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Rating: 
Summary: Richie's Picks: MELTDOWN
Review: God bless my public library. I'm curled up in front of my computer at 6:30 A.M., marshaling my thoughts about nuclear power--a topic which monopolized my life for several years during the late 1970s--and I'm wondering how I can locate a copy of Amory Lovins' seminal essay on energy in the October 1976 issue of Foreign Affairs. Turns out it takes just five little key-steps from my library's homepage ..., and I am able to view a pdf file of the 32 page article! I utilized that article, "Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken," back then as the foundation to my own argument--that the electricity from the twin nuclear power plants, then proposed for eastern Long Island, was unnecessary. If our years of protests and legal intervention hadn't already killed plans for constructing those twin nuclear plants, they were officially pronounced dead after the nation spent a scary few days awaiting the outcome of events in Middletown, Pennsylvania. MELTDOWN: A RACE AGAINST NUCLEAR DISASTER AT THREE MILE ISLAND, by Wilborn Hampton, is a great introduction for young adults about what it's like to be a journalist. More importantly, it's a chronicle by a journalist on the scene of the events at Three Mile Island in the spring of 1979, where we got lucky--a catastrophe that would far outweigh that of 9-11 was narrowly averted. A full understanding of the extent of that potential disaster can only be grasped when viewed in relation to the 1986 nuclear catastrophe at Chernobyl, which is the subject of MELTDOWN's final chapter: "There is no official death toll for Chernobyl. At the time, the Soviet government reported that 31 people died in the accident. But since the breakup of the Soviet Union, more honest assessments of the extent of the tragedy have come out. The Ukraine, which is now an independent nation, has aid that more than 4,300 people died there. Nearly all the firemen who battled the blaze that first night are now dead, most from cancer or other radiation-related illnesses...Deaths among the soldiers and workers who built the concrete shell around the [damaged and contaminated] reactor are estimated to number at least 6,000... "The land around the Chernobyl plant is a wasteland. Ukrainian officials say that 160,000 square kilometers [approximately 62,000 square miles] were contaminated with radioactive fallout at a level forty times greater than the level of radiation that Hiroshima or Nagasaki received from the first atomic bombs...Pripyat is now a ghost town...Bulldozers have buried most of the houses, and the old apartment blocks are deserted, the possessions of the former inhabitants too radioactive to reclaim... "In Gomel, a town about sixty miles north of Chernobyl that received perhaps the heaviest concentration of radioactive fallout, the local orphanage is full of infants and young children as a result of what has become an epidemic of birth defects now being born to women who received large doses of radiation." A young adult reading such awful facts and considering the root causes of why such potentially catastrophic technology is "necessary" may well be a young adult who, at the very least, decides to turn off their light the next time they leave the room. Furthermore, MELTDOWN provides a comprehensible introduction to nuclear power for the young adults who are growing up facing the world's aging inventory of nuclear power plants--and the ever-increasing quantities of highly radioactive nuclear waste from those power plants (which has been a hot topic just this past week). Common sense dictates that many of these plants will need to be abandoned in the not-so-distant future. Face it: it's one thing for me to keep my 1980 Datsun station wagon on the road, but I can afford to have something break down on it. (Actually that thought makes me a bit nervous.) We expect someone to be watching out for us when it comes to such things as geriatric commercial airliners. But who is going to going to make the decisions regarding the antiquated nuclear plants that currently produce such a significant portion of our nation's electric supply? MELTDOWN gives young adults a head start on considering this dilemma. Its readability and the significance of the subject matter, combined with a fine glossary and a list of recommended resources, make MELTDOWN: A RACE AGAINST NUCLEAR DISASTER AT THREE MILE ISLAND a must-have. It provides today's young adults an opportunity for examining a pivotal episode from our energy past and an incentive for contemplating their energy future...
