“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In Note 2 for the 936th session, I also described how the NRC had asked the operators of certain nuclear power plants to check for cracks in the vessel walls of their pressurized-water reactors, which are the kind installed at TMI. Now problems with corrosion are being announced. The reactor for Unit No. 1 at TMI is undamaged; it had been shut down for maintenance and refueling at the time of the accident to its twin, nearly three years ago, and a series of delays has kept it idle ever since. In February, again, company officials revealed the discovery of extensive corrosion in the bundles of small-diameter tubes in the two steam generators powered by Unit No. 1, which will delay any restarting of the unit for another six months to a year. The tubes circulate hot radioactive water from the reactor throughout the steam generators. Replacement of at least several thousand such tubes will cost millions of dollars; if engineers simply plug the damaged tubes, the reactor will operate well below capacity. (Steam generators at some other plants have a new problem: the accumulation of a corrosive sludge at their bases.)

Company projections are that the entire cleanup at TMI won’t be completed until the end of 1988—more than nine years after the accident took place. Current plans are that once the radioactive water is drained from the containment building of Unit No. 2, engineers will conduct remote investigations of the core of the reactor itself. A specially designed video camera will be inserted into the core so that the actual damage to the pencil-thin fuel rods can be assessed; and hundreds of thousands of sonar readings, taken through openings already present in the reactor, will be assembled by computer into images of the core. Several major steps must follow, all of them on an enormous scale: the lifting of the 160-ton metal “head,” or cap, of the reactor; the removal of the upper plenum assembly, the 55-ton mechanism which makes possible the raising and lowering of fuel control rods into the 100-ton reactor core, thus regulating the intensity of its nuclear reactions; and eventually, the difficult piece-by-piece removal of the damaged core itself. Even then, the core will still be so radioactive that most of the work will have to be done by remote-controlled devices. Finally, the cavernous containment building itself will be cleaned, again by remote control.

I last discussed the cleanup at Three Mile Island, and nuclear power challenges in general, including safety and costs, in the opening notes for the 936th session, with its Note 2. That was almost three months ago, in November 1981; see Chapter 11. Lesser accidents, or “events,” as they are called within the nuclear-power industry, have continued to happen within the context of that primary accident at TMI—the loss of coolant for the nuclear reactor of Unit No. 2. I call the whole series of accidents “events of consciousness,” and think of them as unfolding in an orderly way from that initial large-scale event of consciousness, which took place on March 28, 1979. Early in January of this year (1982), for example, decontamination workers in a pair of buildings located between the plant’s two reactors triggered alarms when they inadvertently blew radioactive dust into the buildings from a drain filled with contaminated particles. The “unusual event” was not serious, although a small amount of radiation was released into the atmosphere through a ventilating system.

[...] 2 nuclear reactor has evidently passed; engineers have dissipated the hydrogen bubble in the reactor’s core, but the core temperature is still considerably above normal, and children and pregnant women are still advised to stay out of the area.

[...] Jane and I read that it will take up to four years and many millions of dollars to decontaminate, overhaul, and place the crippled reactor back in operation; the cost is given in incalculable estimates ranging from $40 million to $400 million. Some government officials say that the reactor may never see service again, that it may end up junked, or as a sealed mausoleum, a mute symbol of our nuclear age. [...]

[...] Three Mile Island, with both of its nuclear reactors off line, or inoperative, sprawls on its island in the Susquehanna River like a wounded behemoth. Engineers are guiding the disabled reactor of Unit No. 2 toward a “cold shutdown,” the state in which the temperature of the water in the reactor’s primary cooling system drops below the boiling point, pressure is reduced, and the risk of a meltdown of the uranium fuel rods in the reactor core is eliminated. [...]

[...] It seems that through a combination of mechanical failures and human error, unit 2, one of the plant’s two nuclear reactors, overheated and discharged radioactive water into the river, and began releasing small amounts of radioactive gasses into the atmosphere. [The entire plant is idle, since unit 1 had already been shut down for refueling.] By now the situation is much more serious, however: There’s a chance of a catastrophic “meltdown” of the uranium fuel rods in the damaged reactor’s core—the worst possible accident that can occur in such circumstances, short of an explosion, and a kind that proponents of nuclear power have long maintained “almost certainly cannot happen.” [...]

1. On April 20, technicians managed to lower below the boiling point the temperature of the cooling water in the damaged nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island; this success was achieved just 24 days after the accident began to unfold on March 28. The reactor hasn’t reached an ideal “cold shutdown,” however, when it will be on a natural circulation of water at atmospheric pressure; that situation will come about when an independent backup cooling system is completed several weeks from now.

[...] True or false, we wonder: There never was any danger that the bubble of radioactive hydrogen gas in the core of the disabled reactor would explode; there never was any danger of a meltdown of the core’s uranium fuel; an act of sabotage against the reactor’s primary cooling system set in motion the whole chain of unfortunate events, with their national and worldwide repercussions….

