Thanks so much for watching! If you want to hear my take on Chernobyl, please check out: ru-vid.com/group/PLqzw97Uv36Mn2VnjLKA4TKkYpDJObE1MT&si=KwmoKdw1STebuHei
We have 1 nuclear plant left in my state and I live within range of it if anything happened we have sirens they test specifically every 3 months in the event something happens.The company wanted to shut the plant down the governor refused and realized we would lose like 56% of all power generated in the state if they closed it down it would significantly put a burden on the grid so he said they couldnt and ordered it to stay open and gave it a state prop up financially to keep the plant open. Its a new plant relatively speaking 1987 is when the reactors were finished so they should not close it cause its still a new plant.
There's a power plant a few miles from me that has two cooling towers. Their website is full of vitriolic comments from people talking about meltdowns. The power plant is fueled by natural gas.
The only way a combustion based power plant can "meltdown" is when the combustion gets hotter than the heat capacity of the furnace and melts it. Just an inconvenience though.
This video was of particular interest to me because I did a report on Three Mile Island when I was in grade school. My report only covered the technical aspects of the failure, so I didn't know about the politics surrounding it, but it's good to know that I accurately understood what occurred within the reactor. In my report, I make the argument that a single point of failure is what led to this series of events: The indicator light for the valve showed the state it should be in and not the state it was actually in. There was no way to detect the failure of the valve without inferring that information from a lot of different sources.
I too did a report on TMI in high school, and came to similar conclusions. Years later, I worked at a medical device manufacturing plant that had run into the issue of monitoring that a motor was running, but not that the fan to which it was connected was circulating a sterilant gas. The fan blade had fallen off and that led to unsterilized product shipping, and from that, many customers died. More in fact than died from TMI. Always monitor the thing you need to monitor directly, and not just something connected to it.
@@davidmajors514 yes the gas was ETO. Very dangerous stuff, but also considered far safer than the previous Co-60 sterilization unit that it replaced.
We often joke about companies having a PR person handle when some inexcusable thing happens within a company, but this is an example of exactly why you need public relations. You need someone who can calmly tell the public what's going on without saying things that lose their trust. And you need someone who can decide how much transparency is good, and how much transparency is going to fuel harm from people who willfully disinterpret what's shared to others.
I just wanted to say that videos like kyle hills explanations on nuclear accidents and your added information during these reactions have done a lot to actually bring me around. I live in a country that fully abandoned nuclear after these accidents due to anti nuclear activism that turned the basically entire public against it, but I did start seeing a significant amount of pro nuclear takes on the social medias by now. Repairing the damage these accidents and the activist groups did to the image of nuclear will take still a long time, but it's slowly going forward. So yea, thanks for sharing your knowledge!
I presume that you live in Germany, I was in Germany myself and saw how against people were and I'm sad that this had happened in Germany with the "Die Grüne", I can understand why though but there's also overreaction
all these years I always thought that 3 mile island was some horrible nuclear accident that I've just never heard any details about to learn that it wasn't even a disaster, just a potentially bad situation that resolved itself, is frankly astonishing no wonder I've never really heard any details about it
What's so sad, is this happened before Chernobyl, and basically killed large scale nuclear reactors in the US. Personally, I'm not a fan of the politics surrounding "renewable" energy considering they're marginally more eco friendly than liquid natural gas when you factor in yield and efficiency, and the same people that push it keep nuclear down.
It actually did create a huge mess. Inside the containment building, where it couldn't hurt anyone. It was costly and time consuming to clean up, but it didn't cause any health effects.
If you are a nuclear engineer graduating now, consider yourself lucky, my dad graduated in 1979. I remember as a kid listening to him trying to explain to people how nuclear energy is our best chance at relatively clean energy. People would just look at him like he was selling snake oil. Sad, we had to move from our home country, because no nuclear programs or development. Cheers, and thanks for informing the general public about the advantages of nuclear power.
