March 28, 2023, marks the 44th anniversary of the worst commercial nuclear power plant accident in the history of the United States.  The accident had involved a partial meltdown of the nuclear core at Metropolitan Edison’s Three Mile Island Unit 2 Nuclear Power Plant located on an island in the Susquehanna River just southeast of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.  Except for those who work in (or have retired from) the nuclear industry, it has slowly been fading from memory. 

I was early in my nuclear career when the accident occurred at TMI.  At the time I  felt I had a tremendous future ahead of me.  All that came to a screeching halt when the safety systems were overridden by the Operators at TMI-2 that fateful day.  Although I remained in the nuclear industry, my opportunities shrank and my path drastically changed.   I actually responded to the event (see the picture of my security badge below) and became one of the dozens of people that helped to bring the plant to a safe and stable condition.  The event affected me so much that when I retired I wrote a book about it.  My book, Happiness is a Cool Reactor, is a somewhat autobiography of my life of over 40 years in the nuclear industry, as well as a detailed account of the TMI-2 accident and its aftermath.  I updated it and published a second edition last March from Amazon publishing. 

But as I describe in my book, although designed to be incredibly safe, the TMI Unit 2 reactor core was severely damaged by the actions of a couple of operators at the plant.  As in all industrial technologies, designing safety features is vital to ensure people and the environment remain protected.  The primary unknown variable is how the human in control of the equipment will react when things don’t operate as expected.  Accidents have occurred in all technologies where the people in control did not understand what was happening and thus did not heed  alarms and overrode the safety systems that were designed to prevent such accidents from happening.  For example, the recent preventable train accident in East Palestine, Ohio, to me is an example of where human factors in the railroad industry were not successfully taken into account allowing the hazardous material being transported that day to crash and burn and become a significant disaster.  The other day when I was watching an episode of Air Disasters on the Smithsonian Channel on Pluto TV, it explained how a disaster happened when a large plane was taking off and the right engine braking device deployed.  These devices are only supposed to deploy on landing to help slow down the plane.  When the brake unexpectantly deployed on the right engine during take-off, the plane’s safety system (as designed) brought the right engine to idle which would have allowed the plane to continue to take off with the remaining operable left engine.  The pilots, however, didn’t recognize what was happening and couldn’t understand why the right engine throttled down, so they pushed the throttle back to full thrust.  With the braking device still deployed, this caused the good left engine to push forward while the right engine was now essentially pushing backwards.  This pulled the plane to the right and drove it into the ground killing everyone on board.  If the pilots wouldn’t have overridden the plane’s safety system response, they could have safely landed the plane on the good left engine.  Just like if the operators at TMI would have allowed the safety systems to run as designed, the reactor could have been safely shut down. Despite the adverse feelings that some people have about nuclear power, I strongly believe it is still an important and vital source of energy for both today (with our ever demanding appetite for electricity and the inability of renewables to meet demand) and in the future (when our fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas run out).  Hopefully, with proper safety engineering and design, the new promises made in recent announcements for the development of small modular reactors and even nuclear fusion power plants, nuclear energy will again become a significant part of the answer to our energy needs.