[...] 2, one of the plant’s two nuclear reactors, overheated, discharging radioactive water into the river, and began releasing small amounts of radioactive gases into the atmosphere. [...] 1 had already been shut down for refueling.] By now the situation is much more serious, however: There’s a chance of catastrophic “meltdown” of the uranium fuel rods in the damaged reactor’s core — the worst possible accident that can occur in such circumstances short of an explosion, and a kind that proponents of nuclear power have long maintained “almost certainly cannot happen.” [...]

Look at your nuclear-reactor troubles at the plant by Harrisburg (Three Mile Island). [...]

[...] Federal nuclear safety advisors call the dilemma “stable,” and today the President visited Three Mile Island in an effort to reassure people — yet the chance of a meltdown of the overheated reactor core of Unit No. [...] We’re told that a radioactive and potentially explosive bubble of hydrogen gas, which has been preventing cooling water from reaching the upper portions of the control rods within the reactor’s fuel assembly, is now being very slowly and carefully vented into the atmosphere; this is a first step in the bubble’s planned dissolution. [...]

[...] At the moment we’re sure of but one thing: A nuclear reactor meltdown, like that threatened at Three Mile Island, is just not acceptable in our society under any circumstances. [...]

[...] 2, one the two reactors at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island nuclear power generating plant, overheated and came close to a catastrophic meltdown of its uranium fuel. The situation at TMI is as enigmatic as ever, with the damaged reactor’s massive containment building sealed and holding within it large amounts of highly radioactive gasses, solids, and water. [...]

[...] And in all of this concern for safety there’s much irony: for Three Mile Island, and the people of eastern Pennsylvania, were saved not by the plant’s emergency cooling systems, but by nonsafety-related equipment that plant operators finally used to improvise cooling of the reactor’s overheated core.

(The latest, Jane and I gather from a variety of reports, is that Three Mile Island’s damaged reactor, Unit No. [...] A great amount of radiation is trapped within the reactor’s containment building, so “many months” still must pass before it can even be entered. [...]

[...] Four-and-a-half months ago, one of the two nuclear reactors at TMI malfunctioned and came close to a meltdown of its uranium fuel. [...]

Ever since the accident to the nuclear reactor of Unit No. 2 at TMI, 31 months ago, the reactor’s great containment building and an auxiliary structure have been flooded with highly radioactive water. [It grew to be over eight and a half feet deep in the reactor building.] Utility engineers now have in operation a filtering system to decontaminate before storage the nearly one million gallons of water in the two buildings. [...] Yet to come are the removal of the reactor’s cover, its damaged core, and the decontamination of the buildings themselves.

[...] For example: The staff of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has asked the operators of more than 40 nuclear plants to check for cracks in the walls of the vessels encasing their pressurized-water reactors (which are the kind installed at TMI). Evidence is accumulating that the vessels are becoming embrittled by neutron radiation from the reactors much more quickly than their designers had anticipated. [...]

[...] I don’t know whether the nuclear power industry in the United States will die, but it’s in great trouble: Various studies show that around half of the 90 reactors under construction could be replaced by more economical coal-fired plants, containing excellent pollution-control equipment. [...]

As for the nuclear power generating plant on Three Mile Island, engineers have not yet been able to enter the contaminated containment building housing the reactor—Unit No. [...]

[...] Pu²³⁸, a high-quality isotope consumed in commercial nuclear reactors, has a half-life of about 88 years. [...]

[...] I wrote that in April engineers were scheduled to enter the contaminated containment building housing the damaged reactor [Unit No. [...]

[...] It’s been rescheduled again—this time for late July, upon completion of the venting, and 16 months after the near-meltdown of radioactive fuel in the reactor’s core.

[...] We’d read late this afternoon, then saw on the TV news as we ate supper, that on Sunday Israeli warplanes had destroyed the almost-completed nuclear reactor at Baghdad, Iraq. [...]

Look at your nuclear reactor troubles at the plant by Harrisburg (Three Mile Island). [...]

(Because the proper detection equipment was not in place, government officials do not know just how much radiation was released into the Pennsylvania countryside 28 months ago [in March 1979], when the reactor of Unit No. [...]

[...] Because of a combination of mechanical failure and human error, one of the two reactors at TMI had come very close to a meltdown of the uranium fuel in its core. [...]

After six months, then, Three Mile Island is still “a closed enigma,” as I wrote in finishing Mass Events—only now the costs for the repair and cleanup of its damaged reactor have been projected as being well over $1 billion instead of the $40 million to $400 million of just a month ago, and into many years of “time” instead of just four. [...]

[...] [Two of the men were so strongly affected by the heat inside their heavy protective clothing that they decided to cut short their trip.] The reactor reclamation task is now projected to cost more than $760 million, and to take at least five years.