Word: coolant
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...electricity-generator turbine tripped, or shut itself down. Those actions, says the report, turned what should have been a relatively minor glitch into a potential disaster. Instead of letting the reactor's emergency core cooling system perform its safety functions, the operators paid "undue attention" to keeping the coolant from overfilling the reactor and refused to believe instruments indicating that the plant's fuel core was getting perilously...
...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...
...binary code of the computer that does most of the work. Control rods are automatically dropped into the fuel core, which in effect douses its nuclear fires by stopping the fissioning of uranium atoms. Within several hours the temperature drops to 140° C (280° F). Then fresh coolant water is pumped through the reactor's heat exchanger (or steam generator) until the reactor's temperature dwindles to a still warm 65° C (150° F)-about as "cold" as an operational reactor ever gets. It all takes about...
...there is nothing ordinary any more about Three Mile Island's Unit 2. For one thing, the collection of pumps and machinery called the residual heat removal system, essential to the final temperature drop, is not "canned." In nuclear-engineering jargon, that means it is not designed to handle coolant as radioactive as Three Mile Island's. If the elaborate plumbing system were turned on, it would flush contaminated water through pipes and into the plant's auxiliary building, from which it could leak into the atmosphere. The technicians also point out that the pumps themselves produce heat, and could...
...Testing pumps to see if they will circulate coolant through the reactor's steam generator, which creates the steam that normally powers the electricity-producing turbogenerator...