New Types of Reactors Fail. A number of different types of reactors were the subject of experiments in the early days of the atomic era, with the hope that they would be later used successfully. But they failed; examples of this are breeder reactors (the experiment in Idaho resulted in a meltdown) and sodium-cooled reactors (like the one at Santa Susana, which also melted down). Costs were borne by federal tax dollars.
Decommissioning Costs. With reprocessing facilities and a permanent waste repository now moot, the amount of waste at a typical plant now far more than ever expected, and inflation having taken costs far beyond any early prediction, the costs of decommissioning a nuclear plant when it closes have soared. Federal law requires utilities to set aside a minimum amount for decommissioning – so the company won’t “leave town” if it closes a plant – which is typically in the hundreds of millions of dollars for a single plant. The utility, naturally, passes along these costs to ratepayers while the plant is still in operation.
Insurance Costs. The Price-Anderson legislation was enacted in 1957 because no private insurer would write an insurance policy to cover a meltdown at nuclear plant. The limit of what a utility would be responsible for is now $9.5 billion, far short of actual costs (which would be borne by taxpayers). This maximum amount has never been reached, but the potential excess costs to the utility and taxpayers remain.
Tax Breaks. Nuclear utilities have received considerable tax breaks from federal and state governments over the years, breaks that are paid for by taxpayers, adding to the costs of reactors.
The cost of nuclear reactors was one major cause of the industry’s decline. But numerous meltdowns constitute the other major cause. Below is a description of the meltdowns in the US, and several that occurred in foreign nations, which helped change public policy and reduced the extent to which the nuclear industry developed.
Chalk River, Canada, 1952. The first known meltdown at a nuclear reactor occurred not in the United States, but at Chalk River, Canada, 110 miles northwest of Ottawa. On December 13, 1952, the five-year-old NRX research reactor at the site sustained a hydrogen explosion from an unexpected power surge that couldn’t be controlled. Cooling water was lost, the core was badly damaged, and the structure flooded with radioactive water. Among the cleanup team dispatched to the site was a young Naval officer named Jimmy Carter, a nuclear engineer who would become America’s thirty-ninth President – and who ironically would be dispatched to the stricken Three Mile Island reactor nearly three decades later. Another accident at Chalk River that melted fuel rods occurred in 1958. Although the 1952 meltdown was not part of the American nuclear power program, it was a foreboding of more accidents to come, in the US and around the world.
Experimental Breeder Reactor, Idaho, 1955. The Idaho National Laboratory in the eastern part of that state was founded in 1949, as the US military and AEC prepared a series of plans to develop its atomic program, both for nuclear weapons and power reactors. In its history, Idaho National has operated over fifty small research reactors at that site, and is sometimes known as the “Atomic City.”
The first American nuclear reactor to generate electricity was the Experimental Breeder Reactor (EBR-1) at Idaho National, which accomplished this on December 20, 1951. It later powered the small nearby town of Arco, Idaho with electricity. The concept behind a “breeder reactor” was to produce enough fuel to use not just at that time, but also to use in future reactor operations, rather than just producing useless and dangerous radioactive waste. It could also produce plutonium-239 by ensuring neutrons struck uranium-238 atoms after producing electricity, and sell the plutonium back to the government for military uses. The breeder reactor was a great source of hope for the atomic future of the US in the early 1950s.
But on November 29, 1955, the EBR-1 suffered a partial meltdown of its core. Operators were testing the flow of cooling water, but thermal expansion of fuel rods proved to be much greater than expected, and some of the rods melted. The EBR-1 did not operate after that; and even though an EBR-2 was built at Idaho National, the concept of the breeder reactor had proved too dangerous to be workable. The large breeder reactors envisioned over fifty years ago by nuclear engineers never were used in the US. The 1955 meltdown was kept quiet from the media and American public by the AEC until the Cold War ended decades later.
