Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Three Mile Island accident changed his entire life
SHIPPINGPORT >> It’s been 38 years now, but the long legacy of the March 1979 partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant lingers to this day.
The crisis touched off a public panic in central Pennsylvania, ultimately leading to mass evacuations. This, as mixed messages and outright misinformation from both the power company and public officials masked the truth and eroded trust when it most mattered.
Nearly four decades later, those in central Pennsylvania left to fend for themselves amid this life-and-death crucible haven’t forgotten. In fact, some are still emotionally affected.
“People didn’t know who to turn to or who to trust, so they left town,” recalls Eric Epstein, chairman of TMI Alert, the nuclear plant monitoring group formed two years before the accident.
Central Pennsylvanians left in droves. The governor’s evacuation advisory at the time covered only pregnant women and young children — around 5,000 people within a 5-mile radius of the plant, just outside Middletown.
Instead, an estimated 144,000 people clogged the roads and highways exiting the Harrisburg region, Epstein recalls.
“A lot of people didn’t know if they were ever coming back,” he says. “That is a psychic emotional experience that doesn’t heal.” Not even 38 years later. Yet, it fell to one man, above all else, to try and regain, then maintain, the public’s trust in Three Mile Island over the next nearly four decades.
His name in Ralph DeSantis.
At the time of the accident, however, he was little more than a fresh-faced college graduate with a teaching degree who just happened to take a job as a TMI security guard a few months before what still stands as America’s worst nuclear disaster. Chain of errors Three Mile Island’s Unit 2 had been operating for just a few months, when in the wee hours of March 28, 1979, a chain of errors would touch off the most serious nuclear accident in American history.
The accident began with a relatively routine attempt by operators to clear a filter blockage while Unit 2 continued to operate at 97 percent capacity.
But as DeSantis now says, “nothing is ever routine in nuclear power.”
Sure enough, a series of events caused feed water pumps supplying Unit 2’s steam generators to be cut off. Heat and pressure began to build inside the reactor’s coolant system. Eventually, this triggered an automatic shut-down of the reactor — exactly as designed.
But there were more problems.
Even though the nuclear reaction had been halted by the automatic shut-off, there was plenty of residual heat — and it was still building up within the primary cooling system.
Auxiliary pumps activated automatically. But because other valves had been closed for the original maintenance — a violation of federal regulations — no additional cooling water could be pumped in.
Pressure continued to build, triggering a pressure relief value. The relief valve should have closed as soon as the excess pressure was vented. But the valve stuck — another major design flaw.
Eventually, this stuck valve allowed precious water to escape the primary cooling system. It depressurized, uncovering part of the reactor core. With nothing to cool it, the core became super-heated, and the uranium oxide fuel rods and fuel pellets partially melted down.
“Half of the core became uncovered,” DeSantis recounts. “That is not a good thing.”
Human error compounded the design flaws.
Operators, confused by an errant indicator light on Unit 2’s control panel, didn’t realize the valve was stuck for hours. And they never verified whether the relief valve was actually opened or closed.
Worse, there was no instrument to directly measure the level of water in the core. So as pressure continued to mount as the superheating accelerated, operators assumed there was too much water, instead of not enough.
This led operators to turn off emergency cooling pumps, which had automatically started in response to the overheating crisis. These operators ignored still other indicators of an ongoing loss-of-coolant — until at 4:15 a.m. on March 28, a relief tank ruptured and radioactive coolant began leaking into the general containment building.
Exactly 165 minutes had passed since this chain of events began when radiation alarms finally sounded.
Unit 2’s general containment building was seriously contaminated. And radiation levels in the primary coolant water were now 300 times normal.
The crisis at Three Mile Island was just beginning. Career move Ralph DeSantis had every reason to believe his time at TMI would be temporary. His work as a security guard there was just something to tide him over until he could put his teaching degree to work and, perhaps, coach basketball, too.
Then three months later, the crisis occurred.
Soon, DeSantis found himself helping escort the likes of then-Gov. Richard “Dick” Thornburgh and then-President Jimmy Carter on and off the island as the crisis stretched out for days. Even as tens of thousands of central Pennsylvanians evacuated, DeSantis never gave a moment’s thought to abandoning his post.
Looking back, he says this is because he had access to the best information coming from inside the plant — something the panicked public never had during the crisis.
“I was surrounded by people in the know,” DeSantis says of the far-different atmosphere inside the plant, then owned by GPU’s Metropolitan Edison. “We were getting very good information at the plant. One of the big problems was all the misinformation that was out there in the days after the accident.”
Indeed, the company and public officials at various levels of governmental weren’t on the same page at all. A panic-producing mess of mixed messages and flatout incorrect information was the unfortunate result.
Simply put, the public didn’t know where to turn for answers. So they left central Pennsylvania in droves.
“The accident was a textbook example of how not to handle a crisis,” TMI Alert’s Epstein says now. “The result was fear and lack of trust in the company and government institutions.”
But even as a security guard, DeSantis was already thinking like the TMI communications staffer he would become some six months later.
Problem No. 1 was that the company employed no communications professionals at all.
“They had no one at the company in communications at the time,” DeSantis recalls. “And there were zero connections with the local community.”
Within this vacuum, miscommunications multiplied and public panic reached a fever-pitch.
“It was a very serious accident,” DeSantis says now. “It got so much publicity and scared so many people. But it really didn’t cause any problems.”
In the end, Unit 2’s containment building and its 3-½ feet of steel-lined, reinforced concrete held.
DeSantis says more than 99 percent of the radioactivity released from the core’s closed system was contained inside building. Even the small amount of radioactivity vented into the atmosphere was in the form of noble gas, which DeSantis says doesn’t affect the food chain and can be breathed and expelled by humans.