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The Energy Spectator
Three Mile Island -- Thirty Years After
(Page 3 of 4)
The confusion in the operating room was mirrored by the lack of communication within the industry itself. The pilot relief valve, whose malfunction set off the Three Mile Island accident, had failed nine times previouslyat other reactors, including once at Toledo's problem-plagued Davis-Besse Reactor only a few months before. Yet none of the utilities communicated with each other and the manufacturer, Babcock and Wilcox, had not deemed the malfunction worthy of anybody's attention. As the Kemeny Commission, which investigated the accident, finally concluded: "[G]iven all the above deficiencies, we are convinced that an accident like Three Mile Island was eventually inevitable."
Safety and operating procedures at nuclear reactors have improved immeasurably. Prodded by both a draconian Nuclear Regulatory Commission and an outraged public, the industry began healing itself. INPO -- the Institute for Nuclear Power Operations -- a voluntary, industry-run operation in Atlanta, was set up to supervise and develop safety procedures. Although funded by the utilities, INPO remained independent and was given wide latitude in overseeing and inspecting reactor operation. The utilities were more than willing to cooperate. One more accident and they knew every reactor in the country would have to close down. As one executive put it, "We are all hostages to each other."
The philosophy of reactor operation changed completely. The original premise had been that the technology was too complicated for ordinary human beings but the engineers who designed reactors were such geniuses they could build them so no human being could possibly foul them up. Early operators were high school graduates. Indeed, the Three Mile Island accident occurred when the operators misread several signals and overrode safety measures that were preventing the meltdown.
Now things changed completely. Operator training became a five-year regimen more demanding than that of airline pilots. Five years experience in the Nuclear Navy -- where a lot of operators get their start -- barely got you in the door. Trainees now sat in classes for ten months before ever touching a valve. Then they did a two-to-five year apprenticeship in the control room before they could begin their licensing courses. They would then spend another 14 months on the job and in the simulator before taking the NRC-administered exam. Only then could they become licensed operators.
A simulator was required at every reactor. These were detail-by-detail duplications of the actual control room, serving both as classroom and laboratory for continuing research. Even after they have finished their five-year training, licensed operators are required to spend one week out of six in the simulator honing their skills and refining their knowledge of the plant. "We've made equipment changes in the real plant based on things that happened right in this simulator," says Mike Goskamp, who supervises training at Vermont Yankee. As a result of all this, reactor operations slowly improved over the 1980s and 1990s and there were no more serious incidents.
Things didn't really take off, however, until a group of new merchant energy companies entered the field in the mid-1990s. Deregulation of the electrical industry had suddenly turned most of the nation's 100-or-so reactors into "stranded assets" -- white elephants that were costing the utilities so much money it would make them incapable of competing in an unregulated market. Then Southern Utilities and Chicago's Commonwealth Edison, which had both improved their nuclear performance, decided to set up subsidiaries that would start buying distressed reactors.
"At the time, reactors were running at about 60 percent capacity, which was the standard for the industry," says Gary Taylor, CEO of Entergy. "It was a holdover from the coal days. You would shut them down every two weeks or so to give the boiler a rest. But we had some Navy guys on board who said, 'We run these reactors for five years at a time in the Navy. Why can't we do that here?'
"We soon found that most shut-downs had nothing to do with the nuclear side. It was the electrical equipment that kept breaking down. A turbine would trip or a wire would short out and you'd be offline for a few days. We started paying much more attention to this stuff and concentrating on keeping the plant up and running."
Soon capacity factors -- the portion of time the reactor is up and running -- began to creep up toward 80 percent -- unprecedented for the utility industry. Safety records improved correspondingly. "The more we paid attention to little things, the better these reactors ran and the better they ran, the more we could afford to pay attention to little things," says Taylor.
Refueling operations -- which usually took three months and were regarded as a vacation by plant employees -- became carefully choreographed operations taking three weeks and planned years ahead of time. Maintenance operations were scheduled to coincide with the shutdowns. Soon Entergy and Exelon had special teams touring the country to supervise refueling operations. The companies also set up special safety teams that can be dispatched to a reactor site at a moment's notice. "These days if a reactor incident occurs anywhere in this country, the whole industry knows it within a half-hour," says one executive.
By 2000 capacity factors were climbing toward 90 percent and reactors were running for 18 months without going offline. In 2002 the whole industry went over 90 percent and has remained there since. In the decade from 1998 to 2008 only one reactor -- the infamous Davis-Besse -- has shut down for more than a year because of safety problems. In the previous ten-year period 23 reactors had yearlong shutdowns and there were 22 in the decade before that.