I got out of high school (in a suburb of NYC) in '79, there was a very fearful attitude about nuclear power at the time. It's taken many years for the US to overcome it.
If there is one video I was really looking forward to being narrated by you, it would have been this one. Kyle's video about the TMI accident is one of the best I've ever seen. Your detailed additions on what is done differently today, compared to what they had back then, are so awesome because you debunk many myths that are still incredibly persistent to this day. A great many things have been learned from the TMI and Chernobyl accidents, making nuclear power even safer than it already was. These were 45 minutes of pure nerdy heaven for me. And yes, I have actually read the full report on the Three Mile accident😁
If you replaced all coal power stations with nuclear and every single one had a 3 Mile Island incident, the death toll and health risks would be far less.
I live a few miles from a nuclear power plant. they have a full mock control room for training I believe. anyhow I went on a tour of it, and it was really cool. I kinda felt like I was on the bridge of starship enterprise. one of the coolest tours of something I've ever been on. they had a pellet or puck of fuel, I believe it was real I can't remember. it was rather small. no one ever mentions the rain from the cooling towers either.
One thing you should talk about and showcase is how those cooling towers that is mostly associated with nuclear power plants work, even though all thermal plants have them. I found a video from someone breaking one down and showcasing such a tower. Then there was a video from India where some visitors to a coal powerplant got to visit and enter the cooling tower itself and see it from the maintenance walkway on top of the sprinklers.
Last night I was listening to a podcast on the Bhopal/Union Carbide disaster (from This Podcast Will Kill You). That event killed thousands of people, and is often forgotten. You grab anyone off the street and see which one they've heard of and they'll probably say Three Mile Island, an event that killed no-one. I myself grew up very "anti-nuke", but I was curious as to how radiation ACTUALLY worked and eventually found great communicators on RU-vid that explained it, and I now I understand, and now I realise nuclear power is utterly preferable over fossil fuels and even some renewable energy sources.
To be fair, the Bhopal incident killed only brown people in a foreign country and we don't care about brown people or foreign countries. Yes, I'm being cynical.
Woo, I'm early to this one! I think Three Mile Island shows how safe nuclear energy is in the US, it was basically a worst case scenario where the core had basically no cooling causing a meltdown, and yet there was basically no radiation that left the containment building. It cost a whole lot of money, but that's it. As for the cause, one of the things that made it worse was the fact that the only way to see a log of alarms and warnings was through a very slow printer (slow enough it took several hours to stop printing). Because of how slow the printer was, and how many warning lights there were, it made it possible to miss certain warnings that would have let the team in the control room react much more adequately. The team was also trained by the Navy for reactors on nuclear submarines that have way less output, and therefore way less decay heat. That in turn led to the people operating the reactor to prioritize the wrong things, they were treating it like a low output reactor on a nuclear sub, which has a much different set of risks to consider than the ones at Three Mile Island.
Grew up and still live about 30 miles south of tmi: about halfway between tmi and peach bottom power station; was born after the accident though. Remember going on a school trip there sometime in late 90's (middle school?) we visited the info center that was across the road then they drove us through the site on the buses and then walked under one of unit 2's old cooling tower
TMI wasn't a nuclear disaster, it was a PR disaster, and on the technical side, a very obvious learning point about industrial control systems (interface with blinking alarms, not enough sensors, indicator light wired to the button instead of giving feedback on what's actually happening, etc..)
Thanks for debunking the "the reactor will explode" - myth that is simply not true. This isn't even confusing a hydrogen explosion with the containment vessel exploding, it's pure hysteria for political purposes.
The amount of hydrogen needed to be generated for a large explosion is idk how may cubic meters. So yes I'm happy to know that some are attempting to rectify the hysteria of a bygone Era. This Tyler guy is alright haha
@@jingalls9142 Of course he's alright. After all, he's a nuclear engineer with little over 10 years experience in the commercial nuclear power industry, from engineering to operations to emergency response. He doesn't even claim to know everything there is nuclear, but he can certainly share some knowledge.
