Lax operations and loose regulations lead to calls for change
The radioactive gas and particles that rose from the stacks of a nuclear power plant at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island last March may turn out to be as harmless to humans as many radiologists predict. But the cloud of uncertainty cast over the future of the beleaguered industry by the nation's scariest nuclear accident remains as dark as ever. This week the best-regarded of half a dozen commissions probing the accident will issue a scathing report that raises new questions about the safety of nuclear reactors and makes some important recommendations.
The twelve-member commission selected by Jimmy Carter is headed by Dartmouth College President John Kemeny, an eminent mathematician and nuclear expert, and has as members a balance of leaders from the sciences, politics, labor and academe. Nuclear power proponents had hoped that an unbiased investigation would find the Three Mile Island accident such a rare and isolated sequence of equipment failures and human errors as to have no implications for the safety of the other 72 U.S. nuclear power plants or the 88 new plants for which construction permits have been granted. But the commission's report places the blame so widely on federal regulators, the plant's builders and managers and control room operators that six of the twelve members voted to ask President Carter to ban the construction of any new nuclear plants until suggested reforms could be enacted. This moratorium failed to gain a majority only because Kemeny, who had supported other forms of a ban in preliminary voting, inexplicably abstained on the final ballot.
Instead, the commission urged the President to prevent the start of construction or operation of any new plants in those states that have not completed satisfactory plans for dealing with a nuclear accident. Only 14 states have emergency plans that have been approved by the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The report implies that the so-called
China syndrome, in which the reactor core melts and burns its way into the earth, releasing potentially catastrophic radiation, had been a possibility at T.M.I.
The commission found that at least 30 tons of fuel in the upper portion of the reactor core, which had lost the protection of cooling water, had reached the dangerously high temperature of 4,000° F or more. A reactor would hit the meltdown point at about 5,200° F—a level that ''may have'' been reached by a small but still undetermined portion of the fuel.
In assessing blame, the report claims that General Public Utilities Service Corp., which constructed T.M.I.'s Units No. 1 and No. 2, ''lacked the staff or expertise to discharge its responsibility'' for designing a safe plant. Then G.P.U.S.C.
turned the facility over to Metropolitan Edison, but Met Ed, contends the commission, was ''lacking sufficient knowledge, expertise and personnel to operate the plant and maintain it properly.''