It was 7 a.m., three hours later, when Metropolitan Edison, the plant operators, declared a site emergency. That was long enough, however, for growing radiation and pressure to send meters off their scale. The emergency system was the last line of defense.Īll this took only five minutes. Now there was nothing to hold down the temperature. But an operator, getting false readings from the computer, turned the system off after four minutes and 30 seconds. The operators apparently had no inkling that the top of the core was uncovered.Īnother cooling system, the emergency system, automatically sent tons of water into the reactor. Not far away, in a control room half the size of a tennis court, a computer measured the temperature of the core, the nuclear fuel, and found nothing abnormal. “It would have been an entirely different outcome if they had been operational,” Denton would say later. Three auxiliary pumps kicked in, but their valves had been turned off two weeks earlier during routine maintenance so the water output was blocked Coolant spurted out of the valve, covering the floor with 80,000 gallons of highly radioactive water. Any human trying to go in to close the valve manually would have been on a suicide mission.
They overheated so badly that they expanded, broke through their protective shields and sent the radioactive products of fission swirling through the 40foot high vessel.Īn operator tried to close the relief valve by remote control. Precious coolant - dropped, exposing the uranium rods at least two feet below the top. A second valve, designed to relieve overpressure, opened properly but failed to close when the pressure dropped below safe levels. In the coolant system, a valve closed, causing water pressure to build. But the aftermath of this one demonstrated for the world that a nuclear accident was possible. Turbine shutdowns are not all that uncommon. The nukes, as people who work in such plants are called, refer to the sudden shutdown of fission as a scram. In the reactor, 69 control rods slid smoothly into the hellfire furnace, creating an atomic sponge to soak up the neutron bullets. the condensate and feed pump failed, shutting down the steam turbine in a building behind the reactor container. Whether that had anything to do with what followed is not known.Īt 3:53 a.m. and 4 a.m., maintenance work was done on Unit 2’s feed pump system. It had been heard before, any time there was a sudden shutdown of the generator, a not infrequent occurrence.īetween 3 a.m. It awoke those within earshot, but it was not a cause for alarm.
#DRAMATIC MELTDOWN SYNONYM FULL#
The seven days at Three Mile Island began with a gush of steam, a sound not unlike a jet engine at full howl. In 21 other countries, there are 151 plants in operation, 45 on order and 235 in the planning stage. Two of the 72 nuclear power reactors in the United States are at Three Mile Island. Denton himself was in the drama, cast by President Carter who saw in Three Mile Island a possible unraveling of trust in a power source that he considers indispensable. Harold Denton saw the film in late March he told his wife he was impressed by its technical accuracy and by Jane Fonda.
#DRAMATIC MELTDOWN SYNONYM MOVIE#
If it loses its covering of water it could heat to incredible temperatures, devouring its own container and - if theory is correct - melt through the bottom into the earth, spewing and spreading deadly radiation.Ī runaway reactor, the stuff of fiction, the movie “China Syndrome” come alive. The reactor’s core contains a shock of uranium rods, bound closely together, intensifying the frenzy of the neutron bullets. This occurs in a reactor penned inside a waterfilled steel tank that sits at the center of a huge building with fourfootthick concrete and steel walls. This is “critical mass” - unleashing the power of the atom. Again and again, neutron bullets, reproducing. After all, don’t Xray technicians duck for cover after placing machine against tooth?Ī full generation into the nuclear age, it’s still like science fiction, this business of chain reactions, a formula dimly recalled from high school physics:Ī chain reaction is set off by neutrons, striking, almost like bullets, the nucleus of other uranium235 atoms, splitting them. We live with radiation all of our lives but never see, or smell, or feel, or hear it, and so tend not to understand. It loosed the unknown, unseen threat of radiation. Pirate or Treasure Then you can Type ‘ Pirate‘ Or ‘ Treasure‘ or any word from the answer to know the whole phrase.Even among those who live in its shadow, few understand nuclear power, and how it is harnessed to make the heat that makes the steam that turns the turbines that make electricity the greatest force known to man used to heat his teakettle.ĭuring the midnight shift on Three Mile Island, on Wednesday, March 28, 1979, the harness slipped.
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