It was thirty years ago this week that the Unit 2
reactor of the
power plant began a partial meltdown. As its fuel
rods began to burn out of control, a hydrogen
bubble formed, causing a small explosion.
By Christian Parenti
The Nation
March 27, 2009
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090413/parenti
During the accident, plant operators were myopically
glued to their instruments, which were incorrectly
indicating that a crucial pressure valve was closed. In
fact, it was open and draining coolant from the plant's
core, thus causing it to burn out of control. When the
shift changed, someone on the new crew had the presence
of mind to check the temperature on the reactor's
effluent pipe. It was way too hot. That meant the
crucial pressure valve--which read "closed" on the
monitors--was actually wide open.
The crisis was eventually brought under control. How
narrow the margin of error. That accident was
bad--43,000 curies of krypton radiation were released--
but it could have been catastrophic.
One reason more radiation was not released was because
"paranoid" anti-nuke activists worried that the plant,
built directly in the flight path of the
airport, could be hit by a jet. They demanded a very
strong containment shell be built over the reactor. As a
result, TMI had one of the strongest such protective
seals in the country. Had the meltdown not been caught
when it was and had there not been a containment shell,
the whole Northeast could have become a fallout zone for
10,000 years thereafter. It would have been like those
national sacrifice zone; devastation akin to
March, except permanent.
to a rump version of itself.
It is fitting to reflect on the TMI accident because in
the face of climate change there is still much unhinged
talk about a nuclear renaissance. During the 2008
presidential campaign, John McCain called for forty-five
new nuke plants to be built. Barack Obama, while less
specific, also pledged federal subsidies to help build
atomic power plants.
As I have reported in these pages, this second wave of
state-of-the-art atomic power plant construction is pure
fantasy. No one wants to invest in nukes, despite
government guarantees to cover 80 percent of the costs
if the projects default. No one will insure them. They
will not be built. However, underneath this nuclear
renaissance discourse lurks the real danger: while we
debate the fantasy qualities of a new fleet of plants
that will never be built, a handful of companies that
own the existing fleet of decrepit old zombie plants are
quietly pushing these reactors to the very edge of their
capacity and beyond.
There are 103 reactors in sixty-four locations across
the
to last more than forty years. We are reaching that
deadline. But companies like Entergy and Exelon have
been demanding and receiving dangerous license
extensions and so-called power "uprates". These
companies are insisting that the plants be allowed to
run for sixty years rather than forty, and that they be
allowed to run the plants at 120 percent of their
designed capacity. The companies are doing this to
extract every last penny of profit from the old
reactors. During the Bush years, the NRC relicensed
forty of the country's reactors. In those eight years,
the NRC did not deny a single renewal request. This is
unconscionably reckless behavior. The regulators of this
industry would appear to be somnambulant hostages to the nuke operators.
President Obama has an opportunity to address this
gathering crisis. Though he supported atomic power
subsidies during his campaign, he has not come out in
support of relicensing old plants--this, after all, is
the crucial issue. Subsidies don't matter because no one
is going to build new plants. Relicensing, on the other
hand, is a real and present danger. There are two
positions open on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and
President Obama has yet to make any appointments. For
the sake of sanity and safety he must use his NRC
appointments to oppose relicensing. And at the top of
the NRC's agenda should be shutting and decommissioning
the nation's remaining fleet of Three Mile Island-era nuke plants.
Christian Parenti, a frequent contributor to The Nation
on international affairs, is the author of The Freedom:
Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied
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