diversified) has strong merits, some demerits. But with further R&D and some funding, not impossible.
But the alternatives are another diary, for another time. I wanted to mark this anniversary by once again noting that the whole truth has never been told, the harm done has never been acknowledged or reconciled. If nukes want an unchallenged place at the current power bargaining table, that much must be done. It's most unreasonable to expect the public to trust you if you're still lying about things that happened 30 years ago. Really.
Some Links:
Scathing Look at Nuclear Safety
Killing Our Own: How Much Radiation?
Yucca Mountain