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In 1979 I was fifteen years old and fifteen miles away when Three Mile Island had a "malfunction." At first the news was interesting and we watched carefully as the day progressed. Then the news got big, it went national, and everything changed in town. Dial tone took ten seconds to appear on the phone. Schools let out early. Local channels went on 24-hour news coverage at a time when that was unheard of and the new Governor Dick Thornburg was on the air for days at a time with some guy named "Dr. Denton," a rare bird that could actually describe how a nuclear reactor worked to us normal people. In 1987 Doctor Harold Denton would be the key-note speaker at my graduation from Penn State. In the following six days most people in the Harrisburg area knew how a three-stage cooling PWR reactor worked, and what had gone wrong in Unit 2. The education was detailed and immersive. It was the only subject worth considering.
President Jimmy Carter, first in his class at the Naval Academy with a degree in Nuclear Engineering came on scene because surely he thought (God bless him) the best thing a President could do with his time in a crisis was get in the way of the people trying to handle the problem and offer his technical advice.
One of the things we were educated on was the escalation stages that would occur in the event things would spiral out of control. We were blessed to see the mark stay next to the lowest stage -- shut down as much as possible and cool cool cool. Though Unit 2 was never able to fully seat the zirconium control rods that interfere with fission they were closed enough to suppress the reaction. Unit 2 slowly shut down and once the Pressure Ordinance Release Valve issue was understood the engineers were in a position to slowly regain control and shut down the reaction completely. Unit 2 never reopened and cleanup is still not fully complete. But no one died from TMI. The contingency plans functioned as designed. Catastrophe was halted a long way down on the escalation list.
This weekend I was sitting in CiCi's Pizza visiting with my extended family in Virginia. My Ma and both my sisters were there, as was one of my brothers-in-law who had lived across the river in Mechanicsburg at the time of TMI. The TV announced that they were dumping seawater into Fukushima and all of us exhaled in exasperation. That had been on the list of escalation stages, well up the chart and all of us understood what the others in the restaurant did not -- it was an indication that the engineers had lost. Fukushima was a runaway. It would do what it wanted; containment was being surrendered in a desperate attempt to gain control through brute force.
This evening I watched on the evening news as they listed the different issues present, 4 reactors out of control and their associated cool-off tanks that are boiling away their water. This is truly a catastrophic turn of events. Once broken away from its control structures the uranium will do as it pleases. Little Boy contained 140 pounds of fuel. You can fit that in a gym bag. These reactors and their cooling tanks would fill a fast food restaurant corner to corner in all three dimensions.
Japan truly has had a very bad day today, likely the worst in its incredibly long, storied history. If any culture on this Earth can overcome this kind of adversity surely this is it, and when all is said and done Japan will certainly survive. But it will be changed. I believe all of us will be changed as well.
S.
