Its funny how Three Mile Island is one of the three big nuclear accidents people always think of, along with Fukushima and Chernobyl. But the Windscale fire in the UK had arguably more serious radioactive release than Three Mile Island. It wasn't a civilian power plant like the others, but it is interesting that its been so forgotten about
You probably know the one I am talking about, but there is one on the south coast that is looking very rickety and also has the French, who are just a whisker away across the channel, quite worried.
Always helps to rename a disaster site after the event. That way the next generation won't associate Sellafield with Windscale. Literally re-writing history. Some of us remember.
@@interestedlen8823 I know about it because my parents took me and my brother on a tour of Sellafield when we were kids while on a family holiday in the area, and we almost got kicked out after my mum was overheard telling us about how the plant had been renamed after a fire there. Really helped me remember that bit of info 😂
As a former commercial reactor operator a few things are missing. The relief valve indication was only an indication of power, not an indication of the actual valve position. At the time the secondary side auxiliary feed water system had undergone maintenance but had failed to be properly restored.
That's correct David. I was a young nuclear engineer with Babcock & Wilcox (Lynchburg VA) and assisted with the 1/3 core swap out for the TMI Unit #1 refuel (not unit #2). Learning the Stearns & Rogers refueling crane operation. I was at TMI in February 1979, completed my assignment, and was transferred to Crystal River FL. It was there that I got the phone call that TMI Unit #2 had suffered a serious SCRAM. The PORV (pilot operated relief valve) was made by Dresser Industries. The PORV did indeed stick open. Downstream thermocouples were reading hot. The rupture-disc on the drain tank blew out. Heck, my career outlook came to a crashing halt and the best I could do is find a different career.
David, such a neat job... The indicating of the valve though seems strange to me. Im an airline pilot, and we have many valves on the engine... Start valve, high and low pressure bleed valves, fuel, hydraulic valves, etc. That'd be like "your bleed manifold valve is showing engine power of 10k lbs thrust" when I simply need to know the valve is open and functioning properly!
@@BobbyGeneric145 servo valve repair technician hear: many valves have an LVDT on the spool which indicates spool position. This likely way your instruments use to indicate valve state.
I had a long career as a reliability engineer in the oil industry. Sometimes I helped with other industries. Every single project that I analyzed had problems, some minor some so serious that the project got cancelled or totally redesigned. I am talking multi million and billion dollar projects. Finding the problems was the easy part; sometimes ridiculously easy. I could give examples but would likely be sued. Some companies, typically the Norwegian ones, immediately welcomed the information and always resolved the issues. Some UK and US company managers however I can only describe as going berserk, but they all had to back down. It is easy to imagine from even the simpler explanation of what happened at Three Mile Island that the designers had not thought through the system fully. They could have made a design that was less likely to fail. You can't eliminate or predict all failures. But what you can do is put in systems that mitigate the impact of failures. It isn't difficult and it is way cheaper than leaving faults to cause problems. The most genius idea about safety was in the Cullen report on Piper Alpha. The Safety Case is a brilliant system. Sadly it is not adopted globally and at least while I was in the US it wasn't adopted there.
I think in regards to US/UK managers vs others there is a mindset difference. Simply from what I read online everyday it seems that US/UK manager type people expect to be in full control of everything they manage. To a point where they expect whatever they say not to be questioned. Now this is probably a biased sample group, since it's the kind of thing people would post online but that's all I got.
My experience of managers in the UK is they're too often under-talented and over-confident. They take bad news as a personal insult, because they've been trained to believe they can manage anything - no matter how complex - with a few abstract skills.
@@Skyfox94 Its just greed. Safety issues cost money, lots of money sometimes, and if some outsider finds safety issues with your facility/equipment/etc then you can't just brush it under a rug and hope it goes awhile while continuing to make those profits. You would think people wouldn't be so fully given to put profits over safety but the kind of people who rise up into the higher managerial positions of things like powerplants didn't get their by doing the right things, they did it by making the most money for the company.
I served in US Navy Nuclear power 1984-90. Our procedures and Instrumentation were updated directly by lessons learned at TMI. The incident report(s) were required reading.
So the ships are nuclear powered, that’s why they could stay outside for so long! Do the ships also have 18 month fuel cycles or do they have to return to shore within a year or so?
Not a hiccup in US nuclear power production since,of course those are old fashioned,soo BuScale plants much safer cheaper safer will be working worldwide.
I actually think the 3 Mile Island incident was a good thing. It was a very low danger accident and lots of valuable knowledge was gained by the industry like flaws in current designs & procedures to ultimately make sure less people die due to nuclear power... By having a partial meltdown.
Most certainly true from an engineering standpoint, from a adoption standpoint and from the standpoint of someone who is concerned about carbon in the atmosphere it was a disaster. Even PR disasters have real life consequences unfortunately.
@@M167A1 yes... But had they not found out the weaknesses in the system and a power station failed (with the safety standards of the time, quite likely) in a far more 'Chernobyl' fashion in the US... That would have likely had a far worse impact on public opinion. At least this way you can point to the worst nuclear power disaster in the west (the likes of Windscale likely killed a bunch of people, but that's a reprocessing plant) being one where nobody died or was seriously injured (at least not from radiation).
True although it lead to cancellation of many planned nuclear power plants that today could have been providing cheap electricity which would permit industry to better compete with China that is today building hundreds of nuclear power plants.
@@sergarlantyrell7847 *Even the Chernobyl disaster, unlike what the myth says, was not a huge one* in terms of the death toll. An IAEA-certified study has shown about 150 people dead over the span of 35 years: about 50 of them back in 1986 and the rest 100 over the years due to complications from the radiation. The Fukushima disaster, which was more than an order of magnitude deadlier, still had only a minor portion of the death toll related to radiation. Chemical catastrophes as in India in 1984 (outsourced from the USA) or many more others are incomparably more dangerous than anything ever happened with nuclear power plants.
That's like saying COVID happening is a good thing because it brought awareness to humans vulnerability to viruses. We could of just not had the media frenzy we could had it happen, listen to the experts and made corrective actions....but were humans...as we learned in 2020 as well.
My mother-in-law was a nuclear chemist at TMI at the time of the Unit #2 accident. I remember talking with her about TMI unit 1 vs. unit 2. She described unit 1 as an excellent reactor that performed exactly as it was designed, from the time it first was put into service all the way through its service life. Unit #2, not so much.
If you view the video carefully, you can even hear them mentioning not having had the "instruments" to get readings after the accident. What they meant, was they didn't have a "Post Accident Sampling System" that would allow plant operators to safely take highly radioactively contaminated water and air samples from OUTSIDE the containment at various elevations of the reactor AFTER a major accident (see also my previous post further up) to geauge what had happened inside the containment - exactly ONE of the many issues that made TMI such a disaster. After TMI, these PASS systems had to be designed and retrofitted into all GE reactors around the globe, as this system (among others) was not included in the GE powerplant designs. The lack of including such a PASS is mindboggling in hindsight, to put it mildly. BTW: BOTH TMI reactors did NOT have a Post Accident Sampling System befor the accident and also had to be retrofitted. A "PASS" today is one of many standard subsystems on ALL nuclear reactors. No one would even DREAM of building a reactor without the capability to take contamination samples from outside the containment, when an accident with potential breaches makes entering the containment impossible.
@@christheswiss390not to mention TMI released negligible levels of radiation and has so far killed 0 people from radiation yet people still act like it was a Chernobyl level disaster
I was 29 years old and my Company Belfab made the incore detection sensors that were inserted into the nuclear core . I welded the sensor ends and made large steam valves to control the pressure at a stable level . What happened was several incore temperature detectors failed to detect a temperature increase and the core started to overheat . My steam valve assemblies could not let off all the extra pressure and the core split open and blew out radiated steam . I remember that night QA and the lead Inspector stayed at Belfab all night to make sure all inspection signatures were written on the documents !
Another problem at TMI was, the powerplant did not have a "Post Accident Sampling System" that would allow plant operators to safely take highly radioactively contaminated water and air samples from OUTSIDE the containment at various elevations of the reactor AFTER a major accident (see also my previous posts further up) to gauge what had happened inside the containment - ONE of the many shortfalls and design oversights that made TMI such a disaster.
@@craigjensen6853 I understand what the abbreviation stands for, yet have no clue what the "logic" or the "deepr insight" of your post is suppposed to be. Perhaps more than three letters could be illuminating? How is a missing system C Y A?? Let's hope you don't write SOP manuals in a nuclear power plant for a living... 😉
I was in 8th grade English class when the principal came on the intercom saying there was an emergency and the busses were already outside ready to take us home. We were about 45 min or so from the TMI plant. It was about 2 weeks i think that my school district was closed.
We lived in southern York County at the time (I was in 7th grade) and we were sent home from school and there were no classes for a few days, if I remember correctly.
I was at Redland High School about 4 miles from TMI on the day of the accident. It was one of the reasons I became a medical physicist. Excellent video.
@@S3thc0n it was really scary at the time because no one knew what was going on other than a major accident had occurred. And the phone lines were jammed so it took me a long time to contact my parents to come get me. We ended up evacuating to Philadelphia. We didn’t know if we would ever be able to come back.
TMI 1 could still be operating today after a refurbishment and still go strong for another 40 years. However, nukers run best in multiples of 2 for best economic efficiency especially around downtime for refuelling. This would catch TMI 1 out. But even after two Level 7s and one Level 6 nukers are still the safest and most reliable form of low carbon power generation we have. With TMI 2 it was a major lesson around design (cooling circuits and control room layouts, and even regulation as the NRC got a major overhaul after this. Then President Carter had served in the Nuclear Navy so knew his stuff when the accident occurred. Not the first time Carter would bail out a nuker either (Canada was another).
On December 12, 1952, the NRX research reactor at Chalk River Laboratories suffered a partial meltdown. There was a power surge and as a result some fuel rods melted after rupturing.The crucial reactor's core was left unusable. It was later rebuilt and worked for decades before its retirement in the early 1990s. At the time, Carter was based in Schenectady, New York, and working closely with Adm. Hyman Rickover on the nuclear propulsion system for the Sea Wolf submarine. He was quickly ordered to Chalk River, joining other Canadian and American service personnel.
I've heard TMI described as a "spectacular non-event". Invaluable for the resulting improvements in safety, but the event itself has acquired a reputation far in excess of its actual danger.
@@CarFreeSegnitz I think that's certainly the case. At first blush the event seems like the movie coming true, only to end as a fizzle. A concerning fizzle, a fizzle you're ever thankful never actually sparked off, but the fears tapped into and heightened by the China Syndrome I think were very much fueling the reaction to poor news reporting.
I was in 1st Grade when the movie came out, then the incident happened. It seemed so uncanny that thought it was sabotage! Then I read all I could about what really happened, and I've been a proponent of nuclear power ever since.
I was too young at the time to remember the incident but grew up in a nearby part of Pennsylvania and got to hear a lot from those old enough at the time about what they recall. Of particular note was a bad PR move by a Met-Ed spokesman who angrily snapped at a reporter's question about a reported release of radiation. The report, which later turned out to be false, had come in after the press conference began so the spokesman had not been briefed, but his angry response at the question didn't do anything to help the public opinion of the operator and the incident.
Still live nearby. Toured it twice. My father in law worked at TMI for decades. My brother worked at TMI until the Covid shutdown, now he works from home but still for the same company, for other plants. Shame TMI got shut down. Terribly short sighted by our PA legislature, and also partially caused by subsidies to wind/solar causing them to be ridiculously cheap, natural gas being extremely inexpensive, and nuclear trying to fit in. Funny how not long after TMI shut down, suddenly the price of natural gas and LP fuel seems to be creeping up. Suddenly nuclear has become financially viable again. Unfortunately, these plants can't just "turn back on". Once they are off - they are off. Wont even be until after 2075 until the plant begins its final clean up and deconstruction.
You say "Once they are off - they are off" which gives me the impression that you can't start a nuclear reactor back up for a conceivable amount of time after it is shut down. It that right, and in that case, what stops us from fixing a shut down reactor so it can operate again?
@@jenspettersen7837 Putting a new core into it and recommissioning it is a huge undertaking, it is probably way cheaper to just build an entirely new plant with current safety measures than trying to retrofit an older one. It is like pulling the engine out of your car, taking it apart into thousands of pieces, putting those pieces into concrete cylinders, and then trying to take it all out of concrete and reassemble it because unlike your cars engine, that core is unique to that type of reactor and its not just a "hot swap".
KInda wrong because they had so much info arrriving on a slow printer that they got it late. Prioritising and understanding the most useful info is not all about quantity.
Yeah, great but safer is not safe enough. We will have nuclear core melt down or "China-Syndrom" and therefore some tenthousand or million square (miles or kilometers) of polluted soil only every 15 or 20 years instead of all ten or fiveteen? Gosh, that's a huge achievement! Until today there are areas in Bavaria, Germany, where you can't eat natural deer, pork or mushrooms. It is still to high with Caesium from Tschernobyl.
@@jakelong4271 maybe. But that doesn’t mean we should invest into coal either. I say: use nuclear for reasearch and space only and renewables for the rest.
