Word: controls
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Suddenly, a shrill alarm shatters the control room's silence. Red lights flash on the instrument panel. One of the reactor's steam condensers has lost its vacuum, causing a turbine "trip," or shutoff. No longer is the reactor able to shed heat produced by its radioactive core. Ominously its temperature climbs, threatening to boil away the coolant. Unless something is done fast, there may be a meltdown, spilling lethal radioactive gases...
...automatic safety systems come quickly to the rescue. Control rods that had been pulled out earlier to bring the plant back on line are now reinserted. That "scrams," or shuts down, the reactor. Higginbotham and Helton move swiftly too, throwing switches, isolating complex plumbing and carefully monitoring critical meters as the emergency cooling system pours hundreds of gallons of cold water into the core. "Pressure's holding pretty good," says Higginbotham. Sighs Helton: "I think we're all right...
Real as it seemed, the taut control-room drama was only a training exercise. In fact, "emergencies" are daily happenings at General Electric's Boiling Water Reactor Training Center in Morris, Ill., 50 miles southwest of Chicago. Since it opened eleven years ago, it has been instructing more than 400 people a year in the fine art of running and maintaining G.E.-built reactors. Says Don Janacek, the school's "dean": "Our aim is to produce people who can operate their plants not just efficiently but safely...
...typical day for Higginbotham and Helton begins with a lecture, then moves on to mathematical exercises-say, computing the rate at which heat will be produced by withdrawing control rods from the reactor's core. But the most important training is the "hands-on," or practical, instruction. The classroom is a gleaming, $3 million air-conditioned simulation of the control rooms in 42 G.E. reactors now in operation around the country. With one important difference: the training center's controls are connected to a computer, not a reactor. Jokes Instructor Jerry Maher: "We have everything but Jane Fonda...
Picking up from the previous day's noisy interruption, Higginbotham and Helton resume the tediously slow job of getting the reactor back into action. One by one they withdraw control rods, watching as the reactor temperature rises. The work must proceed with agonizing care, and the morning is nearly gone before Maher says, "O.K., guys, we're taking her up. Let's shift her onto line and make money." But Janacek stops to check his students' progress. "We've got damn good safety systems," he says. "But they're only as good...