Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 8: Three Mile Island

Episode Date: December 4, 2019

Today @donoteat01, @aliceavizandum, and @oldmananders0n are joined by @LindsayPB to head to Central Pennsylvania to talk about the biggest civilian nuclear accident in the United States, which nonetheless didn't do very much here is the link to the video with slides: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sm5p2K9eW9o   listen to trashfuture: https://trashfuturepodcast.podbean.com/   Here's the Patreon link so you can watch the Groverhaus episode: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod    

Alright folks, so I forgot to turn on screen recording when we recorded this podcast so I lost all the annotations. So I'm gonna reference a few annotations I put on the slides through the podcast which you're not gonna be able to see because again I lost them all. I think it's still pretty watchable you know maybe if you just stop the video you can like sort of look at the picture and figure out what we're talking about and of course if you're listening to this on a podcast app of course that doesn't matter at all but I'm sorry about that I'm gonna try and make sure that don't happen again and you get you know all

the nice annotations that help you understand and learn. Okay now we're gonna podcast. Alright, let us talk about Adams. Alright. Not specifically smashing Adams for fun and profit. Yes. And people can stop bitching about your mic quality because it's much better now. Yes. Yeah yeah I ran out thanks to the Patreon dollars I ran out and got a new microphone so you can calm the fuck down. Smash right through that that first Patreon goal. Much like the Adams were about to smash. Well there's your problem a podcast about engineering disasters. I'm Justin Rosniak I do this

podcast and also a YouTube channel about city and urban planning and I'm on Twitter at do not eat one. My pronouns are he and him. Alice called well Kelly I'm on a podcast called Trash Future about why the future will be trash as well as this and my pronouns are she and her. Hi I'm Lindsay I somehow got elected as a city counsellor and my pronouns are any I really don't care. She her though is easiest. It's easiest because that's what everyone like offline knows me as and I'm just like yeah let's let's not pull that thread okay let's not try to explain what being non-binary is to like 70 year olds that's that that tends to

that tends to be either you run into you run into either like cool old people like that's really cool and I support you or just that is disgusting and you're horrible there is no in between. The big cable knit sweater of non-binary gender you just start pulling and it just keeps pulling. I'm mostly in forever. Finally I am Liam Anderson I'm at old man Anderson on Twitter so I I get really annoyed with dumb comments in our YouTube section and I have two things to say. First happy birthday to older man Anderson my dad and two I I would like to point out personal in the YouTube comments Megan Burke is a dear friend and don't comment

on jokes you don't understand and then get us all mad when we're drunk thank you very much for your cooperation. We also got canceled for culturally appropriating Grover House. That too just blocked everyone. There can only be one Grover House thread. This is so fucking embarrassing. One of one of my friends tweeted about it and she said I hate that I know what every individual element of canceled for culturally appropriating Grover House is and I blame Alice for all of it. Yeah it was it was truly incredible it's just like man. And I'm just sitting here like I have no idea what the hell Grover House is. Yeah

well go back and listen to the bonus episode subscribe to our to subscribe to our own Patriot. We'll wait just do just do that now. Yeah yeah it's not uploaded yet but yeah go and listen to it. All right so as you can see from our image on the screen here today we're going to be talking about nuclear power more specifically one particular nuclear power plant Three Mile Island which is just just south to Harrisburg Pennsylvania on the Susquehanna River and I can understand this one if I haven't seen either of the two previous Mile Islands. No you got to go back. Oh it's like a soft reboot so it's fine. The

gritty reboot of nuclear meltdown. The gritty reboot of Corium and secondary containment. Yes so I'm going to start with the primer on what is nuclear power. How does it work. It's very simple right so. Oh yeah the MSP genius hard it works. Jesus. So you have spicy rocks and you put them in water and you use the bubbles that the spicy rocks make to turn a fan right and it turns it backwards so when you plug it into the wall it generates electricity right. And you have two different kinds of nuclear reactor in this diagram. Do I. You do. You have a friendly sun just reacting up there. That is true. But the thing

with the sun is that it doesn't have a fan so it's less efficient as a power source. Not with that attitude. You can't just attach a fan to it. It's true. Yeah. That's why the good Lord invented the Dyson Sphere Alice. No but you can put earth on sea. You can put solar panels all over earth as long as you don't mind you know clouds and night getting in the way. It's coming. It's coming. Yeah one day one day we're going to get bubbles out of that sun. So obviously that's a very simplified version. But you know basically what what is making these rocks spicy is nuclear fission. Right. Yeah. You hit a hit the nucleus of a