Westinghouse Testing Reactor, Pennsylvania, 1960. In 1960, a second US nuclear meltdown took place, this time in western Pennsylvania. The Westinghouse Corporation, based in Pittsburgh, was poised to test and build many nuclear reactors for the growing American fleet; in fact, Westinghouse and General Electric did build the large majority of the 500-plus reactors ever operated worldwide.
Westinghouse built a Testing Reactor at Waltz Mill, a tiny town about twenty miles from company headquarters in Pittsburgh, and began operating it in 1959. The Testing Reactor used shorter fuel rods (three to four feet, instead of the usual twelve to thirteen feet) that were clad in aluminum instead of the usual zirconium. Just several months after operations began, on April 3, 1960, the reactor experienced a meltdown to some of the fuel rods in the core. Radioactive krypton and xenon were released into the air, and the site was immediately evacuated.
Over two million gallons of radioactive water accumulated in lagoons in the area, and had to be disposed of into permanent storage by state officials. Much like the breeder reactor tested in Idaho, the Westinghouse concept of a new reactor with shorter fuel rods clad in aluminum never caught on, and was scrapped in the 1960s. The company kept the meltdown a secret, and again the event went unnoticed by the public and the media.
Santa Susana, California, 1959. The 1950s also saw its share of nuclear accidents overseas that caused large releases of radiation. One occurred in late 1957 at the Kyshtym radioactive waste dump in the Ural Mountains in the former Soviet Union. A massive explosion at Kyshtym was fatal to a large – and still unknown – number of people, but the Soviet authorities kept the blast a secret for decades.
Also in late 1957, the Windscale nuclear plant in northern England that produced plutonium experienced a fire that melted fuel pellets in its core. Large amounts of radiation escaped through the stacks of the reactor before it could be controlled, and a ban on selling milk produced in a 200 square mile area around Windscale was implemented, because of public health risk posed by the radioactivity in milk. Unlike earlier meltdowns, this one was made public, arousing the British people but having little effect in the US.
Just two years later, a meltdown occurred at a research reactor in the Santa Susana Laboratory near Los Angeles in July 1959, arguably the largest nuclear meltdown in US history. The tragic details of the Santa Susana fiasco were to be made public only at the end of the Cold War. Much is still unknown about Santa Susana.
Savannah River Plant, South Carolina, 1970. In late 1970, two fuel rods melted down at the Savannah River Plant, a large nuclear weapons production site near Aiken, South Carolina. The accidents discharged considerable radioactivity, but in keeping with the typical practices at government run weapons plants, the public was kept in the dark, and the plant continued to operate.
Not until eighteen years later did hearings chaired by Senator John Glenn reveal these meltdowns, causing a prolonged debate over the radioactive releases and the potential health threats to plant workers and the general population. Dr. Jay Gould documented a threefold rise in strontium-90 in South Carolina milk from 1970 to 1971, along with unexpectedly large increases in infant and total deaths in the state in the few months after the accident.
Idaho National Lab, 1961. Among the meltdowns in the early years of the American atomic program, possibly the most dramatic occurred on January 4, 1961. The event occurred at the Idaho National Laboratory, in the Lost River Desert, forty miles west of Idaho Falls – where the 1955 meltdown earlier described had taken place.
Just before Christmas 1960, workers shut the Stationery Low-Power Plant #1. SL-1, as was known, was a research reactor designed for military use in remote
areas, one that could fit into cargo planes and trucks and be assembled quickly. The reactor had been having problems, especially with control rods sticking as they were inserted and removed from the reactor core, instead of sliding in and out easily; in the five weeks prior to shutdown, control rods stuck 13% of the time.
On the frigid night of January 3, when the temperature reached seventeen degrees below zero, a three-person crew appeared at the dark building to prepare the reactor for restart. The team consisted of John Byrnes, Richard Legg, and Richard McKinley, all soldiers in their twenties, who had volunteered for duty in the military’s nuclear program. At about 9 p.m. the workers were reconnecting control rods to the drive mechanism (these had been disconnected to move blocks at the top of the reactor). As they lifted the control rods out of the reactor, something went terribly wrong – a malfunction whose exact cause still remains unknown.