Ive driven past TMI many times. I always thought it was the coolest thing and couldnt take my eyes off of it and knowing the issue they had back in the day made it even more interesting to me. Wish i could have gotten a quick peek around the place.
I think it's wild how scared people are of reprocessing the spent fuel. Everyone complains about having to store all this spent fuel somewhere eventually, but what is it like 94 percent of the spent fuel get's made back into new fuel and the remaining 6 percent is all that needs to be stored. With reprocessing all the spent fuel and a bunch of new reactors we would be pretty good for a long time on energy.
This is because only money matters. It's cheaper to just stash it away somewhere than it is to extract the still viable fuel for future use. In fact many industries have this issue. Toss it and replace it rather than repair and reuse.
I was 8 years old, and living in Philadelphia when Three Mile Island had it's problem. I can still remember the fear the "Hydrogen Bubble" caused. This incident got me interested in nuclear power, and how reactors work. Then there was the accident at Chernobyl in 1986. Excellent video, and very informative.
As someone who did take part of an evacuation, I saw the better side of most people. Our whole community was evacuated over a period of several hours and I don't recall so much as a fender bender occurring. It was slow going as traffic was moving at an average of 5-10 mph (compared to a speed limit of 60. 2 lane highway.) and I did see some utterly stupid behavior, but mostly everyone was helping each other. The big difference is we weren't dealing with an overhyped boogie man, but a very visible smoke and flame.
Sad thing is of all Presidents Mr. Carter should have known better than to put the brakes on nuclear development. He was also the at the President that stopped all nuclear fuel reprocessing laving the United States as the ONLY country in the world that does not reprocess spent fuel. And this led to the waste issue we face today. Reprocessing nuclear fuel reduces dangerous waste by over 95%. Shame on President Carter.
In addition to the fact of no deaths or even injuries, the best part about this was how they investigated after the fact. They (quite properly) focused on "What happened? Why did it happen that way? How do we stop that from happening again" rather than trying to blame anyone. Nickolas Means did a good Lead Dev talk on the incident and lessons to be learned/how to properly learn lessons. I suppose the worst part is not just having the President on site, but that the President was, himself, quite knowledgeable on the topic of reactor problems.
Hey T Folse! I really would recommend the video on Soviet RTGs that were littered all over the post USSR and what happened to them. It’s a very informative video on what can happen when nuclear fuel is just left to rot. The name is The Soviet Union’s Deadly Abandoned Nuclear Generators by Andy McLoone
To start off, I absolutely love the way you explain basically everything related to nuclear power, it's made me smarter by just watching enjoyable videos; I think you did a fantastic job at detailing the OP danger in enclosed spaces. I would say that you should really check out the SL-1 Reactor video by Kyle Hill. He does a really good rundown of the standard process and why it happened, and seeing a comparison would be absolutely fantastic! As someone who left naval nuclear power for IT, please keep making awesome videos, this is absolutely awesome to see! Best wishes!
I grew up near the Oyster Creek power plant, which was an older boiling reactor design. In the late 70's, they were planning to upgrade the plant to pressurized water reactors, and had even floated the new reactor units by barge up to the plant. Then TMI happened and all that ended. The plant shut down for good in 2018.
This one is also about 3MI, it looks at the human aspects of it, and how the operators were just trying to do a good job with what they had. It's also somewhat technical and in depth. It's a conference about leadership and how to treat employees in a software development context, but it's mostly about the nuclear accident. v=1xQeXOz0Ncs @6:10 there was an indication. It was the high temperature of the far side of the valve. But the valve had been leaking prior to the accident and it was always over the limit, and after just having vented extremely hot gas, the operator didn't think a few degrees over what he would normally see was anything abnormal. Furthermore the indicator light would only display the command send to the valve, which indicated closed. And so the operators assumed it was closed. @7:30 there were walls of warning lights at 3MI. Apparently the warning light for reactor overpressure was right next to service elevator is stuck and other such nonsense, and with 50 or so warning lights on even during normal operation it was easy to miss them. The printer that would log the time and warnings generated was connected to the computer with a really awfully slow connection and wouldn't be done printing for the next few hours. @14:00 well the root cause was not the valve, but the condensate polishers getting their pipes all blown off simultaneously by a water hammer. @20:45 closing the block valve at this time was a mistake, as venting steam was the only way for the reactor to cool itself at this point.