America's fleet of 104 nuclear reactors now runs at a level of safety and efficiency unprecedented in any industry. Reactors now run for nearly two years without interruption. The record -- 688 straight days -- is held by Unit 1, Three Mile Island, the one that didn't melt down.
New construction is needed if this record is to be maintained. The only looming threat to this stellar recover is our failure to continue with the technology and build new reactors. The American nuclear industry has atrophied to the point where barely exists. Babcock and Wilcox has decided not to design any new reactors but will only maintain the ones it has already built. Westinghouse's Advanced Pressurized Boiling Water Reactor is a strong candidate for new construction, but the company was bought by Toshiba in 2006. On the other hand, General Electric's Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor (ESBWR) has fared poorly in Nuclear Regulatory Commission reviews and the last American manufacturer may be about to drop out of the business. Areva, the French giant, is now the major competitor in the American market.
This decline is reflected in the engineering profession. A whole generation of nuclear engineers and nuclear scientists eventually dropped out of the field because they saw no future in the field and because they got sick of trying to explain their profession to skeptical friends and relatives. There is hardly anyone in the nuclear industry these days under age 50 and this generation will be retiring soon. If their accumulated wisdom is to be passed on, we must have a revival soon.
Operating performance has improved so much that more than half the country's reactors have successfully applied to have their licenses extended for another twenty years. A few of these renewals, however, are approaching a danger zone. The Oyster Creek Reactor in New Jersey, for instance, the oldest operating reactor in the country, is now scheduled for an NRC relicensing decision in April. Completed in 1969 under a much earlier technology, the reactor is showing its age. Ideally, it would be shut down and replaced by a new one. Under present conditions, however, this is next to impossible. Oyster Creek provides New Jersey with 60 percent of its electricity. Shutting it down would cripple the New Jersey economy and make a mockery of Governor Jon Corzine's grandiose plans to power the state with wind and solar facilities.
Comments
Leave a Comment
Indiana Alex| 3.31.09 @ 9:18AM
This administration is not interested in science, only the failed religion of liberalism.
owyheewine| 3.31.09 @ 9:41AM
A couple of points that need to be corrected and clarified. First, U238 is fissable, but when it "breaks apart", it does not produce enough neutrons to sustain the reaction. Just a picky point. The other omission is the failure to mention the development of DDC, direct digital (computer) control. Earlier systems, called analog, were orders of magnitude slower and less precise than DDC. What that means is that an old outdated PC (think pre pentium processors) has enough computing horsepower to control a reactor. These systems usually are operated in triplicate so that control systems are backed up as much as space shuttle systems. That combined with better training and operations technique make today's reactors almost failure proof.
Mike Donavan| 3.31.09 @ 10:55AM
According to that bill security is OK. Fine, but what about radioactive waste and retired nuclear facilities ? Nobody knows what to do with that stuff. Considering that some of it has a 10 000 years lifelong, you'd better consider it twice if you don't want to blow our children's environment. That is the real question about nuclear energy as we know it today.
I am surprised that 30 years later, no significant improvment has come from scientific research...
Big Leo| 3.31.09 @ 11:08AM
Most nuclear waste is low-level waste that is scarcely radioactive. You wouldn't want to sleep on a pile of it for a couple of years, but it isn't particularly deadly. The high level waste is very compact and could be stored in a medium sized room. I'll put all of it in a bunker in the back field for a million dollars a year. Actually, a stable geological area would be better, like Yucca Flats. I live on a dormant volcanic field.
Joe| 3.31.09 @ 11:29AM
Mike, wake up. The French have been doing a good job of getting rid of it for years including recycling it until it is of no use anymore. We are very very safe!!!
William Tucker| 3.31.09 @ 11:46AM
Gentleman,
I refer you to my previous article on French reprocessing efforts: http://spectator.org/archives/2008/05/12/parlez-vous-nucleaire
cdc| 3.31.09 @ 4:22PM
Reprocessing introduces more risks and inefficiencies into the system than necessary. The promising designs now, my preference is for molten salt, don't need reprocessing; but rather allow for continuos in line fueling/breeding so fissibles go in and non-fissibles come out.
Marc Jeric| 3.31.09 @ 4:27PM
To call the Three-Mile Island equipment failure "an accident" is criminally negligent - not a fly was hurt in that so-called accident. When two cars collide with no injuries we call that a bumper hit or paint scratch - we do not call it an accident when there are no injuries.
