Lessons Learned in a Year

The Kemeny commission that investigated Three Mile Island for President Carter put only small blame on the operators in the control room on the day of the near disaster. Instead, the commission took aim at what it called the "shallow," "deficient" and "inadequate" operator training system created by industry and Government. In the year since the accident, industry executives and Government regulators have made a number of changes. Says Loring Mills, a spokesman for the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations: "Before T.M.I., the industry was training people to run plants as if they always ran correctly. Now we throw trainees situations they didn't anticipate and expect them to respond."

Among the safety moves:

Creating Supernukes. Under new Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules, utilities are permanently assigning an additional expert to each shift to serve as technical adviser or supernuke, in operator lingo. The adviser is supposed to be kept free of all routine duties so that he can monitor safety indicators and help operators interpret plant conditions. Says Jim Toscas, the nuclear training supervisor for Commonwealth Edison in Illinois: "The objective is for the adviser to be so well rounded he can't be snowed by anybody in the plant."

Rehearsing Snafus. Before T.M.I., operators practiced handling emergencies on computer-driven simulators, but the training concentrated on one mishap at a time. At T.M.I., problems occurred in rapid succession: pumps quit, a valve

PIERCE stuck open, and some steam generators boiled dry within minutes. Today, operators drill to handle multiple failures, and all 2,500 licensed reactor operators in the U.S. have gone through the sequence that occurred at T.M.I. In Soddy-Daisy, Term., an annual two-week refresher course covering multiple breakdowns is offered by the Tennessee Valley Authority.

Emphasizing Theory. The Kemeny commission found that training did not pay enough attention to the theory of how the system worked. One mistake of the T.M.I, operators, for example, was their failure to realize that hot water in the reactor core boiled into steam because of the loss of pressure during the accident. Says Toscas: "We're planning to add much more study of the basic theory of heat transfer, fluid flow, water and steam theory--all the stuff the operators flew right by before and which normal operating conditions don't require."

Improving Warnings. Says former Kemeny Commissioner Thomas Pigford:

"The thing that bothered us more than anything else was that there were advance indications that this accident could happen, and they were ignored." Indeed a similar event began in 1977 in Toledo Edison's Davis-Besse 1 plant, and operators mistakenly cut off the operation of automatic emergency cooling pumps, just as they did at T.M.I. But at Davis-Besse the mistake was detected in time, and the reactor was quickly brought back to normal.

Required reports were filed on the incident with the NRC, and should have led to a simple warning that would have kept T.M.I.'s operators from misreading the situation two years later. However, that warning was never issued. Now, instead of waiting for such an NRC alert, the industry has set up a new watchdog group, the Nuclear Safety Analysis Center. It will review reports of minor incidents and, if necessary, press for changes in operating practice or equipment design.

Three months ago, another industry-wide supervisory group, the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations (INPO), opened for business in Atlanta. This spring, INPO, which is funded by 54 utilities, will begin annual inspections of nuclear plants and intends eventually to set standards and accredit both training programs and instructors for member utilities.

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