Nuke 'em 'til they glow and then wander around in the dark: TMI 1979

In the spring of 1979 I was pretty much what most 22-year-old guys are; clueless yet unabashed, barbarous in an oversocialized, post-industrial sort of fashion. I was also attending a small private college in south-central Pennsylvania. Like many of my peers I was concerned with my social life more than learning, with getting laid more than getting educated. In short, I was what a young nomad would have been had he been de-loused and shoved into Topsiders and a polo shirt and told to stop riding across other people's grazing lands.

What I was not was particularly aware of my surroundings. I paid as little attention to the world's business as I had just half a dozen years earlier when I was approaching draft age and the war in Southeast Asia was winding down...which says something about how gormless I was, given that I had not the slightest assurance that my government might want me to go to proof-test the Domino Theory with my body when I came to legal adulthood.

I was a dope. A fairly socialized, relatively educated dope, but a dope nonetheless.

So I can't say it was surprising that I hadn't the slightest idea on this day 38 years ago that as I was lazing about sleeping in my old bedroom in my parent's house on a Spring Break vacation Wednesday that about sixty miles to the northwest, at the Three Mile Island power station, reactor TMI-2 was melting down.

It was four in the fucking morning; who was getting up that early on a vacation weekday..?

Here's the sad, funny part of this story, though.

You can read the accounts of "Three Mile Island" to get the history; it's a bit beyond this post, which is just a personal momento nuki. The accident was more frightening than actually dangerous but it was frightening, and a fairly broad swath of central Pennsylvania (and, I think, even a bit of north-central Maryland) was warned that a deadly radioactive cloud might descend at any time in the manner of one of those Fifties mutant-monster films. The governor of Pennsylvania issued some sort of evacuation order which was widely ignored, and the public response was entirely determined by individual threshold levels of nuclear panic.

Young Chief, being, as noted above, a clueless git, had no panic because he had no clue. Literally; I didn't turn on the news or bother to read the newspaper. I had no idea what the fresh hell was going on along the banks of the Susquehanna River. Armored in that impervious ignorance I bagged up my clean laundry and shoved it in my father's secondhand Ford Pinto station wagon (all I could afford as college transportation and quite the babe-magnet it was, I tell you. Ugh.) that Friday. I had a couple of exams early in the next week, and my plan was to return to the dorm to get a weekend of studying in away from the fleshpots of Kennett Square, PA.

I won't pretend that my college, even in the coke-and-disco-fueled Seventies, was the sort of girls-gone-wild party school of college films so I wasn't really surprised that the campus was dark and quiet on an end-of-break Friday night. What was surprising, however, was that the outside door of my dorm was locked.

The exterior doors of dorms were never locked. They just weren't. Not only was it some sort of fire code rule there were always at least a handful of people who needed to go in and out. I recall yanking on the door handle in a sort of irritated disbelief. The fuck..? Who the hell locks a damn dorm door? Must be some sort of prank; the north side door will be open.

Except it wasn't. And on the walk around the outside I began to wonder. My school was pretty dead socially, but...not this dead. West of my dorm was the broad open space hemmed with classroom buildings, underclass dorms, and the student union. Even on the deadest of dead evenings there should have been someone walking across the oval; a couple going to the U, random library-seekers. Someone.

Not that evening.

I don't recall exactly what tuition was running in those days. Certainly much less than the current nearly-quarter-million it costs for four years there today. But for 1979 the costs were steep, so you'd think that after three years I'd have received enough of that expensive education to have figured out that something wasn't right. But you'd have underestimated the thickness of young Chief's skull. I ambled over to the union to find it dark and locked. The geology building? Locked. The freshman dorm across the oval? Yep; darkened and locked.

Finally I did what I should have done first; I wandered over to the campus cop shop. There, finally, was a light, and open door, and an extremely indifferent looking guy in a uniform.

"Ummm...where the heck is everybody?" I whined.

The law, in its impartial majesty, lowered his newspaper and looked at me with a perfect combination of boredom, amusement, and irritation.

"Not here. Campus is closed."

"Closed? What? Why?"

Irritation and boredom were replaced with mild disbelief.

"Because of the nuclear plant blowing up. You don't know about that?"

"Uh, no. What nuclear plant?"

"That one over by Harrisburg, on the river. Something happened, there's a warning, campus is closed until the warning is cancelled."

"The...what the hell? What am I supposed to do?" Now Officer Friendly looked at me with a frown that matched his increasing contempt for my stupidity.