Instead of adding only the tail end of the RU-vid link in your comment, you should probably say the videos title and the RU-vid channels name, especially for us mobile users as we can't copy from a RU-vid comment.
@@madmax2069 The talk is "Who Destroyed Three Mile Island" by Nickolas Means. There are quite a few videos of the talk on RU-vid since he has given it at several conferences.
Thank you very much for your channel! As my country is preparing to finally build its first nuclear power plant, your explainers are invaluable. Now it seems even easier to understand why nuclear energy is super safe. :)
Sounds like you worked at the STP site. Man what I wouldn't give to get a detailed tour of a place like that. The engineering of every system is so fascinating.
I work as a medication assistant and we call that exact scenario "alarm fatique" there's a reason you almost never hear alarms or excess pages in a hospital 🏥 it is expected practice to turn off any non-functioning/ unnecessary alarms so as to not become desensitized. And pages are sent for emergencies only knowing full well that everyone is so used to checking their hip thousands of times throughout the day even from "phantom pages" when nothing was sent.
Thanks for your videos. I thought you might like to know that Pilot and Power operated relief valves are two flavors of the same device ...but different. Kyle Hill is correct in that it was a Dressler Pilot operated relief valve in place at the time of the TMI. At very high pressures (like a reactor primary cooling system) spring sizes become too large to be practical, the solution is a pilot operated relief system. They use the high system pressure and a poppet spring that is maybe set within 50 psig (not a hard number, it varies with each valve/installation) of maximum system pressure. An orifice feeds pressure to a secondary poppet of much smaller size to maintain back pressure on the primary poppet keeping it closed. When the system exceeds maximum set pressure plus spring pressure the primary pops open and relieves system pressure. One main issue with them (and what happened at TMI) as they release pressure and close then open again they can literally pound themselves to destruction. After TMI all Pilot operated relief valves were replaced with Power operated relief valves which use an electric signal to open a solenoid., thus relieving pressure. Thus it is what is now in the nuclear field an archaic device, kind of like the term "letting the pressurizer go solid" The idea is that a power operated valve is safer and will not beat itself up. Pilot operated valves are still in wide use in the chemical industry.
I'm just going to start liking and commenting for the algorithm because honestly I appreciate how many videos you push out. I think eventually your channel is going to get to the point where you can hire someone else to raise the production quality but I enjoy you and your videos immensely as they are now and I really hope you continue
I have to say that there is hope, all my early zoomer friends and me desperately wish that nuclear Power was more prevalent. and we understand how much of a non threat it is.
Honestly I fear that the consequence from this is that by the time the current mental block dies and the following generation is permitted to make changes, operational hurdles will have accumulated far too much. There is a reason why we could make reactors cheaply and fast in the 70 and 80s but can't seem to do it right now despite all the progress we made. Simply put there used to be a wealth of experience in building and operating reactors from... Building and operating reactors. In the 50s and 60s, the experience from the Manhattan project allowed people with pen and paper to design all the underpinning of all reactors today, and many that still exceed our current capabilities. Those people are now dead and their work either archived or unceremoniously dumped and destroyed. In the 70s and 80s there was a cadre of experienced reactor builders and engineering experts that had built PWRs. And while it meant all those great ideas from the 60s were washed away under the impression that PWR was all there was, it meant that at least these reactors were built well from the get go. But now these people are well retired. And their knowledge was not passed upon a new generation because no new scale reactor project happened for nearly 50 years. The reason why nuclear is getting "more expensive" to build and maintain isn't intrinsically because of nuclear, but because those who build it are inexperienced in nuclear construction and CONSISTENTLY mess up the processes. Leading to them having to tear down the whole thing and starting again. And even then once they finally learned, they cannot pass down that knowledge since the programs ever get cancelled or never scaled up to meaningful levels. The next generation will have to do one of the hardest things there is to do, and that is to re-invent the process while the outside industry mocks, hampers and lobbies against the effort.