@@joes3100 look it up yourself, WOW. Why would you ask such an embarrassing question? We are talking 95+percent less deaths than coal AND oil. All you had to do was Google "coal related deaths vs nuclear related deaths". It's very telling about your thought process that yeu took the time to post an embarrassing "says who" but yeu didn't spend that few seconds fact checking him. I used to laugh at people like you, but now it's just sad.
Fantastic video! These mini-documentaries on engineering accidents are invaluable, as they help ensure future safety by highlighting in clear detail what went wrong. Please make more videos similar to this one; bridges, power plants, the Challenger, etc.
That's how people work. The industry learned and improved a great deal from this incident, probably preventing several other incidents from happening elsewhere. We should not fear learning and improvement, but stagnation and non-development.
And 12 years & one billion US$ costs of cleaning operation and whole site + 100 tonnes of damaged fuel rods which needs permanent monitoring for many centuries was even better. Luckily, nuclear power is too cheap to meter.
My dad worked for ConEd for 40+ years and started as a reactor engineer at Indian Point. He always described Three Mile Island as the worst case scenario for a reactor "meltdown" in the US.
Indian Point burped some radioactive steam in February, 2000 and the incident netted me a good deal on an '88 Fiero Formula. I bought the car from the power plant parking lot the following spring with snow tires still on it. I suspect the guy's wife wouldn't let him bring it home.
@@42luke93 IIRC, their certification was up for renewal and there was political pressure to not recertify, especially after Fukushima. It provided 25% of New York City's electricity, which will be replaced by natural gas. This will definitely not have any negative impact on our carbon production.
I grew up only a few miles away but I wasn't born until a few years after the accident. Seeing the island and the steam climb into the air on a calm day was a normal thing growing up. As a kid in the 90's we went to TMI on a field trip and I got to stand inside the base of one of Unit 2's empty cooling towers. Pretty amazing site to see as a kid.
I never even look to see what the title is. If it’s a curious droid video I click on it. I think this and technology connections are the only two channels like that. You’ve been on fire this year. Your proximity fuse video was a masterpiece, As with so many more this year that I could literally name in order each buy each. I’ve watched all of them so many times! Keep it up and here’s to a wonderful new year of content at least!
I grew up in Lancaster, PA which is about 30 miles away from TMI. On the first day of the accident it was one of the first nice weather days of the spring but we were not allowed to play outside due to the gas releases. On the night of the accident my parents had our bags packed and we were ready to evacuate. I took care of a neighbor's dog when they did decide to temporarily evacuate.
Yup I remember we were at the movie theater to see China Syndrome when this news story came out . Literally the audience got up and left including US No way this was not planned !
I know part of the public fear was because a movie about a nuclear meltdown was released a couple weeks before this incident. I decided to watch the movie. It’s CRAZY how the initial failure and subsequent improper response is so similar…..
TMI resulted in zero deaths, but is often called the "worst nuclear accident in US history". Why is that? The SL-1 accident, for example, killed three people directly, yet a lot of people have never heard of it, and there have been other nasty accidents as well. TMI was very public and very scary (I was living not too far from it at the time as a child and it was BIG news), but in the end turned out to be little more than an expensive mess.
Because generally people dont call it "the worst nuclear accident in US history", generally they call it "the worst commercial nuclear accident in US history", and when people do make the mistake of calling it "the worst nuclear accident in US history" its either the worst they know of or a simplification that results in them being wrong.
Yeah I walked out my front door and randomly shot my rifle with a 50-round magazine in random directions. Not a single person was hurt. I can’t understand why everybody is making such a fuss about it.
We should be thankful Three Mile Island was built with a strong containment building, and the reactor was a pressurized water reactor that did not have a positive void coefficient and the "tip effect" the reactor that exploded at Chernobyl had.
The void coefficient is not relevant here. It's the difference between "I crashed my car into a tree" and "I parked my car in a swamp and it sank". The engine wasn't running when it sank so no characteristics affect the outcome.
The RBMK style reactors like the ones in Chernobyl would never have been permitted in the West... The design violated multiple safety regulations, even the engineers and scientists who built them had private reservations about the design, but feared what would happen to them if they spoke out.
Born a year before Chernobyl. To the day. About 30 miles away. Thankfully we were fairly “well off”, in as much as you can be in the Soviet Ukraine. So we were able to get uncontaminated food. And then escape in 1991. A month before my mom died of cancer. Was it Chernobyl? Or the crummy “free healthcare?” Will never know.
Sorry to hear about your Mom. Also of interest in that area was the "woodpecker" antenna. Maybe another video for CD? I imagine a lot of people were subjected to unhealthy amounts of RF energy while it was up and running (powered by Chernobyl).
the globe did NOT need nuclear there was a much better option but GREED kept it from geting built. MOLTEN SALT REACTOR TECH - VERY VERY SAFE and effective but RUINED, DECOMMISSIONED and HIDDEN by Corrupt US politicians PAID OFF BY Nuclear power backers who could make a quick buck on nuclear ! So now you have these DEADLY TIME-BOMBS all over the globe just waiting to spew lethal radioactivity into Earth environment These criminals will NEVER tell the public in your former country or USA what real danger they are exposed to .
Ukrainian on my grandmother's side although they escaped wonderful socialism in the late 30s. I tried looking around in the 90s but could find no one who even remembered our family. Apparently none survived the Communists, the fascists and then the Communists again.
@@MsSaudm I would suggest you go do some additional reading, wherever you've gotten your information about reactor types and their various advantages and disadvantages is incorrect.
I was young then and I remember a guy coming to the house and was talking to my mom and dad about stocks. They sort of planned on buying consumer energy stock which paid 7.55 while GPU as recall paid 8.25%. They went with GPU. Not long after the 3 mile island incident occurred. The dividends top and I remember the stock they paid $7,000 for went as low as $17. The stock will be split between the kids at TOD, but as of about 10-15 years ago it started doing very well and it has split a few times, although the utility company has been bought and sold several times and dividends every month are back.
Yep. It is also astonishing how ridiculous the ignorance is involving nuclear power. During the whole "debate" in Harrisburg, it is absolutely absurd to me how many people commented how "it should be shut down, because of all of the radioactive smoke" and other stupid thoughts. Even locals here had no idea that was pure water vapor coming from the cooling towers, not radioactive, and not even smoke. Such dumbness forming energy policy and influencing energy policy.
After the Three Mile Island (TMI) incident, all the reactors of the same type (world-wide) had to be retrofitted with technical systems that would prevent the accident from happening again. At that time, I was part of the team that built the largest and most modern nuclear powerplant in Switzerland and I was tasked with designing and building two systems that would ensure the same TMI accident could not happen there as well. The final operating approval for the entire plant was (among other things) contingent upon these two systems being built, tested and then licensed by the regulator. One of the systems was called the "Post Accident Sampling System" (or PASS) and it would allow to safely take highly radioactively contaminated water and air samples from outside the containment at various elevations of the reactor after a potential accident. As a result of the TMI accident, today EVERY nuclear powerplant still operating has a Post Accident Sampling System, as well as a few others that were invented after the TMI accident.
@@DrMackSplackem Like you said: "they WERE marching to a different tune". As far as I know, the russians also don't build the imbecilic graphite bloc reactors anymore, as they learned the hard way in Tshernobyl how this technology can destroy itself and thousands of lives. These days, I'm pretty sure even russian reactors must have a PASS - in their own interest. It's the only way to gauge radiation levels from outside the containment after a breach of the reactor and thus the only way to understand from outside a) what happened, b) WHERE did radiation accumulate or originate and c) allow investigating possible remedies. It's actually a bit mind-blowing how TMI and other reactors were even ALLOWED to be built WITHOUT such systems in the first place!
Not criticizing your work then, but now you could be regarded as a single point of failure for those two safety sysems. I worked on oil rig safety systems where the teams for the control system were always separate from the safety systems to ensure that the same design biases were not included in the two systems.
@@christheswiss390 What's even more mind-boggling is that they only learned this lesson by performing an experiment that would make the weakness in the design turn deadly. I guess in some places, life is just that cheap.
At time of 3 mile I was Enginner in Royal Canadian Air Force. As member of Refrigeration Electro- mechanical section on a heavy Radar station of NORAD we followed 3 mile islands closely. Heavy radar deals with radiation and similar cooling & back up systems. Right away from diagrams shown we determined 2 thing A lack of training & emergence practice drills. Not knowing where gauges are and use of go/no go should have had a few responsible above the operators hung publicly by the scrotum! Than you all these yrs later for confirming what usas young airmen deducted long ago! PER ADRA AD ASTRA - through adversity to the stars
The young airmen did not deduce anything. The airmen followed a checklist developed by government contractor's Engineers, then passed down through their chain of command.
I think the amazing thing that the average person didn't know that the other Unit was still operating for decades after the accident. I mistakenly (until very recently even) thought that 3-mile island area was a radioactive no-man's land. Additionally, there were 0 deaths as a result of the accident....just a very very expensive clean up on isle 2.
Just an aside. I do not believe one can accurately conclude no deaths resulted due to the TMI #2 failure. Only that no immediate deaths resulted. Since it can take years, perhaps decades, for premature death due to cancer or other ailments to manifest themselves as a result of radiation poisoning, especially if exposure is during pregnancy or very early childhood, it's pretty hard to pin down what causes what, but I continue to believe it's not correct to dismiss any concern just because nobody died right away. As I understand it, there was a marked increase in thyroid cancers of the residents in the communities downwind from TMI in the years following 1979.
@@d_shepperd Maybe so, but there are also plenty of cancers brought on by working in or as the result of interaction with the fossil fuel industry. It makes more sense to examine why there were fewer deaths than in chernobyl and fukishima.
There used to be a outdoor concert venue located in the river below Three Mile Island. We were setting up an Atlanta Rhythm Section show when we were told we needed to leave on that day 42 years ago.!
So many people don't understand just how particularly and uniquely more destructive Chernobyl was compared to the other nuclear accidents. It was a completely different system and failed in a way reactors now, and most at the time, could not.
Thank you for telling the *truth* which is that 3 Mile Island didn't do any lasting major harms and that nuclear power is safer than all other forms of electric generation, even wind. Okay, you missed that last part, but you at least gave us facts instead of fear. That's why I stay subbed to this channel!
The fukushima "nuclear" disaster was overblown by media... nobody died because of the nuclear power plant (only after the government decided it would be a good idea to evacuate hospitals because of the "nuclear threat") and then there was a bunch of water pumped into the pacific, but that hardly raises radioactivity above background levels... and that was after the plant has literally been hit by a very strong earthquake and a freaking tsunami...
well it was a big disaster but you are right about radioactivity - dispersing is the best policy, but it makes people understandably nervous for a short while it was my lab chore to pump water around in the nuclear waste tanks (a mixture of isotopes, you get that with several labs doing various experiments) until the count was at the legally allowed near-background value in all of them. Obviously that would have happened just the same if we'd just dumped the stuff as-is, apart from any transient concentration effects near the release point of course
And because nuclear power was seen as so "dangerous", the modern world just keeps getting dirtier and closer to the brink. Thank you eighties public! Truly the best years...
Not really, it being more expensive than the alternative, having not many people in the industry to build them and the amount of time it takes to build them even without protest and let alone the dismantling process there is one near me that was decommissioned in the 90s and is still being dismantled, anything else can come down in weeks to months, maybe even a couple of years if something goes wrong, but not half a century. These are the real reasons rather than the public.
Nuclear is not so clean when you take in the complete chain cradle to cradle. And now that the plants are mostly over 30 or even 40 years old, they show the symptoms of that age. Currently there are 1/3 of the reactors sown in France. And that in winter, where many people in France use electrical heating. This is resulting in crazy high prices for electricity, up to 400€ per MWh. As France is drawing electricity form other European countries more electricity has to be produced by those and the prices there increase as well. This at a time where Russia and other countries play a game of showing their muscles to each other, leading Russia to increase gas prices. Thus gas power plants, which have to run, because nuclear power is down, increase the prices for electricity even more. Nuclear power is not cheap. It never was. And as you were mentioning "dangerous". Tschernobyl, Fukushima and other "near miss" accidents show, that the technology is not as safe as it needs to be, especially in densely populated regions of the world. By the way, all known failures were based on human error. Be it stupid planning or or wrong decisions during operation. On the other hand, in Sweden a core meltdown could just be prevented by persons ignoring the text books. There, s cooling generator would not start and the operators went down, trying to start it manually, which finally worked, only minutes before the catastrophe would have taken its course.
Nuclear is increasingly popular among the general public and especially among a hardcore band of enthusiasts. The reality is that nuclear is simply to slow, cumbersome and expensive for commercial operators to bother with. That is the plain and naked truth on why nuclear power plants are not being build in any significant numbers. If it really was so great, a few hippies wouldn't be able to stop it.
@@dschledermann It's not "few hippies" that stopped it, but giant media corporations that earn more money with sensationalist fearmongering than with rational and calm description of the subject. Look at Zwentendorf - fully prepared to start electricity production, but media "successfully" turned public opinion against it and the result was massive financial (and environmental) loss. Or Germany and their policy of shutting down perfectly fine and working nuclear power plants instead of closing coal power plants (result of Fukushima).