uranium atom with a neutron. Right. And if you whack it hard enough it'll split into pieces and that releases energy. Right. And it also releases heat. He releases more neutrons that go and whack into other atoms and split them apart. Right. Now if you do if you do that real fast you get a bomb. We don't want that. We want to do it slow. So we just have a continuous source of heat. Right. So obviously nuclear reactors can't blow up like bombs. That doesn't happen. But I saw all those movies like the China syndrome and chess character assassination on an entire industry. It's like oh no my pressurized water

reactor is something going to turn us under a bomb by magic. Yes. It's like how I turn the ignition of my car. It blows up and demolishes the entire block. It's got the same basic components as a fuel air bomb. That means it's the same thing. Tesla is working on that. The cyber truck more like the cyber bomb. It's so goddamn stupid and I hate it. I don't understand why we can't just bring back the 95 Ranger. Why did he make why did he make the Warthog from Halo. Must be the one from the first Halo with no polygons. Yes. Absolutely. I mean I'm with I'm with Liam on the 95 Ranger thing. I think like the only acceptable

truck has a case of steel reserve in one foot well and the roof line and kind of sags on one side and the driver is your cousin and he just kind of says hell yeah hell yeah brother you got like six tins of skull running around in the back yeah if you scrape out all of it together you get one lip out of it yep I've been there you see it's funny it's like the future I was promised was space and reacts everywhere the future I got is the fucking cyber truck but don't worry they'll put a cyber truck in space oh yeah just to ruin everything a little bit more can we make sure that Elon Musk is inside it this time so in a nuclear reactor right we have to control these reactions so they don't get

out of control and we use a thing called a control rod to do that and that's you know just sort of a thing you lower into where the spicy rocks are and they absorb some of the neutrons you know it stops the reaction this is how you like do active control of the spicy rocks passive design is a whole other kettle of fish like you have negative void coefficients fuel temperature coefficients so many coefficients there's a lot of coefficients if we have our spicy rocks then this is the fabled smooth black mineral right as you have something neutral like graphite that you insert into it and it absorbs those neutrons yes in this case math is literally power yes and if you drop them all the way in that stops the reaction dead but there's some residual decay heat

as Lindsay was mentioned about um uh what's it though the the void coefficient yeah it's like every reactor is negative except Chernobyl because they're like what could possibly go wrong our boiling water act will never undergo thermal runaway until it did and uh so let's go and do I guess we'll talk a little bit about how Three Mile Island was built and how that worked Three Mile Island was something called a pressurized water reactor this is as opposed to a boiling water reactor right in the pressurized water reactor the water never boils uh because it's under pressure hence pressurized water reactor um give me my pen there we are so i'm just gonna madden it yeah i'm gonna john madden this oh great it's a the pressurized water reactor a lunch pail quarterback that has good

coachability yeah show me uh texas tech running for 98 yards please draw it draw it it's like the boring but practical insert appropriate footballer here i have no idea about football yes it it is the lunch pail quarterback compared to the like flashy showboating uh boiling water you could just say the washington football team you can just go ahead and say it so uh the the spicy rocks are here in this big red tank right there's um there there's water going through there it's at about 153 atmospheres of pressure so it doesn't boil even though it's up to like 600 degrees fahrenheit or like 400 degrees celsius or whatever it is right and that goes out of the reactor it goes into this uh steam generator here and the hot pressurized water goes in the top it comes out the bottom

cold it runs through a pump it goes through the cycle again in the meantime there's another cycle of the water that goes to the turbine which also goes through the the steam generator it goes in the bottom cold it comes out the top hot uh runs to the turbine turbine runs generator generator you know goes goes out and then you can plug in i don't know your your phone or something to the wall yeah your juicero your toaster whatever transformator does not sound like a real word by the way i have no i i i just noticed that just ask this scientist one thing i want to draw attention to which is going to be relevant here is this tank here called the pressurizer right so how do we maintain pressure in a pressurized water system uh you squeeze the water you can't

do that because the water is incompressible damn okay new plan it's basically like hey whatever we have a little bit of air in the top so we can adjust the pressure and also we know how high the water level is in the reactor that's going to be important later yes so this is partially filled with water and then there's a bunch of steam on top which is keeping the whole thing at a certain pressure and then you can make adjustments here to the whole system this thing is usually at the top of the the the whole pressurized water system right where this would be the highest component in there that way you can assume that if it's full then everything else is full of water right i feel like it's not it's a good idea to make assumptions in terms of nuclear power yes go on

so the power planning question here at Three Mile Island that opened in 1974 with unit one 18 or or 819 megawatts unit two went online december 30th 1978 it was designed by a company called Babcock and Wilcox Boilermakers yes yeah you just imported one of our terribly uh like humorous British names yeah this is like there's no way there's no way a company with that name doesn't do anything other than than then build like incredibly high-strength pressure vessels they make big tea kettles big tea kettles that's what british does they more or less they built all of the um boilers for like uh steamships and like and then like coal fired battleships and stuff so they do know from

