Three Mile Island: Nuclear Nightmare

In the dead of night, the hulks of four 372-ft. cooling towers and two high domed nuclear reactor container buildings were scarcely discernible above the gentle waters of the Susquehanna River, eleven miles southeast of Harrisburg, Pa. Inside the brightly lit control room of Metropolitan Edison’s Unit 2, technicians on the lobster shift one night last week faced a tranquil, even boring watch. Suddenly, at 4 a.m., alarm lights blinked red on their instrument panels. A siren whooped a warning. In the understated jargon of the nuclear power industry, an “event” had occurred. In plain English, it was the beginning of the worst accident in the history of U.S. nuclear power production, and of a long, often confused nightmare that threw the future of the nuclear industry into question.

There was no panic at the plant, situated on a stretch of muddy soil called Three Mile Island in an otherwise scenic bend in the river. The men in the control room had heard those sirens before. They went about their task of meeting what looked at first like just another “transient,” a minor glitch somewhere in the complex system like so many they had dealt with in the past. Unit 2’s huge turbine, which generates 880 megawatts of electricity, had “tripped,” shut down automatically, as it should when the steam that turns it has somehow been cut off. The technicians assumed that the cause would be easy to find and correct.

They could hardly have been more wrong. For the next several days, radioactive steam and gas seeped sporadically into the atmosphere from the plant. Pennsylvania Governor Richard Thornburgh advised the evacuation of all pregnant women and preschool children living within five miles of Three Mile Island, and thousands of people fled the area. As tension mounted, engineers struggled to cool the reactor’s core. There was a genuine danger of a “meltdown,” in which the core could drop into the water coolant at the bottom of its chamber, causing a steam explosion that could rupture the 4-ft.-thick concrete walls of the containment building; or the molten core could burn through the even thicker concrete base and deep into the earth. In either case, lethally radioactive gases would be released, causing a nuclear catastrophe.

At week’s end officials insisted that while the danger of a meltdown had not vanished, it was receding. Nevertheless, suspense as to the eventual outcome buttressed the claims of nuclear power’s foes that all the wondrous fail-safe gadgets of modern technology had turned out to be just as fallible as the men who had designed and built them. Declared Nuclear Power Critic Ralph Nader: “This is the beginning of the end of nuclear power in this country.”

That, of course, was a considerable rush to judgment. But the already beleaguered nuclear power industry had clearly suffered a crippling setback. Not only are its plans for expansion now in grave doubt, but the Three Mile Island accident came at a time when President Carter was about to propose a new approach to the nation’s energy problems. He had already urged a speedup in putting new nuclear power plants into operation by reducing the years it takes to pass through all of the regulatory challenges. While a case could still be made that bureaucratic indecision and delay ought to be minimized even tougher safety standards would almost inevitably be one result of the Pennsylvania breakdown. Wrote Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy in a letter to Energy Secretary James Schlesinger: “It s more important to build these plants safely than to build them quickly.”

Three Mile Island also comes at a time of renewed interest in the case of Karen Silkwood, who was killed in 1974 when her car ran off a road as she was on her way to meet with a reporter to discuss the unsafe handling of highly radioactive plutonium at a Kerr-McGee Corp. plant in Oklahoma. The trial in an $11.5 million suit filed by Silkwood’s family against the company is now under way in Oklahoma City.

The industry has been battered further by recent reverses in fights with Government regulators. Last January the Nuclear Regulatory Commission withdrew its endorsement of a bench mark 1974 study by about 60 scientists, headed by Norman Rasmussen. a professor of nuclear engineering at M.I.T. The report rated the chance of a serious nuclear accident about the same as the probability of a meteor hitting a major city (one in a million). An opposing group of scientists, led by University of California Physicist Harold Lewis, had convinced the NRC that the Rasmussen study, while not necessarily wrong, had insufficient statistical basis to necessarily be right. Three weeks ago, a Government task force reported to President Carter that the problem of disposing of radioactive waste from nuclear plants was far more complex than either the industry or the Government had believed. At about the same time, the NRC shut down five nuclear power plants in the East because it was not certain they had been designed so that their coolant pipes could survive an earthquake.

