Early sample of alternative media from the Maine Owl library
In March 1979 I was a student in electrical engineering at the University of Minnesota. I was working a co-op job in the electric utility industry programming big mainframe computers to display information on and control power grids. I loved wires and currents. I hated the industry.
Then Three Mile Island happened. It soured my taste for what I was doing there. Later, I would end up in Maine working on a graduate degree in physics while sniffing around the countryside for extremely low-level environmental radioactivity. (There is extremely low-level human-produced radioactivity present almost everywhere, along with much stronger natural radioactivity.)
I still object to the use of nuclear power. This is not because I think reactor meltdowns are likely or widely-distributed low-level radioactivity is super dangerous. It is not, at least not compared to a lot of other things. It's rather because of the un-democratic exercise of unaccountable government and corporate power and dominating wealth that the nuclear industry represents.
The story of what happened in Harrisburg, PA thirty years ago gives us important lessons about our over-reliance on arrogant scientific/technical decision-making processes that still harms our society. This comment is not made while failing to place risk in perspective. I'm not saying nuclear power plants cannot be operated somewhat safely. I'm just saying that we should not allow is trusting the vested corporate power structure to make all of our energy decisions. Inevitably if we do, they'll be bad ones.
Dr. Arjun Makhijani of ieer.org has the perspective that I prefer: we can have a carbon-free, nuclear-free energy system in fifty years if we start making the right decisions now. (Dr. Makhijani spoke in Maine in 2007, see HERE.) He's been posting recently that some of these bad decisions to resume building nukes are today on the table, ending the de facto thirty-year post-TMI moratorium.
Dr. Arjun Makhijani: Eight new nuclear reactors are being proposed in Texas alone. The two near Amarillo, in the panhandle, will consume 60 million gallons of water every day?more than what the entire city uses. The company proposing the plant has said there is a lake there in an unidentified location that will supply the water. In Idaho, the CEO of Alternate Energy Holdings, which wants to build a power plant there, implies that nuclear power will cost only 1 to 2 cents per kilowatt-hour, because capital cost is borne by the investors, as if Wall Street were a kind of charity for electricity consumers.Despite government attempts to grease the skids on these things, Dr. Makhijani writes that some localities are finding it "unwise and imprudent" to pursue nukes "because of insufficient time to examine the paperwork and the risk of cost overruns and delays." That's hopeful.
The main lesson of Three Mile Island is that depending technical systems is very unwise when the risk of failure is so catastrophic. There are many parallels for our own time. Below I reproduce many illustrative details of those events of so long ago from one of the best accessible articles ever written on the subject. These authors captured my young conscience at the time. It's worth looking back at an extended excerpt...
Corporate Meltdown
The Lessons of Three Mile Island
by Bill Keisling and Ed Perrone | The Progressive, June 1979
... At four o'clock in the morning on March 28, 1979, the loud whistle of highly pressurized steam escaped the confines of Three Mile Island's Unit 2 nuclear power plant. The noise gushed into the darkness. Some nearby residents would later tell reporters that the sound had been loud enough to wake them from sleep. But others, less noted by the press, said they heard nothing, continued to sleep, unaware of the drama that was about to engulf them.
The men in the control room of Unit 2, working Three Mile Island's graveyard shift, heard the sudden escape of steam. They knew what it meant. The plant's generating turbine had for some reason shut down. This caused the shutdown of the secondary feedwater system, which carries heat away from the radioactive primary cooling system by way of two large steam generators. Within seconds, the nuclear core's primary cooling system overheated. Responding to the resulting sudden pressure increase, a relief valve on the pressurizer of the reactor?s primary cooling system opened, venting the excess steam, relieving the pressure. This was the sound some people heard in the night.
At the same time, the computer monitoring Unit 2's operations automatically directed the reactor's control rods to descend around the cylinders of uranium pellets, halting nuclear fission, shutting off the reactor.
Within thirty seconds, the computer's logic circuits turned on the auxiliary feed-water system to cool the steam generators, since the main feedwater system had shut down with the turbines. What the computer didn't know was that the auxiliary feedwater system had been shut off at valves between the auxiliary pumps and the steam generators. One emergency cooling system was useless. The computer, programmed to assume the valves were open, began to lose control of the nuclear power plant. ...
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Posted by The Owl on Mar 28 at 02:16. Filed under: Environment