Rating:
Summary: A very personal story about reporting
Review: There is very little information in this book to aid a scientific evaluation of the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant accident. In the case of Three Mile Island, what happened might be described as an accident more truly than in the case of Chernobyl, where stupidity became a more obvious factor in the series of events leading up to the accident. It should not be unusual, now, for Americans to have some opinions about mistakes that were made in the design and testing of Chernobyl Unit No. 4, particularly after seeing how much of the building surrounding it was destroyed on April 26, 1986, as shown in the picture on page 80 of this book, at the start of Chapter 11. Blowing the top off the reactor was the first clue the operators had that they needed to call some fire departments to help battle the blaze. Wilborn Hampton does not give a definite temperature for what happened at Chernobyl, or at Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16, 1945 (p. 3), or at Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945, or at Nagasaki three days later (p. 4), but "It was estimated that the temperature at the point the bomb exploded exceeded 10,000 degrees. Heat engulfed the city." (pp. 4-5). The efficiencies of producing electrical power from heat and steam seem to improve as temperatures rise above what a plant burning coal would produce, but the danger that human beings will misunderstand what is happening in such situations is one of the most frightening aspects of dangerous situations that people do not know how to control. The first of the problems reported at Three Mile Island were some unusual radiation leaks. Page 18 shows a March 30 story by Richard D. Lyons (Special to the New York Times) that described "large amounts of water containing small amounts of radioactivity" released by "the almost new generating plant." The element of human error involved in the situation might be due to that: "Because of the radioactive water and gas within the containment building, no one was able to go back inside Unit No. 2 to make an assessment of the damage. All they had to go on was information transmitted from instruments that might have been damaged by the accident. When Miller ordered readings taken on the amount of heat and the level of radiation that were building up inside the reactor, the results were so high--one showed that the temperature in the top of the reactor was over 4,000 degrees--that he thought the equipment was simply malfunctioning and so he discounted them." (p. 25) It was hot, and a large hydrogen gas bubble at the top of the reactor's core suddenly became the major technical fact that most of the drama from page 30 on makes people start to worry about a meltdown. Conflicting stories in the press about the possibility of a hydrogen explosion kept Harold Denton, Joseph M. Hendrie, Roger Mattson, and Victor Stello arguing until there was a press conference after midnight that announced President Jimmy Carter would visit Three Mile Island the next day. (p. 61). Even Rosalynn was on the old yellow bus that took them to the island. The major scientific revelation is the description of the argument that was going on at the same time: "The radiolysis was not producing new oxygen that might trigger the hydrogen bubble. Some of the water in the reactor was indeed separating into hydrogen and oxygen molecules, but because there was so much extra hydrogen, the oxygen was constantly combining with it to form back into water. The bubble was, in effect, a built-in self-defense against an explosion." (p. 66). After the bubble shrank from 1,000 cubic feet to about fifty cubic feet, a radiation level of 30,000 rems an hour inside the containment building was announced, lethal enough to make shutting it down an expensive problem. The UPI article by Wilborn Hampton shown on page 72 reports the comments of George Boyer, the 76-year-old owner of a general store "just across the street from the bridge that leads to Three Mile Island and its crippled nuclear plant. . . . During the years of building the nuclear plant, Boyer's store was a hangout for the hundreds of construction workers. . . . `I remember everything went real smooth on No. 1 -- no problems at all,' he said. `But No. 2 (the reactor that malfunctioned), there were always problems.' " Sometimes things work, and sometimes there ought to be a way to go back to the beginning and do it right, but that never happens. There are a few reports of human error in this book and problems with valves that didn't seem quite as important as that general sense that when things weren't going right, at least someone was willing to describe the system as stable.