"Go the hell home, kid. Before your balls start to glow in the dark."

So I did. My parents were surprised, and immediately called my kid sister (going to school at another small private college some ways to the north and west of Three Mile Island) to ensure that she was not in immediate danger of nuclear irradiation. She wasn't.

Nobody was, as it turns out.

(As a technical aside, one of the things that has always amazed, irked, and amused me about my country's private nuclear power generation is the ridiculously pre-industrial fashion that U.S. commercial nuclear plants have been typically designed and built.

Military reactors, and most commercial nuclear plants in Europe as well as Japan (where the cost of and access to fossil fuels mean that nuclear power is a much larger part of the power grid), are typically made as part of a mass-produced, standardized series. Reactors and their controls are alike - or identical - in the same way that automobiles of a particular model are alike or identical. Construction is simplified, operations are predictable, and lessons learned from failures can be quickly standardized and disseminated through the production run.

Most U.S. commercial reactors are one-offs, designed and constructed individually (or, at best, very small series of two or three or modifications from an earlier design) for each plant. So Massachusetts' Connecticut Yankee plant's reactors are different from Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island that are different from Oregon's Trojan. Every new plant reinvents the nuclear wheel, making the opportunities for design or operating flaws much greater.

Ironically, TMI-2 was an 879 MWe pressurized water reactor designed and constructed by the firm of Babcock & Wilcox. This type of reactor had a failure identical to the 1979 accident two years earlier at the Davis-Besse plant in Ohio. The Ohio reactor was running at a very low level compared to TMI-2, so the core didn't melt down...but the valve failure wasn't recognized as a design flaw or the problem diagnosed and that diagnosis sent to the other plants operating this type of reactor.

So two years later I got to wander around in the dark wondering where the hell everybody had gone.

If there's a lesson here, I'm not sure what it is, other than "young men are stupid".

But recruiting sergeants have known that since Ramses' regimental sergeant-major bought the village plowboys their first jug of palm wine.

Perhaps it's "Contractors whose sole purpose is profit are stupid so long as it profits them to be."

Although I'll bet pharoah's sergeants could have told you that about contractors, too.

Smoking guns and mushroom clouds

The generation of this post came from a headline on my Comcast website (where I go to check my e-mail): "Rare picture of split mushroom cloud found" Here's the pic:

I followed the original article and found a irkingly cryptic story about this picture.

Apparently the "split" cloud over Hiroshima had already been seen in 1945; photographed by observers aboard one of the aircraft accompanying Enola Gay (tagged, by the way, with a terrific name for an implement of mass destruction: Necessary Evil).

Here's that snapshot - note that the upper "cap" cloud has pretty much separated from the "stem":

The thing I couldn't get from either the initial story linked by Comcast or the History Blog post I linked to above was - what was so fucking terrific about this picture?

I mean, was this some sort of truly odd, unusual atomic phenomenon?

Did the split in the Hiroshima cloud indicate that some really peculiar atmospheric condition, or some bizarre anomaly in the detonation, had resulted in this strange cloud formation that was never seen again during the many atmospheric nuclear tests conducted during the Forties, Fifties, and Sixties?

Okay, no.

The photo above is from the "Charlie" shot in the "Buster-Jangle" test series conducted in October and November of 1951. Note the double separations, the upper between the "cap" and "stem" as well as a lower split in the stem.

That led me to further research into the whole "mushroom cloud" business. Seems that these things are not just a nuclear signature. Any sufficiently large explosion will create them. The fireball of the explosion creates the "cap" as it rises, and the low pressure beneath the cap causes entrainment of the surrounding air and the moisture in the rising air condenses.

Not surprisingly, all this rising and condensing is dependent on the ambient air temperatures and pressures, so that if the rising cloud encounters a warmer air layer at altitude there will be no cloud formation, or the water droplets will evaporate again...

So it turns out that the photo itself was the big deal, if big deal it was, not the "split cloud".

And even that was not really all that such of a muchness; the photo had been published years earlier. It was the actual photo print that had been lost for some time and recently rediscovered.

So. No frightful new nuclear revelations, just a tiny bit of historical documentation come back to light.

Well, okay then. Let's dance!

Now I am become Death, destroyer of Worlds.

Hush-a-boom

Fascinating little website on the history of Soviet atomic weapons.

The Soviet experiment is kind of intriguing and mostly appalling.