pressure but also having a very silly name and so you've heard that we did use stubborn engineering company literally called the butthole company so it's like maybe i can spread them on my toast i don't know they make boilers in both lips this part of pennsylvania also has uh paradise bird in hand bearville and blue ball uh this is unfortunately my neck of the woods and uh the lake stir is just delightfully named an intercourse don't forget any intercourse oh how could i forget intercourse yeah very beautiful scenery there about uh lots of like brown and gray and brown and it looks like the stalker series of video games so unit two is 906 megawatts of electricity it's the name plate capacity by the way if you're going to replace this uh plant with a solar farm in the

same general area there would be about 23 square miles of solar panels by my back of the envelope calculations um okay but how many really big windmills well it depends on how the wind's blowing if it's not blowing it's infinite infinite windmills right i feel like i'm one of those billboards on the side of i-80 that says you need reliable pa coal and natural gas the wind the wind dies down the sun sets every single drive we take to pittsburgh i mean the whole thing is that like they're right but they're also advertising just the worst stuff yeah exactly it's like when the worst person you know makes a great point that famously the goo that's going to kill all of us yeah so the um the the capacity factor on this plant i think when it opened it was

about 73 percent that means you could expect like it's making the amount of power it says it's going to make 73 percent of the time it was on 73 percent of the time it works all the time yeah yeah well you know for uh for a lot of like wind and solar installations that stand to like 20 or 30 percent it depends where you're on the world like if you're in germany the solar installations there are like 10 percent and i think the wind is like mid to low 20s it really depends though it's like if you don't have much wind using all the best sites your capacity factor is really high like 40 or even 50 percent if you're building a lot of wind you start to build on more marginal sites so you end up going down about 30 average by that point well i mean scott scottish wind power is

pretty good because a we have a lot of wind and b it upsets donald trump uh this was one of his like this was one of his bet noirs on twitter before he became president was uh we were gonna build an offshore wind farm that he thought was going to ruin the view from his shitty golf course do you know what also annoys him i hope it did like the wind farms are built with migrant labor a lot of them exploited migrant labor which i imagine he's slightly more fine with but you know and that uh when they're just a wind turbine company that fired all its workers for organizing solar yeah solar okay yeah all right if you if you have a notice uh most of us in this podcast i think all of us in this podcast are pretty pro nuclear you wouldn't expect that from an engineering

disasters podcast but uh i mean i mean part of the disaster is that the three mile island was like a massively huge pr disaster but in terms of engineering it's like well shit we break a reactor but literally no one got hurt yeah so what i what i will say is the disaster the by far the largest and most expansive disaster that we've ever talked about in passing is our continued use of coal and natural gas to generate power and nuclear is kind of the best way to avoid that yes so this was owned by a company called metropolitan edison um it's just as i mentioned before just downstream from harrisburg pennsylvania it's uh near lancaster it's near middle town it's near york um yeah anyway so um let's talk about the accident i've gone back to

back to this uh diagram with the the transformator yeah yeah i don't like that i don't think that's a real i think they're supposed to say transformer the transform the transformation isa yeah words aren't real all words are made up don't worry transformators more than meets the eye someone's gonna someone's gonna comment and we're gonna find out that's a real thing i don't care i'm what i was a poor where uh above the control rods to the left the poor it's like pork but gone wrong ah well to me all pork is pork that's gone wrong that is fair that's a pilot activated relief valve and we're gonna talk about it in a second ah okay spoilers that's not how you spell activated this is the night of the night of march 27th 1979 this

is seven years before turnable right um the accident not the television series everyone's driving enormous cars and like wearing huge collars and stuff it's a terrible time in american history speak for yourselves somehow inexplicably all have british accents we love you moley's motors so the unit two i think was uh 13 months old at this point and at this on this day unit two was running at 97 percent power unit one was shut down earlier that day they had removed a blockage in a condensate condensate polisher um which is like something they used to sort of it's like a big water softener that they use for the uh the feed water that goes into the steam generator right it's like a big bristle filter

yeah basically so when they remove this blockage um it result it resulted in uh water making its way into a compressed airline of some kind which shut down the feed water pumps that um uh provide the water into the steam generator right so that this guy is shut down now there's no water going into here right sound safe that was about four o'clock in the morning um now so the reactor uh does a thing called scram um that that's uh that's an acronym for safety control rod axe man because the first nuclear reactor that was ever built in the the the squash uh court in the university chicago um the idea was if they needed to shut it down quickly there was just a guy with an axe who would chop the thing yeah chop a rope that would drop the control rods into the reactor

