An Infrastructure & Resilience Examination of Three-Mile Island
November 2022
Through the annals of infrastructure and energy design, the term “nuclear” has often been met with trepidation. Through the prism of the American academic and energistic scholar, nuclear fallouts are part and parcel of failures abroad, with the landmark Chernobyl and Fukushima-Daiichi disasters becoming the unequivocal, cautionary linchpins for how matters can exacerbate a continental issue. Preceding Chernobyl by five years, however, was the most catastrophic nuclear accident in modern history at the time, and it occurred on more familiar soil.
Umbrella organization General Public Utilities’ Three Mile Island-2 nuclear facility, located near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, has enshrined itself in the echelons of history as being a landmark occurrence for not only nuclear energy writ large, but for also effervescing how critical power generation infrastructure must be safeguarded and understood. In providing a thorough overview of the causes, vulnerabilities, risks, as well as the subsequent local, national and cultural response, the lessons from Three Mile’s disaster can be extrapolated to better safeguard nuclear infrastructure, which, nearly four decades later, is still in abundance.
On the morning of March 28, 1979, it didn’t seem fathomable that a seemingly minor temperature malfunctioning error could lead to what is officially known as a nuclear fallout. A fallout occurs when highly hazardous nuclear waste, which is radioactive and therefore extremely perilous to all organic life, is emitted into the atmosphere outside the directed confines of the plant. Yet this happened due to a course of events, which are slightly condensed for the sake of brevity, that were both as serendipitous as they were misguided.
At approximately 4AM, one of Three Mile Island’s (TMI) two cooling reactors failed to regulate its own temperature. Whether this was caused by some mechanical or electrical fault is a matter of conjecture – this critical knowledge gap will be addressed regressively. A water pumping mechanism, which transmits vaporized liquid to the steam generators, was unable to detect the appropriate temperature as mentioned, and was programmed to shut down upon mission failure.
Due to this perilous imbalance, the other “half” of the plant was burdened with a fatal error to its communication control loop. Nuclear manufacturers plan for this risk, and a human-operated relief valve is then calibrated to open to quite literally blow off steam and configure the pressure. That being said, this valve is meant to close-shut once it detects that pressure units have returned to functional, non-temperature afflicted levels. Yet, it didn’t close, and cooling water was “pouring out of the stuck open valve”. A series of technical mishaps ensued, which further conveys the shortcomings of analytic reduction: everything should not go wrong simply because of one fault. Eventually, with still no efficient temperature control and employees scrambling to fix the water-temperature treatment, the core of the plant overheated, and the fate all dread ensued: radioactive emissions wafted through the air, outside of the plant, and 700,000 gallons of radioactive water seeped underneath the plant to auxiliary buildings. An estimated 2 million people were exposed to radiation, and a full-scale evacuation was ordered by Pennsylvania Governor Richard Thornburgh of over 140,00 people from the area on the day, not knowing they would be unable to safely return for another three days. Journalists, television crews, policymakers, and academics all weighed in on the perplexing question: is nuclear a feasible option for our collective energy future?
In assessing the underlying hazards, risks and vulnerabilities, a massive discrepancy is present. It is very simple to chastise the staff at TMI for not reacting to the circumstances that lead to the fallout more rapidly, but being bereft of robust digital monitoring at the time makes for processes to be all the more manual. It is also important to comprehend the cultural landscape around nuclear energy, as this informs the perceived risks at the time.
Scholars and utilities alike championed the utilization of nuclear technologies as being an “environmentally friendly, clean and safe” method of electricity production in the 1970s; especially when juxtaposed with the relatively spurious, toxic emissions of coal that populations were becoming more cognizant of as part of the environment zeitgeist of the decade. It was believed that many of the hazard and risk mitigation measures taken to avoid cascading effects were prescient: The TMI plant is located over 16km from the closest town, which renders it as being fairly isolated – what could go wrong? Nothing would spill over into Harrisburg. It must be understood that, at the time, nuclear power was very much perceived to be a heavensent - and therefore perhaps an energy source whose faults were overlooked.
However, hazards to nuclear plants are in abundance - adversarial pipeline affronts, external environment HVAC failures, electricity outages; the sheer delicacy of harnessing nuclear energy renders it a very sensitive, and potentially dangerous, method of power generation.
Moreover, nuclear facilities are prime military targets for adversarial actors. I was astonished that this thinking was not more pertinent in the zeitgeist given that the U.S. had deployed nuclear weapons in-theater merely a couple decades prior. However, In a pre-Chernobyl world, the timorousness often associated with nuclear power was nonexistent at the time.