Whatever the final report, months from now, on what went wrong and how at Three Mile Island, the way in which federal and plant officials seemed to handle the breakdown will not help the industry’s image. The trouble was dismissed at first by Jack Herbein, Metropolitan Edison’s vice president for power generation, in a memorable engineer’s euphemism, as merely “a normal aberration.” Reassuring statements spewed from the plant’s press spokesmen, sounding as if they were taken right out of the script for the film The China Syndrome, a thriller that depicts nuclear plant officials as placing greed for profits far above their concern for public safety. But if the movie, starring real-life Antinuclear Activist Jane Fonda, is unfair in its villainous caricature of power-and construction-industry officials, its basic premise will no longer seem so farfetched to those moviegoers until now unattuned to the nation’s debate over nuclear power. The premise: that a nuclear power plant is not nearly as accident-proof as its builders proclaim and that “the China Syndrome,” a total meltdown that causes the core to sink lethally into the earth (hence, fancifully, toward China), is not a totally outlandish possibility. Ironically, though the film’s fictional plant is located in California, the example that is offered of the devastation a meltdown could cause is an area the size of Pennsylvania. Even more ironically, given the bias of the film makers, what actually happened at Three Mile Island is far more serious than the “event” portrayed at the fictional plant.

The stock market indicated the public’s response. Shares of Columbia Pictures, which gained a publicity bonanza for its movie, soared by $2.74 in two days, to $24.75. Stocks of nuclear power companies declined sharply. General Public Utilities, which owns the damaged plant, dropped 50¢ a share, while the stock of Kerr-McGee plunged $4.12, to $51.

When the first alarm sounded inside Unit 2 at 4 a.m. on Wednesday, only about 60 employees were at work. Precisely what the engineers at the control panels did to find out why the turbine had tripped—and just what steps they took next—will be the object of long investigations. Company spokesmen insisted that most of the procedures had been automatic, implying that all of the complex machinery, with its multiple, supposedly infallible back-up systems, had flipped into computer-controlled action.

Don Curry, Metropolitan Edison’s top public relations man, explained initially that a pump had broken down in the reactor’s secondary loop, which carries nonradioactive water into the steam generator, where it absorbs heat that is transferred from the nuclear chain reaction in the core by the primary loop, turns to steam and drives the turbine that generates electricity. Lacking the steam’s push, the turbine automatically shut down. This, said Curry, was regarded by the engineers as a routine mechanical failure that under the plant’s safety rules did not have to be immediately reported to state or federal authorities.

Not until 6 a.m., said Curry, did workers notice that “a small amount” of radioactive water had leaked onto the floor of the containment building. That meant the primary loop, which brings cooling water into direct contact with the radioactive reactor core and keeps its temperature at a safe 600° F., had been affected in some unexplained way. Curry insisted that an emergency was declared almost immediately and the proper state and local authorities promptly notified. State police immediately blocked off the two bridges leading to the 600-acre island, letting through only plant officials.

The company then issued a statement that was intended to head off public concern. “There have been no recordings of any significant levels of radiation and none are expected outside the plant,” it said. “The reactor is being cooled according to design by the reactor cooling system, and should be cooled by the end of the day. There is no danger of a meltdown. There were no injuries, either to plant workers or to the public.” Declared Curry: “Everything worked. The shutdown was automatic.” Added David Klucsick, another company spokesman: “We are not in a China Syndrome situation.”

Shortly after the company released its soothing statement, officials of Pennsylvania’s department of environmental resources flew over the plant in a helicopter, carrying a Geiger counter. They reported detecting “a small release of radiation into the environment.”

How had that happened? Curry and other company spokesmen began to backpedal and offered a new explanation. When the secondary loop lost pressure and the turbine stopped, they said, this caused a rise in both pressure and temperature in the primary loop. This, in turn, automatically opened several relief valves, letting some contaminated water leak onto the floor of the reactor building. Just “a small amount”? Well, no, conceded a company engineer. It was 50,000 gal. of water, and it accidentally overflowed the drainage tanks, covering the floor to a depth of “several feet.” Later an NRC official said the leak was 250,000 gal.