awesome yes so that so your smooth black mineral uh or becomes fully inserted and it just kills the fish you stick the rod in the hole and everything dies it's yes it's worth noting that that's probably a acronym just from uh the actual use of scram i.e. get the fuck out get the fuck out now yeah it's it's a acronym like the whole axe man story didn't actually happen but it's a good story so that's a better story i believe i choose to believe it my my feelings don't care about your facts okay well that's good i'm gonna come over there be successful so uh anyway so this and if you watch your noble you you you heard i'm talking about az five all the time this is the same process it's the same process except in Chernobyl the control rods took like 20 seconds to first

hide at the core three mile and they took one and also the control rods actually shut reacts down rather than causing a momentary increase in power which is the opposite of what they're supposed to do Chernobyl was bad yes we're so bad so um now ordinarily in this situation right um they're supposed to be auxiliary pumps that provide you know water just to cool down the pressurized water in the steam generator so they can continue cooling down the reactor which is still producing decay heat even though the control rods are in right uh all those pumps had been turned off for maintenance or they hadn't been turned off but the valves to them were closed so they turned on and were just spinning uselessly in air um now the the big mood of this accident yeah exactly and this is why

you never do routine maintenance it really makes these things worse probably have the worst safety culture this would not have happened yeah i mean this is actually kind of true like one thing we can learn from this and Chernobyl is that a nuclear reactor is basically fine most of the time yeah once you have it started and it's only once you start to really fuck with it in some really strange ways that you get these things this is just me installing a dragonfly bsd on my desktop but also with the potential for widespread ecological disaster i mean the whole thing is like you also need to have the extra for building the reactor really really shiddly in the first place like you know fuck Ashima it's like hey we don't need to build a tall seawall i know on a gawa's

seawall is like 40 meters tall we'd be fine with five even though we know tsunami's been tall than that and Chernobyl is just like hmm let's build a reactor design which unlike every other designer react on the planet is capable of undergoing thermal runaway and exploding a fact which you consistently cover up and then instead of a big heavy reinforced concrete containment building let's cover it with a tin shack with an asphalt roof shed yeah it's just someone shed it's just one step up from that that boy scout who built a nuclear reactor in his backyard i mean what is what is an rb mk reactor but barbecuing too close to the vinyl side of the orchestra the best grover reactor automatic consistency yes i i figured since we had the estonian thing last time i would

keep that through line going obviously so um now the uh so the pressurizer right the big tank we were talking about before it has a relief valve on the top in case the pressure gets too high right from the pressurized water system because it's still heating up and it's not being cooled down right so that pressure relief valve is a pilot activated relief valve so that's what the pore of is right which basically there's like a complicated system where if the pressure is at a certain level it will hold the valve in place but then when it gets higher the valve moves and there's like an electronic aspect to it i don't understand it too well the only thing you need to understand is that the indicator light for it took no to what the server was doing not

what the actual valve was doing so it's like if the valve got stuck open it would say i'm closed even though it's not yes and that's what happened oh good that sounds good hmm do you placidus warning lights there's two warning lights and one always tells the truth so uh yeah it it opens and it gets stuck open right so we've got this water that runs through the reactor which is now you know it's just shooting at the top of the the the pressurizer and it's going down into this tank that's supposed to hold it if it's venting right okay so as as lindy as lindsey mentioned there was a flaw in the control system uh the light said the valve was closed even though it was open um and um you know there's now sort of this uh there's there's this

condition developing where you know rather than circulate through all the water in the pressurized system is just shooting out the top and going into this tank right i'm just getting a dry reactor that's no good and the operators are looking at this and they're very confused because the level of water in the pressurizer keeps going up um and they can't figure out why they're like oh geez do we need a vent uh do we need to vent some steam out of this pressurizer when of course what they needed to do is the opposite of that so one of the things which you're taught not to do when you're operating these things is let the pressurizer get to the point where it's completely full because then you'll wind up with water hammer issues which isn't good right that's basically

like the ability to regulate the pressure and react to it's kind of like when you know certain surgeries it's like hey we're gonna give you a muscle relax and it's like what'll i do it means you don't die using the surgery but you'll also lose all control over your bowels oh yeah where my body's working but my body ate yes give them to me water hammers water hammers are all though just because if you look at any of the diagrams they used to teach them it is literally the most metal stuff imaginable because it's step one water flows step two water abruptly cut off step three a bunch of like jagged lines and then almost inevitably in bold red italic letters water hammer yeah sorry i was trying to do the fatality voice but i have to keep it down

because my roommate's asleep so i can't do the fatality voice in the grim future of water hammer 40k there is only oh you're still my joke god damn it okay let me let me get rid of some of these lines so i can continue to john madden um now so at about 411 this tank over here was now full of coolant water and it started overflow right but i thought more that's more was more gooder it's more not more gooder in this case uh no more was bad yeah and um so you know the the the the system's just vending coolant water into this tank which now overflowing the sump pump turns on it like pumps the water into another building somehow like this water that was just in the reactor this irradiated water that's now like in the bottom of the reactor building and that little indent