The reactor went critical, 20% of the fuel melted, and a huge amount of heat energy was released. Water shot upwards against the lid of the pressure vessel that contained the reactor, shooting the lid nine feet into the air until it slammed against the ceiling. Byrnes and McKinley were violently thrown sideways, and Legg was impaled in the ceiling of the room with a control rod thrust into his mid-section. His body “looked like a bundle of rags hanging down,” according to one rescue worker. The violent impact was the cause of death, but because the explosion blew radioactive metal shards into their bodies at a staggering 500 to 1000 rads per hour, they would have quickly succumbed to radiation poisoning had they survived the blast. The bodies could only be removed at very brief intervals by workers who raced in and out of the building to hold down exposures, and could only be buried in drums encased in lead shielded boxes.
The reactor was destroyed, and the site dismantled and buried nearby. The accident was not the worst in atomic history, but was the first to receive substantial attention – because the worker deaths had to be made public. It was impossible for the AEC to hide the deaths of young men being killed while working with this dangerous machine. The martyred workers became symbols for the dangers of the atom – even though many, many more were being imperiled by the use of this technology.
The AEC soon reported that a “low-level” plume of radioactive iodine-131 had escaped from the reactor into the air, and that soil samples had detected strontium-90. But in general, the AEC was very secretive with the press. Labor leader Walter Reuther, who was opposing construction of the Fermi nuclear plant near Detroit at that time, claimed a similar accident near a populated area would have harmed “thousands of people.” Michigan Health Commissioner Albert Heustis asked for “official factual data” about the accident, complaining that the only information available was in a few brief press releases. But no further information was forthcoming. Three decades later, an Energy Department analysis confirmed that I-131 from the 1961 explosion did actually spread to towns sixty miles downwind, and was 100 times above normal levels in nearby Atomic City, Nevada.
Fermi 1, 1966. Among the types of nuclear reactors that were the subject of 1950s experiments was the breeder reactor. In the early part of the decade, Detroit Edison President Walker Cisler became interested in the concept, and formed a consortium (including representatives from powerful companies like Ford and General Motors) to build a breeder reactor at Monroe, Michigan, about thirty miles south of Detroit. He raised millions for research, and with the blessing of the AEC, the project seemed inevitable.
In late 1955, the accident at the EBR-1 facility in Idaho raised the question of whether building a new breeder reactor was a sound idea. EBR was actually much smaller than the one Cisler envisioned, and less capable of harming people. Moreover, the EBR was in a remote part of Idaho as opposed to near Detroit, a city with 1.8 million people at the time and hundreds of thousands more in its suburbs. But in January 1956, Detroit Edison submitted its AEC application for the new Fermi reactor (named after the famed physicist Enrico Fermi), at an estimated cost of $40 million.
Even in the atomic-happy 1950s, not everybody was in favor of Fermi. US Senator Pat McNamara of Michigan went on record in the Senate:
First and foremost in my mind was the vastly important question of safety of the proposed reactor… Monroe, Mr. President, is only about thirty miles from Detroit, a city of over two million people and surrounded by populous suburbs. That is why safety is so important. Up to now, the AEC has appeared to run roughshod over the safety question, and there are many questions to be answered.
Other high-profile opponents included Walter Reuther, head of the United Auto Workers, who teamed up with the United Paper Workers of America and the United Electrical Workers to hold hearings about Fermi safety issues. Some witnesses raised serious concerns, but Detroit Edison and government officials tried to assure Reuther that the plant was safe. Reuther filed a suit against the AEC to halt construction; in 1960, an appeals court ruled in his favor, only to be reversed the next year by the Supreme Court. The Fermi construction went on.