How had the radioactive steam escaped from the reactor building? Again, said the company spokesmen, this was intentional. The control rods had automatically dropped into the core and stopped the chain reaction. But the loss of water in the primary loop allowed the reactor to get too hot. When more water was pumped into the system, the pressure rose —and other relief valves opened. These valves vented some of the radioactive steam out of the top of the dome. When the core temperature continued to rise, employees deliberately vented more steam in brief bursts. Some of the spilled radioactive water from the primary loop was automatically drawn from the containment dome’s floor into the neighboring pump-house building, which does not normally handle radioactive material and is not radiation-safe. The water gave off radioactive xenon and krypton gases that escaped through the plant’s ventilation system into the atmosphere.

How much radioactivity leaked?

“I’ll be honest about it, I don’t know,” replied Metropolitan Edison President Walter Creitz when reporters persisted. The first estimate came from William Dornsife, a nuclear engineer who had flown in the state helicopter. He put the radiation reading taken downwind from the plant at 1 millirem per hour—not an alarming or unalarming level. By 3 in the afternoon, Creitz put the reading at 2 to 3 millirems per hour, measured at the outer edge of the 200-acre plant site on the island.

By this time, in Harrisburg, Lieut Governor William Scranton III expressed alarm that he might be getting inaccurate reports from plant officials. He told reporters: “This situation is more complex than the company first led us to believe. Metropolitan Edison has given you and us conflicting information.” Indeed federal investigators from the nearby headquarters of the NRC in King of Prussia reported later in the day that radio activity had been detected as far as 16 miles from the plant, and claimed that radiation within the reactor containment building had risen to a startling 1,000 times its normal level. At one point operators in the nearby control room had to put on protective gas masks.

By Thursday an NRC official was calling the plant failure “one of the most serious nuclear accidents to occur in the U.S.” Nevertheless, at a jammed press conference in Hershey, an uncomfortable Herbein still contended: “We didn’t injure anybody. We didn’t overexpose anybody. We didn’t kill a single soul. The release of radioactivity off-site was minimal.” He said only 15 employees had even been exposed to enough radiation to require them to take showers and discard the clothes they had worn at the time of the accident. His biggest worry seemed to be what to do with the 250,000 gal. of contaminated water on the floor of the reactor building.

Inescapably parodying The China Syndrome, Herbein expressed concern over the fact that the plant could be shut down for several weeks and over the multimillion dollar cost of decontaminating the two buildings. He did not rule out the possibility that consumers might have to shoulder the expense. Both company officials and investigators from NRC again assured the public that the reactor was cooling and should be down to its normal shut-off temperature within a day.

By this time, hundreds of reporters from as far away as Britain and Japan had rushed to Three Mile Island. Said a genuinely startled Creitz: “We’re simply aghast at the number of people we’ve had to deal with.” The visitors found the residents, as well as workers at the plant, surprisingly calm. “There was an accident, not a disaster,” insisted William Metzger, a maintenance man on Three Mile Island. “I’m not afraid. I think these plants are safe.” Asked Co-Worker William Wilsbach: “Do you think I’d work here if I thought it was dangerous?” In Harrisburg, Secretary Margaret Duffy dismissed the whole fuss as “much ado about nothing.” Mary Anne Koehler, who is seven months pregnant, said she would worry a lot more about damage to her unborn child “if I worked in a chemical plant.”

Between sips of coffee at a roadside diner in the rich farm land near Three Mile Island, area residents kept citing the reassurances of company officials that there was no need for concern. As Vice President Herbein had been saying: “This accident is not out of the ordinary for this kind of reactor. It was not unexpected.’ President Creitz meant to be equally low key, but in retrospect his words were unwittingly chilling. Said he: “The same occurrence happened two or three times in 1974 on Unit No. 1, but the tanks didn’t spill.” It was about this time, 11 a.m. on Thursday, that plant officials first disclosed that some of the fuel rods had been damaged on Wednesday, when the emergency cooling system had been briefly shut off, apparently because of an equipment failure that was quickly corrected. Company officials said less than 1% of the 37,000 rods had been damaged; by week’s end NRC investigators increased the estimate to 60%.