that you have there and is now being pumped out yes cool so this sounds an alarm and and you know the operators ignore it they just didn't do anything about it that sounds like harrisburg yeah you know because i i think the water that goes through the reactor is only like significantly reactive for like seven minutes or so or something like that just like the hot spicy rocks just make the water temporarily hot and spicy but they last for like seconds does mean in a boiling water reactor though you can't go in the turbine building when it's on because you'll get radiation not much but you'll get radiation so don't swim in it but aside from that you could use it to make your tea you british fox you could because by the time the tea is brewed it's not

radioactive anymore there you go i don't like tea i wouldn't i would not want to live in enko myself testing that but okay yeah you know get the radium like the good old days get your radium beauty rubs yeah so at about 5 20 a.m this uh this overheated coolant which keep in mind has been it's been circulating this whole time right just going around in circles without the crucial part that cools it off right uh it's you know it's it's boiling into steam even under a huge amount of pressure um and uh it starts to cavitate inside the pipes and inside the pumps that means you know there's just big voids full of steam in the flow right very noisy i learned about this from playing submarine sims no seriously propeller cavitation it's a real thing

it's very annoying i learned something yesterday i'll kill you in a whole different way yeah the solution to this was to turn the pump off right so they turn the pump off so it stops vibrating and they figure out a natural circulation can handle it right so after after they do that at 6 a.m there's a shift change do your problem now yeah do you just punch out you're like well we've turned off the thing that sounds like somebody is like hitting the inside of our reactor with a bunch of hammers uh so it's fine bad thing take cover closing time yeah i'm gonna go on home this is this is your problem now so the new shift uh you know they they they get their bearings and look there's like a hmm this seems wrong hmm i don't think any of this should be

happening so someone uses another valve to finally shut off the vent out of the uh pressurizer but at this point 32 000 gallons of of uh coolant had leaked out and then just before this of course enough coolant had leaked out that the uh the top of the reactor uh the innards was exposed over the water line yeah so i mean that's one thing you don't want is to have a reactor just exposed to chris murris voice this is the one thing we didn't want to happen so uh as a result there was a reaction with the fuel rods cladding and the steam and the extremely high heat which produced more heat and that melted the fuel rods right so we're in full on like meltdown at this point right that also has the effect of releasing radio

active you know fission products into the coolant which is also you know still flying at the top of the pressure pressurizer right and now now you can't use that water to boil your tea anymore because you will die yes good good that's a gift for drinking tea a devil's drink this is a pro coffee yeah exactly pro coffee anti tea we will happily die on this this is a pro i thought this was a pro whiskey podcast this is a pro whiskey hot but well can you put can you put whiskey in tea yeah man what you can put rum in tea you can put whiskey in tea if you're not a coward it can put moonshine in tea rum and tea is like an army thing you can put anything in tea well it's trick except milk that makes tea horrible i will fight you on this milk

and tea was a mistake you might have to i don't drink milk and tea because i'm not uh a child or my dad see i respect you thanks appreciate you okay so at this point like the water that's coming out it's leaking out of this tank which is overfilling is no longer the type of water that's spicy for a few minutes it's the type of water that's spicy for a long time right how long is it depends on what isotopes it's contaminated with if it's cesium 137 it's got a half life of 30 years give or take oh yeah i was gonna say somewhere between 24 years and like i don't know it's half a million but that's like one part per million in terms of what's actually in the contaminants it's like people say it'll be radioactive for billions of years and it's like yeah but that also means

it's like you could just set a rock of it on your desk and it'll literally get more radiation from the trace isotopes and the walls of your house because the longer the half life the less radioactive it is which instantly is why iodine radio iodine is the one you really got to watch out for because that sticks around for eight days which is like long enough to be ingested but because it only sticks around for eight days and because it accumulates in the thyroid it gets your thyroid cancer which incidentally is all died from that instantly that's about like where three quarters of the direct deaths and Chernobyl came from because either side was like hey no accidents happened we don't need to dispose of contaminated food radio iodine what's that

also all of the firefighters who were just like handling uh fissile materials and then as we saw in the series just kind of turned into gummy bears you don't get yellow fever whatever but you do get radiation poisoning so there are trade-offs one thing the show did do is is like compress the timeline of the guy with uh you know when he picks up like the chunk of graphite that got blown out the core and just immediately starts screaming he actually took about eight hours to start screaming and then a few days later his hand actually fell off apparently so it's both better and oh wow that'll damn so at about 645 the radiation alarms go off they find out oh the containment building is basically uninhabitable good thing no one went