Perhaps you should spend a bit of time discussing the "Swiss cheese model" to elaborate on why you disagree with the assertion that this was bound to happen. The argument isn't crazy on its face if you don't factor in redundant measures at the physical and operational levels. In this case a few holes lined up, but the additional layers of safety caught the issue before it was "through the block of cheese".
Yeah, the once-thru steam-generators of the B&W plants hold very little liquid water. They can boil dry VERY quickly. Navy reactor plants, and Westinghouse plants use a different recirculating type of steam generator that has a lot more water and can go several minutes before drying out.
I would love to watch you review Kyle Hills "SL-1 America's First Nuclear Disaster". Edit: Love your videos by the way. Been binge watching them this week.
I live near Davis Besse NPP , I believe it was boric acid that cause degradation to to reactor head. They replaced it in 2003 from a canceled Midland MI power plant, then again with a better designed reactor head in 2011.
My favorite anecdote related to TMI has got to be the one serious negative health effect it caused (by proxy) to none other than Edward Teller himself. In the wake of the accident he was so busy in debunking the misinfo and woo-woo spread by Jane Fonda, who starred in _The China Syndrome_ you mentioned, that he overworked himself into a heart attack. Edward Teller was a casualty of the TMI accident. There's also the song _Suomi-ilmiö_ by Finnish band Eppu Normaali, a wordplay on China syndrome, that sarcastically praises Finnish nuclear power industry while condemning it elsewhere. Good song, but a crummy message.
The reactors in the great lakes area like Pickering and Bruce use the great lakes themselves as part of the cooling process. It's honestly a brilliant use of local resources. I love everything about how Ontario does it's nuclear power. I'm very passionate about CANDU reactors
Wow the worst nuclear accident that happened in amarica wasn’t even a reactor explosion goes to show how much better actualy checking and updating safety feature oh yeah and NO GRAPHITE ON THE CONTROL RODS
I really enjoy your videos man thanks a lot, just a quick question, how I could get into the nuclear industry as a nuclear physicist? Keep it up man thanks a lot!
The nuclear industry is the #1 leader in "Safety 1st". It is glorious and hopefully other industries eventually become this level of safe and efficient :3
I live in a province in Canada that contains 3 nuclear power plants (Bruce, Pickering, Darlington) and a nuclear research facility (Chalk River). The power plants are a key part of the electrical grid, with hydro-electric as the second largest contributor by generator type to the grid. Without nuclear power, it would be impossible to meet the current and future demand for electricity. Before I started watching these videos, I was a bit leary of nuclear power. Now, I feel much better informed. There are, obviously , risks associated with nuclear reactors. The biggest issue is not the operation of these facilities, but the long term storage of spent nuclear materials. This is not just a nuclear power issue, but a nuclear industry issue. All of our nuclear power facilities have visitor information centres - I plan to visit them when I am in the area. Fun fact: Jimmy Carter worked at the Chalk River Nuclear facility for a time.
a lot of the people assuming the 3mi event caused mass health effects just think “if it’s bad enough that i’ve heard of it and ones i’ve heard of caused health disasters then it must’ve caused a massive health disaster”
Unfortunately primary education is far from sufficient for creating understanding of technical things like this, like the difference between nuclear power and nuclear weapons, like so many subjects that are left to ignorance, fear, and emotional reactions rather than knowledge. Thank you for doing what you can to help break that barrier of information and understanding.
Saturday Night Live did a skit on this Carter's visit to Three Mile Island. They used your typical instant mutation trope, and Carter and a plant's janitorial staff (female) become giants, and become a couple. Its a hoot !
