We were fine. I think the hidden gem in this is that a nuclear power plant reacted to a safety concern and shut down. So often people decry them as being bad, and here is a nice example of one working as advertised. The grid may have issues, but nuclear continues to be fairly safe.
Similar thing happened in 3 mile island - an example of a huge successful shut down (albeit permanent)... No injuries, no deaths - even in the surrounding area... but the media didn't find that as interesting as reporting it as a disaster.
20+ years later we're dependent on Middle East oil and we wonder why...
You're partially correct. It depends on who is evaluating the circumstances. For anyone involved in the nuclear power industry to any degree (such as myself), what happened at 3 Mile was a not too friendly reminder of the inherent safeguards that must be implemented with any operating nuclear reactor and the fact that a combination of human error and faulty equipment can lead us perilously close to disaster - which is precisely what occurred there. I've been trained extensively on the conditions and circumstances surrounding both the Three Mile Island incident, and of course the big one - Chernobyl. The entire industry has taken many lessons from both events and have applied them to existing operations.
Of course the media will always sensationalize any event that occurs with a nuclear facility, that much we can count on. However the incident at Three Mile was far from just a normal emergency shutdown. It was an unfortunate series of events that ultimately led to a partial meltdown of the core within TMI-2, which is classified by NRC standards as a nuclear accident. Aforementioned safeguard systems failed to operate correctly, and the event was compounded by subsequent faulty indications and therefore incorrect actions taken by plant operators who believed what they were reading. To make a long story short, all combined, the chain of events led to overheating and subsequent over-pressurization of the primary (reactor) cooling system (which also transports heat to a secondary system for steam generation, which is what spins the turbines to produce electricity), and loss of said cooling water flow led to the reactor's inability to avoid a condition called Critical Heat Flux, which is an implicit thermal limit inherent in all reactor designs. Basically water flashed to steam and led to further complications to plant operators trying desperately to determine reactor water levels.
By the way, in the nuclear world, on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the worst case scenario (a full on Chernobyl event), this ranks as an 8.5 to 9.
My point here is not to sway anyone away from nuclear power, in fact like you Clint believe strongly in the need for future nuke expansion within our power infrastructure to meet increasing demand. But, it is important to fully understand the events that have preceded us in the past as a way to avoid them in the future, and an educated public IMO, is a trusting public. Nuclear power scares the bejeesus out of some people, but it still remains one of the safest, most reliable sources of energy that exists on this planet. You can not
begin to conceive the safeguards systems, redundancy, and backup safety systems that are built into these plants - and the incredible amount of training and certifications a plant operator must go through before he is handed the controls, and then they must go through lengthy recertification processes periodically and continuous training to ensure they are kept sharp as a tack when sitting at the panels.
Chernobyl happened because plant operators bypassed these safety features and exercised a testing protocol that was designed to take the reactor outside of its normal operating limits - typical Soviet bravado that ultimately ended in catastrophe.
Three Mile Island happened because of a ridiculous chain of events that all happened to take place at once, and for the grace of god and the actions of the aforementioned highly trained operators - this could have easily been the American version of Chernobyl - yet under the craziest of circumstances it was not.
If anyone would like any further information, please feel free to PM me.