That brought back memories. I wasn't even old enough to attend school yet, and I remember when that happened. I grew-up about 60 miles away from 3 Mile Island.
Rather than a back-up to so-called "renewables", nuclear should be our primary choice for baseload generation. All we have to do in order to get it right is to follow France's example, as far as policy goes, and seriously develop safe and cheap nuclear options, such as, e.g. LFTR. Even though it would be nice to have, thermonuclear fusion is still way far down our future. As for windmills and PV panels, if we look closely at their external costs and remove various form of subsidies, they no longer look so appealing, while they are always unreliable and a burden to electricity grid planning and construction.
@@Tolpuddle581 Modern nuclear plant design might be more profitable. However natural gas has been extremely cheap the last few years up until the last few months. Compared to nuclear, it's much more volatile, however it can be cheaper. New natural gas plants are fairly clean but in comparison to nuclear it's dirty.
@@sickregret Never mind the fact the actual volume of the waste is next to non-existent compared to the waste from mother other power sources and some of it may even be useful resources in the future.
@@theoldscout3478 Fourth and Fifth Generation reactors slow burn the waste into nothing. Research the start-up Terra Power, there's speculations why Bill Gates is buying so much farm land to create those Nuclear Power Plants. If you don't like their zero pollution design, we can always use depleted uranium to make 30mm ammo for some hungry-hungry A-10 Warthogs .
In college, because of my background in computer science and physics, I had the opportunity to intern at Argonne National Laboratory, where I was assigned to Dunn and Schleger's TMI investigation project. The objective of the project was to determine why the TMI accident released far less radiation than expected. I wrote data analysis software and had a couple of opportunities to run the experiment. It was a great experience. Needless to say, the scientists studying the accident continued to be quite comfortable with nuclear power after the accident, unlike the panicky reaction by the media and public.
What about talking more about more advanced fission reactors? We got stuck on light water reactors and never really got fission right. Fusion is a whole different story, but I think the fission story is the worst told of them and so needs more Cherenkov light shown on it.
You’re absolutely right. We’ll need safe clean reliable nuclear power in the future. They should have already been built next to the coal fired plants and replaced them. Thanks for the honest report about what actually happened and the zero health risk to the public. Can you do another about Fukushima?
There wouldn't even be an anti-nuclear energy movement if the media had just told the truth. No one died from Fukushima radiation either, despite three complete meltdowns.
We just had a hell of a fire here in Colorado, talk about relative sponsorship! We're all stoked for more content Droid Boi. Thank you for your high quality stuff
Great video! If only the media was as thorough and fact-oriented as this channel during those days, maybe we wouldn't have seen the start of the nonsensical and baseless fearmongering we see today regarding nuclear power. It's extra moronic nowadays as we move away from pressurized water cooled reactors and towards even safer and more efficient ones, such as the Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactor and other generation 4 designs.
Unfortunately, the media is not about truth. They are about ratings. Ratings are money and truth walks, to coin part of a phrase. The more the fear, the better the ratings, even if they manufactured it! In terms of the media, Samuel Clemens was a wise man.
The fearmongering comes straight from the fossil fuel industry using faux-Green entities like the Sierra Club to inhibit and disrupt their only real competitor; nuclear power.
If the media reminded ratepayers they’ll be on the hook for any nuclear accidents - remediating TMI cost them a billion dollars back in the ‘80s - not to mention billions in decommissioning costs per-plant, they’d probably be even more opposed to nuclear power.
Fission power is our best option until someone has a break thru with a tokamak design. We have enough experience and case study to build reliable safe nuclear plants. I for one will not embrace electric cars as being more “green” until we are using clean source of electric generation.
Fusion is a fraud. We need to construct newer designs of fission rather wasting money on fusion given the insurmountable engineering problems with fusion. A fusion reactor produces a sleet of high speed neutrons that will eventually make the entire fusion reactor and building radioactive. How about that for clean energy? Nothing can solve that basic problem of fusion reactors. The new and improved fission reactors work better than fusion reactors ever will. Leave fusion in the stars, and collect the energy from that. Along with fission, and more conservation, we could stop our energy generation from producing green house gases. We will also have to deal with long distance transport as well as agricult.
Magnetically confined fusion is unlikely to be a paying proposition in the foreseeable future. ICF is probably even farther out. as for electric cars, even with green generation you still need to worry about disposal. Having said that, anything is better than the dirty diesel that the US is using for it's trucks and heavy equipment.
@@aristoclesathenaioi4939 I agree that we need to develop fission reactors based on Thorium (it is abundant and not easily reprocessed into nuclear weapons). But, if there is even a theoretical chance that fusion will work, we need to develop the technology. It is environmentally friendly and does not produce nuclear waste (tritium is slightly radioactive, but not nearly as radioactive as fission reactor waste)
I'd argue the ban on Plutonium or Mox fuel which can be reprocessed in breeder reactors (like the rest of the entire world does) - causing the nuclear waste handling and storage issues power plants now have did more than anything to taint the nuclear power industry. We could drastically reduce if not virtually remove that problem switching to Mox. In fact, the largest power station in the US (Palo Verde, in AZ with 3 cores) was designed for Mox - but had its fuel replaced with Uranium after the ban. Thanks to environmentalists - the US is the only country with nuclear waste 'problem'. So, thanks for that.
@Charles Martell Oh they're great! Huge fan of their potential! But the MOX fuel already has reprocessing plants and 3 reactor cores near me ready to take it. There's also pebble-bucket battery reactors (so insanely cool it hurts). The fuel (whatever you use) is placed in a bucket with a heat exchange to convert the heat to electricity - the cool part - the fuel is sealed in near-unbreakable ceramic beads / pellets. The fuel can't 'go wild' because the spacing is determined by the geometry of the pellets. If the core was 'breached' the pellets scatter and the reaction stops. In a MOX configuration - the pellets can be reprocessed 'as is' (last I checked, I'd need to double-check / feel free to fact-check me) so the whole system is about as closed and safe as you can get. A small bucket will power an entire town without needing a massive infrastructure common to Nuclear Plants, and can essentially be buried underground in a secure location (like under concrete). You don't have to get 'too crazy' because again - if the 'marbles' scatter - no reaction - and you can't get to the fuel. China was making some last I 'heard' but I haven't deep-dived into them in over a decade. The science is pretty classic tho and the basic design (heat to energy) has been used on many space probes - as well as the SNAP-27 radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) that was supposed to fuel instruments left on the lunar surface for Apollo 13. Since the LEM returned to Earth - one more problem (of many) that had to be considered was splashing the RTG into the ocean since it would (and did) survive re-entry but they wanted the Plutonium 'away and safe' (at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean).
AFAIK the nuclear fuel processing in the US is highly regulated due to concerns of "proliferation" which is fancy speak for nuclear weapon technology, ironically russia is currently in the lead with MOX fuels and a number of other fancy designs when it comes to this stuff. It really is a shame that in the US nuclear fuel is so heavily regulated for no real reason.
This is probably one of the best descriptions of the accident (in layman's terms), I've seen, ever. As an aside - do you have links to the various footage, and reports that were shown in the video? I keep a folder of TMI-related stuff. Thanks!
I live in the town in the shadow of three mile island - Goldsboro PA. It’s always interesting hearing about my little corner of the world as a result of this one incident
The sheer lack of knowledge of what was happening to this reactor during the incident by those operating it and in the aftermath by those who designed and built it was what created the impression of danger and spread real fear. The movie encapsulates that scenario were there is an effort to hide from the public near misses at a plant before an almost meltdown event damages one of the reactors. That the film came out first demonstrated that similar near misses were occurring in the nuclear industry & being covered up as the price of business rather than being addressed. Although Chernobyl was on a different scale, some of the fundamental issues, like poorly written manuals, lack of operator & designer reporting or understanding of the physics in extreme circumstances and the planning of additional redundancy in safety measures was common to 3-mile island & Chernobyl. The latter nearly destroyed a continent & did change the world. Nuclear power is complex & dangerous, the risks can be mitigated, but the methods used should always be open to heavy scrutiny. That was the point of the China Syndrome film were a journalist and a plant middle manager are being prevented from whistle-blowing on a plant that’s heading to disaster.
In the early 90's I started working with a team in college who were doing nuclear power plant fault monitoring with neural networks. It was just barely possible with the computers we had back then, and we had to spend a lot of time optimizing the code. We also worked with other industrial plant monitoring for quality prediction, and saved the companies a lot of money by modeling their plants so they could figure out how to tune them for differing weather conditions, etc. If the plant produced bad product, it'd have to be recycled, which was very expensive. So my personal carbon footprint is OK, having helped save quite a lot of energy and other resources, starting back then. I'm still interested in the Wren thing though, seems like they have good plans.
Im curious what do you mean by bad product? Its a powerplant then its just producing electricity right? And how does recycling it end up in being very expensive ?
@@connorjohnson4402 Working to avoid bad product was from the other, non-power plant business we consulted for. Manufacturers of consumer and industrial products. They'd have a big plant that produced a large amount of stuff all in one production run (which could take an hour or longer), and need to adjust how that ran to cope with the weather and ingredient properties. Adjust things incorrectly and they could end up with a batch they couldn't use. We came up with a way to make models (AI-based simulations) that let them play with the parameters and find ways to handle the changing conditions, and thereby stop throwing out an hour's production several times a week.
I worked in operations at Ontario Hydro just after this happened. ALL the valves of consequence and especially those inside containment all had limit switches that independently verified a valves position. If a relief valve had not seated correctly, especially one as important as this one, the operators would have seen the indication almost immediately. As it was explained to me, you have a sensor that indicates a PHT over pressure and turns on a light on the panel. Independent of this, the PRV which is largely regulated by a large spring (in those days) is supposed to actuate at the same pressure, but the light and the valve are NOT connected. Now, for a small less critical system where you want to save a few bucks on instrumentation sure, but for a nuclear reactor. No way. It is the same kind of mistake like Fukushima where the safety systems were on the ground floor and sure to be flooded how does this happen? In addition, we were told that the operators at TMI were trained to run the panel and other folks work in the plant on inspection routines and such like. Not so where I worked, you had to work in the 'field' for at a minimum 6 years before even being allowed to be trained for the panel and then the exam was pretty tough. You never got any feedback only pass or fail and you were only allowed to write it 3 times in your life. I am not a fan of PWR reactors. Something about loading a reactor vessel up with slightly enriched fuel and then poisoning it to keep the reaction under control is unsettling. I really liked the system we have/had in Ontario where we fueled on power and had some reactors running at 96% availability at that time. In 1986 a pressure tube split on Pickering #2 and caused a serious loss of coolant, but everything was contained by the safety systems, the reactor was retubed (as were many others) and put back in service. I am pretty proud of that. This was all run by the government and while it cost more to set up, I think it has paid benefits for many years in higher operational availability and safe operation. I am not comfortable allowing for profit companies run nuclear power stations. I think the risk is too high. I do not know who pushed who in Japan, but one does hear that the companies in Japan have a lot of influence. However, having the safety systems where they were located in a tsunami region is criminal, but as JFK once said “victory has a 100 fathers and defeat is an orphan..” Any technology, nuclear, air travel, rail, sea travel and so on can kill many people when not operated in faith with the principles of physics. Such principles often run counter to someone's financial plan. Such unscientific influence can never be responsibly allowed in such situations where failure of a system or of the people operating it leads to catastrophe. If regulations are 'job killers' they are there because unregulated systems are 'people killers'. I guess on voting day you get to choose.
Paulk, what a simple but clear explanation of what happened to 3-mile island with useful contrasts to Fucashima and Chernobyl. Great video with amazing photos and vid included.
No one died from Fukushima radiation. Chernobyl released about 10 time the radiation than Fukushima did, and there were less than 50 acute radiation deaths.
Really enjoyed the video fantastic explanation. I was no more than 2 weeks old when this happened less than 20 miles away from the plant. Every Time March came around they would talk about this on the news the anniversary it actually caused me to be very curious about nuclear energy and anything nuclear related. I'm so glad that it didn't explode or I wouldn't be here. 💥🤯
Man, @CuriousDroid, why do we keep JUST missing each other on projects? I flew a drone over HAARP like a week after your video on it, and I shot a TON of drone video of TMI not long ago but lacked the narrative ability to really make something of it. Please let me know if any missile silos or weird abandoned Cold War places are on your To-Do list, so we can compare notes! :D
TMI survived by accident. Many of the things talked about above survived rupture and explosion just by dumb luck. The casings that had been designed to handle X amount of pressure before rupturing held 2X that pressure, way beyond their designed max. There are many other things that without luck would have never held that did, we can just thank our lucky stars for because it wasn't planning or policy that we ended up with what we did instead of a Chernobyl sized accident. What TMI made us realize that there is a big problem with taking extreme risks, and it is that no matter how well you engineer and plan to try to keep things safe, the nature of accidents is always something beyond the problems envisioned. So, the nature of accidents means if you have risk the size of Chernobyl than an accident like Chernobyl will be the level of disaster that you are playing with since it is in the possibility of outcomes. All nuclear power plants have this level of risk as a possibility. Compare that to the risk of a disastrous accident happening at a natural gas power plant. Let's say that a high pressure leak happens in the plant and the roofed portion of the plant is filled with natural gas and air and it is ignited by someone turning on a light switch. The entire facility will blow up, there will be fire, machinery broken, the shockwave will destroy buildings and windows a mile away within a mile of the plant will break. The emergency crew responds and turns off the gas to the plant. A fire fighting team puts out the fires. A few weeks later a demolition team moves in and removes the debris. The utility company pays for the houses around the plant for their broken windows. A year after that the utility begins building a new powerplant on the site. With nuclear disaster there will be hundreds of square miles of unusable land, all houses and cities will need to be evacuated, there will be significantly increased rates of cancer to the people in those miles exposed. Get the picture. Nuclear isn't safe. Solar, wind, hydro, geothermal and more are safe. We have to work hard to make these forms of distributed energy much more prevalent and use batteries to match energy production with energy use.
