THE THREE MILE ISLAND

By Matt Douglass

What is the Three Mile Island

The Three Mile Island accident was a partial nuclear meltdown which occurred in one of the two Three Mile Island nuclear reactors in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, United States, on March 28, 1979.

The accident began at 4 a.m. on Wednesday, March 28, 1979, with failures in the non-nuclear secondary system, followed by a stuck-open pilot-operated relief valve (PORV) in the primary system, which allowed large amounts of nuclear reactor coolant to escape.

The chain of events that led to the crisis at the TMI plant included several minor equipment failures that operator errors drastically compounded, resulting in a major accident.

Facts

Within three hours after the first sign of trouble, elevated radiation levels were detected by monitors in the reactor auxiliary building

 Thousands living near the plant left the area before the 12-day crisis ended, during which time some radioactive water and gases were released from the plant.

 The accident involved the failure of the feed water system, which picks up heat from the system that has circulated through the reactor core.

Only 28 people died from the accident

How the It could've of been prevented

It could've been avoided by checking all electrical problems

They had no backup pumps because all of them were shut down for maintenance

And they could've got better operators because some of them didn’t read the lights of the pumps correctly.

Work Cited

http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/3mile-isle.html

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/readings/tmi.html

http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/20/us/pennsylvania-three-mile-island/