Lastly, the most significant risk in a pre-digitized world is simply human error. The TMI fallout occurred in part due to employee panic; akin to Con Edison engineers frantically load-shedding during the 1977 New York City Blackout two years prior. This is due to the fact that there was no simulation framework in place for what to do other than resort to the emergency valve. If that doesn’t work…there was no contingency other than to manually attempt to shut everything down. Coercing panicked employees to undertake a manual override when they are more focussed on saving their lives is not a pragmatic strategy. Therefore, a lack of emergency preparedness is arguably the biggest hazard - dwarfing the potency of nuclear emissions.
In diving into the relevant actors and their responses, another question emerged: Which government agency would be responsible for monitoring and responding to the TMI fallout? This is an exercise in understanding the actors involved. What ensued was a rather frantic smorgasbord of alphabet soup: The Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Health, the Department of Energy, President Carter’s Kemeny Commission, and relevant offices within the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania all hovered at the scene. In the hours and days following the fallout, specialists from these agencies were tasked with collecting samples across people, wildlife, and the environment to better understand the radiation that had been emitted.
But their efforts were not successful in tandem: different agencies had diagnosed the TMI disaster with different derivations, and “garbled communications reported by…a series of misunderstandings [along with] the media generated a debate”. In truth, the panic was not warranted: the readings taken by the actual agencies were not found to be anomalously high, yet a “political storm was raging based on confusion”. As a consequence of this incongruence, an early instance of what we now know as “misinformation” occurred; and this is indicative of a cascading effect: an aftershock of a critical infrastructure failure leading to an apex of puzzlement. There was a need for a central agency to step in and assure a unitary approach.
An agency rose to the occasion as an example of scrupulous disaster response. The TMI fallout led to the further edification of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). Prior to TMI, the NRC had been a sleepy, largely theoretical-focused agency that had been created in 1974 to provide basic infrastructure safeguarding. In the days following TMI, the NRC, spearheaded by John F. Ahearne, got to work in outlining NRC regulations that would become mandatory to follow, including:
Mandatory upgrades for plant design and equipment requirements,
The instatement of drills and responses at nuclear plants, tested several times a year,
The instatment of an “NRC Resident Inspector” Program, which ensures that a non-company affiliated inspector assures quality and safety standards at regular intervals,
Establishment of the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations (INPO), a “policing” mechanism that can distribute punitive measures on plant operators who fail stress tests. The INPO also established the National Academy for Nuclear Training. The Nuclear Energy Institute, writing about the INPO, points out that thanks to these measures, no slight semblance of a fallout has occurred in the U.S.
The Carter administration’s Kemeny Commission echoed these findings, also recommending that – in a bullet to the industry’s utility operators – a moratorium on nuclear licenses would be in place for three years, and should a nuclear plant be erected it must undergo scrupulous, NRC and INPO checks. This turned out to be a nuclear deterrent of the local kind, as astonishingly no nuclear power plants have been constructed in the U.S. since 1974 – prior to TMI.
The primary long-term cascading effects were on the logistics/transportation, water treatment and healthcare sectors respectively, though Pennsylvania’s relevant offices were assisted by the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Administration in their efforts.
The primary effect on the transportation sector was the retirement and handling of the entire TMI plant itself. The cleanup and nuclear waste operation took approximately 12 years from start to finish, and while there is no available numerical data present on what the effort entailed in terms of transportation inventory required, it is safe to say that it was costly: present day estimates rank the total cleanup bill as costing American taxpayers $973 million. The waste was transported from TMI to a specialized, delicate treatment facility in Iowa, and presumably not via air.
Similarly, the disposal of radioactive water took two years, with over 2.8 million gallons of water requiring delicate disposal, away from the privy of any members of the public. Conjecturally, thorough, military-grade wastewater treatment plants had to be responsible for purifying and responsibly discarding this safe, radiation-free water back into the atmosphere.
The undertaking for the healthcare sector was an eighteen year endeavor, with the Pennsylvania Dept of Health (PDH) maintaining a registry of 300,000 people within worrying proximity to TMI. While radiation levels were fortunately far below hysteria-induced estimations, surveying en masse still had to be conducted: Scores of studies investigating mortality rates, cancer diagnoses, radiation levels, congenital hypothyroidism were conducted by the PDH from 1981 until the early 1990s.
Miraculously, not a single one of these afflictions experienced elevated levels of concern despite the fact that radiation emitted from TMI for several days after the initial fallout. There was one tragic predicament that the PDH identified as being directly correlated to TMI - increased feelings of anxiety and psychological stress lasting up to six years in subjects.
