Technicians are taught to prepare for—and avert—the worst
By the Nuclear Regulatory Commission 's reckoning, some of the responsibility for the near miss at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island nuclear plant lay with control-room personnel: they were not able to cope with a crisis. Just how should reactor operators learn their jobs? To find out, TIME Correspondent Peter Staler visited a nuclear training school near Chicago, where emergencies are programmed into the curriculum. His report:
Since 8 a.m., Paul Higginbotham, 32, a fiercely mustached Kentuckian, and Michael Helton, 28, a stocky Ohioan, have been slowly, methodically bringing the 850-megawatt nuclear reactor back on line after a routine shutdown for maintenance. Now, with the plant operating at 21% of capacity, they begin to relax.
Suddenly, a shrill alarm shatters the control room's silence. Red lights flash on the instrument panel. One of the reactor's steam condensers has lost its vacuum, causing a turbine "trip," or shutoff. No longer is the reactor able to shed heat produced by its radioactive core. Ominously its temperature climbs, threatening to boil away the coolant. Unless something is done fast, there may be a meltdown, spilling lethal radioactive gases.
But automatic safety systems come quickly to the rescue. Control rods that had been pulled out earlier to bring the plant back on line are now reinserted. That "scrams," or shuts down, the reactor. Higginbotham and Helton move swiftly too, throwing switches, isolating complex plumbing and carefully monitoring critical meters as the emergency cooling system pours hundreds of gallons of cold water into the core. "Pressure's holding pretty good," says Higginbotham. Sighs Helton: "I think we're all right."
Real as it seemed, the taut control-room drama was only a training exercise. In fact, "emergencies" are daily happenings at General Electric's Boiling Water Reactor Training Center in Morris, Ill., 50 miles southwest of Chicago. Since it opened eleven years ago, it has been instructing more than 400 people a year in the fine art of running and maintaining G.E.-built reactors. Says Don Janacek, the school's "dean": "Our aim is to produce people who can operate their plants not just efficiently but safely."
The B.W.R. Training Center has all the marks of a topnotch engineering school. Cutaway reactor models line its cinder-block corridors. Classrooms contain charts, overhead projectors and closed-circuit TV systems. Instructors, identified by the hand calculators in their shirt pockets, lecture on everything from nuclear physics and chemistry to radiation safety. But students look older, more intent than most collegians.
Many, like Higginbotham and Helton, have had more than five years' experience running gas, oil-or coal-fired power plants before completing the two years of training required of reactor operators. Now they are undergoing advanced training to become shift supervisors. All reactor operators must be high school graduates. Senior operators, who direct whole reactor crews, must be college graduates with degrees in engineering; many are also veterans of the Navy's nuclear training programs. All must pass NRC examinations before they can be licensed.