I had no idea Babcock and Wilcox Diamond Power made all that stuff. They're one of my clients down in Lancaster, Ohio. Obviously nobody from that incident is still there, but id love to hear their stories about it.
B&W actually made pretty good PWR's. My mom sold computer time to them (at their nuclear division). The problem at TMI was not B&W's design but, a vendor issue with the Pilot operated relief valve. Nobody talks about the initial issue that triggered everything else which was the reactor feedwater goes through a "polisher" to remove particles and chemical contaminants. They consist of large columns filled with ion exchange resins... kind of like your home water purifying systems. After sitting awhile the resin gets sticky and packs. The maintenance crew used air to try to fluidize the resin. To get the air they connected to an instrument air supply line. They left forgetting to disconnect or even close the air valve. This allowed water to back up into the much lower pressure air line when the column was put back in use. It after some time backed into a flow device on the primary loop causing it fail and shut the feedwater pumps.
40:36 Yes, and although not recent, a specific series of "accidents" that is very underrated and too forgotten is the Love canal catastrophe. Also this is one that Jimmy Carter got involved and finally properly managed.
There are two things here. One this shows the importance of making thing walk a way safe. Two. None died, no significant exposure to radioactive material by the civilian population and no large long term environmental impact.
Jack Herbein's disastrous press conferences during the TMI accident was a case study in my engineering professional practice class about HOW NOT TO TALK TO THE PUBLIC.
There's 2 other videos from Kyle Hill's Half Life Histories series I'm eager to hear your thoughts on. The Castle Bravo Disaster and SL-1 America's First Nuclear Disaster.
You'd of thought having valve positions would be default for a system that's as expensive as a nuclear reactor. We use them in simple test rigs in production...
Crazy question: would it be possible, in a practible sense, to build a, an, I don't know a concrete cylinder designed for the explicit purpose that the middle of it melts around Corium, letting the Corium sink into it while *it* sinks out the heat, until the Corium itself is contained in a solidified concrete bottle?
Is there any knowledge of why, when the emergency core cooling system came on automatically, didn’t the operators wonder why it had kicked on automatically, and investigate? Was there no instrumentation that could tell them that?
TMI incident, especially about the lack to transparency are the crimes here. As long as governments remain as open and communicative as possible: when something goes this poorly with a reactor, the PR can help maintain the public's confidence that conditions are still safe. Like was it really that unclear on that Sunday, hydrogen gas readings were lessening and the core was slowly returning to normal? Anecdotally to lack of transparency: some high tension, high voltage power lines run over some homes. This was found in the disclosure when I was looking at a home for sale in the neighbourhood. The energy company, through a formal written request would not disclose to me the amount of high voltage; despite my interest in how much radiation was the home actually getting. It’s a simple health and safety question; their refusal to answer, that turned me off from buying too close to the high tension and high voltage power line. When energy companies hide potential problems and ignore to answer technical questions, it creates so much distrust. Why hide it. And that mentality hasn’t gone away (the email and reply from this energy company was from 2023).
Former president Carter was not just familiar with Nuclear reactors, he was an expert. Tasked as the engineering officer aboard the USS Seawolf, our second nuclear submarine. He designed the training program for the enlisted nuclear technicians. And, when the NRX reactor in the Chalk River Research Facility in Canada partially melted down, it was Mr. Carter who designed and executed the procedure for clearing out the damaged core. Specifically he and his 22 man team would work in three man shifts of 90 seconds and, be lowered into the reactor to disassemble and clean up the site.