Oh, it was most definitely an incident, alright. Though, not as grave as the panic would call for, but still. Edit: And yes, I wholeheartedly agree that it's a shame
@@23merlino All of the "nuclear waste" that's ever been generated in the entire 60+ year history of the nuclear power industry in the United States wouldn't fill a quarter of a high school regulation football field. Comparing the amount of biproduct generated to the amount of power produced, there's nothing that comes close to nuclear fission's level of efficiency save nuclear fusion (fusion produces about twice as much power-per-ton as fission.)
One could sanely argue that not having a “walk away safe” reactor with a “walk away safe” waste product means that the system’s design is a decidedly poor one.
You know who also knew that? The guys that created the PWR and BWR designs. Their creators, before the first reactor was even built, raised the issues of water as a moderator. They knew a highly pressurized water was dangerous and inefficient solution... but they needed to start somewhere. The navy was the one footing most of the bill and for the navy a water cooled small reactor for a submarine was enough for them, and walkaway safe at that scale. To someone like Weinberg, the PWR was nothing but a stopgap, a useful one, but since they had working breeder reactors before the first PWR was even built, it was nothing but a matter of time before proper liquid fuel breeder designs would supplant the wasteful solid fuel designs... but politics ran their course and here we are, left with technological remnants, 50 years past their end of life. Those that questioned the safety of light water reactors were silenced back then, now those that are trying to steer this energy back where it should have been are the ones getting attacked. Our nuclear founders would be horrified to see us still relying on PWRs, and be just as horrified to see that despite being so old they are still the best energy source we have.
Really excellent presentation. You're un-biased from a position of empiricism, something the BBC needs to learn. To them any crackpot opinion is equally viable.
In reality it's the most expensive type of energy, doesn't have many people who can build it, most countries aren't allowed them and takes ages to be built even without protest or and dismantling is embarrassingly slow.
@@Alex-cw3rz no, it is ARTIFICIALLY expensive, with many restrictions introduced for the expressed purpose of discouraging it. Even then its more profitable than any other green solution which are propped up by artificial demand from political retards.
@@samsonsoturian6013 go on name one of these artifical regulations that can make it 3 times more expensive... How can it be more profitable when it's more expensive 🤦♂️ who's using the family braincell today then? I truly hope you liked your own comment and their isn't someone else so brain dead to like your contradictory comment.
@@SchardtCinematic nice! Worked out if FedEx Lewisberry for the last 2 months. I'm a truck driver. I'd see the sunrise over TMI and the airport from the Turnpike bridge every morning.
@@94nolo Oh that's cool. Despite the high prices. I still like taking the Turnpike out to Breezewood. Then head out on the back roads to Somerset to visit family. Flight 93 that crashed on 9/11 in Shanksville had me worried that the terrorists were heading to TMI to crash into it to cause a meltdown. Then later learned they were heading to the White House. After that for a few months Harrisburg were flying planes into the airport differently and you could here them right over my home.
I've watched China Syndrome a few years ago, because I was curious how anti-nuclear it is really. I was surprised that it isn't at all. But it isn't really pro-nuclear either. Somehow it manages to objectively show both sides of the argument. And the story isn't really about the reactor, it's a relatively standard plot, and could have worked with any industry. The nuclear reactor was just a relevant, exciting, and a bit mysterious, setting for the movie. It only became the center of the movie after TMI happened.
@@danadurnfordkevinblanchdebunk Yes, they grossly overstated the potential damage, but it didn't feel like a deliberate lie. It's basic film making technique to raise the stakes as high as possible. That's why saving the world is so common in movies. They exaggerate all dangers, not just nuclear energy's. Also many reputable scientists said similar things, unfortunately. Compared to a real anti-nuclear works this is very mild. If they really wanted to scare the shit out of people, the protagonist would have failed in the first act, and the rest of the movie would have been about the aftermath of the disaster.
If the media would have educated instead of propagandized radiation/nuclear the last 50+ years, there wouldn't even be an anti-nuclear energy movement today.
@@danadurnfordkevinblanchdebunk Maybe if it were only the mild TMI incident. However the subsequent Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters made even pro-nuke people not want them in their neighborhood.
I remember watching The China Syndrome, it's a great movie, love me some Jack Lemon. Days after the movie as you noted, a very similar event actually happened at TMI. I suspect time travel may be involved. 🙂
People try to talk about this event like it was the "US Chernobyl" and I hate it. The reactor operators unknowingly did pretty much everything they could possibly do to cause a meltdown to happen and the results were no damage to people or environment. Compare that to exploding the reactor containment for Chernobyl or having a giant hydrogen explosion in for Fukishima and still not being able to live anywhere near the areas. All in all it was an event that showed some glaring flaws in design and training and that was about it.
Hardly an expert of any sort ( unless watching lots of youtube counts, then I damn well AM an expert! ) but from what I know of both forms of power, I'd take Nuclear ( uranium or preferably thorium ) over Coal. Between early accidents and lobbying making it ridiculously difficult and overly expensive Nuclear power was pretty much killed in the cradle ( in the US at least )
There's been a lot of progress with reactor design, not quite as magical as you describe but certainly improved. However this mostly goes toward naval construction. In the present political climate I don't see any worthwhile amount of new construction being approved
It’s easy to downplay the danger of TMI now that we’ve seen the damage to the reactor, but had things been slightly worse, we’d have had a Chernobyl-sized disaster in the US. MetEd vehemently denied any of the core had melted down, up until the moment reactor was viewed by camera. I knew the inspection revealed a partial meltdown, but I did not realize 40% of the core had melted! Had the containment building also failed, tons of molten radioactive fuel would had hit the Susquehanna River, making swaths of the Eastern US uninhabitable.
What are the numbers of people that have died from lung cancers as a result of coal and gas power? Guarantee that number is higher than all nuclear accidents in the world combined.
Excellent video on what can often be seen as a devicive topic. I will throw one thing out there for discussion though. Another, less flexible alternative is off stream hydroelectric. This is where you use something like solar or wind to pump water into a reservoir and then release it as needed to generate hydropower. Unfortunately getting this approved is nearly as difficult as getting a new reactor approved
Pumped hydro requires hundreds of new massive reservoirs around the country to meet renewable storage needs. More PH might be feasible near the Great Lakes, such as Ludington Pumped Hydro, but the water resources are drying up in places that need energy storage such as California. Grid battery tech with Lithium-Iron-Phosphate batteries is already working and getting cheaper every year, along with other energy storage devices such as sand & compressed gas. The compressed gas route can repurpose old fossil fuel infrastructure into "air batteries" that supply industrial gases and energy storage. Pumped hydro is still going to be a factor, but it can't do this alone.
@@Nphen I honestly dont see any energy source that requires large amounts of storage(such as solar or wind) being worth the investment for grid power, only one with a decent chance is solar and only if we can put the power plants in orbit.
None of the present day energy storage methods are viable in their present day technological advancement to meet a 100% renewables off peak demand at a utility scale, and there are many of them being played with. Until there is a quantum leap in one of them, we will need nuclear when fossil fuels are phased out.
Its funny how Three Mile Island is one of the three big nuclear accidents people always think of, along with Fukushima and Chernobyl. But the Windscale fire in the UK had arguably more serious radioactive release than Three Mile Island. It wasn't a civilian power plant like the others, but it is interesting that its been so forgotten about
You probably know the one I am talking about, but there is one on the south coast that is looking very rickety and also has the French, who are just a whisker away across the channel, quite worried.
same as california salt reactor
@@aar3682 I've never heard about that one
Always helps to rename a disaster site after the event. That way the next generation won't associate Sellafield with Windscale. Literally re-writing history. Some of us remember.
@@interestedlen8823 I know about it because my parents took me and my brother on a tour of Sellafield when we were kids while on a family holiday in the area, and we almost got kicked out after my mum was overheard telling us about how the plant had been renamed after a fire there. Really helped me remember that bit of info 😂
As a former commercial reactor operator a few things are missing. The relief valve indication was only an indication of power, not an indication of the actual valve position. At the time the secondary side auxiliary feed water system had undergone maintenance but had failed to be properly restored.
That's correct David. I was a young nuclear engineer with Babcock & Wilcox (Lynchburg VA) and assisted with the 1/3 core swap out for the TMI Unit #1 refuel (not unit #2). Learning the Stearns & Rogers refueling crane operation. I was at TMI in February 1979, completed my assignment, and was transferred to Crystal River FL. It was there that I got the phone call that TMI Unit #2 had suffered a serious SCRAM. The PORV (pilot operated relief valve) was made by Dresser Industries. The PORV did indeed stick open. Downstream thermocouples were reading hot. The rupture-disc on the drain tank blew out. Heck, my career outlook came to a crashing halt and the best I could do is find a different career.
David, such a neat job... The indicating of the valve though seems strange to me. Im an airline pilot, and we have many valves on the engine... Start valve, high and low pressure bleed valves, fuel, hydraulic valves, etc. That'd be like "your bleed manifold valve is showing engine power of 10k lbs thrust" when I simply need to know the valve is open and functioning properly!
Are you guys familiar with Peach Bottom? My dad built that place as a welder before going to American Airlines.
That makes sense, as he is more than a bit of a nuclear industry apologist.
@@BobbyGeneric145 servo valve repair technician hear: many valves have an LVDT on the spool which indicates spool position. This likely way your instruments use to indicate valve state.
I had a long career as a reliability engineer in the oil industry. Sometimes I helped with other industries. Every single project that I analyzed had problems, some minor some so serious that the project got cancelled or totally redesigned. I am talking multi million and billion dollar projects. Finding the problems was the easy part; sometimes ridiculously easy. I could give examples but would likely be sued. Some companies, typically the Norwegian ones, immediately welcomed the information and always resolved the issues. Some UK and US company managers however I can only describe as going berserk, but they all had to back down.
It is easy to imagine from even the simpler explanation of what happened at Three Mile Island that the designers had not thought through the system fully. They could have made a design that was less likely to fail. You can't eliminate or predict all failures. But what you can do is put in systems that mitigate the impact of failures. It isn't difficult and it is way cheaper than leaving faults to cause problems.
The most genius idea about safety was in the Cullen report on Piper Alpha. The Safety Case is a brilliant system. Sadly it is not adopted globally and at least while I was in the US it wasn't adopted there.
I think in regards to US/UK managers vs others there is a mindset difference. Simply from what I read online everyday it seems that US/UK manager type people expect to be in full control of everything they manage. To a point where they expect whatever they say not to be questioned. Now this is probably a biased sample group, since it's the kind of thing people would post online but that's all I got.
My experience of managers in the UK is they're too often under-talented and over-confident. They take bad news as a personal insult, because they've been trained to believe they can manage anything - no matter how complex - with a few abstract skills.
See my comnent. In US everything is goid enough.
@@Skyfox94 Its just greed. Safety issues cost money, lots of money sometimes, and if some outsider finds safety issues with your facility/equipment/etc then you can't just brush it under a rug and hope it goes awhile while continuing to make those profits.
You would think people wouldn't be so fully given to put profits over safety but the kind of people who rise up into the higher managerial positions of things like powerplants didn't get their by doing the right things, they did it by making the most money for the company.
I wonder of most of the UK based managers you refer to worked for US companies with operations in the UK..?
I served in US Navy Nuclear power 1984-90. Our procedures and Instrumentation were updated directly by lessons learned at TMI. The incident report(s) were required reading.
So the ships are nuclear powered, that’s why they could stay outside for so long!
Do the ships also have 18 month fuel cycles or do they have to return to shore within a year or so?
Not a hiccup in US nuclear power production since,of course those are old fashioned,soo BuScale plants much safer cheaper safer will be working worldwide.
@@42luke93 submarines usually refuel halfway through their operational life. New submarines are not designed to be refueled at all.
I actually think the 3 Mile Island incident was a good thing. It was a very low danger accident and lots of valuable knowledge was gained by the industry like flaws in current designs & procedures to ultimately make sure less people die due to nuclear power... By having a partial meltdown.
