The airborne alert program came to an immediate stop at Strategic Air Command. As one observer pointed out, if HOBO 28 had crashed into the BMEWS site, we would have concluded that the Soviets had simultaneously destroyed our radar outpost and our look-down aircraft, and the Third World War would have commenced.
On the whole, the Air Force, Navy, and Army were good stewards with the thousands of nuclear weapons and warheads in inventory in the 20th century. They managed to never detonate one, even with planes crashing, ships colliding, and mistakes and errors so simple, it was impossible to predict what would happen next. A solid conclusion that one can draw from the representative subset of accidents here is that a technically advanced warplane is safe only when it is on the ground with the engines turned off.
The accidents that did happen were not technically nuclear in nature, and they certainly were not nuclear-power accidents, and yet they added to the distortion and the magnification of the public nuclear concept. When one of the tobacco farmers in Faro was advised to leave town while the specialists dealt with the thermonuclear weapon standing on its nose in his field, he and his wife stole a glance at it on the way out. The wife said she could feel it. The radiation was making the right side of her body burn. Psychologically, that was true, but it was not alpha, beta, or gamma rays streaming out of the weapon. It was difficult to detect the plutonium and uranium deep inside the bomb chassis using the most sensitive electronic instruments pressed against it, much less two hundred feet away with sensitive skin. It was not the radiation, but it was the very thought of radiation that made her skin react. It was the strictly imposed secrecy, the complete lack of knowledge of what was inside the bomb case that would let the imagination run wild and make a normal person break out into hives. The major edict in the instructions for cleaning up a lost nuclear weapon, the Air Force procedure known as Moist Mop, is “Don’t scare the locals!” The effect seems just the opposite.
It will take decades or maybe centuries for the fear of deliberate nuclear destruction to subside, but that emotion is not even necessary to sustain the atomic dread. Commercial nuclear power, the benign type that makes electricity come out of your wall, would itself cause enough mayhem to keep the fire burning, now that the Cold War is over and continual transport of nuclear bombs via airplane is not as routine. The next event would happen in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, on a fine March day in 1979, and it would become known to nuclear engineers everywhere as “TMI.” As was the case of the aircraft accidents, the initiating fault would be so minor, so insignificant that it would be impossible to predict what was going to happen.
Chapter 9:
The China Syndrome Plays in Harrisburg and Pripyat
“The most important man in a nuclear submarine? That would be the inconspicuous seaman who goes all around the sub and drips oil in the bearings. You lose one bearing in something like a valve-actuating motor somewhere, and you can lose the whole boat.”
One day I was in the E.I. Hatch Nuclear Power Plant near Baxley, Georgia, on a mission to install my life’s work in the former operator’s break room, which had been converted into an equipment bay. There was a list of new equipment mandated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission after the Three Mile Island disaster, and my contribution was four ROLM MSE/14 minicomputers and associated hardware, taking up four racks for each of the two reactors. These machines would work hard, 24 hours a day, constantly updating a long list of data considered crucial to the safe operation of the two reactors at the plant and making it available to the operators on demand.
I was supremely confident that my MSE/14s would be the meanest, toughest pieces of hardware in the entire room. They were built to military specifications and were meant to run on the upper deck of a navy ship, pitching in the waves and taking fire in salt water spray and rocket exhaust.[222] I was so, so wrong. In the adjacent rack was an unidentifiable piece of electronic gizmo bolted in with very heavy screws. The front face was half-inch steel armor-plate, and the thing looked like it weighed about 500 pounds. My mil-spec equipment looked delicate in comparison. I was concerned to notice that the meters on the gizmo’s face were smashed flat, and the extremely robust controls, built for use by a gorilla, had been crushed and sheared off.
I turned to my handler and asked nervously, “Uh, what happened to this thing?”
“Oh,” he responded. “That. Well, the installer complained that the pipefitters were in his way. My suggestion is, don’t upset the pipefitters.”
I had noticed all the plumbers with their bending machines strung out all over the yard, working slowly and carefully to install piping upgrades and new tubing runs all over the place, including in the ceiling of the new equipment bay. Quickly I learned working at the plant that the pipes, valves, and pumps had a much higher coefficient of importance than any electronic gadget in the facility. There were reasons for this hierarchy.
The great meltdown accident at the Three Mile Island Unit 2 in Pennsylvania would seem to have been the end of the Exuberance Period in atomic energy, but, of course, it was not. The excitement and mystique of nuclear power had pretty much faded out years before then, as the cold realities of loan interest and wavering public power demand put a lid on it. It was too bad, because the adolescence phase is interesting even for technology, and nuclear power technology had been declared mature while it was still wearing short pants. There remained unresolved problems, some of which were known and some of which would snap into clarity with a couple of hard jolts.
By the late seventies, a world standard for commercial nuclear power reactors had been loosely established by what utilities chose to buy. It was the light-water-moderated and — cooled reactor, mainly the pressurized-water-reactor concept that Admiral Rickover had developed with spectacular results for his nuclear submarine program. Liquid-metal-cooled breeders and all oddball reactor types, such as molten-salt, gas-cooled, and pebble-bed designs, were largely abandoned and suffered a lack of development funds. About 80 percent of the reactors being built or run in the United States were PWRs made by Westinghouse, Combustion Engineering (CE), or Babcock and Wilcox (B&W), with the remainder being the simpler boiling-water reactors built by General Electric (GE).
An unresolved technical detail was the Emergency Core Cooling System (ECCS), a collection of devices used to prevent a fuel meltdown in case of an accidental breakage of the primary cooling loop. In the spring of 1972, the AEC held a series of hearings to address concerns that insufficient attention had been paid to this unlikely but potentially disastrous type of accident. Interim ECCS designs were being sold to utilities, and these were extremely complicated add-ons, consisting of multiple auxiliary water-injection systems with a great deal of plumbing. These systems were reminiscent of “five-mile-per-hour bumpers,” clumsy-looking things added to cars because a small tap on the front of the vehicle could cause a lot of expensive damage. A single pipe break could bring down an entire generating plant, and the insurers were justifiably frightened. These auxiliary coolant systems required electricity to operate valves remotely, run pumps, and provide power for the control room, so backup generators had to be installed as well, ensuring that there would be power for the ECCS even if the turbine had stopped and there was no power available on the utility network. The ECCS, even in its possibly inadequate form, ran up the cost of a nuclear power plant. The AEC hearings ran for a year and a half, and a few improvements were mandated.
222
The MSE/14 was the mil-spec equivalent of the Data General Eclipse S/140, a 16-bit industrial control computer. The military designation was AN/UYK-64(V) (“yuck sixty-four”) or 1666B. They were used in the Ground-Launched Cruise Missile and Sea-Launched Cruise Missile (“glick’em — slick’em”) military programs as the launch-sequencers, but the GLCM (BGM-109C Gryphon) went away with the INF Treaty in 1988. SLCMs (BGM-109 Tomahawks) were last used on March 22, 2011, against targets in Libya.