What strikes me: You explain that a lot of stuff has been upgraded in instrumentation, procedures, etc., that was obviously not up to the task before the accident, and that since the accident this could not happen anymore. But if I would have asked you 5 min before the accident in 1979, if this plant is safe, all the procedures are safe and the instruments is up to date, you would have said with the same confidence: Everything is safe, nothing can ever happen, we tested it all and have plans for all emergencys. You get my point? Why have more trust into the actual status, than the one before the accident? ok, *this* accident can not happen in the same way, but again - all the insurances are not worth much, if another series of events can bring about another uncontrolled / unplanned accident. After the one accident is before another accident - at this location or somewhere else. There can not be "absolute" safety with nuclear plants, but the huge impact requires a zero failure / fatal accident rate, that can in practice not be matched. So, basically it's just a matter of time multiplied by the number of active reactors on not if, but when we will see the next serious accident with nuclear power.
The main failure of TMI was the piblic relations. One thing i am very happy about is that the normal accident theory forgot to take into account human learning and how humans tend to undo mistakes rather than make them again
I agree that one of the biggest failures was public relations. But it's undeniable there were operations failures as well. Allowing boron deposits to form stalagmites large enough to freeze a valve is inexcusable. Even if they didn't know as much about nuclear plant safety as we do now, that boils down to common sense. If a valve is there, it's probably necessary and should therefore probably work. Most nuclear reactor accidents can be traced to laziness, sloppiness, impatience or profit-seeking over safety. Coincidentally, the same can be said about most human-causes disasters in general, and as far as learning from our mistakes? NASA destroyed a shuttle and killed seven astronauts running a system they knew was dangerous. They fixed that system but didn't learn the lesson because they later destroyed a shuttle and killed seven astronauts running a different system they knew was dangerous. We tend to learn from our mistakes in the immediate aftermath, but then unless constant reinforcement happens, we forget after a few years and go back to our old habits.
I think we’re having a different understanding on the part where he says it’s a “normal accident”. Or it seems like you might have misunderstood what he was saying. The way I understood it, he wasn’t saying that it was a single unavoidable failure that caused this accident, he was saying that it was a bunch of seemingly inconsequential things that eventually led to this, most or all of which wouldn’t be a big deal on their own. It’s the compounding of all those things that made this accident unavoidable, or the lining up of the holes in the Swiss Cheese as you might say. It wasn’t just that the pump stopped working, or that the PORV stuck open, or that they thought water levels were higher than they were, or anything else, it was everything adding together on top of the people in the control room running on faulty information due the failed, missed, or nonexistent sensors/warning lights. I get that hindsight makes it seem simple to avoid this outcome, but that’s hindsight for you. The people working that day didn’t have the same training or experience that you do. In other words, they didn’t know what they didn’t know.
I was born in Harrisburg and I was 5 and living in the area when TMI happened. I can tell you that Kyle's assertion that there was misinformation with regard to the Netflix documentary is, in and of itself not entirely true. Most of what the documentary covered is verifiable and is consistent with my personal experience growing up in that area through the 1980s. The level of confusion ( and coverup ) was insane at the time and the potential for disaster along the entire eastern US was downplayed way too much. That being said, the inconsistent and confused statements made by company and governmental officials were probably the most dangerous problem at that time.
Well the "normal accident" theory part, there's some validity in that failsafe measures and redundancy, come through failures. The aero industry is a great example. Accidents lead to modifications to include better failsafes in the systems. Nuclear is the same in some ways, criticality incidents and previous accidents inform the next generation of safety measures, but that means in the earlier stages of a technology "Normal accidents" will occur, these will inform us moving forward. When we understand the dangers involved. we can make better systems. However that also involves fostering a culture around design safety where you feel confident to question the design "What happens if this fails"
Anyplace where there is a bolted joint and a seal there is a potential for leaks. SpaceX is developing their Raptor rocket engine and working to replace as many of the bolted joints as they can with welded components, because under the pressures involved (over 300 bar in some areas) there will be methane and oxygen leaks and the potential for fire. NASA has an even worse problem with the Artemis rocket because it uses hydrogen fuel, and hydrogen is even more prone to leak than methane. (During the first launch countdown, NASA had to send a "Red Team" out to the pad to tighten bolts on a hydrogen connection that had loosened under cryogenic temperatures.) I don't know if this is practical for nuclear reactor plumbing, but it may be something to consider.