By Friday all of the sanguine assurances were blown away by additional releases of radioactivity into the skies above the plant. According to NRC spokesmen, early morning workers had been trying to remove some radioactive water from the pump building. As the water flowed into a storage tank, the temperature and pressure rose. A valve automatically opened, letting some of the gas escape. The building’s ventilation system sucked up the gas and blew it out a stack. At that moment, a state and federal monitoring crew flying over the stack recorded an alarming increase in radiation.

Soon there were reports of “uncontrolled new radiation” from the plant. Screamed a headline in the New York Post: NUKE LEAK GOES OUT OF CONTROL. Company officials insisted again that an emergency back-up system had worked as planned and nothing was out of control. Once more there was confusion as spokesmen for the various parties involved in coping with the crisis argued about whether or not the release had been unexpected or intentional.

For the first time company officials conceded that the reactor core was not cooling down, as they had been assuring the public for three days. The average temperature in the core had remained stubbornly at 280° F., while some of the core’s fuel rods, which are filled with fissionable uranium, showed spots as high as 600°. When reporters pressed for more information, Vice President Herbein turned hostile. Said he: “I don’t know why we need to tell you each and every thing we do. People around the plant have to recognize that we have to get on with our job.”

In Harrisburg, Governor Thornburgh, who had carefully avoided any statements that might cause panic, even while remaining skeptical of the utility company’s pacifying pronouncements, decided it was time to warn people living near Three Mile Island to take prudent precautions. First, he asked all residents within ten miles to remain inside their homes with their windows closed (though in fact that provides scant protection from radiation). Then he urged pregnant women and young children within a five-mile radius to move out, and closed schools. He also took the broader step of advising the four counties in the area, where nearly 900,000 people live, to prepare for evacuation. The Harrisburg airport was closed for several hours because of the radiation hazard.

Why the possible full-scale flight from the region? The first explanation came from NRC officials. They said the reactor had unexpectedly developed an 880-cu.-ft. gas bubble, which was compressed between the water covering the reactor’s core and the top of its steel housing. Acting like a lid on a pressure cooker, the bubble was maintaining high temperatures and pressures. NRC officials warned that there was a very remote but frightening possibility that the bubble would grow big enough to block the flow of water. In that case, the temperature in the core could rise high enough (3,000°) to begin a meltdown, which would require the large-scale evacuation.

The bubble problem had not been anticipated in engineering studies. Said Dudley Thompson, an executive officer of the NRC: “We are in a situation that is not a situation we have ever been in before.” As officials studied the complex hazard, they discovered yet another ominous possibility: if the amount of hydrogen in the reactor kept growing, it could reach a level at which only a spark would be needed to set off a hydrogen-gas explosion. If the explosion were powerful enough, the core vessel might rupture and the concrete walls of the container building might break, exposing the surrounding area to the reactor’s escaping radioactivity. One NRC official saw this eventuality as in some ways worse than a meltdown. Said he: “With a meltdown you get a warning of four to five hours that it has begun. There’s no warning at all of an explosion of hydrogen gas.”

Various ways of eliminating the problem were considered by the increasingly anxious engineers. One was to try burning off the hydrogen under controlled circumstances. The second was to gradually raise the pressure inside the reactor to the point that the hydrogen would dissolve in the water at the bottom of the reactor room. The third choice was to lower the water level at the floor of the reactor room and pour fresh water in from the top, thus pushing the bubble toward the bottom and away from the fuel rods. Another possibility was to restart the reactor, generating heat and steam that might break up the bubble. But this option was ruled out because of fears that the control rods might be too bent to be lowered again; if so, the chain reaction could not be controlled.