in there um because it's full of highly radioactive contaminated coolant and at 657 they declare an emergency right but no one actually knows what the hell is going on um yeah because it's still the pressurizer is given indications there's plenty of coolant in the reactor right um so and there's lots of hullabaloo of uh state and federal agencies in metropolitan edison all contradict each other about whether there was a radiation release and blah blah blah but no one actually figures out that we need to add water into the system until seven hours afterwards dude that's not ideal are they still pumping water out of the reactor building yeah and so they started the sump pumps on but it wasn't like it was being dumped outside it was just in

some auxiliary building or it wasn't supposed to be so it's like hey this is a horrible violation of working practice but it's probably fine you just made you just made two buildings uninhabitable but it's not like uh it's not going into the ground yeah Chernobyl is ain't yeah it's not going straight straight into sesquihanna after it honestly probably approved the sesquihanna just get people to dig under the reactor and just like get all that groundwater out and just be like you know hey they're still wearing the hats so and 16 hours later is when the pumps were turned out to remove heat from the reactor so they finally had a state that this thing was like slowly melting itself in the slop for like 16 hours so we almost did the actual china syndrome where it just like

melts into the floor yeah and keep in mind that film had come out I think about a week before yeah I think exactly a week particular incident the worst viral marketing 12 days 12 days probably one of the first two pretty pretty effective it's like if they'd known about in advance significantly and now you get to see the movie in real life one day for yourself senna a hydrogen bubble was discovered in the pressure vessel about three days later from the reaction with the the um what's it the fuel rods um casing and the steam and they just went ahead and vented that to the atmosphere you know whatever better than an explosion I guess sure yeah that's how I feel but it feels cool man your turbo gets to make all the noises yeah just roll cold with a

fucking nuclear reactor this is my bro off valve yeah just get the revs up and then just belches out hydrogen cloud yeah it's just like the whole thing is like you can you'd be like rolling cold it's like I got a live reactor on my bed it's like but I don't see anything it's like yeah but you will like six to eight hours when you start throwing up bits of your own stomach because it's literally dead from radiation poisoning it's like rolling cold but with a multiple hour latency and it's not cold it's like vomit and organs and just gummy bear people I think you might be stretching this I think I might be it's just at this point they look like gummy bears they look like gummy bears that have been like dipped in like custard or something that's I mean that's

literally what it does look like I hit the Ford f-150 with the extended cab and the lead lined cab yeah the lead lining it means you get radiation poisoning but it's not immediately fatal yes I like those odds so um all right so what are the results of this right here here's a picture of the reactor after the fact not a picture it's a drawing yeah technically a ravioli yes you'd see like everything's fucking melted all the stuff melted is bad it took a long time to do so they had to really screw up to make this happen I really like the uh the poster in the back right there it says don't leak on me yeah they got the snap I'm gonna have my reactionary tampons that say the same thing they say don't leak on me and then they go home there's a scale model the

reactor and it's just like this is my greatest shame leak on me leak on me so what happened afterwards well there was very little actual radiation released outside of the containment building right the average dosage in the surrounding area was 1.4 milligrams it was basically like a dental x-ray it's it's like the the real disaster here was just that you know these idiots brick to brand new reactor and cause more coal to be burned and therefore kill this slowly but you know the whole thing was it was a pr disaster because they're like hey we declared an emergency but we have no idea what's going on and also the populace at large is freaking out about nuclear energy because hey it turns out coal and oil interests like

if we can make people shit scared of our biggest competitor we get to sell more coal get that uh get that good pennsylvania coal i mean it that must have been a pr coup right there just like good natural pennsylvania coal it'll blow uranium all over your place because coal has uranium in it and thorium you've seen those billboards look febe febe snow uh like rides upon a rail of anthracite she doesn't do that on like a rail of uranium with a like jaw hanging off and shit yeah a damn shame too nuclear trains when the atomic train come here come here to well there's your problem podcast for lack of one of railroad jokes so yeah so they break the reactor they can't use it anymore right uh it's a big shot in the arm for anti-nuclear groups because yeah the

china syndrome had come out in theaters just a couple days ago activism to prevent catastrophic nuclear accidents was cool now um i mean to be fair like the nuclear industry did not have entirely clean hands with this because i mean they had also recently probably murdered a whistleblower called caron silkwood uh for like trying to expose unsafe working practices at a fuel plant so yeah capitalism it's not great everybody's kind of implicated yeah yeah capitalism it turns out is like not very good with nuclear power or many things but at least we have the cyber truck yeah i mean the whole thing is like nuclear power you gotta spend the money and do it properly and it's got a really long payback time like hey why do that when you can build gas plants which blow up

