Dr. Conca says no, nothing did. There were no effects on human health or the environment. It was an industrial accident. The core should have been replaced and the plant restarted. Instead, the accident achieved mythological status as a dreadful event, even though no one was hurt and deaths occur every year at all other types of power plants - except nuclear. Four o’clock this morning, March 28th marked the 40th Anniversary of the partial meltdown of Reactor #2 at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station in Dauphin County near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
The accident involved a relatively minor malfunction in the secondary cooling circuit which caused the temperature in the primary coolant to rise. This in turn caused the reactor to shut down automatically. Shut down took about one second. At this point a relief valve failed to close, but 1970’s instrumentation did not reveal that fact, and so much of the primary coolant drained away that the residual decay heat in the reactor core was not removed. The core suffered a partial meltdown as a result.
The operators were unable to diagnose or respond properly to the unplanned automatic shutdown of the reactor. Deficient control room instrumentation and inadequate emergency response training in the nascent industry proved to be root causes of the accident. This was quickly rectified at all reactors throughout the United States.
The Energy Deathprint (below), normalizing deaths in the energy industry to the amount of power produced for each of the major sources. Note the difference between American deaths and the rest of the world for coal, hydroelectric and nuclear, for which data exists, the result of strong U.S. regulations. Note also that the U.S. government values a human life at $7 million when taken as a result of an environmental disaster.
Original working URL: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2019/03/28/the-40th-anniversary-of-three-mile-island-did-anything-bad-ever-happen/#f8b2f2907d12
Managed by I2M Consulting, LLC