It's difficult for an American of 2012 - whose nation is only now beginning to exhume some of the worst aspects of one of the worst periods of governance and social economy (for those of us not in the two-yacht families) in its history - to really understand how for its entire fucking history the polity that is Russia and was the USSR does not have, and never has had, anything remotely approaching a political and economic system that had the sort of responsiveness and approachability that we associate with our own, as corrupt and ridiculous as it is.

Pre-Soviet Russia was an autocracy typified by a vast and brutal clumsiness. When the Soviets overthrew the czar, sadly, they adopted many of the czarist ways. When the Soviets fell they retained much of their economic crudity while devolving back into czarist kleptocracy.

What this has tended to produce is a society and a nation where - though many people have lived decent lives in decent circumstances (as in any society) - the sort of brute-force solutions that often were and are the Russian style can make things very bad for very many very suddenly.

You could extrapolate a lot from the picture at the top; a land that produced a nuclear weapon held together with rivets and assembled by men whose lives came straight out of a novel by Gogol.

(h/t to Lawyers, Guns, and Money that posted this link today)

...et pacem appelant

More ghost cities. This time, Hiroshima, 1945.I can't help thinking the same thing the woman in the article muses:

“The thing that affects me most about the photographs is what isn’t there. The absences, like the photograph of the chalk marks of the feet on the bridge. People know what we did at Hiroshima,” she says pensively, “but we just don’t want to think about it.”

We never do. We like to think we make decisions based on "facts" and "reason", that the fact that we are in "control" is a good thing. And don't get me wrong; penicillin, flush toilets, clean food...these ARE all good things.But the default setting for almost all of us - if I do it, if it benefits me in some way, it must be good - is a dangerous foolery, and we would do well to be more suspicious of our own intentions and more skeptical of our rationalizations.Because once you get to the point of standing there on the Aioi Bridge looking into the sun appearing 1,963 feet above your head, there is nothing you can do except become part of the sunrise.

Solitudinem faciunt

One of the commentors on the previous post about Verdun (thanks, Leon!) gave us this; a website showing views of the abandoned city of Pripyat, killed by the implosion of the nearby Chernobyl nuclear power plant.While it doesn't have quite yet the same time-haunted loneliness or the loom of the awful destruction visited on Fleury-devant-Douaumont there's still something of a similar, frightening stopped-clock desolation there.

I think one of the things that frighten us so badly about these places is the awful familarity about them. We can get angry or frustrated about the destruction visited on the wild places, the Deepwater Horizons, or the Exxon Valdezes, but somehow these places don't seize our hearts and minds like the scattered homework in the Pripyat elementary schoolor the empty field where the little village of Kopachi used to bebefore ionizing radiation made it too dangerous to live in, or near, and the Soviet engineers buried it and sowed the ruins with grass and poplars...These sorts of man-made wastelands always come to mind whenever I hear some fathead (and, sorry, Republicans, but most of the fatheads saying this stuff are your fellow Republicans) talking about how the real problem is "too much regulation" and how the job creators and the Magic of the Market needs to be unleashed to get us all to the Magical Happy Money Place, or when some idiot (see Santorum, Rick) flaps his gums about what a great fucking job humans have done "controlling" their world.

You'd think that "conservatives", who are supposed to be skeptical of human altruism and motives and grounded in a realistic assessment of human failings, would be the first to look at places like this and demand that there always be a second, disinterested, opinion about the gains and costs of human risktaking.

But, as humans always have, we will probably continue to fuck up and then blame everything but ourselves. Being optimists, we will believe ourselves to live in the best of all possible worlds.

Being a pessimist, I tend to agree.

Judgement Day

There are times I suspect that I am a profoundly unserious person.

My friend Geochick is a very Concerned Person and has no trouble being exceptionally serious. She's always sending me links to various serious things through our Facebook connection. So when she sent me this link I knew she was being Serious.

But the title of the link on the Facebook page didn't come up as "Nuclear Weapons on a Highway Near You" (the title of the Mother Jones article).

It came up as "Nuclear Truckers: Warheads on 18 Wheels".

And instead of being Concerned.

Or Serious.

All I could think of was; what a totally fucking awesome name for a band, and their first single.

I mean, I could effing see the headline in Billboard: NUCLEAR TRUCKERS EXPLODE THE CHART WITH "WARHEADS ON 18 WHEELS!"

"They don't look like major rock stars, but the four dudes out of Clackamas County, Oregon who go by "Nuclear Truckers" are serious about their music. And they've gone Ground Zero with their first release, an explosion of three-chord power rock they titled "Warheads on Eighteen Wheels". Although the guys still think of themselves as one step up from a garage band, Rolling Stone sees them in the arena already; "These guys are more than hot - they're a blast wave, they're #!@#!%! thermonuclear," says Chip Burton, executive for Manhattan, the label that signed the Truckers..."