Also, not many people know how that equipment failure occurred nor why. The brand-new Unit 2 of that nuclear power plant was only 8 weeks in operation when the Carter's Nuclear Regulatory Commission, with one member of the 5-member commission was a Sierra Club lawyer and another a Massachussetts consumer advocate, directed additional tests of the auxilliary cooling water system. Why - there was no reason for that - the plant just finished all required tests 8 weeks before.
The lectric utility company contracted out this unnecessary test to an outside company with union labor. They tested that system with satisfactory results - but, following union rules the crew left the work on time with 20 minutes given to washup. Thus they left the auxilliary cooling water pump with the valve closed instead of open, without informing the operators of that fact. When the relief valve on the reactor got stuck in the open position the water escaped from the reactor while the Auxilliary cooling water pump came on - but the closed valve did not let that water to arrive to the reactor.
So - it was not an accident since nobody was injured. The causes were :
1) unnecessary tests demanded by the NRC nincompoops for a brand new plant;
2) union work rules that stopped the inspections;
3) unionized utility workforce without a single competent engineer on staff.
Pingback| 3.31.09 @ 6:00PM
Three Mile Island in Perspective | The Blog of Record links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
W White| 3.31.09 @ 7:57PM
TMI was a godsend for the Nuclear Program.
I had been involved in Nuclear Power in the decade before TMI and spent 3 months on site in the initial recovery phase. For several years after that I was involved in the application of 'Lessons Learned' and the Upgrading efforts. TMI enlightened all of us, and we needed it. It was sobering to realize firsthand how little the Regulators and the Utility hierarchy understood about what they were dealing with.
The accident hit the pocketbook hard enough that the glaring TMI message was taken seriously . A safe, reliable ,mature program has evolved -one that this country desperately needs at least until the 20% nuclear contribution can be replaced.
Unfortunately that enviable record is being put in jeopardy by the blanket approach in the relicensing laws. They do not account for the much greater risk in trying to extend the life of pre-TMI Plants. The whole industry is vulnerable, and indeed the power sensitive economy as a whole, while these plants remain in the system . Older units should be phased out as soon as replacement power becomes available.
A TMI type event at any one of the existing 100 plants would, to say the least, undo 30 years of hard earned progress. That 'bailout' would indeed be a real challenge!
What a shame that the blanket relicensing rules
V Fisher| 3.31.09 @ 8:45PM
I did some research for a debate last year and was surprised to learn that there has never been a personal injury suit brought about by the Three Mile Island incident and the only legal action was by local businesses who sued the local government because they were shut down due to over reaction to the situation.
stmichrick| 3.31.09 @ 11:39PM
V Fisher
The local businesses should have sued the producers of The China Syndrome film which MADE money as a result of the incident.
ARealist| 4.1.09 @ 1:37PM
ALL nuclear power plants presently in operation today in the USA are based on designs produced in the late 60s or early 70s.
The designs are, literally, ancient.
Yet, they have performed admirably.
New nuclear plants, if ever built in the USA, will be far safer , more stupid proof and more efficient than those operating today.
Look at the good results of nuclear plants operated by the French and by the US Navy.
As to nuclear waste ; it is inconceivable that scientists will have made ZERO progress over the next 100 years in figuring out what to do with this stuff and turn it into useful materials - either recycled or otherwise.
As to whether we will have any more nuclear plants built in the USA , well, that is a pipe dream.
We have a Marxist as president who is doing all he can to destroy the USA via bankruptcy.
We have a communist environmental lobby that tosses money to their fellow useful idiots in Congress to prevent any thoughts of nuclear plants.
We have an ignorant public that believes that there is no difference betwixt an H bomb and a nuclear powered generating station.
We have a communist media that will willfully engage in lies and distortion to "prove"nuclear power is the same as an H bomb, and will give face time to any facist communist hate-america firster wacko "environmentalist."
We are doomed to 8 dollar gasoline, sky rocketing electric and heating gas bills - and worse - as Obama and his fellow traveling hate america first communist fascist bolshevik nazi pig tyrants take over.
American Patriot| 4.2.09 @ 1:11AM
Jeez, ARealist, looks like every one is a communist but you! Give in and join us!
flyboy| 4.2.09 @ 8:46AM
After spending 20+ years in Nuclear power as engineer and licensed operator, I can assure you that refueling outages, whether three months or three weeks duration, have never been viewed as vacations by the plant personnel! The Westinghouse AP-1000 is a brilliant design that should be guilt in quantity. It has passive safety systems that lower cost and make it basically disaster proof. (Full disclosure, I have done a little contract work on the AP-1000 initial operating procedure preparation) Thanks for the good article.
Mike Donavan| 4.16.09 @ 4:45AM
Interesting paper about TMI :
http://www.southernstudies.org/2009/04/post-4.html