March 1982 http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.... Watch the full program: http://thefilmarchived.blogspot.com/2010/09/three-mile-island-accident-interv...
Three Mile Island has been of interest to human factors engineers as an example of how groups of people react to and make decisions under stress. There is now a general consensus that the accident was exacerbated by wrong decisions made because the operators were overwhelmed with information, much of it irrelevant, misleading or incorrect. As a result of the TMI-2 incident, nuclear reactor operator training has been improved. Before the incident it focused on diagnosing the underlying problem; afterward, it focused on reacting to the emergency by going through a standardized checklist to ensure that the core is receiving enough coolant under sufficient pressure.
In addition to the improved operating training, improvements in quality assurance, engineering, operational surveillance and emergency planning have been instituted. Improvements in control room habitability, "sight lines" to instruments, ambiguous indications and even the placement of "trouble" tags were made; some trouble tags were covering important instrument indications during the accident. Improved surveillance of critical systems, structures and components required for cooling the plant and mitigating the escape of radionuclides during an emergency were also implemented. In addition, each nuclear site needed to have an approved emergency plan to direct the evacuation of the public within a ten mile Emergency Planning Zone (EPZ); and to facilitate rapid notification and evacuation. This plan is periodically rehearsed with federal and local authorities to ensure that all groups work together quickly and efficiently.
In 1979, as Pennsylvania state secretary of health in the Thornburg administration, Gordon K MacLeod, MD, managed the health effects of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident. He criticized Pennsylvania's preparedness, in the event of a nuclear accident, at the time for not having potassium iodide in stock, which protects the thyroid gland in the event of exposure to radioactive iodine, as well as for not having any physicians on Pennsylvania's equivalent to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The Three Mile Island accident inspired Charles Perrow's 1982 exposition of Normal Accident Theory, which became widely known through his 1984 book. TMI was an example of this type of accident because it was "unexpected, incomprehensible, uncontrollable and unavoidable."
The accident at the plant occurred 12 days after the release of the movie The China Syndrome, which featured Jane Fonda as a news anchor at a California TV station. In the film, a major nuclear plant failure almost happens while Fonda's character and her cameraman (Michael Douglas) are at a plant doing a series on nuclear power. She proceeds to raise awareness of how unsafe the plant was. Coincidentally, there is a scene in which Fonda's character speaks with a nuclear safety expert who says that a meltdown could render an area "the size of Pennsylvania permanently uninhabitable." Also, the fictional near-accident in the movie stems from plant operators overestimating the amount of water within the core.
After the release of the film, Fonda began lobbying against nuclear power — the only actor in the film to do so. In an attempt to counter her efforts, the nuclear physicist Edward Teller, "father of the hydrogen bomb" and long-time government science advisor, himself lobbied in favor of nuclear power, and the 71-year-old scientist eventually suffered a heart attack on May 8, 1979, which he later blamed on Fonda: "You might say that I was the only one whose health was affected by that reactor near Harrisburg. No, that would be wrong. It was not the reactor. It was Jane Fonda. Reactors are not dangerous."
Loading...
this so funny because it lookes like it was filmed in the 1930s. But this happened in 1979.
phybergod 2 years ago 5