Most certainly true from an engineering standpoint, from a adoption standpoint and from the standpoint of someone who is concerned about carbon in the atmosphere it was a disaster.
Even PR disasters have real life consequences unfortunately.
@@M167A1 yes... But had they not found out the weaknesses in the system and a power station failed (with the safety standards of the time, quite likely) in a far more 'Chernobyl' fashion in the US... That would have likely had a far worse impact on public opinion.
At least this way you can point to the worst nuclear power disaster in the west (the likes of Windscale likely killed a bunch of people, but that's a reprocessing plant) being one where nobody died or was seriously injured (at least not from radiation).
True although it lead to cancellation of many planned nuclear power plants that today could have been providing cheap electricity which would permit industry to better compete with China that is today building hundreds of nuclear power plants.
@@sergarlantyrell7847 *Even the Chernobyl disaster, unlike what the myth says, was not a huge one* in terms of the death toll. An IAEA-certified study has shown about 150 people dead over the span of 35 years: about 50 of them back in 1986 and the rest 100 over the years due to complications from the radiation.
The Fukushima disaster, which was more than an order of magnitude deadlier, still had only a minor portion of the death toll related to radiation. Chemical catastrophes as in India in 1984 (outsourced from the USA) or many more others are incomparably more dangerous than anything ever happened with nuclear power plants.
That's like saying COVID happening is a good thing because it brought awareness to humans vulnerability to viruses. We could of just not had the media frenzy we could had it happen, listen to the experts and made corrective actions....but were humans...as we learned in 2020 as well.
My mother-in-law was a nuclear chemist at TMI at the time of the Unit #2 accident. I remember talking with her about TMI unit 1 vs. unit 2. She described unit 1 as an excellent reactor that performed exactly as it was designed, from the time it first was put into service all the way through its service life. Unit #2, not so much.
If you view the video carefully, you can even hear them mentioning not having had the "instruments" to get readings after the accident. What they meant, was they didn't have a "Post Accident Sampling System" that would allow plant operators to safely take highly radioactively contaminated water and air samples from OUTSIDE the containment at various elevations of the reactor AFTER a major accident (see also my previous post further up) to geauge what had happened inside the containment - exactly ONE of the many issues that made TMI such a disaster. After TMI, these PASS systems had to be designed and retrofitted into all GE reactors around the globe, as this system (among others) was not included in the GE powerplant designs. The lack of including such a PASS is mindboggling in hindsight, to put it mildly.
BTW: BOTH TMI reactors did NOT have a Post Accident Sampling System befor the accident and also had to be retrofitted. A "PASS" today is one of many standard subsystems on ALL nuclear reactors. No one would even DREAM of building a reactor without the capability to take contamination samples from outside the containment, when an accident with potential breaches makes entering the containment impossible.
@@christheswiss390not to mention TMI released negligible levels of radiation and has so far killed 0 people from radiation yet people still act like it was a Chernobyl level disaster
I was 29 years old and my Company Belfab made the incore detection sensors that were inserted into the nuclear core . I welded the sensor ends and made large steam valves to control the pressure at a stable level . What happened was several
incore temperature detectors failed to detect a temperature increase and the core started to overheat . My steam valve assemblies could not let off all the extra pressure and the core split open and blew out radiated steam . I remember that night QA and the lead Inspector stayed at Belfab all night to make sure all inspection signatures were written on the documents !
That sounds stressful, my tig game isn't good enough to do nuclear. Couldn't imagine the pressure...
@@sammorris2721 I had to get certified to do the nuke stuff you are right
Another problem at TMI was, the powerplant did not have a "Post Accident Sampling System" that would allow plant operators to safely take highly radioactively contaminated water and air samples from OUTSIDE the containment at various elevations of the reactor AFTER a major accident (see also my previous posts further up) to gauge what had happened inside the containment - ONE of the many shortfalls and design oversights that made TMI such a disaster.
@@craigjensen6853 I understand what the abbreviation stands for, yet have no clue what the "logic" or the "deepr insight" of your post is suppposed to be. Perhaps more than three letters could be illuminating? How is a missing system C Y A??
Let's hope you don't write SOP manuals in a nuclear power plant for a living... 😉
@@BigDsGaming2022 why would you risk your life for $
I was in 8th grade English class when the principal came on the intercom saying there was an emergency and the busses were already outside ready to take us home. We were about 45 min or so from the TMI plant. It was about 2 weeks i think that my school district was closed.
Luckily you'd already been taught the difference between principal and principle had been before your education was so brutally terminated😄!
@@DrWhom English was never my favorite class. =)
@@DrWhom At least Judy's comment isn't giving me a stroke.
We lived in southern York County at the time (I was in 7th grade) and we were sent home from school and there were no classes for a few days, if I remember correctly.
I was at Redland High School about 4 miles from TMI on the day of the accident. It was one of the reasons I became a medical physicist. Excellent video.
I guess you're lucky it was only /three/ mile island.
@@S3thc0n it was really scary at the time because no one knew what was going on other than a major accident had occurred. And the phone lines were jammed so it took me a long time to contact my parents to come get me. We ended up evacuating to Philadelphia. We didn’t know if we would ever be able to come back.
@@S3thc0n I see what you did there just now😅🤣😂
What's a medical physicist?
@@303elliott radiation safety and imaging quality control in a medical setting.
TMI 1 could still be operating today after a refurbishment and still go strong for another 40 years. However, nukers run best in multiples of 2 for best economic efficiency especially around downtime for refuelling. This would catch TMI 1 out. But even after two Level 7s and one Level 6 nukers are still the safest and most reliable form of low carbon power generation we have. With TMI 2 it was a major lesson around design (cooling circuits and control room layouts, and even regulation as the NRC got a major overhaul after this. Then President Carter had served in the Nuclear Navy so knew his stuff when the accident occurred. Not the first time Carter would bail out a nuker either (Canada was another).
Nuclear power is by far the safest power we have not just safest low Carbon.
Is this why it's impossible to get a gig with "Habitat for Humanity?"
On December 12, 1952, the NRX research reactor at Chalk River Laboratories suffered a partial meltdown. There was a power surge and as a result some fuel rods melted after rupturing.The crucial reactor's core was left unusable. It was later rebuilt and worked for decades before its retirement in the early 1990s.
At the time, Carter was based in Schenectady, New York, and working closely with Adm. Hyman Rickover on the nuclear propulsion system for the Sea Wolf submarine. He was quickly ordered to Chalk River, joining other Canadian and American service personnel.
@@emilgrigorescu8282 If the Japanese had asked we would have saved their reactor as well.
One reactor is still operating, last I checked.
I've heard TMI described as a "spectacular non-event". Invaluable for the resulting improvements in safety, but the event itself has acquired a reputation far in excess of its actual danger.
Perhaps the unfortunate timing with the China Syndrome movie gave the incident more legs than it deserved.
Yes a spectacular non-event is accurate.
@@CarFreeSegnitz I think that's certainly the case. At first blush the event seems like the movie coming true, only to end as a fizzle.
A concerning fizzle, a fizzle you're ever thankful never actually sparked off, but the fears tapped into and heightened by the China Syndrome I think were very much fueling the reaction to poor news reporting.
People are so easily scared and manipulated. It's a miracle our society has lasted this long!
I was in 1st Grade when the movie came out, then the incident happened. It seemed so uncanny that thought it was sabotage! Then I read all I could about what really happened, and I've been a proponent of nuclear power ever since.
I was too young at the time to remember the incident but grew up in a nearby part of Pennsylvania and got to hear a lot from those old enough at the time about what they recall. Of particular note was a bad PR move by a Met-Ed spokesman who angrily snapped at a reporter's question about a reported release of radiation. The report, which later turned out to be false, had come in after the press conference began so the spokesman had not been briefed, but his angry response at the question didn't do anything to help the public opinion of the operator and the incident.
Still live nearby. Toured it twice. My father in law worked at TMI for decades. My brother worked at TMI until the Covid shutdown, now he works from home but still for the same company, for other plants.
Shame TMI got shut down. Terribly short sighted by our PA legislature, and also partially caused by subsidies to wind/solar causing them to be ridiculously cheap, natural gas being extremely inexpensive, and nuclear trying to fit in. Funny how not long after TMI shut down, suddenly the price of natural gas and LP fuel seems to be creeping up. Suddenly nuclear has become financially viable again. Unfortunately, these plants can't just "turn back on". Once they are off - they are off. Wont even be until after 2075 until the plant begins its final clean up and deconstruction.
You say "Once they are off - they are off" which gives me the impression that you can't start a nuclear reactor back up for a conceivable amount of time after it is shut down. It that right, and in that case, what stops us from fixing a shut down reactor so it can operate again?
@@jenspettersen7837 It's a matter of money and political will power, usually both of those are very lacking
@@jenspettersen7837 Putting a new core into it and recommissioning it is a huge undertaking, it is probably way cheaper to just build an entirely new plant with current safety measures than trying to retrofit an older one. It is like pulling the engine out of your car, taking it apart into thousands of pieces, putting those pieces into concrete cylinders, and then trying to take it all out of concrete and reassemble it because unlike your cars engine, that core is unique to that type of reactor and its not just a "hot swap".
Wow... You got to tour it? I'm so jealous....!
The shut down of TMI and the increased cost of Natural Gas were both caused by Politicians with little to no knowledge about either.
The real lesson of TMI: operators can never have Too Much Information.
KInda wrong because they had so much info arrriving on a slow printer that they got it late. Prioritising and understanding the most useful info is not all about quantity.
@@PMA65537 Fair enough, but it's a better problem to have than not enough info.
You kidding i know ppl that work there and they are were loose with security then and still are .
I see what you did there. Have jelly baby.
Real lesson is " build goddam control room user friendly"
Nuclear plants are safer today than back then.
We still need to have a real plan for the waste, and for the inevitable accidents.
Yeah, great but safer is not safe enough. We will have nuclear core melt down or "China-Syndrom" and therefore some tenthousand or million square (miles or kilometers) of polluted soil only every 15 or 20 years instead of all ten or fiveteen? Gosh, that's a huge achievement! Until today there are areas in Bavaria, Germany, where you can't eat natural deer, pork or mushrooms. It is still to high with Caesium from Tschernobyl.
@@gregor-samsa the death toll from coal is exponentially greater than that of nuclear.
@@jakelong4271 maybe. But that doesn’t mean we should invest into coal either. I say: use nuclear for reasearch and space only and renewables for the rest.
@@joes3100 look it up yourself, WOW. Why would you ask such an embarrassing question? We are talking 95+percent less deaths than coal AND oil. All you had to do was Google "coal related deaths vs nuclear related deaths". It's very telling about your thought process that yeu took the time to post an embarrassing "says who" but yeu didn't spend that few seconds fact checking him. I used to laugh at people like you, but now it's just sad.
Fantastic video! These mini-documentaries on engineering accidents are invaluable, as they help ensure future safety by highlighting in clear detail what went wrong. Please make more videos similar to this one; bridges, power plants, the Challenger, etc.
"Practical Engineering" is another great channel that does those kinds of videos, among other things. Check him out, if you haven't already.
@@bhzucker Yes.... Grady does an OUTSTANDING job; as in, "the WORLD ought to see these videos".
It was good to revisit this incident.
It was a big thing at the time and turned a lot of people off nuclear power.
That's how people work. The industry learned and improved a great deal from this incident, probably preventing several other incidents from happening elsewhere. We should not fear learning and improvement, but stagnation and non-development.
And 12 years & one billion US$ costs of cleaning operation and whole site + 100 tonnes of damaged fuel rods which needs permanent monitoring for many centuries was even better. Luckily, nuclear power is too cheap to meter.
If Homer had brought donuts that morning everything would've been fine.
That was the best explanation of biochar I've ever heard, keep it up
That was a commercial
Best explained 4 sure. But there is as much bio as burning wood.
My dad worked for ConEd for 40+ years and started as a reactor engineer at Indian Point. He always described Three Mile Island as the worst case scenario for a reactor "meltdown" in the US.
see my comment from above and read Perrow Normal Accident.
@@gregor-samsa no
Indian Point burped some radioactive steam in February, 2000 and the incident netted me a good deal on an '88 Fiero Formula. I bought the car from the power plant parking lot the following spring with snow tires still on it. I suspect the guy's wife wouldn't let him bring it home.
It’s a shame they closed it 14 years earlier than scheduled. Was it structurally sound or did they close it due to fear?
@@42luke93 IIRC, their certification was up for renewal and there was political pressure to not recertify, especially after Fukushima. It provided 25% of New York City's electricity, which will be replaced by natural gas. This will definitely not have any negative impact on our carbon production.
I grew up only a few miles away but I wasn't born until a few years after the accident. Seeing the island and the steam climb into the air on a calm day was a normal thing growing up. As a kid in the 90's we went to TMI on a field trip and I got to stand inside the base of one of Unit 2's empty cooling towers. Pretty amazing site to see as a kid.
How many extra toes do you have now bobby?
@@-iIIiiiiiIiiiiIIIiiIi- lol I'm good. No issues that I know of.
