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Three Mile Island Meltdown Research Paper

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On March 28th of 1979 the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor had a partial meltdown in the second reactor unit. The 880-megawatt reactor, located on an island near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania began its meltdown around 4 am while operating near full capacity (Makhijani, Arjun, Max Schulz, and Brice Smith). In The Fold, J.S.S says “A misreading by one of the engineers on duty compounded by equipment and instrument malfunctions led to a loss of coolant from the reactor core”. By this he means that this partial meltdown was caused by human error and faulty technology as well as a combination of the two.

Faulty technology is where the accident began. The cooling pump failed, which caused the turbine and the reactor in unit number two to shut down …show more content…
However, the valve didn’t operate properly and failed to close after getting to the proper pressure level. Normally after a failure, the control room equipment would read the valve as still open, but there was no in between to say that it had begun to shut and failed to actually close and it simply showed as closed. Since the valve was open, the coolant that was being pumped in was escaping as fast as it was entering Unit Two (“Three Mile Island Accident”).With coolant escaping, the reactor started overheating and no one even knew it. The next issue to arise was the cooling water surging into the pressurizer which caused the water level in it to rise. As far as the operators could tell, there was too much water in the pressurized tank so they stopped the flow of water which caused a huge buildup of steam. When the steam and water mixed, it caused the cooling …show more content…
They added onto each other all day and continued to exaggerate the problems at hand. As the issues progressed throughout the day, the wrong decisions and bad tech mixed together sort of like purple and red Play-Doh™; it starts out with a swirl and slowly turn an off shade of brown until you can’t save any of it. Luckily in this case, the issue was solved in time to avoid that nasty brown and still have some purple and red to use later

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