On Saturday, the engineers began preparing yet another approach to getting rid of the bubble. They continued to vent some of the gas from the containment building in controlled steps. This meant that low-level radiation was still being released from the plant. But it also caused the bubble to shrink slightly. When it became small enough, the engineers hoped that it could be siphoned into a tank in the pump building. Since the gas in the bubble was highly radioactive, a wall of lead bricks had to be built around the tank.

Because preparations would take several days, the engineers said they would not make an attempt to remove the bubble until this week. When they do, said NRC Chairman Joseph M. Hendrie, all people within ten or 20 miles downwind of the plant may be evacuated “if we determine that the process of getting rid of the gas bubble has unsafe elements.”

State and federal officials were readying evacuation plans, in case the situation at Three Mile Island took a turn for the worse. Carter ordered the creation of a White House task force to coordinate all federal assistance. The group’s first move was to send the NRC’S chief operations officer, Harold Denton, to Three Mile Island. He carried with him legal authority to take complete charge, overruling plant officials if he thought it necessary. Carter also called Governor Thornburgh and asked how the state could be helped. Citing overloaded telephone circuits, Thornburgh asked for a clear line. Carter dispatched an entire communications team to tie the Governor’s office in to the plant, NRC headquarters in Washington, and the White House.

Although the Defense Department was preparing plans to feed and house evacuees, any decision on evacuation remained with the Pennsylvania Governor.

On Sunday, the President helicoptered from Washington to visit the ailing plant. The former navy nuclear engineer toured the control room, was briefed by the experts in charge of solving the reactor problems and afterward issued a reassuring statement. Even if an evacuation is ordered of the Three Mile Island area, Carter said, “This will not indicate that danger is high. It will be strictly a precautionary measure.”

When the emergency is over, the President promised, “I will be personally responsible for informing the American people” about the results of the investigation, which he said will be “conducted thoroughly.”

While there was no panic, thousands of residents left the endangered area of their own volition. In the countryside near the disabled plant, once complacent families were now both worried and angry. “You hear one thing from the utility,” protested Suzanne Machita, as she began packing a suitcase. “Then one thing from the Government, another thing from Harrisburg and something else from civil defense. I don’t know what to believe, what to do, so I guess the best thing is to go It’s better than doing nothing.” She said she had often argued with her husband Harry when he raised questions about living so close to the plant. “I just believed the company when they said it was safe Now I don’t believe it.”

Next door, Karl Krodel, a computer technician, his wife and three children had piled travel clothes on chairs in their living room. But Krodel was reluctant to evacuate. “We’re ready to go if they tell us to,” he said. “But we’re not going before that. If it is dangerous, we already got it Wednesday. We just built this home two years ago and we’re not about to desert it.”

Some refugees went to Hershey Park, twelve miles from Three Mile Island, where an evacuation center was set up in a sports arena built by the chocolate company. As children played ring-around-a-rosy on the arena floor, Charles Noon said angrily about the nuclear plant: “They ought to shut that damn thing down.” He had fled his home in Middletown with his wife and two children. “We came here as soon as we heard the warning on the radio,” he said. “We didn’t want to take any chances.”

In Middletown (pop. 11,000), the streets were unusually empty. Some teenage boys played basketball outside an elementary school. Many residents were following instructions to remain inside their houses and to keep air conditioners turned off to limit the intake of any contaminated air. To prevent looting, Mayor Robert Reid imposed a 9 p.m.-to-7 a.m. curfew. The Red Cross was ready for any full-scale evacuation. It was no new thing, in a way; the town had been cleared during several recent floods, dating from the big one of 1972. Across the river, tiny Goldsboro (pop. 600) was virtually a ghost town.

Some residents had an I-told-you-so attitude toward the accident. They had opposed the building of the plant from its start. They failed to prevent Unit 1 from being placed in operation in 1974. When construction of Unit 2 began in 1970, the opponents renewed their fight, but to no avail. Some 100 people from the Goldsboro area rallied in protest on May 31, 1977, and released balloons into the air that carried tags advising any finder: FALLOUT FROM A NUCLEAR ACCIDENT MAY TRAVEL THIS FAR. Chauncey R. Kepford, a leader of the local protesters, warned more than a year ago before the NRC appeal panel: “Unit 2 is an accident just waiting to happen. And when it does, the glib assurances that the public health and safety are being protected will not suffice.”

