Anniversary Lessons From Three Mile Island and Chernobyl

HARRISBURG, Pennsylvania, March 26, 2004 (ENS) - March 28 marks the 25th anniversary of the nuclear accident at Unit 2 Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

April 26 is the 18th anniversary of the 1986 nuclear accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Slavutych, Ukraine.

The Ukrainian-American Environmental Association invites the world to take a lesson from these anniversaries of the two worst mishaps in the history of commercial nuclear power.

The must "serve as a continuing reminder of the inherent risks of nuclear energy and the necessity for both Ukraine and the United States to increase reliance on safer, cleaner, more affordable, and sustainable energy efficient and renewable energy technologies," the association says.

Residents living in the vicinity of the Three Mile Island (TMI) nuclear plant would agree. Events are taking place all this week to remember the morning 25 years ago when the Unit 2 reactor at Three Mile Island lost cooling water and the overheated plant came within 30 minutes of a full meltdown. A schedule is online at: http://www.tmia.com/

Unit 2 never generated power again after the accident. But Three Mile Island's Unit 1 is still in operation. Located in Middletown, Pennsylvania TMI-1 is a pressurized water reactor that, at full power, meets the electricity needs of a city the size of Philadelphia. The plant began commercial operation in 1974.

Three Mile Island Unit 1 on the right is still operating, while Unit 2 stands empty on the left. (Photo courtesy NRC)

On Sunday, No Nukes Pennsylvania is holding the Annual Three Mile Island Vigil at the North Gate of facility. Speakers will draw parallels between the American and the Ukranian nuclear accidents. They will call for a phaseout of nuclear power worldwide and for increased safety precautions in Pennsylvania and across the United States.

Nils Diaz, who chairs the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the federal agency responsible for nuclear power generation in the United States, says regulatory improvements since the accident are "significant," making all U.S. nuclear reactors safer.

Improvements include - upgrading and strengthening of plant design and equipment requirements, identifying human performance as a critical part of plant safety, immediate NRC notification requirements for plant events, and an NRC operations center which is staffed 24 hours a day.

On March 3, Diaz hosted a workshop on the TMI accident and what can be done to ensure that "the lessons so painfully learned in the immediate aftermath of of the accident remain in sharp focus 25 years later for members of the NRC staff, who share our continuing responsibility to protect the public health and safety and the environment from the potential hazards associated with the commercial uses of nuclear energy."

Diaz stressed that "safety management remains the ultimate responsibility of licensees," the companies that are licensed to operate the 103 commercial nuclear reactors. And he emphasized that "organizational cultures with a strong sense of safety management" are essential for keeping these reactors operating without another accident. To Diaz safety management means "commitment," "technical expertise," and "the people, programs, and processes to implement a safety program effectively."

The NRC offers a fact sheet on the Three Mile Island accident with a summary of events, a report on the health effects of the accident and a list of improvements made by the nuclear industry as a result of the most serious accident in U.S. commercial nuclear power plant operating history.

"The accident was caused by a combination of personnel error, design deficiencies, and component failures," the NRC states and asserts that it "led to no deaths or injuries to plant workers or members of the nearby community."

The nuclear watchdog organization Three Mile Island Alert has issued a comparison between the NRC Three Mile Island fact sheet and the events surrounding on March 28, 1979 as they know them.

The group emphasizes that on the day of the accident, Metropolitan Edison-General Public Utilities was operating the Three Mile Island reactor in violation of NRC regulations.

"It should be noted that if the company had operated lawfully, the plant would have been shutdown for repairs and there would have been no accident on March 28th 1979," the comparison document states.

"On May 22 1979, former control room operator Harold W. Hartman, Jr. tells the NRC investigators that Metropolitan Edison- General Public Utilities had been falsifying primary-coolant, leak rate data for months prior to the accident. At least two members of management were aware of the practice," the comparison report states. Later, the company pleaded “no contest” to federal charges of criminal falsifications

"The NRC’s role in the accident is one of tacit permissiveness," criticizes Three Mile Island Alert, which warns that "safety conditions and attitudes are returning to the level evidenced by the industry in 1979."

Many of the so called “permanent” changes have been downgraded since the time of their installation, the watchdog group says. It cites a January 2000 investigation by the General Accounting Office, a Congressional agency, which found that NRC inspectors have little confidence in the newly implemented regulatory process. Unless a suspicious condition is deemed clearly dangerous, the new process does not allow the implementation of other than routine inspections.

The current owner of Three Mile Island (TMI), Exelon, is failing to maintain adequate staffing levels, according to Eric Joseph Epstein writing December 16, 2003 in the "Lancaster New Era."

He reports that the plant workers have been removed through attrition, regionalization, forced overtime and consolidation of job functions.

"Since they purchased TMI, the number of workers has shrunk from 804 (1998) to 643 (2002). Contract labor, including security, has supplanted existing full-time positions, and the number of contractor and subcontractor employees has grown from 65 (2000) to 103 (2002)," Epstein writes.

But Bruce Williams, TMI Site vice president, says Three Mile Island is in good shape and that the community should feel safer with a new siren system being installed this summer.

“The additional sirens and upgrades continue to demonstrate our commitment to protecting the health and safety of the public around Three Mile Island,” Williams said. “Safe plant operations combined with an emergency preparedness program that is integrated with state and local emergency management organizations provides a high level of assurance to the public.”

On the morning of March 28, 1979, the Unit-2 reactor at the TMI nuclear power facility near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, suddenly overheated and the plant came within 30 minutes of a full meltdown. The reactor vessel was destroyed, and large amounts of unmonitored radiation was released directly into the community. During the following week, scientists scrambled to prevent a nuclear meltdown, officials tried to calm public fears, and more than 100,000 residents fled the area.

TMI-2 was built at a cost to rate payers of US$700 million and had been online for just 90 days when the accident occurred. One billion dollars was spent to defuel the facility.

The ruined Chernobyl Reactor 4 (Photo courtesy Chernobyl Tour)

Reactor Four at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant began to fail in the early hours of April 26, 1986. Seven seconds after the operators activated the 20 second shut down system, there was a power surge. The chemical explosions that followed were so powerful that they blew the 1,000 ton cover off the top of the reactor. Design flaws in the power plant's cooling system probably caused the uncontrollable power surge that led to Chernobyl's destruction.

The NRC offers a fact sheet on the Chernobyl accident online at: http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/fschernobyl.html

Ukraine has lost more than $140 billion as a result of the Chernobyl nuclear accident, the group says, about $5 billion to clean up the fallout from the accident.

In both countries there is a resurgence in the nuclear power industry. American companies and the Tennessee Valley Authority, a federal agency, are lobbying the NRC for permission to build new generating facilities. The U.S. Energy Department is actively involved in designing the next generation of nuclear power plants.

The Ukraine government continues to seek funding to complete two new reactors as part of the Khmelnitsky and Rivne nuclear power plants, commonly known as the K2R4 project.

But binational the environmental association maintains that renewables are the best path toward safe, abundant energy for the future. Although Ukraine is now getting only about two percent of its energy from renewable sources, wind, solar, biogas, hydropower and geothermal energy have been shown to be theoretically sufficient to satisfy all of the country's energy needs.

For instance, the association says, if 2,700 square kilometers of the shallow waters in the Black Sea and Sea of Asov were used for wind turbines, this would meet the entire electricity demand in Ukraine.