At three mile island it was the employees themselves that caused the near meltdown. They tried a practice drill that went wrong, turning off the cooling water. President carter called them and told them to turn the god d ...water on NOW!( the press reported the events very carefully). Carter, having been trained as a nuclear sub operator , rushed up there, toured the place and remarked it had been a close call. At the time , it was thought 300 thousand might have died due to exposure. Would have been similar to Chernobyl. As for an airplane hitting one , if it hit the spent rod fuel section and damaged it, it would be all over. They all have these and they are mostly full due to politics and no place to put them.
Huh. Impressive fiction there Jimmy. Care to cite any sources on any of that?
Considering that TMI-2 was running at 97% of capacity while TMI-1 was shut down for refueling, I'm going to take a teeny tiny little guess that nobody shut off any cooling water on purpose for any "drills".
Which of course brings your entire weird story into question considering there's book after book and page after page of logs available to read on the topic.
But the Jimmy Carter thing is just precious. Victor Gilinsky of NRC who is documented as THE individual who notified the White House staff said this in a 2009 article:
"It was five weeks later that we learned that the reactor operators had measured fuel temperatures near the melting point on that early Wednesday morning. We didn't learn for years – until the reactor vessel was physically opened – that by the time the plant operator called the NRC at about 8:00 a.m., roughly half of the uranium fuel had already melted. In a sense, the accident was over before we had even heard about it--and it had been many, many times worse than we envisioned at the time."
So... either Galinski is lying -- or there's no way the President knew of the need for coolant water or made any cutesy phone calls during the event "saving the day" like in the movies.
NRC didn't even know the severity of the accident for five weeks and didn't know the fuel had melted for YEARS, there Jimbo.
Plus, for chrissakes, most operators of nuclear power plants at the time were staffed with MANY Navy-trained nuclear operators. It was the main hiring pool of workers for decades in that business and still is.
Citing some superpower endowed only to Carter via his "Navy training" is kinda stupid, considering most of the people running the plant were also.
There was no Jimmy Carter Nuclear Operator and President Superhero moment with TMI-2.
Nor was it a drill when running the plant at 97%.
And of course you left out that Carter went around NRC leadership and was speaking directly to an on-site guy, bypassing most of his own staff, and generally messing up the entire chain of command, and posed for pictures with the plant operator who cheated on his certification tests because he decided a photo op was a good idea without talking to NRC leadership first about it, too. Probably a good idea to check in with your own regulatory staff before flying into a nuclear disaster site, if nothing else to avoid some rather embarrassing photos.
But the best, while not directly Carter's fault, was when NRC was concerned about a hydrogen bubble forming in the containment and causing an explosion, when NRC explained that no one could go near the valve to release the hydrogen due to radiation inside the containment -- a White House staff member suggested directly to Galinski that they could use terminal cancer patients to open the valve.
More of an indication of the type of idiots that work in DC and surrounded Carter, than any knock on Carter himself, but what a freaking tool.
Feel free to read Galinski's article and get back to us on the new story there Jimmy. It's linked below.
I'm sure it'll be a fetching tale of a Democratic President's derring-doo and action-hero-like qualities!
Excerpt from Jimmy Cooper's new book on TMI-2:
Turn on the pumps! Yelled the President into the phone, the only man in America who could see what on-site staff who'd operated the station for years, couldn't. The man was mystical in his amazing ability to read instrument panels via psychic powers and if they'd have kept his secret, he could have run the plant remotely through telekinesis... but the world wasn't ready to know yet that he was really SuperPresident.
Not yet. Someday. Someday he would tell them through his friend Jimmy Cooper, but until that day, the secret must be kept safe!
Here's Galinski's article for ya -- widely used as source material in various books and articles on the event:
http://thebulletin.org/behind-scenes-three-mile-island-0