I never even look to see what the title is. If it’s a curious droid video I click on it. I think this and technology connections are the only two channels like that. You’ve been on fire this year. Your proximity fuse video was a masterpiece, As with so many more this year that I could literally name in order each buy each. I’ve watched all of them so many times! Keep it up and here’s to a wonderful new year of content at least!
Curious is top quality 👌
Always hit like before video starts
I lived in York, PA for a few years and it was creepy living near it
I grew up in Lancaster, PA which is about 30 miles away from TMI. On the first day of the accident it was one of the first nice weather days of the spring but we were not allowed to play outside due to the gas releases. On the night of the accident my parents had our bags packed and we were ready to evacuate. I took care of a neighbor's dog when they did decide to temporarily evacuate.
I'm in Hellam pa and I sit just within the 10 mile radius of the power plant.
Yup I remember we were at the movie theater to see China Syndrome when this news story came out . Literally the audience got up and left including US No way this was not planned !
@@MsSaudm Fail.
I know part of the public fear was because a movie about a nuclear meltdown was released a couple weeks before this incident. I decided to watch the movie. It’s CRAZY how the initial failure and subsequent improper response is so similar…..
TMI resulted in zero deaths, but is often called the "worst nuclear accident in US history". Why is that? The SL-1 accident, for example, killed three people directly, yet a lot of people have never heard of it, and there have been other nasty accidents as well. TMI was very public and very scary (I was living not too far from it at the time as a child and it was BIG news), but in the end turned out to be little more than an expensive mess.
Because generally people dont call it "the worst nuclear accident in US history", generally they call it "the worst commercial nuclear accident in US history", and when people do make the mistake of calling it "the worst nuclear accident in US history" its either the worst they know of or a simplification that results in them being wrong.
Exactly, public and scary with lots of media fanning the flames.
Because SL1 was experimental and didn’t require the evacuation of thousands of people.
If not the worst, it is the most publicized.
Yeah I walked out my front door and randomly shot my rifle with a 50-round magazine in random directions. Not a single person was hurt. I can’t understand why everybody is making such a fuss about it.
We should be thankful Three Mile Island was built with a strong containment building, and the reactor was a pressurized water reactor that did not have a positive void coefficient and the "tip effect" the reactor that exploded at Chernobyl had.
The void coefficient is not relevant here. It's the difference between "I crashed my car into a tree" and "I parked my car in a swamp and it sank". The engine wasn't running when it sank so no characteristics affect the outcome.
The RBMK style reactors like the ones in Chernobyl would never have been permitted in the West... The design violated multiple safety regulations, even the engineers and scientists who built them had private reservations about the design, but feared what would happen to them if they spoke out.
You can thank Edward Teller, he had a large role both in developing nuclear safety standards, and safe reactors.
@@PMA65537 Thanks for that useless analogy.
@@andrasbiro3007 I am not much inclined to thank Teller.
Sad that this reduced the building of new reactors. Nuclear needs to be part of our energy strategy more than it has been.
Well, perhaps in someone's mind after all occurs that decommissioning is the issue too?
So refreshing to see a video that isn’t full of nonsense about the Nuclear issue. Nice job.
Born a year before Chernobyl. To the day. About 30 miles away. Thankfully we were fairly “well off”, in as much as you can be in the Soviet Ukraine. So we were able to get uncontaminated food. And then escape in 1991. A month before my mom died of cancer. Was it Chernobyl? Or the crummy “free healthcare?” Will never know.
Sorry to hear about your Mom. Also of interest in that area was the "woodpecker" antenna. Maybe another video for CD? I imagine a lot of people were subjected to unhealthy amounts of RF energy while it was up and running (powered by Chernobyl).
the globe did NOT need nuclear there was a much better option but GREED kept it from geting built. MOLTEN SALT REACTOR TECH - VERY VERY SAFE and effective but RUINED, DECOMMISSIONED and HIDDEN by Corrupt US politicians PAID OFF BY Nuclear power backers who could make a quick buck on nuclear ! So now you have these DEADLY TIME-BOMBS all over the globe just waiting to spew lethal radioactivity into Earth environment These criminals will NEVER tell the public in your former country or USA what real danger they are exposed to .
Ukrainian on my grandmother's side although they escaped wonderful socialism in the late 30s. I tried looking around in the 90s but could find no one who even remembered our family. Apparently none survived the Communists, the fascists and then the Communists again.
@@MsSaudm I would suggest you go do some additional reading, wherever you've gotten your information about reactor types and their various advantages and disadvantages is incorrect.
@@MsSaudm molten salt reactors ARE nuclear.
I was young then and I remember a guy coming to the house and was talking to my mom and dad about stocks. They sort of planned on buying consumer energy stock which paid 7.55 while GPU as recall paid 8.25%. They went with GPU. Not long after the 3 mile island incident occurred. The dividends top and I remember the stock they paid $7,000 for went as low as $17. The stock will be split between the kids at TOD, but as of about 10-15 years ago it started doing very well and it has split a few times, although the utility company has been bought and sold several times and dividends every month are back.
Great video, as usual Paul! That was very clear and concise information delivered in truly professional way. Keep up the good work!
As someone who sees TMI nearly everyday, It is a real shame that it was closed.
We shoul'd snipe away at anyone. That's it.
Yep.
It is also astonishing how ridiculous the ignorance is involving nuclear power.
During the whole "debate" in Harrisburg, it is absolutely absurd to me how many people commented how "it should be shut down, because of all of the radioactive smoke" and other stupid thoughts. Even locals here had no idea that was pure water vapor coming from the cooling towers, not radioactive, and not even smoke.
Such dumbness forming energy policy and influencing energy policy.
Three Mile Island was so over-hyped it's sad.
this is the first video in months to appear on my youtube... ive been subbed and have notifs on for years
After the Three Mile Island (TMI) incident, all the reactors of the same type (world-wide) had to be retrofitted with technical systems that would prevent the accident from happening again. At that time, I was part of the team that built the largest and most modern nuclear powerplant in Switzerland and I was tasked with designing and building two systems that would ensure the same TMI accident could not happen there as well. The final operating approval for the entire plant was (among other things) contingent upon these two systems being built, tested and then licensed by the regulator. One of the systems was called the "Post Accident Sampling System" (or PASS) and it would allow to safely take highly radioactively contaminated water and air samples from outside the containment at various elevations of the reactor after a potential accident. As a result of the TMI accident, today EVERY nuclear powerplant still operating has a Post Accident Sampling System, as well as a few others that were invented after the TMI accident.
Worldwide minus the USSR, I presume. Of course, they were marching to a different drum.
@@DrMackSplackem Like you said: "they WERE marching to a different tune". As far as I know, the russians also don't build the imbecilic graphite bloc reactors anymore, as they learned the hard way in Tshernobyl how this technology can destroy itself and thousands of lives. These days, I'm pretty sure even russian reactors must have a PASS - in their own interest. It's the only way to gauge radiation levels from outside the containment after a breach of the reactor and thus the only way to understand from outside a) what happened, b) WHERE did radiation accumulate or originate and c) allow investigating possible remedies.
It's actually a bit mind-blowing how TMI and other reactors were even ALLOWED to be built WITHOUT such systems in the first place!
Not criticizing your work then, but now you could be regarded as a single point of failure for those two safety sysems. I worked on oil rig safety systems where the teams for the control system were always separate from the safety systems to ensure that the same design biases were not included in the two systems.
@@christheswiss390 What's even more mind-boggling is that they only learned this lesson by performing an experiment that would make the weakness in the design turn deadly. I guess in some places, life is just that cheap.
At time of 3 mile I was Enginner in Royal Canadian Air Force. As member of Refrigeration Electro- mechanical section on a heavy Radar station of NORAD we followed 3 mile islands closely. Heavy radar deals with radiation and similar cooling & back up systems. Right away from diagrams shown we determined 2 thing A lack of training & emergence practice drills. Not knowing where gauges are and use of go/no go should have had a few responsible above the operators hung publicly by the scrotum!
Than you all these yrs later for confirming what usas young airmen deducted long ago!
PER ADRA AD ASTRA - through adversity to the stars
The young airmen did not deduce anything. The airmen followed a checklist developed by government contractor's Engineers, then passed down through their chain of command.
I think the amazing thing that the average person didn't know that the other Unit was still operating for decades after the accident. I mistakenly (until very recently even) thought that 3-mile island area was a radioactive no-man's land. Additionally, there were 0 deaths as a result of the accident....just a very very expensive clean up on isle 2.
Funnier thing is, Chernobyl NPP also worked to the 2000, before being fully stopped.
amazing what the media leads you to believe eh?
@@bartman2468 Activists in the media.
Just an aside. I do not believe one can accurately conclude no deaths resulted due to the TMI #2 failure. Only that no immediate deaths resulted. Since it can take years, perhaps decades, for premature death due to cancer or other ailments to manifest themselves as a result of radiation poisoning, especially if exposure is during pregnancy or very early childhood, it's pretty hard to pin down what causes what, but I continue to believe it's not correct to dismiss any concern just because nobody died right away. As I understand it, there was a marked increase in thyroid cancers of the residents in the communities downwind from TMI in the years following 1979.
@@d_shepperd Maybe so, but there are also plenty of cancers brought on by working in or as the result of interaction with the fossil fuel industry. It makes more sense to examine why there were fewer deaths than in chernobyl and fukishima.
I'm pleased to find a view which explains the Three Mile Island incident. Great job, well done.
There used to be a outdoor concert venue located in the river below Three Mile Island. We were setting up an Atlanta Rhythm Section show when we were told we needed to leave on that day 42 years ago.!
Didn't have a Champaign Jam?
So many people don't understand just how particularly and uniquely more destructive Chernobyl was compared to the other nuclear accidents. It was a completely different system and failed in a way reactors now, and most at the time, could not.
Thank you for telling the *truth* which is that 3 Mile Island didn't do any lasting major harms and that nuclear power is safer than all other forms of electric generation, even wind. Okay, you missed that last part, but you at least gave us facts instead of fear. That's why I stay subbed to this channel!
damn, Americans really go the extra three miles when it's time to viral market their movie releases.
Thanks Paul. I was 15 when this happened and it was very scary to live through
Healthy new year wishes to you and the company you keep, Paul! :)
The fear around nuclear power is like fearing all electronics because of an exposed live wire somewhere in the world
To be fair one of those live wires caused radioactive fallout to rain over half of Europe. Seems legit to me.
The fukushima "nuclear" disaster was overblown by media... nobody died because of the nuclear power plant (only after the government decided it would be a good idea to evacuate hospitals because of the "nuclear threat") and then there was a bunch of water pumped into the pacific, but that hardly raises radioactivity above background levels...
and that was after the plant has literally been hit by a very strong earthquake and a freaking tsunami...
well it was a big disaster
but you are right about radioactivity - dispersing is the best policy, but it makes people understandably nervous
for a short while it was my lab chore to pump water around in the nuclear waste tanks (a mixture of isotopes, you get that with several labs doing various experiments) until the count was at the legally allowed near-background value in all of them. Obviously that would have happened just the same if we'd just dumped the stuff as-is, apart from any transient concentration effects near the release point of course
And because nuclear power was seen as so "dangerous", the modern world just keeps getting dirtier and closer to the brink. Thank you eighties public! Truly the best years...
Not really, it being more expensive than the alternative, having not many people in the industry to build them and the amount of time it takes to build them even without protest and let alone the dismantling process there is one near me that was decommissioned in the 90s and is still being dismantled, anything else can come down in weeks to months, maybe even a couple of years if something goes wrong, but not half a century. These are the real reasons rather than the public.
Yeah, 'coz 2020's public have shown themselves to be the real brains of the operation (!)
Nuclear is not so clean when you take in the complete chain cradle to cradle.
And now that the plants are mostly over 30 or even 40 years old, they show the symptoms of that age. Currently there are 1/3 of the reactors sown in France. And that in winter, where many people in France use electrical heating. This is resulting in crazy high prices for electricity, up to 400€ per MWh. As France is drawing electricity form other European countries more electricity has to be produced by those and the prices there increase as well. This at a time where Russia and other countries play a game of showing their muscles to each other, leading Russia to increase gas prices. Thus gas power plants, which have to run, because nuclear power is down, increase the prices for electricity even more.
Nuclear power is not cheap. It never was.
And as you were mentioning "dangerous". Tschernobyl, Fukushima and other "near miss" accidents show, that the technology is not as safe as it needs to be, especially in densely populated regions of the world. By the way, all known failures were based on human error. Be it stupid planning or or wrong decisions during operation.
On the other hand, in Sweden a core meltdown could just be prevented by persons ignoring the text books. There, s cooling generator would not start and the operators went down, trying to start it manually, which finally worked, only minutes before the catastrophe would have taken its course.
Nuclear is increasingly popular among the general public and especially among a hardcore band of enthusiasts. The reality is that nuclear is simply to slow, cumbersome and expensive for commercial operators to bother with. That is the plain and naked truth on why nuclear power plants are not being build in any significant numbers. If it really was so great, a few hippies wouldn't be able to stop it.