a lot hmm the um it doesn't work well with a profit motive is the thing um it's very expensive and it takes a long time and it only really works as a public good you can't really just have a like a nuclear corporation that works very well i mean the thing is it's one of these things where it does work well and it is cheap but you've got to do it on such a large scale that basically only country can do it it's why like nuclear power in france is really cheap because they're like hey we're gonna build 50 reactors all the same pretty much and they they did they just did it any company is just like company is like i'm gonna build this reactor and company b is like i'm gonna build the same reactor functionally but it's all proprietary so you can't use the same machines

and tooling to make it and the third company is like i'm gonna make another reactor which is again functionally the same it's like the difference so you basically just end up with like this reactor zoo of all different designs built on private money all competing over resources and just like eating each other and that's why what spa unit two took like 27 years to get built i would absolutely visit the radiator or reactor zoo yeah you want the the stereotype of communism that everything is drab and everything is identical and it kind of works forever with no maintenance but it's very like uninteresting that's what you want you don't want an exciting nuclear reactor it is literally like i've visited um size well b which is like the only pressurized water reactor and it is it is

literally just extremely boring there is just nothing happening it's like and that's a reactor it sits there and does nothing this is spent fuel it sits there and does nothing well Liam you've you've been to Three Mile Island you went on the classic Pennsylvania school field trip there right yes uh yeah i mean it's from what i remember the tour i was i was pretty out of my mind on on some good drugs at the time i they were they they were talking about just like i kind of almost about that about you know they're not really visible until everything hits the hits the wall as it were uh but they were they were talking about you know especially in Pennsylvania like we have so much coal power plants everywhere and then in your county there's

also a peach bottom or like you're okay like and they were trying to like impress upon us 15 year the idea of you want your nuclear power to be as utilitarian as possible uh and they were explaining like how it's like impossible to run a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania at this point just because of the kind of cultural like scars almost so yeah no build more nuclear power plants though the irony is of course that like with all those coal plants they're basically like if the reactor fire at Chernobyl 4 was a feature another bug so an investigation after Three Mile Island did uh note that a similar accident had occurred at Davis Bessie power station 18 months earlier there was another stuck valve on the

pressurizer but they had corrected that um you know they they they realized what was wrong in about 20 minutes and like oh shit we gotta stop this and they stopped it and then they noted that this problem was common on Babcock and Wilcox reactors and known to the company but they didn't what a surprise yeah it's like this this again is just why you do the standardization thing because then it's like hey we know there's a thing with this reactor which means that there's a thing with every reactor which means hey we can just roll out the fixes to all of them and everyone knows what's what it's like hey by the way there's this bug on this reactor which isn't it which like the situation America's like hey this particular model reactor has this weird bug

this other mother reactor doesn't and it literally can vary from unit to unit if they were built to different designs which some of them were and i'm just like this is why you make everything the same standardization is efficient it's like when i was at labor conference and i was over here in like Paul Sweeney just overhearing these nuclear energy representatives basically saying why all these different designs going these is like why don't you just build them all the same one and i was like i like this man you get something to do build them all the same sometimes boring things are good yeah so the three-mile island accident plus the end of the energy crisis really began a slowdown of nuclear power plant construction at least the united states we did not approve

another nuclear power plant from three-mile island until 2012 i think yeah i'm sure this will have no repercussions for the wider like planet oh god no it's not like it's not like we're damn near carbon neutral in southeastern pennsylvania because of our nuclear plants or anything like that thanks limerick yeah this podcast produced by nuclear power literally 30 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions come from burning cold generate electricity which really should be obsolete by this point but it's not because nuclear power is scary well to be fair it is scary nuclear power you're scary but like i i feel like it's just a thing about how humans process risk that uh perhaps for obvious reasons it's more salient in our minds of

like people turning into fucked up weird gummy bears in agony for weeks over pretty much the same thing happening but because you get lung cancer like yeah or or like oil or an oil refinery blows up yeah the hf alkylation unit oh nice not that i would know anything about that uh well no because you were drunk yeah it's it's like legit really funny to me though because you know people are just like they don't feel this visceral terror about like any other sort of energy source but some sometimes when you just like points really basic stuff out to them suddenly people are afraid of it's like hey did you know that the bus bars and large solar installations are live anytime there's daylight and can't be isolated if you touch them you die and are like

oh that's scary and it's like oh by the way people have to go up to the top of wind turbine to service them yes wind turbine fires yeah those things are terrifying and literally almost everything in the top of a turbine is flammable and it's like every so often they catch fire and just you know if you're lucky you die of smoke inflation if you're unlucky you're like there's two engineers who literally got stuck on the top of the turbine with the fire cutting off their escape route and it's like do i jump or do i burn hmm yeah i mean it's probably the only uh a working out height thing where you might actually want to parachute it's awesome hmm base to base jumpers overly represented in the wind power sector hmm that'll do it so i i guess so what would really went wrong

