MIDDLETOWN, Pa.—On March 28, 1979, Ken Klinepeter was 21 and his wife was expecting a baby any day. He worked at an auto parts store in downtown Middletown, Pennsylvania.
“I remember a guy running down the street on the sidewalk with his coat over his head. And I could hear this loudspeaker,“ said Mr. Klinepeter, now 65 and Middletown Borough manager. ”As it got closer, it was a fire truck going past the store telling everybody to stay inside and keep your doors and windows shut.”
They decided to close the store and go home.
His brother, a Middletown police officer, asked the family to gather at their father’s house so he could talk with them.
“There was my brother in his full police uniform, and he hands me a .357 revolver and he says, ‘I want you to take this, and I want you to get out of town.’”
His brother told them there were talks of a mass evacuation and things could get out of control. The family decided to leave first thing in the morning.
Unit 2 of the Three Mile Island (TMI-2) nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania’s Londonderry Township was having a partial meltdown.
It had been in operation for three months.
Now, 44 years later, the cleanup is restarting.
Shutting down a nuclear power plant is more complicated than just flipping a switch to the off position. Under normal circumstances, it’s a decades-long process involving decontaminating to reduce radioactivity, dismantling structures, moving contaminated materials to appropriate disposal facilities, and storing used nuclear fuel until it can be removed for disposal.
However, the circumstances aren’t normal at TMI-2, which was shut down after the 1979 partial meltdown. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) still considers it the most serious accident in U.S. commercial nuclear power plant operating history.
The cleanup began in the months after the incident and, according to a presidential report published in October 1979, some 12 truckloads of waste were hauled to Richland, Washington, where they were buried at a commercial disposal site. The waste included a variety of solid, slightly radioactive items such as clothing, rags, and contaminated air filters.
Cleanup continued through 1993, during which, NRC documents show 99 percent of the fuel was removed, the reactor coolant system was drained, radioactive water was decontaminated and evaporated, radioactive waste was shipped off-site to “an appropriate disposal area,” and the reactor fuel and core debris was shipped to the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory.
In 1993, TMI-2 was placed in “Post-Defueling Monitored Storage,” an inactive status.
Today, lingering radiation and materials from the partial meltdown still must be removed.
Mapping Radiation
TMI-2 transitioned in May to a DECON license issued by NRC from Post-Defueling Monitored Storage status, meaning that decontamination techniques can be applied to remediate the facility.The work is being done by TMI-2 Solutions, specifically formed to handle the decommissioning of the Three Mile Island Unit-2 Nuclear Power Plant. TMI-2 Solutions is a subsidiary of EnergySolutions, a nuclear services company headquartered in Salt Lake City.
“We have very good data and understanding of the levels of contamination and the radioactive fields that are in different parts of the plant,” Jeff Richardson, chief operating officer of decommissioning at EnergySolutions, told The Epoch Times. “There are a number of areas of the plant that we don’t send people into because the radioactive fields are too high to do that safely.”
This summer, workers used drones and Boston Dynamics Spot robotic dogs equipped with radioactive detecting equipment to go where humans can’t safely go, to measure radiation dose rates.
After the 1979 incident, measurements were taken of the contamination and radioactive fields, before and after the core debris material, fuel, and other highly radioactive materials were removed from the plant. This data was the source of detailed radioactive maps of the plant.
“Analytically, we understand the kinds of materials that make up that radioactive contamination—the actual isotopic contents of that material—and we know how that material decays and becomes less radioactive over time,” Mr. Richardson said.
“And so, before we actually went into the plant, we spent a fair amount of time doing analysis on the original data from the 1980s and early 1990s, built that into a three-dimensional map of the facility, and then used algorithms that essentially age the isotopic components, to determine what the expected fields would be today versus 40 years ago, when people were last in there taking measurements.”
Engineers also used laser scans to make a three-dimensional structure map and then added details to that map such as design and plan drawings.
With equipment to detect radioactivity, workers were able to validate the radioactive fields and contamination levels.
“It really was amazing how accurately our mathematical models had predicted the radioactive level,” Mr. Richardson said.
Size of Dust
The radioactive material that remains isn’t in large chunks that can be picked up; anything like that was removed in the early cleanup. What remains are fine particles the size of dust.“In the aftermath of the accident, you had melted fuel, and you had water that was used to cool the reactor components and systems,” Mr. Richardson said.