Afer preliminary tests were conductid on Unit 2 last year, Harrisburg area opponents went to court to try to prevent it from being put into full operation. They lost again, and Unit 2 was placed on line last Dec. 30. It had been operating at full capacity for only about five weeks when the accident happened.

Sensing that the nuclear power industry had been badly wounded by the events at Three Mile Island, antinuclear groups moved into action across the country. Near Minneapolis and Eau Claire, Wis., they demonstrated against nuclear power plants, crying, “It could happen here!”

Once again, Folk Singer Joan Baez lent her plaintive voice to a rally in San Francisco, where her colleagues staged a “die-in,” falling under the onslaught of an imagined nuclear disaster. Plants from Oregon to New York and Connecticut came under fire from the antinuclear brigade. Said a TVA official about last week’s accident: “This will be just another piece of ammunition that the protesters can use. But frankly, it has a lot more substance than most of the things they’ve had.”

The antinuclear movement, already thriving as an amalgam of the intellectually concerned and the idealistic young, who can scarcely find any other cause available that is both so tangible and satisfyingly antigovernment and antiEstablishment, doubtless will now gain new recruits, especially from people who live near the 39 proposed sites for plants across the U.S. In Washington, some of nuclear power’s newly acquired friends, reluctantly won over by arguments that atomic plants were necessary to cope with the energy crisis, were wavering. One was Arizona Congressman Morris Udall, chairman of the House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, which must approve parts of any Carter energy package. Said Udall after the Three Mile Island accident: “We may have rushed headlong into a dangerous technology without sufficient understanding of the pitfalls.” Both Udall and Alaska Senator Mike Gravel demanded an outright moratorium on all new nuclear power plants.

Whether such a drastic step, with all its consequences for America’s energy future, might be prudent cannot be determined until both the final outcome and the precise causes of the failure at Three Mile Island are known. By the company’s own version of events, there were at least five equipment breakdowns—of valves, pumps and fuel rods. Moreover, the engineers should have been able to cool the reactor to a safe level within twelve hours. Only after the reactor core has fully cooled and the abnormal radiation levels within the container building have been reduced will investigators be able to pinpoint the sequence of mechanical failure, as well as any human mistakes that might have been made. On that issue—human error—there are contradictory statements as well.

But what is already evident is that the engineers at Three Mile Island, for whatever reason, were confronted by a situation they had not foreseen, were uncertain at first how to handle—and most unsettling of all, perhaps did not even understand. At the least, the eight other plants using the same design, and built by the firm of Babcock & Wilcox, might be taken out of operation until the problem is thoroughly analyzed. This is the approach used by the aviation industry, which sometimes grounds all planes of a given model when a dangerous structural or mechanical defect is found in one of them. The potential human tragedy in an aircraft accident, of course, is dwarfed by the possible consequences of a nuclear catastrophe.

President Carter acknowledged the new reality in a talk with a group of editors. He said the accident “will make all of us reassess our present safety regulations … and will probably lead inexorably toward even more stringent safety design mechanisms and standards.” Said Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd: “We’ve been assured time and time again by the industry and federal regulatory agencies that this was something that was impossible, that could not happen, but it did happen. There’s going to be great difficulty on the part of the American people to feel absolutely reassured about nuclear power.”

It is clear that the grounds of the long national debate over nuclear energy have now shifted drastically. For many years the foes of nuclear power, for all their protest rallies, “clamshell alliances” and sit-ins, were very much on the defensive. Their complaints about plant safety had lacked credibility; the exigencies of the nation’s energy crisis were unarguable; the fragility and risk, to some degree inherent in many parts of an advanced industrial society, had a common-sense acceptance as inevitable. But the price of progress, like the price of anything, has a ceiling, and for the nuclear power industry, the radioactive gases drifting from Three Mile Island have undeniably raised the price—and public consciousness about the risks—of nuclear power. Just how high rests in large measure on how Pennsylvania’s nightmare ends.