Word: controled
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...assignment with an early-morning high-speed drive on a rainswept turnpike to Harrisburg. For the next three days, Stoler interviewed plant workers, area residents and protesters, and visited the Pennsylvania Governor's offices, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission vania Governor's offices, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission control van parked on a knoll directly across the Susquehanna River from the plant and a refugee center set up in an amusement park. "I don't know how much radiation I've absorbed," says Stoler, "but I was standing across the river from the plant while, unbeknownst...
...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...
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...
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...
...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...