Rating:
Summary: A very personal story about reporting
Review: There is very little information in this book to aid a scientific evaluation of the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant accident. In the case of Three Mile Island, what happened might be described as an accident more truly than in the case of Chernobyl, where stupidity became a more obvious factor in the series of events leading up to the accident. It should not be unusual, now, for Americans to have some opinions about mistakes that were made in the design and testing of Chernobyl Unit No. 4, particularly after seeing how much of the building surrounding it was destroyed on April 26, 1986, as shown in the picture on page 80 of this book, at the start of Chapter 11. Blowing the top off the reactor was the first clue the operators had that they needed to call some fire departments to help battle the blaze. Wilborn Hampton does not give a definite temperature for what happened at Chernobyl, or at Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16, 1945 (p. 3), or at Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945, or at Nagasaki three days later (p. 4), but "It was estimated that the temperature at the point the bomb exploded exceeded 10,000 degrees. Heat engulfed the city." (pp. 4-5). The efficiencies of producing electrical power from heat and steam seem to improve as temperatures rise above what a plant burning coal would produce, but the danger that human beings will misunderstand what is happening in such situations is one of the most frightening aspects of dangerous situations that people do not know how to control. The first of the problems reported at Three Mile Island were some unusual radiation leaks. Page 18 shows a March 30 story by Richard D. Lyons (Special to the New York Times) that described "large amounts of water containing small amounts of radioactivity" released by "the almost new generating plant." The element of human error involved in the situation might be due to that: "Because of the radioactive water and gas within the containment building, no one was able to go back inside Unit No. 2 to make an assessment of the damage. All they had to go on was information transmitted from instruments that might have been damaged by the accident. When Miller ordered readings taken on the amount of heat and the level of radiation that were building up inside the reactor, the results were so high--one showed that the temperature in the top of the reactor was over 4,000 degrees--that he thought the equipment was simply malfunctioning and so he discounted them." (p. 25) It was hot, and a large hydrogen gas bubble at the top of the reactor's core suddenly became the major technical fact that most of the drama from page 30 on makes people start to worry about a meltdown. Conflicting stories in the press about the possibility of a hydrogen explosion kept Harold Denton, Joseph M. Hendrie, Roger Mattson, and Victor Stello arguing until there was a press conference after midnight that announced President Jimmy Carter would visit Three Mile Island the next day. (p. 61). Even Rosalynn was on the old yellow bus that took them to the island. The major scientific revelation is the description of the argument that was going on at the same time: "The radiolysis was not producing new oxygen that might trigger the hydrogen bubble. Some of the water in the reactor was indeed separating into hydrogen and oxygen molecules, but because there was so much extra hydrogen, the oxygen was constantly combining with it to form back into water. The bubble was, in effect, a built-in self-defense against an explosion." (p. 66). After the bubble shrank from 1,000 cubic feet to about fifty cubic feet, a radiation level of 30,000 rems an hour inside the containment building was announced, lethal enough to make shutting it down an expensive problem. The UPI article by Wilborn Hampton shown on page 72 reports the comments of George Boyer, the 76-year-old owner of a general store "just across the street from the bridge that leads to Three Mile Island and its crippled nuclear plant. . . . During the years of building the nuclear plant, Boyer's store was a hangout for the hundreds of construction workers. . . . `I remember everything went real smooth on No. 1 -- no problems at all,' he said. `But No. 2 (the reactor that malfunctioned), there were always problems.' " Sometimes things work, and sometimes there ought to be a way to go back to the beginning and do it right, but that never happens. There are a few reports of human error in this book and problems with valves that didn't seem quite as important as that general sense that when things weren't going right, at least someone was willing to describe the system as stable.
Rating: 
Summary: A Good Sense of What Was Going On At The Time
Review: Wilborn Hampton was assigned by UPI to cover the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island nuclear plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Mr. Hampton has done a fine job at portraying the confusion of the experts, the contradicting conclusions drawn from the same material in Washington DC and at the plant as well as the high anxiety level that all this created in nearby towns and counties. I lived near the plant at the time of the accident and was one of the children evacuated because of the impending doom. I remember well the confusion surrounding what was going on. No one seemed to know for sure what was going to happen and some experts came right out and admitted so. Mr. Hampton has portrayed these feelings well and while reading the book you can see why. With behind the scene knowledge and of course hindsight the writer has produced an excellent book on the public events that this area went through. This book is not too technical but touches on how close we actually were to a meltdown, something still at debate in many circles. This book is good for young teens on up. It should be read by anyone who is interested in history, nuclear power or even how big corporations treat teh surrounding communities and the local and state governments. There is much more that can be read on the subject but this is a very interesting book and good place to start.
Rating:
Summary: A Good Sense of What Was Going On At The Time
Review: Wilborn Hampton was assigned by UPI to cover the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island nuclear plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Mr. Hampton has done a fine job at portraying the confusion of the experts, the contradicting conclusions drawn from the same material in Washington DC and at the plant as well as the high anxiety level that all this created in nearby towns and counties. I lived near the plant at the time of the accident and was one of the children evacuated because of the impending doom. I remember well the confusion surrounding what was going on. No one seemed to know for sure what was going to happen and some experts came right out and admitted so. Mr. Hampton has portrayed these feelings well and while reading the book you can see why. With behind the scene knowledge and of course hindsight the writer has produced an excellent book on the public events that this area went through. This book is not too technical but touches on how close we actually were to a meltdown, something still at debate in many circles. This book is good for young teens on up. It should be read by anyone who is interested in history, nuclear power or even how big corporations treat teh surrounding communities and the local and state governments. There is much more that can be read on the subject but this is a very interesting book and good place to start.
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