![]() This added to the confusion without providing any useful information to the operators. Over 100 alarms went off in the control room during the first few minutes of the accident. The training was the responsibility of Met Ed and Babcock and Wilcox. One of the factors which added to the severity of the accident at TMI was the inadequate training of the employees at the facility. During the initial stages of the accident Edward Fredrick and Craig Faust, the Control Room Operators were present in the control room. The accident at TMI could have been contained had either the PORV shut at this point, or the operators noticed that the valve was stuck open. In the first 100 minutes of the accident almost 32,000 gallons of water, or one third of the reactors capacity escaped through the PORV. ![]() This is known as a Loss of Coolant Accident (LOCA). In reality the PORV was stuck open and steam and water was escaping from the reactor. open) shut off, leading the operators to assume that the PORV had was now closed. The light indicating that the PORV was energized (i.e. 13 seconds into the accident the PORV should have closed since the pressure in the reactor had dropped. Even though this heat was a fraction of what is normally produced during the fission reaction, it was enough to potentially overheat the core. This halted the fission reaction but the latent heat of the radioactive material continued to heat the water. The panel in the control room had lights to indicate that the valves were closed, one of the lights was covered by a yellow maintenance tag, while the operator did not notice the other light.ĭespite the opening of the PORV the pressure continued to rise, 9 seconds into the accident the control rods automatically lowered as designed to halt the fission reaction. An operator noticed that they were running, but he did not notice that the valves on the emergency feedwater lines were closed. As designed the increase in pressure caused the Pilot Operated Relief Valve to open (PORV) draining the steam and water from the reactor core in to a tank on the floor.Īt this point the three emergency feedwater pumps started. This caused the water inside the reactor to expand, increasing the pressure inside the pressurizer to 2200 psi, 100 psi more then the normal. When the flow of the water stopped the temperature inside the reactor core increased. The steam produced by the reactor not only runs the generators to produce electricity but also serves to cool down the reactor core, reducing the risk of a meltdown. It was later determined that this was caused by maintenance work being done on the Number 7 Polisher at the time. on the 28th of March, 1979 the first of a series of pumps feeding water to the steam generators at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant stopped functioning.
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