@@dschledermann It's not "few hippies" that stopped it, but giant media corporations that earn more money with sensationalist fearmongering than with rational and calm description of the subject. Look at Zwentendorf - fully prepared to start electricity production, but media "successfully" turned public opinion against it and the result was massive financial (and environmental) loss.
Or Germany and their policy of shutting down perfectly fine and working nuclear power plants instead of closing coal power plants (result of Fukushima).
That brought back memories. I wasn't even old enough to attend school yet, and I remember when that happened. I grew-up about 60 miles away from 3 Mile Island.
This was a very well done video, Thank you for taking the time to get all this information together for the video.
Rather than a back-up to so-called "renewables", nuclear should be our primary choice for baseload generation. All we have to do in order to get it right is to follow France's example, as far as policy goes, and seriously develop safe and cheap nuclear options, such as, e.g. LFTR. Even though it would be nice to have, thermonuclear fusion is still way far down our future. As for windmills and PV panels, if we look closely at their external costs and remove various form of subsidies, they no longer look so appealing, while they are always unreliable and a burden to electricity grid planning and construction.
I have thermonuclear fusion collectors on my roof...
France has built most of its reactors close to the borders. That is how much they trust them.
@@martingerken7094 France builds their nuclear reactors adjacent to large bodies of water, as all nuclear plants around the world do. Get a clue.
Nuclear power is safe and profitable. Big fan of Terra Power. Great video! Hope to see more.
Except for the waste, still no where to safely put it. Maybe shoot it into the sun.
@@Tolpuddle581 Modern nuclear plant design might be more profitable. However natural gas has been extremely cheap the last few years up until the last few months. Compared to nuclear, it's much more volatile, however it can be cheaper. New natural gas plants are fairly clean but in comparison to nuclear it's dirty.
Except we have to hollow out mountains and fill them with radioactive forever waste. Cool stuff.
@@sickregret Never mind the fact the actual volume of the waste is next to non-existent compared to the waste from mother other power sources and some of it may even be useful resources in the future.
@@theoldscout3478 Fourth and Fifth Generation reactors slow burn the waste into nothing. Research the start-up Terra Power, there's speculations why Bill Gates is buying so much farm land to create those Nuclear Power Plants. If you don't like their zero pollution design, we can always use depleted uranium to make 30mm ammo for some hungry-hungry A-10 Warthogs .
Nuclear is as safe as many other forms of energy, we will go back to it someday.
Three reactors were licensed for 2022, first since this happened
Actually nuclear IS the safest.
I dont live to far from there, but I'm not old enough to remember it happening. Thank you for the video!
In college, because of my background in computer science and physics, I had the opportunity to intern at Argonne National Laboratory, where I was assigned to Dunn and Schleger's TMI investigation project. The objective of the project was to determine why the TMI accident released far less radiation than expected. I wrote data analysis software and had a couple of opportunities to run the experiment. It was a great experience. Needless to say, the scientists studying the accident continued to be quite comfortable with nuclear power after the accident, unlike the panicky reaction by the media and public.
What about talking more about more advanced fission reactors? We got stuck on light water reactors and never really got fission right. Fusion is a whole different story, but I think the fission story is the worst told of them and so needs more Cherenkov light shown on it.
Exactly! IE low pressure molten metal reactors. The tech has matured to where they would be a viable option.
Well Done Paul! Your right, Chernobyl is another story that will haunt this planet forever! Happy New Year!
You’re absolutely right. We’ll need safe clean reliable nuclear power in the future. They should have already been built next to the coal fired plants and replaced them. Thanks for the honest report about what actually happened and the zero health risk to the public. Can you do another about Fukushima?
There wouldn't even be an anti-nuclear energy movement if the media had just told the truth. No one died from Fukushima radiation either, despite three complete meltdowns.
@@danadurnfordkevinblanchdebunk exactly right.
@@grumpy3543 woo hoo germany turned off the last reactor today yea
@@danansana7411 isn’t Germany in trouble for using huge amounts of greenhouse gasses compared to France who have lots of nuclear?
@@grumpy3543 this past week france has had problems check it out
Hello from Middletown, PA!
We just had a hell of a fire here in Colorado, talk about relative sponsorship!
We're all stoked for more content Droid Boi. Thank you for your high quality stuff
Great video! If only the media was as thorough and fact-oriented as this channel during those days, maybe we wouldn't have seen the start of the nonsensical and baseless fearmongering we see today regarding nuclear power. It's extra moronic nowadays as we move away from pressurized water cooled reactors and towards even safer and more efficient ones, such as the Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactor and other generation 4 designs.
Unfortunately, the media is not about truth. They are about ratings. Ratings are money and truth walks, to coin part of a phrase. The more the fear, the better the ratings, even if they manufactured it! In terms of the media, Samuel Clemens was a wise man.
The fearmongering comes straight from the fossil fuel industry using faux-Green entities like the Sierra Club to inhibit and disrupt their only real competitor; nuclear power.
@@Willaev If the media were to tell the truth about radiation/nuclear, there wouldn't even be an anti-nuclear energy movement.
It's all sensationalized just like today. If everyone had the internet back then, it would all be clickbait.
If the media reminded ratepayers they’ll be on the hook for any nuclear accidents - remediating TMI cost them a billion dollars back in the ‘80s - not to mention billions in decommissioning costs per-plant, they’d probably be even more opposed to nuclear power.
Good too see your shirts are still radioactive 😆 keep them coming
Fission power is our best option until someone has a break thru with a tokamak design. We have enough experience and case study to build reliable safe nuclear plants. I for one will not embrace electric cars as being more “green” until we are using clean source of electric generation.
100% agree
Fusion is a fraud. We need to construct newer designs of fission rather wasting money on fusion given the insurmountable engineering problems with fusion. A fusion reactor produces a sleet of high speed neutrons that will eventually make the entire fusion reactor and building radioactive. How about that for clean energy? Nothing can solve that basic problem of fusion reactors. The new and improved fission reactors work better than fusion reactors ever will. Leave fusion in the stars, and collect the energy from that. Along with fission, and more conservation, we could stop our energy generation from producing green house gases. We will also have to deal with long distance transport as well as agricult.
Magnetically confined fusion is unlikely to be a paying proposition in the foreseeable future. ICF is probably even farther out. as for electric cars, even with green generation you still need to worry about disposal. Having said that, anything is better than the dirty diesel that the US is using for it's trucks and heavy equipment.
@@aristoclesathenaioi4939 I agree that we need to develop fission reactors based on Thorium (it is abundant and not easily reprocessed into nuclear weapons). But, if there is even a theoretical chance that fusion will work, we need to develop the technology. It is environmentally friendly and does not produce nuclear waste (tritium is slightly radioactive, but not nearly as radioactive as fission reactor waste)
@@aristoclesathenaioi4939 I'm afraid you have a 4th grade science class level of education on this subject.
Great video my guy! Keep up the great work!
As usual - superb and very professional explanation !!! Very good !!!
I'd argue the ban on Plutonium or Mox fuel which can be reprocessed in breeder reactors (like the rest of the entire world does) - causing the nuclear waste handling and storage issues power plants now have did more than anything to taint the nuclear power industry. We could drastically reduce if not virtually remove that problem switching to Mox. In fact, the largest power station in the US (Palo Verde, in AZ with 3 cores) was designed for Mox - but had its fuel replaced with Uranium after the ban. Thanks to environmentalists - the US is the only country with nuclear waste 'problem'. So, thanks for that.
@Charles Martell Oh they're great! Huge fan of their potential! But the MOX fuel already has reprocessing plants and 3 reactor cores near me ready to take it.
There's also pebble-bucket battery reactors (so insanely cool it hurts). The fuel (whatever you use) is placed in a bucket with a heat exchange to convert the heat to electricity - the cool part - the fuel is sealed in near-unbreakable ceramic beads / pellets. The fuel can't 'go wild' because the spacing is determined by the geometry of the pellets. If the core was 'breached' the pellets scatter and the reaction stops. In a MOX configuration - the pellets can be reprocessed 'as is' (last I checked, I'd need to double-check / feel free to fact-check me) so the whole system is about as closed and safe as you can get.
A small bucket will power an entire town without needing a massive infrastructure common to Nuclear Plants, and can essentially be buried underground in a secure location (like under concrete). You don't have to get 'too crazy' because again - if the 'marbles' scatter - no reaction - and you can't get to the fuel. China was making some last I 'heard' but I haven't deep-dived into them in over a decade.
The science is pretty classic tho and the basic design (heat to energy) has been used on many space probes - as well as the SNAP-27 radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) that was supposed to fuel instruments left on the lunar surface for Apollo 13. Since the LEM returned to Earth - one more problem (of many) that had to be considered was splashing the RTG into the ocean since it would (and did) survive re-entry but they wanted the Plutonium 'away and safe' (at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean).
AFAIK the nuclear fuel processing in the US is highly regulated due to concerns of "proliferation" which is fancy speak for nuclear weapon technology, ironically russia is currently in the lead with MOX fuels and a number of other fancy designs when it comes to this stuff.
It really is a shame that in the US nuclear fuel is so heavily regulated for no real reason.
@@killingtimeitself It's an even bigger shame when the regulators steal luggage from the airport.
"The sea was angry that day my friends, like an old man trying to send back soup in a deli."
This is probably one of the best descriptions of the accident (in layman's terms), I've seen, ever. As an aside - do you have links to the various footage, and reports that were shown in the video? I keep a folder of TMI-related stuff. Thanks!
Great video. Best I've seen on Tree Mile Island. Thanks. Top Notch.
I live in the town in the shadow of three mile island - Goldsboro PA. It’s always interesting hearing about my little corner of the world as a result of this one incident
The sheer lack of knowledge of what was happening to this reactor during the incident by those operating it and in the aftermath by those who designed and built it was what created the impression of danger and spread real fear. The movie encapsulates that scenario were there is an effort to hide from the public near misses at a plant before an almost meltdown event damages one of the reactors. That the film came out first demonstrated that similar near misses were occurring in the nuclear industry & being covered up as the price of business rather than being addressed. Although Chernobyl was on a different scale, some of the fundamental issues, like poorly written manuals, lack of operator & designer reporting or understanding of the physics in extreme circumstances and the planning of additional redundancy in safety measures was common to 3-mile island & Chernobyl. The latter nearly destroyed a continent & did change the world. Nuclear power is complex & dangerous, the risks can be mitigated, but the methods used should always be open to heavy scrutiny. That was the point of the China Syndrome film were a journalist and a plant middle manager are being prevented from whistle-blowing on a plant that’s heading to disaster.
In the early 90's I started working with a team in college who were doing nuclear power plant fault monitoring with neural networks. It was just barely possible with the computers we had back then, and we had to spend a lot of time optimizing the code. We also worked with other industrial plant monitoring for quality prediction, and saved the companies a lot of money by modeling their plants so they could figure out how to tune them for differing weather conditions, etc. If the plant produced bad product, it'd have to be recycled, which was very expensive. So my personal carbon footprint is OK, having helped save quite a lot of energy and other resources, starting back then. I'm still interested in the Wren thing though, seems like they have good plans.
Im curious what do you mean by bad product? Its a powerplant then its just producing electricity right? And how does recycling it end up in being very expensive ?
@@connorjohnson4402 Working to avoid bad product was from the other, non-power plant business we consulted for. Manufacturers of consumer and industrial products. They'd have a big plant that produced a large amount of stuff all in one production run (which could take an hour or longer), and need to adjust how that ran to cope with the weather and ingredient properties. Adjust things incorrectly and they could end up with a batch they couldn't use. We came up with a way to make models (AI-based simulations) that let them play with the parameters and find ways to handle the changing conditions, and thereby stop throwing out an hour's production several times a week.
I worked in operations at Ontario Hydro just after this happened. ALL the valves of consequence and especially those inside containment all had limit switches that independently verified a valves position. If a relief valve had not seated correctly, especially one as important as this one, the operators would have seen the indication almost immediately. As it was explained to me, you have a sensor that indicates a PHT over pressure and turns on a light on the panel. Independent of this, the PRV which is largely regulated by a large spring (in those days) is supposed to actuate at the same pressure, but the light and the valve are NOT connected. Now, for a small less critical system where you want to save a few bucks on instrumentation sure, but for a nuclear reactor. No way. It is the same kind of mistake like Fukushima where the safety systems were on the ground floor and sure to be flooded how does this happen?
In addition, we were told that the operators at TMI were trained to run the panel and other folks work in the plant on inspection routines and such like. Not so where I worked, you had to work in the 'field' for at a minimum 6 years before even being allowed to be trained for the panel and then the exam was pretty tough. You never got any feedback only pass or fail and you were only allowed to write it 3 times in your life.
I am not a fan of PWR reactors. Something about loading a reactor vessel up with slightly enriched fuel and then poisoning it to keep the reaction under control is unsettling. I really liked the system we have/had in Ontario where we fueled on power and had some reactors running at 96% availability at that time. In 1986 a pressure tube split on Pickering #2 and caused a serious loss of coolant, but everything was contained by the safety systems, the reactor was retubed (as were many others) and put back in service. I am pretty proud of that. This was all run by the government and while it cost more to set up, I think it has paid benefits for many years in higher operational availability and safe operation. I am not comfortable allowing for profit companies run nuclear power stations. I think the risk is too high.