I know, I know...it's a real story and it's no joke. I should be Concerned. I should be Serious.

But I just can't stop fucking giggling.

There are times when I wonder whether I'm really a grown-up, and there are other times when I suspect that the answer to that question would discourage me. Don't tell me fart jokes, either. I'll probably laugh at them. Damn.

Where's Blinky?

The ongoing emergency at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi power plant raise some interesting questions about the current state of nuclear power generation.Specifically; why is there no "go-to-hell" plan in place for these facilities?

From what I can figure out (being, as a nuclear engineer, a hell of a former paratroop sergeant...) the issue with most of these pile-meltdown incidents is cooling.

Unlike a coal or gas plant, or a hydroelectric dam, a nuke plant can't be "turned off" by sluicing the fires or opening the spillway. Even with the control rods fully inserted a typical 460 Megawatt (MW) reactor like the Fukushima plant retains about 3% of its operating heat immediately after shutdown. Three percent of 460MW is about 14MW at SCRAM, or about 14 million Joules (1 Watt = 1 Joule/second). 4200 Joules will heat 1 kilogram of water by 1 degree C. So 14 million joules would heat 1 kg of water to ~3300 degrees C in a second.

So the problem is that even after you flick the "off" switch the damn thing has to be cooled, and cooled a LOT.

But almost all of the cooling schemes rely on some sort of power; steam generators, electric pumps...and as the Sendai earthquake showed us, in power stations built near large seismogenic faults, power is almost always lost.

You'd think that there would be a "last-ditch" cooling plan that did not depend on external power, but so far as I can tell there was no such plan in place for the Fukushima plant, and that such plans are nearly unthought of. But it seems to me, a natural pessimist, unthinkable to not-think of such a contingency. What would throw a nuclear plant off-line if not a major accident, and what would be more likely - where in the case of a fire, a storm, an earthquake, an internal control element failure - than losing electrical power?

Count me as someone who doesn't reflexively fear nuclear power. Nuclear seems like something that should be considered in our technologic society as an option, with positives and negatives much like other power production schemes.

But the active-cooling requirement seems like a real potential deal-killer. It seems to me that if you can't figure out a way to flood coolant through the core - without power, without pumps - then you have a significant roadblock to keeping these things safe. And safe with nukes is a problem, too. When the floodwaters from the failed hydropower dam recede, or the fire from the gas-power plant is extinguished, people can move back in and start to rebuild. But a core-containment failure has the potential to poison the surrounding area for years, even generations.Nuclear engineers are among the smartest, best trained people in the entire engineering profession. There has got to be an answer to this cooling problem; why haven't they found it?

Happy 4th...er, I mean 9th of July

Incredibly cool, if more than a little terrifying. I advise following the link to see the NPR video - we're talking megatons of man-made aurora borealis.

Christ, but the Cold War attitude towards radiation was fucked up. Let's not forget about all those glowing sheep in Nevada. You have to look back at the beginning of the Atomic Era and shudder; like giving a monkey a machine gun.

Happy Fourth! (h/t to Crooked Timber)

Campaign Issues: Nuclear Power Generation

Almost lost in the past month of economic terror is one of the weird little sub-issues that I find most curiously and fascinatingly divergent between the bread-and-butter GOP policy line and the national Democratic platform: nuclear power as a form of "alternative" energy. [Content Alert! For those viewing at home - there is a nekkid lady further down the page. Yes, she's very pretty and "artsy" but she's wearing nature's drawers, gang. Nude. Buff-o.

I include this to warn viewing parents and as a way of stimulating readership: not work safe!

So; unless you want to explain to your two-year-old the difference between a "woo-woo" and a "puff-puff" (and yes, these are actual terms heard here at the Fire Direction Center and, no, I did NOT devise them), now's the time to shift over to "Go Diego Go.com"]

I have a peculiar connection to nuclear power. The southeastern Pennsylvania region where I spent much of my young adulthood was ringed with nuclear plants in the 1970s: Three Mile Island along the Susquehanna to the west, Peach Bottom to the southwest, Oyster Creek in New Jersey to the east. Those Mickey's "Big Mouth" cooling towers were as much a part of my high school and college years as avocado green Pinto hatchbacks, Chevy Chase and "Disco Duck".

