What happend
In the mid-1950s, nuclear physicists confidently predicted that nuclear energy would usher in a new age for humanity. The cost of energy would be so low it would be almost too cheap to meter. They predicted that by the year 2000 there would be thousands of commercial reactors producing unlimited amounts of power. Like the horse and buggy, oil and coal would become little more than historical curiosities. With such a bright outlook for the future the engineers and scientists started to get careless. Then on March 28, 1979, an event took place that rocked the nuclear power industry so badly that it has yet to recover. That event was the partial meltdown of one of the reactor cores at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Londonderry Township, Pennsylvania. The accident at Three Mile Island was a combination of equipment failures, design problems, and human error. It was even more that though it was a complacent attitude that the industry had as a whole as Harold Den!ton former Nuclear Regulatory Commission official said, " We thought the plant was too well designed to have a serious accident." "It was kind of like the Titanic."(CNN) It may surprise some people to find out how close we came to a major disaster and the
The back up pumps for the secondary loop had had a test run on them 42 hours before the indent. In reality the water level was still dropping but since the gauge that the workers saw was reading incorrectly they were unaware of this. The plant workers discovered the valve closed in about eight minutes and reopened. "(Diamond) A lot of the stress on the residents was from disagreements on weather the family should leave or stay. Allowing pressure to continue to drop and too much water to escape. Because of design shortcomings the plant operators also did not know that the pressure relief valve was stuck open. The licenses of fifty-six reactors run out in the next twenty years only two have applied for new licenses. (NRC) Later a remote controlled camera was sent in to the reactor to see how much damage was done. The water in the primary loop in now 350 times its normal level of radi!oactivity. When these pockets of steam passed through the pumps it made them shake violently prompting the workers to shut two of the four pumps down. This is due in large part to the sky rocketing cost of clean up. The heat is then transferred from the water in the primary loop to the water in the secondary loop. With the core uncovered more waters boils away creating more heat, more hydrogen, more radioactivity, and more damage to the core.
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Acceptance Essays