“That water then picked up some of that material and deposited it in other places. And so now, part of our challenge with TMI-2, is a lot of this core debris material is spread very finely in different areas of the plant, and we'll have to go retrieve that material robotically and remotely and pull it out, which will then cause the electromagnetic field—the energy—to drop, once that contamination is removed.”
Mixed with water, contaminated material may have soaked into the concrete walls and floors. It might be removed in pieces or the top layer may be raked off.
TMI-2 Solutions is currently mapping out the best plan for each contaminated area. The goal is to remove materials and start regular decontamination and decommissioning.
The activity is taking place in a containment building, Mr. Richardson said, assuring that there’s no danger to the public.
Depending on the level of radiation, the waste will be taken to EnergySolutions’ Clive, Utah, disposal facility, another facility in Texas, or placed in casks and stored at the TMI site in Londonderry.
The NRC gives nuclear reactor operators 60 years from the time operations cease to be fully decommissioned.
TMI Unit 1
The first nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island, TMI-1, was built in 1974 on a sandbar in the Susquehanna River, 10 miles from Harrisburg. A second reactor, TMI-2, was built in 1978, at the height of the U.S. energy crisis. Together, they had a generating capacity of 1,700 megawatts, enough electricity to supply the needs of 300,000 homes.After the 1979 incident, Unit 1 was restarted in 1985 and was licensed to operate until 2034, but its owner, Exelon Generation (now Constellation Energy) permanently shut it down in September 2019, after market conditions became unfavorable.
Fracking lowered the cost of natural gas. The Pennsylvania state government subsidizes renewable energy sources but doesn’t categorize nuclear power as clean energy. It became difficult for nuclear power to compete.
Partial Meltdown
Three months after TMI-2 went into operation, at 4 a.m. on March 28, 1979, a pump in the reactor malfunctioned and a pressure valve failed to close. The valve remained open for 2 hours and 22 minutes and in the first 100 minutes, 32,000 gallons of cooling water drained away, according to a 1979 federal report.The control room instruments indicated the valve was closed. Operators were at first unaware the plant was experiencing a loss of coolant but when they realized something was wrong, they didn’t have a clear picture of the problem.
They focused on preventing “going solid,” a situation they had been trained to avoid, where the entire reactor and cooling system fills with water.
“The operators followed this line of reasoning, oblivious for over four hours to a far greater threat, that the loss of water from the system could result in uncovering the core,” the report said. “They did not realize water was actually flashing into steam in the reactor, and with more water leaving the system than being added, the core was on its way to being uncovered.”
Workers responded to alarms and indicators as they tried to bring the system under control. By 6:48 a.m., high radiation levels existed in several areas of the plant, and according to the report, as much as two-thirds of the 12-foot-high core, usually underwater, was uncovered and heating up.
Nuclear Scare
Robert Reid, now 91, was mayor of Middletown at the time; he was also a high school teacher. On the morning of March 28, 1979, he was in the school hallway as students arrived, around 7:30 a.m. One student relayed a message that he was wanted in the office.“I got a call from my emergency manager, and he said something was going on down at the island. He said he didn’t know exactly what, because he was getting different reports from the radio and television,” Mr. Reid told The Epoch Times.
“I left school, and I went and tried to find out what was going on. We went from channel to channel and each gave us different information. And the radio stations, each one gave us different information because they didn’t know what was going on either. I called down to the island and really didn’t get a good answer. So I decided to call [Metropolitan Edison Co.] and they said, ‘Yeah mayor, there was a problem earlier in the morning. But there’s no problem.’ But a couple of hours later, we found out that there was a problem.”
Many reports since then talk about how difficult it was for emergency managers and the public to get information.
“I think they were dealing with something that was new, and every hour things were changing. They would come out with something different than the hour past, and by doing that, people thought they were lying. But looking at it now, I don’t think they were lying. They just didn’t know what was going on, and didn’t know how to handle things,” Mr. Reid said.
“Today if something like that would happen, there wouldn’t be a panic, I don’t think, because I think we know a little more about nuclear energy.”
Close to 10,000 people were frightened and panicking, and Mr. Reid felt it was his responsibility to take care of the town.
“I remember standing on the corner at Emaus and Union Street at the traffic light, and rows of cars just moving out of town and people hollering, ‘Mayor, take care of the town! Watch my house.’ And I’m standing there thinking to myself, these people are leaving—evacuating—and I’m still here. But it was my job.”
The partial meltdown at Three Mile Island has brought safety changes to nuclear power plants; it also has been studied for mistakes made in crisis communication and public evacuations.
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