My most immediate connection with nuclear power was an unplanned Spring Break in March of 1979; my college was located less than twenty miles east of TMI, and in the panic ensuing after the accident the school was evacuated and closed.

Clueless as a lad could be (having avoided the television news during a visit home) I arrived back on campus to find the dormitories locked and the place deserted. A bored campus cop informed me that the nuke plant at TMI had melted down and classes were cancelled due to potential radioactive death. Simultaneously pleased with the unexpected vacation and disappointed at the lack of a mushroom-shaped Cloud of Doom I drove back down Highway 42 wondering what the heck all the fuss was about.

Anyway, the panic of Chernobyl and TMI seems to have comprehensively abated. The national Democratic website contains a link to something called the "Comprehensive New Energy for America" plan. In it, the Democratic candidates specify that potential problems involving "security of nuclear fuel and waste, waste storage, and proliferation" are so serious that any future plans for nuclear generation will depend on successfully solving them. The Democratic attitude towards nukes seems to be characterized as: "Enh, well..."

Over at JohnMcCain.com the Straight Talker talks straight about lovin' him some nukes: "John McCain Will Put His Administration On Track To Construct 45 New Nuclear Power Plants By 2030 With The Ultimate Goal Of Eventually Constructing 100 New Plants." Damn the Russians and Chinese, full speed ahead. The GOP will also ensure that those dusky furriners don't get to build our nukes, either. Their website says: "It is also critical that the U.S. be able to build the components for these plants and reactors within our country..."

Thinking about this I'm not sure why McCain seems to feel the need to go all aggro about building nukes. ISTM that most Americans - and I include myself in this group - view the nuclear industry through the Duff Beer goggles of the Simpsons,to include our current Chief Executive's (and his XX-chromosome sister Caribou Barbie's) penchant for pronouncing the name of the damn thing "Nuke-U-lar". I don't get the sense that he's winning anyone's confidence outside the "drill, baby, drill" crowd and they're his anyway.

The other odd thing is that what I remember from TMI and from our own ill-starred Trojan plant is that one critical difference separates U.S. nuclear generation from the much more accepted, much more widespread nuclear program run by France's EDF.

U.S. nuclear plants were, historically, and still are as far as I know, always one-offs: that is, they are designed new from the ground up. With some minor exceptions, the design of almost every nuke plant in the U.S. varies, from slightly to wildly, from every other plant.

Part of this is a bug - nukes were all local power company projects, were all built independently of each other, and usually through a bid process that favored individual design teams from the big power plant contractors.

The other part is a feature - a principal aspect of the free market system. Nuke manufacturers were in competition with each other, and each one would retool their design for each new bid.

This inevitably led to problems, since each new reactor was, in effect, a beta-test version of the last reactor v2.0. Babcock & Wilson, the designers of the TMI reactor, had undoubtedly solved the problems that led to the 1979 accident. But that did nothing to solve the steam-tube failures that made our Trojan plant such an expensive white elephant.ISTM that there is a case to be made for nuclear power generation. But the first thing you need to do - before you make any sort of case that includes discussions of waste disposal, security and environmental concerns - is make the case for a nationally standardized set of designs for the reactors. That works for France, that works for the world's nuclear navies. Why don't either of the current candidates, as they wrestle with Peak Oil and Alternative Energy, make what seems to me this very simple, commonsense suggestion?

Interestingly enough, here's Matt Yglesias spotlighting a McCain stump speech in which he mocks concerns for the safety of nuclear plants. And yet, there IS a safety component to nuclear generation lacking in conventional coal or gas- and oil-fired plants. There IS a serious discussion to be had regarding reprocessing wastes (costs versus benefits) as well as final disposal (how, where and how long). For the candidate that touts nuclearization as the way out of the fossil fuel trap to "blah blah blah" his way around these discussions is to treat the voter like a child. For Obama to simply mention these issues without providing his proposals is also to treat the voter like a child - as Lisa points out in the comments section, neither candidate is talking to us like we were grown-ups

Could it be that neither one intends to have an adult conversation about this with the American voter?

Hmmmm....ya think...?

(A hat tip to Matthew Schneider, for his lovely juxtaposition of the sky-clad lass and the sky-high phallus of a cooling tower that once thrust impudently from the banks of the Columbia outside Rainier. Ah, Trojan, we may have hardly known ye but PGE is gonna try and make us pay for ye's ass if it takes them until 2023.

Or not. Hey, hey, maybe sometimes you CAN fight City Hall!!