3 Mile Island Reactor Shuts Down

[DoYouEverWonder]

November 2, 2006

HARRISBURG, Pa. -- The reactor at Three Mile Island, site of the nation's worst nuclear accident, shut down Thursday, but radiation was not released and there was no danger to the public, company and federal officials said.

A faulty instrument reading triggered the automatic shutdown, officials said. It was the first shutdown of Unit 1 since 1997, said Ralph DeSantis, a spokesman for the plant's operator, AmerGen Energy Co. LLC.

The unit, which opened in 1974, shut off at 1:35 p.m. and remained down Thursday evening.

"It appears this was an uncomplicated, smooth shutdown," said Neil Sheehan, a spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/sns-ap-three-mile-island-shutdown,0,5574432.story?coll=sns-ap-nation-headlines

Nothing to see here, move along.

[whistle]

1. I've heard that story before

[flowomo]

2. we're 24 miles away.... I hope the shutdown went just fine...

and I suspect it did.

[lancdem]

3. I'm around that far away, too

Where do you live? I'm in Lancaster County.

[flowomo]

4. Carlisle...

got this from WHTM-27 TV news:

The last time there was an unplanned shut down at TMI was about six years ago.

[lancdem]

5. Thanks

:hi:

[Born Free]

9. Highspire

We are a bit closer....

[Warren Stupidity]

6. Its 1978, I'm in school and much much younger

and there is still hope for a greening of america and things are not that bad. And now its 2006 and there is hardly any hope at all for anything other than the environmental catastrophe we all knew was the other alternative and its been 30 years of total head-up-ass stupidity by America The Great and we have fucked everything up.

We really have to win this election and try to turn things around. We really have to do this.

And there is TMI all over again reminding me of just how far wrong we have gone.

[enough]

7. The original TMI event was when I realized I was not going to be able to escape politics.

I had come back home to the country in western Chester County to get "back to the land and live a simple life." TMI made short work of that delusion.

[freethought]

8. You would be surprised that most people don't realize

that shutting a reactor down is a risky operation. For example, vast majority of plane crashes occur in a window of time during and after take off and before landing to a full stop. Taking a nuclear reactor from a controlled fission reaction ot "OFF" is carefully orchestrated. The Soviets learned this the hard way with Chernobyl. On the day of that accident the management of that plant were in the process of shutting that reactor (I believe there were 4 reactors at Chernobyl)down while simultaneously trying to perform some sort of experiment that they knew they should not have been doing. The rest is history.

[Tesha]

10. I'm sorry, but you're wrong.

The operators of the Chernobyl unit were performing
an experiment at a very low power level, an area
where the graphite-moderated RBMK-family reactors
were notoriously unstable.

(Unlike our power reactors {but not our military
plutonium and tritium productionn reactors}, the
RBMK reactors have what is known as a "positive
reaction rate coefficient"; as the power level
drifts higher and produces steam in the core,
the nuclear reaction rate tends to then want to
go faster still, producing yet more power, producing
more steam, producing faster nuclear reactions, etc.)

The operators lost control of the reactor and the
result was that the graphite (carbon) structure of
the reactor caught fire. After that, it was un-
controllable.

This wasn't an ordinary start-up or shut-down; the
operators should never have been doing what they
were doing in the first place.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster

Tesha

[gauguin57]

11. Honey, where are my damned potassium iodide pills?

Crap. I know they're here somewhere.