Flanges are useful indeed because they allow you to quickly mount and dismount piping elements. Specifically for raptor they made more sense during initial testing but are structurally and manufacturing inefficient now that raptor is well into scale production. Also, do note that pressures in the system are actually much higher than that. The pressures in the combustion chamber are indeed upward 350 bars, however pressure flows from high to low. So in order to prevent the combustion from making it's way back into the engines, the pressure in the turbopump assembly is substantially higher.
I'd like to see a video explaining why people are so scared of nuclear power, even though it is proven to be the most efficient, safe and storage of "waste" has already been dealt with long time ago. In my opinion.
From my own personal experience with family members passionately against nuclear power. It always seems to come from a place of "Chernobyl, Fukashima, and Nukes had something to do with nuclear therefore nuclear energy must be the same"... and no matter how hard you try to argue against them and show that it's safe, more often then not they won't listen XD their's also an unsettling amount of people who think the steam given off by nuclear reactors is just as polluting as the smoke given off by coal power plants as well. also, not to mention all the misconceptions on nuclear power that exists everywhere, some still taught in school (atleast in some areas of the US, from personal experience, I was taught that the steam nuclear power plants give off were toxic waste that is causing harm to the environment XD and I'm almost 20, so that was fairly recent too). 100% agree on wanting a video like that.
34:12 Yeah, that's basically the whole idea of a gas burner of any sense, as long as you regularly burn the gas, it won't build up to a dangerous level. At least, assuming there's not some flaw in the system letting gas escape
By the way, since you enjoyed this video by Kyle Hill, check out his others on Nuclear Disasters and Nuclear Education. The man has a brilliant mind and is one of the very best educators on RU-vid, having come from a profession of teaching.
I always think it's interesting that Jimmy Carter was so experienced with nuclear topics, I wish presidents these days were more worldly, I think the country would benefit from leaders who've actually had experience with leadership and working. Like, they don't have to be war heros, but them having some measure of not living a pampered lifestyle would be nice.
Generally I don't like the way you are developing this channel, but this particular video was great because its importance. And because it's your area of expertise. I have queston. Could nuclear power plants be significantly cheaper to build if some of the excessively expensive and technically over-the-top safeguards were removed?
@tfolsenuclear How did you get your start in the nuclear industry and how hard is it to get into? Is it a sustainable job for the future? And how could you recommend someone get their start into this field of work? Id be very interested to hear your thoughts.
26:48 The China Syndrome is one of my favorite movies. The reporter talks to an engineer and askes "why do they call it the China Syndrome?" And he replies that it is a hypothetical that is "of course impossible because as soon as the core hits groundwater" [I think he says it flashes to steam, I mean there is bedrock too].. They might have gotten plenty wrong, and using it as a clickbait title long LONG before "clickbait" was a word, sure, criticism is due. Not to mention how much it happened to set back the industry - conspiracy theory rabbit holes I'm SURE.
44:00 I became interested in nuclear energy a long time ago. I may have tried to build a cold fusion reactor in my mom's basement (It was just an electrolysis separator, I didn't have Palladium, and obviously the theory is flawed.) It did get strikingly hot after only a few seconds running from an 18W wall-wart power supply though :/ As long as public education is bloated with whatever nonsense, can we replace something with a basic education of nuclear energy and accurate history? I want to see this technology. We don't need fusion, solar is so bad, we have fission, it works, it's safe, but nobody understands it...
So the company lost a reactor, an expensive asset. Certainly a disaster from their perspective. But why is this a "disaster" or even any sort of concern to the world at large? By far the worst negative consequence of such an event is the sudden lack of power generation to the grid.
Because so much false or incomplete information got released and caused a panic. That's it. That's the only reason. If they had one person in charge of sending out information and making sure it was accurate, very few people ever would have heard of the accident, and most of them would have forgotten it years ago.