I do not know who pushed who in Japan, but one does hear that the companies in Japan have a lot of influence. However, having the safety systems where they were located in a tsunami region is criminal, but as JFK once said “victory has a 100 fathers and defeat is an orphan..”
Any technology, nuclear, air travel, rail, sea travel and so on can kill many people when not operated in faith with the principles of physics. Such principles often run counter to someone's financial plan. Such unscientific influence can never be responsibly allowed in such situations where failure of a system or of the people operating it leads to catastrophe. If regulations are 'job killers' they are there because unregulated systems are 'people killers'. I guess on voting day you get to choose.
Paulk, what a simple but clear explanation of what happened to 3-mile island with useful contrasts to Fucashima and Chernobyl. Great video with amazing photos and vid included.
No one died from Fukushima radiation. Chernobyl released about 10 time the radiation than Fukushima did, and there were less than 50 acute radiation deaths.
Really enjoyed the video fantastic explanation. I was no more than 2 weeks old when this happened less than 20 miles away from the plant. Every Time March came around they would talk about this on the news the anniversary it actually caused me to be very curious about nuclear energy and anything nuclear related. I'm so glad that it didn't explode or I wouldn't be here. 💥🤯
Another misconception that nuclear power is like a nuclear bomb. It's not.
Man, @CuriousDroid, why do we keep JUST missing each other on projects? I flew a drone over HAARP like a week after your video on it, and I shot a TON of drone video of TMI not long ago but lacked the narrative ability to really make something of it. Please let me know if any missile silos or weird abandoned Cold War places are on your To-Do list, so we can compare notes! :D
TMI survived by accident. Many of the things talked about above survived rupture and explosion just by dumb luck. The casings that had been designed to handle X amount of pressure before rupturing held 2X that pressure, way beyond their designed max. There are many other things that without luck would have never held that did, we can just thank our lucky stars for because it wasn't planning or policy that we ended up with what we did instead of a Chernobyl sized accident. What TMI made us realize that there is a big problem with taking extreme risks, and it is that no matter how well you engineer and plan to try to keep things safe, the nature of accidents is always something beyond the problems envisioned. So, the nature of accidents means if you have risk the size of Chernobyl than an accident like Chernobyl will be the level of disaster that you are playing with since it is in the possibility of outcomes. All nuclear power plants have this level of risk as a possibility. Compare that to the risk of a disastrous accident happening at a natural gas power plant. Let's say that a high pressure leak happens in the plant and the roofed portion of the plant is filled with natural gas and air and it is ignited by someone turning on a light switch. The entire facility will blow up, there will be fire, machinery broken, the shockwave will destroy buildings and windows a mile away within a mile of the plant will break. The emergency crew responds and turns off the gas to the plant. A fire fighting team puts out the fires. A few weeks later a demolition team moves in and removes the debris. The utility company pays for the houses around the plant for their broken windows. A year after that the utility begins building a new powerplant on the site. With nuclear disaster there will be hundreds of square miles of unusable land, all houses and cities will need to be evacuated, there will be significantly increased rates of cancer to the people in those miles exposed. Get the picture. Nuclear isn't safe. Solar, wind, hydro, geothermal and more are safe. We have to work hard to make these forms of distributed energy much more prevalent and use batteries to match energy production with energy use.
Nuclear power is so safe and clean, it’s a shame that this non-incident tainted public opinion
Oh, it was most definitely an incident, alright.
Though, not as grave as the panic would call for, but still.
Edit: And yes, I wholeheartedly agree that it's a shame
Well, human factor for safety, etc aside: The main problem for nuclear power today is cost - look up "Cost of electricity by source".
'Nuclear power is so safe and clean'... yeah, till it isn't... there is nothing 'clean' about nuclear waste...
@@23merlino All of the "nuclear waste" that's ever been generated in the entire 60+ year history of the nuclear power industry in the United States wouldn't fill a quarter of a high school regulation football field. Comparing the amount of biproduct generated to the amount of power produced, there's nothing that comes close to nuclear fission's level of efficiency save nuclear fusion (fusion produces about twice as much power-per-ton as fission.)
@@nucflashevent - well then, all is well isn't it...
Great video, Paul...👍👍
Thank you for the video you have done 2021 keep up the good work you're doing Happy New Year
One could sanely argue that not having a “walk away safe” reactor with a “walk away safe” waste product means that the system’s design is a decidedly poor one.
You know who also knew that? The guys that created the PWR and BWR designs.
Their creators, before the first reactor was even built, raised the issues of water as a moderator. They knew a highly pressurized water was dangerous and inefficient solution... but they needed to start somewhere. The navy was the one footing most of the bill and for the navy a water cooled small reactor for a submarine was enough for them, and walkaway safe at that scale.
To someone like Weinberg, the PWR was nothing but a stopgap, a useful one, but since they had working breeder reactors before the first PWR was even built, it was nothing but a matter of time before proper liquid fuel breeder designs would supplant the wasteful solid fuel designs... but politics ran their course and here we are, left with technological remnants, 50 years past their end of life. Those that questioned the safety of light water reactors were silenced back then, now those that are trying to steer this energy back where it should have been are the ones getting attacked.
Our nuclear founders would be horrified to see us still relying on PWRs, and be just as horrified to see that despite being so old they are still the best energy source we have.
Really excellent presentation. You're un-biased from a position of empiricism, something the BBC needs to learn. To them any crackpot opinion is equally viable.
Compared to Chernobyl and Fukushima, we got very lucky with Three Mile Island.
Very lucky, is an understatement. Compared to those other two, nothing happened in three mile island.
@@jamesbizs Yeah, in fact the second reactor building was still functioning up until 2019.
But not as lucky as Davis-Besse. A similar fault was there first and was less serious. With the right organisation TMI could have learned from it.
This was informative, thank you.
Great post Paul. brain food as always. Happy new year to you and your love ones 🙏
I actually live in Middletown pa. It’s the town where the island is. I’m also a tmi baby. Meaning I was born the year the meltdown accrued.
I'd like to find more information on tmi babies. Could you recommend some reading or a video? Maybe up for a conversation?
I’m a Chernobyl baby :). 04/26/85
Ok you got me beat. I'm in Hellam Pa. Just with that 10 mile radius. Lol. I haven't been near middle town in awhile.
I live in the east end of Middletown.
@@piratetaurussackinhaff9402 There's nothing to read or see. It was a non-issue.
The only obstacle to nuclear power is widespread delusions about nuclear power.
exactly
Based
In reality it's the most expensive type of energy, doesn't have many people who can build it, most countries aren't allowed them and takes ages to be built even without protest or and dismantling is embarrassingly slow.
@@Alex-cw3rz no, it is ARTIFICIALLY expensive, with many restrictions introduced for the expressed purpose of discouraging it. Even then its more profitable than any other green solution which are propped up by artificial demand from political retards.
@@samsonsoturian6013 go on name one of these artifical regulations that can make it 3 times more expensive... How can it be more profitable when it's more expensive 🤦♂️ who's using the family braincell today then? I truly hope you liked your own comment and their isn't someone else so brain dead to like your contradictory comment.
This should be interesting. 👀 I live very close to TMI.
Same I'm in York, Hellam township. I sit just within the 10 mile radius circle around the power plant.
@@SchardtCinematic nice! Worked out if FedEx Lewisberry for the last 2 months. I'm a truck driver. I'd see the sunrise over TMI and the airport from the Turnpike bridge every morning.
@@94nolo Oh that's cool. Despite the high prices. I still like taking the Turnpike out to Breezewood. Then head out on the back roads to Somerset to visit family. Flight 93 that crashed on 9/11 in Shanksville had me worried that the terrorists were heading to TMI to crash into it to cause a meltdown. Then later learned they were heading to the White House. After that for a few months Harrisburg were flying planes into the airport differently and you could here them right over my home.
Three mile island. Hits home for me. Grew up down the road from it. Also my grandpap worked there.
Love the channel. Keep it up!
I've watched China Syndrome a few years ago, because I was curious how anti-nuclear it is really.
I was surprised that it isn't at all. But it isn't really pro-nuclear either. Somehow it manages to objectively show both sides of the argument.
And the story isn't really about the reactor, it's a relatively standard plot, and could have worked with any industry. The nuclear reactor was just a relevant, exciting, and a bit mysterious, setting for the movie. It only became the center of the movie after TMI happened.
With the outright lies shown in the film about nuclear, I would say it's quite anti-nuke.
@@danadurnfordkevinblanchdebunk
Yes, they grossly overstated the potential damage, but it didn't feel like a deliberate lie. It's basic film making technique to raise the stakes as high as possible. That's why saving the world is so common in movies. They exaggerate all dangers, not just nuclear energy's. Also many reputable scientists said similar things, unfortunately. Compared to a real anti-nuclear works this is very mild. If they really wanted to scare the shit out of people, the protagonist would have failed in the first act, and the rest of the movie would have been about the aftermath of the disaster.
Both New York and California are rabidly anti nuclear, they are both in favor of a much warmer world.
If the media would have educated instead of propagandized radiation/nuclear the last 50+ years, there wouldn't even be an anti-nuclear energy movement today.
@@danadurnfordkevinblanchdebunk Maybe if it were only the mild TMI incident. However the subsequent Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters made even pro-nuke people not want them in their neighborhood.
I remember watching The China Syndrome, it's a great movie, love me some Jack Lemon. Days after the movie as you noted, a very similar event actually happened at TMI. I suspect time travel may be involved. 🙂
People try to talk about this event like it was the "US Chernobyl" and I hate it.
The reactor operators unknowingly did pretty much everything they could possibly do to cause a meltdown to happen and the results were no damage to people or environment.
Compare that to exploding the reactor containment for Chernobyl or having a giant hydrogen explosion in for Fukishima and still not being able to live anywhere near the areas.
All in all it was an event that showed some glaring flaws in design and training and that was about it.
Love your videos Paul! Can't wait to see you turn pro and get your own Discovery Channel show!
Former nuclear mechanic - drives me crazy when cooling towers are shown when talking about reactors.
Hardly an expert of any sort ( unless watching lots of youtube counts, then I damn well AM an expert! ) but from what I know of both forms of power, I'd take Nuclear ( uranium or preferably thorium ) over Coal. Between early accidents and lobbying making it ridiculously difficult and overly expensive Nuclear power was pretty much killed in the cradle ( in the US at least )
If only someone in the US could build a nuclear power plant for something less than $100B and actually get it running without constant maintenance.
There's been a lot of progress with reactor design, not quite as magical as you describe but certainly improved. However this mostly goes toward naval construction.
In the present political climate I don't see any worthwhile amount of new construction being approved
It’s easy to downplay the danger of TMI now that we’ve seen the damage to the reactor, but had things been slightly worse, we’d have had a Chernobyl-sized disaster in the US. MetEd vehemently denied any of the core had melted down, up until the moment reactor was viewed by camera. I knew the inspection revealed a partial meltdown, but I did not realize 40% of the core had melted! Had the containment building also failed, tons of molten radioactive fuel would had hit the Susquehanna River, making swaths of the Eastern US uninhabitable.
exactly my thoughts. just lucky. we learned a lot from this.
What are the numbers of people that have died from lung cancers as a result of coal and gas power? Guarantee that number is higher than all nuclear accidents in the world combined.
@@renegade_patriot - "so children, let me show you how to compare apples with pears..."
@@23merlino it is people dying vs people dying? Seems a fair match. Fossil fuels kill a lot, lot more.
@@renegade_patriot But each individual coal plant can't suddenly threaten millions of lives at any time.
Great explaination.
Always excellent, informative videos.
Excellent video on what can often be seen as a devicive topic.
I will throw one thing out there for discussion though.
Another, less flexible alternative is off stream hydroelectric. This is where you use something like solar or wind to pump water into a reservoir and then release it as needed to generate hydropower.
Unfortunately getting this approved is nearly as difficult as getting a new reactor approved
Pumped hydro requires hundreds of new massive reservoirs around the country to meet renewable storage needs. More PH might be feasible near the Great Lakes, such as Ludington Pumped Hydro, but the water resources are drying up in places that need energy storage such as California. Grid battery tech with Lithium-Iron-Phosphate batteries is already working and getting cheaper every year, along with other energy storage devices such as sand & compressed gas. The compressed gas route can repurpose old fossil fuel infrastructure into "air batteries" that supply industrial gases and energy storage. Pumped hydro is still going to be a factor, but it can't do this alone.
@@Nphen I honestly dont see any energy source that requires large amounts of storage(such as solar or wind) being worth the investment for grid power, only one with a decent chance is solar and only if we can put the power plants in orbit.
None of the present day energy storage methods are viable in their present day technological advancement to meet a 100% renewables off peak demand at a utility scale, and there are many of them being played with. Until there is a quantum leap in one of them, we will need nuclear when fossil fuels are phased out.
it takes up a lot of space and the landscape has to cooperate, but there are situations and opportunities such as abandoned mines where it is feasible