At 4 a.m. on March 28, 1979, the worst accident in the history of the U.S. nuclear power industry begins when a pressure valve in the Unit-2 reactor at Three Mile Island failed to close. Cooling water, contaminated with radiation, drained from the open valve into adjoining buildings, and the core began to dangerously overheat…
What unfolded was othe worst nuclear incident in the United States, and the world drama played out in real time for residents and people in close proximity to the event..
After the cooling water began to drain out of the broken pressure valve on the morning of March 28, 1979, emergency cooling pumps automatically went into operation. Left alone, these safety devices would have prevented the development of a larger crisis. However, human operators in the control room misread confusing and contradictory readings and shut off the emergency water system. The reactor was also shut down, but residual heat from the fission process was still being released. By early morning, the core had heated to over 4,000 degrees, just 1,000 degrees short of meltdown. In the meltdown scenario, the core melts, and deadly radiation drifts across the countryside, fatally sickening a potentially great number of people.
Finally, at about 8 p.m., plant operators realized they needed to get water moving through the core again and restarted the pumps. The temperature began to drop, and pressure in the reactor was reduced. The reactor had come within less than an hour of a complete meltdown. More than half the core was destroyed or molten, but it had not broken its protective shell, and no radiation was escaping. The crisis was apparently over.
Two days later, however, on March 30, a bubble of highly flammable hydrogen gas was discovered within the reactor building. The bubble of gas was created two days before when exposed core materials reacted with super-heated steam. On March 28, some of this gas had exploded, releasing a small amount of radiation into the atmosphere. At that time, plant operators had not registered the explosion, which sounded like a ventilation door closing. After the radiation leak was discovered on March 30, residents were advised to stay indoors. Experts were uncertain if the hydrogen bubble would create further meltdown or possibly a giant explosion, and as a precaution Governor Thornburgh advised “pregnant women and pre-school age children to leave the area within a five-mile radius of the Three Mile Island facility until further notice.” This led to the panic the governor had hoped to avoid; within days, more than 100,000 people had fled surrounding towns.
This is from the YORK DAILY RECORD:
It was about 8 a.m. on a Wednesday, and Lou Braasch, program director of WKBO radio in Harrisburg, was holding down the morning DJ slot under his on-air name, Dan Steele.
The two-way radio, linking the studio with its traffic reporter, crackled. The station’s chief traffic reporter, Dave Edwards, told Braasch something was happening at Three Mile Island.
There had been no official notification, no public alarm. One of Edwards’ traffic watchers had noticed some activity around the nuclear power plant, just a few miles away, near Middletown, and had heard some chatter on the police scanner.
Braasch connected Edwards with Mike Pintek, the station’s news director. Pintek said he’d check it out. He looked up a phone number for Metropolitan Edison at Three Mile Island and dialed. (Met-Ed owned and operated the plant then.) The number turned out to be the direct line into the control room for TMI’s unit 2 reactor.
The man who answered the phone told Pintek, “I can’t talk right now; we got stuff going on.”
They did.
Pintek was transferred to other people. He explained that the station was going to go on the air with the story. He was told that “everything was under control.”
It wasn’t.