With regards to recommendations and resilience enhancement measures that TMI could’ve taken, the options are multifaceted but also limited by technological constraints. For starters, biweekly nuclear fallout simulations should’ve taken place – and without warning. The employees would be cognizant that it is but a simulated exercise, but it would’ve enhanced communication efficiency between human actors, which in and of itself is vulnerability enhancement, especially given that human error as mentioned before is arguably the most potent threat in a nuclear facility.
In accordance with the simulation, the town of Harrisburg and all neighboring enclaves should participate in an annual evacuation drill. This would bolster civilian preparedness and preclude any notion of panic.
Moreover, while the NRC should be lionized for its response efforts in the aftermath of TMI that this paper lauds, there ought to have been design mechanisms that ensure the water, steam and pressure of the reactor is calibrated thoroughly. The NRC, as part of their inspection, was culpable for this not being the case. Why? This is due to the fact that there was no simulation of unfavorable steam cooling conditions. The risks were not only infinite, but unknown.
This paper also agrees with the World Nuclear Association’s recommendation that, to enhance vulnerability resilience, a “yes-no” playbook should be instated. Is X working? If not, move to Z. If yes, move to Y. If there was a centripetal framework for all employees to adhere to, miscommunication would have been near impossible.
In light of the tremendous, onerous burden the water, healthcare, and transportation sectors had to shoulder, the NRC, INPO, and state governments should collaborate on a unique, multipronged Nuclear Critical Infrastructure Solutions Board. This forum would convene often in non-crisis situations to optimize strategy surrounding when and how to leverage their industry’s resources to respond to fallouts henceforth. This way, the federal agencies, replete with their sclerotic bureaucracy, can also rely on local providers and expertise to unitarily provide solutions in hazardous times.
This paper champions the stringent adoptives declared by the NRC, because they give the NRC more authority. Utilities and private sector operators ought to cede to the NRC and prioritize information sharing with the NRC to pick up on nuances, takeaways, and rulings that the nuclear industry can benefit from writ large without compromising the understandable financial progress that the sector seeks to reap. In a certain manner, this can be construed as a public private partnership.
Shifting gears to contemporary times, the final recommendation to enhance the safety of nuclear energy is rather controversial: gradually, over the course of several years, have the wider American marketplace adopt other clean solutions, all of which have become formidably reliable. Wind, solar, battery storage, hydroelectric and biofuel based technologies offer largely sanitary, non-hazardous solutions, with a fraction of the risk involved. If a basic malfunction occurs at a solar grid array, the chances of it leading to a mass evacuation of over 100,000 people are minimal to nonexistent. Perhaps this is the ultimate didactic takeaway from TMI, followed by Chernobyl and Fukushima-Daiichi – the gradual retirement of nuclear facilities. It cannot feasibly be done quickly as this would be too disruptive a phenomenon for grid reliability to maintain a healthy status. However, alternative renewable technologies can and will easily assume the net generation burden that the removal of nuclear plants will give way to.
The TMI incident was a watershed moment in energy history; perhaps a portentous omen for what was to follow in Chernobyl years later. While it is miraculous that no casualties or severe radiation health consequences were recorded, TMI remains enshrined in the echelons of modern perceptions of nuclear technology. In assessing the hazards, vulnerabilities, responses, resiliency measures, discrepancies and recommendations, it is imperative that the lessons from Three Mile Island resonate henceforth in all energy endeavors.
Works Cited
“Backgrounder on the Three Mile Island Accident | Nrc.gov.” Accessed May 13, 2022. https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/3mile-isle.html.
“Governing Legislation | Nrc.gov.” Accessed May 13, 2022. https://www.nrc.gov/about-nrc/governing-laws.html.
“History | Nrc.gov.” Accessed May 13, 2022. https://www.nrc.gov/about-nrc/history.html.
History.com Editors. “Three Mile Island.” History.com. A&E Television Networks, December 18, 2009. https://www.history.com/topics/1970s/three-mile-island.
“Lessons from the 1979 Accident at Three Mile Island.” Nuclear Energy Institute, October 1, 2019. https://www.nei.org/resources/fact-sheets/lessons-from-1979-accident-at-three-mile-island.
“Radioactive fallout”. Accessed May 13, 2022. https://www.atomicarchive.com/science/effects/radioactive-fallout.html.
“Three Mile Island Accident.” Three Mile Island | TMI 2 |Three Mile Island Accident. - World Nuclear Association. Accessed May 13, 2022. https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/three-mile-island-accident.aspx.
“The TMI-2 Cleanup: Challenging and Successful.” ANS / Public Information / Resources / Special Topics / History of Three Mile Island / The TMI-2 Cleanup: Challenging and Successful. Accessed May 13, 2022. https://ans.org/pi/resources/sptopics/tmi/cleanup.php.