In August 1963, with its construction cost now at $120 million (three times the original estimate), the Fermi breeder reactor “went critical” at very low power. But many problems ensued, and by 1966, it still had not produced any power used by Detroit-area citizens. In the fall of that year, operators believed they had finally fixed all the problems, and planned to raise the reactor gradually to its peak.
On October 5, 1966, this attempt had a disastrous outcome. Control rods were pulled too far out of the core, which promptly overheated. Alarms went off, fuel assemblies melted, and radiation filled the containment building. Nobody was really sure what had caused this problem, until months later when a crushed piece of zirconium metal that protected fuel rods was found at the bottom of the reactor. The piece had broken loose from its original position, clogging coolant nozzles that led to the meltdown.
The worst part of the Fermi 1 debacle was what almost happened. A huge amount of liquid sodium came perilously close to meeting air – a combination that would have caused a massive explosion and release of radiation. Only a tank of argon gas in the core stood between the sodium and air – essentially sparing Detroit a terrible catastrophe.
Operators decided to fix the damage at Fermi, a process that took a long time. Detroit Edison stubbornly clung to the belief that it could still be salvaged and put the enormous amount of $132 million into repairs. But even the gung-ho AEC had soured on Fermi by then. In 1972, it denied an application to restart the reactor, and Fermi 1 closed permanently. The AEC tried the breeder reactor concept at a new plant at Clinch River, near Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a project which was terminated in 1983 before construction was completed, with costs soaring billions past the original estimate.
Fermi backers had high hopes at its outset, but the optimism met with colossal failure. For the hundreds of millions spent over nearly two decades (far outstripping the original $40 million prediction), it operated less than thirty days total, and produced very little plutonium. More importantly, its 1966 meltdown came perilously close to a large-scale disaster that could have had a terrible impact on a major metropolitan center. The frightening near-miss for Detroit was also a warning for the entire US nuclear power program. But it was not to be the last meltdown or the meltdown most critical to American nuclear policy.
Three Mile Island is a strip of land in the Susquehanna River, in south central Pennsylvania. The small, wooded area was virtually unknown to anyone aside from local residents – until March 1979.
By that time, two nuclear reactors were operating on the island, to generate more electrical power for local residents. The twenty mile area around the plant included the historic town of Gettysburg, the popular tourist town of Hershey, the site of a large population of Amish people, and many large dairy farms. It also included the cities of Harrisburg, Lancaster, Lebanon, and York, and was home to about 663,500 persons.
In the mid-1960s, officials of Metropolitan Edison, a large Pennsylvania utility, selected the site as the future home of the t
wo nuclear reactors. The first unit opened in June 1974, and the second unit started in December 1978. The capacity of the Three Mile Island reactors (786 and 906 megawatts electrical) was far greater than the sixty-one megawatts at Fermi. Along with the two similar-sized reactors at Peach Bottom, just thirty-five miles to the southeast, south-central Pennsylvania had the densest concentration of nuclear reactors in the US.
On March 28, 1979, Unit 1 at Three Mile Island was changing fuel rods, and was not operating. But Unit 2 was operating at full capacity just three months after startup, and what happened that day changed American history.
At about four in the morning, for reasons still unknown, the pumps feeding water to the reactor core stopped running. The reactor shut down automatically, and the pressure in the nuclear part of the reactor rose, causing a relief valve to open to relieve this pressure. When the pressure declined, the valve should have closed – but it didn’t, and the signals visible to the operator on duty erroneously showed it to be closed.
Frederick Scheimann, the foreman of the crew working the reactor early that morning, recalled what happened:
“All of a sudden, I started hearing loud, thunderous noises, like a couple of freight trains,” he said later. He jumped down from the pipe, heard the words ‘Turbine trip, turbine trip’ over a loudspeaker, and rushed to the control room. The maintenance crew working on the polisher had accidentally choked off the flow in the main feedwater system, forcing Unit 2’s generating equipment – its turbine and reactor, which had been operating at 97% of full power – to shut down.
Mad Science: The Nuclear Power Experiment Page 19