at three mile island you know it's kind of a systemic failure we got the term normal accident out of this right which is an accident that occurs from unexpected interactions of many different systems which are difficult to predict right you know it's sort of like i mean so there's a continuous line through all these episodes we talked about lack mag antique last uh week and um you know that was uh that was a there there are four braking systems on that train and you know none of them worked because no one knew what was gonna happen if they if they know no one had expertise to uh see what the problem would be except you know the one guy who wasn't allowed to go there um but like here at three mile island it was like who would have thought

that this series of accidents would occur and then just spiral you know into just a straight up like core meltdown that no one even could figure out what's going on this is why you train your plant staff well mm-hmm or never perform routine maintenance uh also also yeah very true fuck it roll the dice scared of cats oh yeah it's it's like the whole routine maintenance thing if if all the backup pumps are isolated or turned off or whatever you're not supposed to operate the acts and i'm like i'm sure it'll be fine what could go wrong i mean i i i hear what you're saying about this being a case of unsafe routine maintenance but i'm still uh gonna die on this hill of perform no routine maintenance ever yeah like that um yeah well yeah i mean if you have

like an rmbk in its completely solid state i mean there's no reason you would ever have to do maintenance or a safety test no oh the irony that the safety test is what caused it to melt down yeah um that's what happens when you try to be safe there was no safety test you didn't see a safety test why because it's not there so uh but this is one of the reasons why uh new nuclear reactors when they are built you know we started to see they're being marketed and designed from the get go to be like simpler and more robust you say well we we need less safety features because now there's less to go wrong yeah thank god it's it's like it's like one of the problems like uh the we're building two new reactors here in the

uk they're both eprs it should basically like the french saying hey we've just like progressively iterated and designed what if we keep doing that but more so you got like the most complicated power plant design in the world and the irony is because it's all using active safety like just hey we have the safety system let's build three identical copies of it it's actually less safe slightly than the american design the economic simplify boiling water reactor it's just like hey hot water rises cold water falls let's use that to do all the safety which just basically means it is a big metal tube whereas the epr is just like this is a big metal tube but with like frankenstein's lab around it like big flashing lights and stuff flashing lights jacob's ladders big sparks

you need a lightning bolt to start it yeah i mean i i like the simplified boiling water reactor just because uh the more you increase the passive safety margin of a nuclear reactor the closer it gets to being an alcohol still nice whole double duty that's what i want i mean just so long as you keep it like isolated enough you can potentially have a column still that's working off of the coolant i i like the idea of like um you ever seen that that fake image for a while back of like the whiskey age 30 days by radiation yes yeah that's what i want now give it to me my atomic whiskey i mean they're making they're making shinobal vodka and that is real uh it's good vodka yeah yeah it's good it's smooth i like it do it the russian style just like you don't do a shot glass

you just get like a full-sized glass fillet with vodka and neck and all in one there you go yeah and then like have like a some cheese and like a dill pickle and you just like eat that it's great schnubble cheese it's to die for very slowly so um the other uh the other reactor at three mile island was still good to go in fact it was it it was licensed to run until 2034 but uh excellent energy who bought it from uh uh what's it metropolitan edison decided to close it down on september 20th of this year fascists i know right they uh because it was too expensive to run compared to you know just building some natural gas so you know that's that's a good 800 megawatts offline in pennsylvania um awesome i know but i mean who doesn't love natural gas um it you know nothing

goes wrong with it and we're definitely not we don't have like a stack of future episodes lined up piper alpha what's that piper alpha is what happens when uh someone plays the scottish national instrument your control room explode and uh also is a chat well three mile island had like one of the best safety records in the industry other than this one incident um it is literally just like unit one was just like hey we still have badly unit two shut the bed we're gonna not be them yeah we're not we're not gonna do that but again they it was shut down because better margins with natural gas i guess you know and closing these plants down is very bad for the climate and that's like one of my main criticisms the green new deal is like you know bernie is like we're not

gonna renew any any nuclear power plant we fucking should yeah it's real bad what are y'all what are y'all gonna do in the interim roll call legit his his definition of clean energy is so restrictive it excludes fusions it's like hey bernie you're now banned from using the sun the sun doesn't get a license extension shut down son you're bad they'd be pretty bad if they shut down the sun i mean i mean they'd be pretty funny the sun the sun goes on a wildcat strike we're gonna unionize the sun but what is the what is the sun's safety record though i mean we should get some osha people it's not that bad it's extremely unsafe operating conditions you know the temperature is out there you know if you're standing there too long you turn into a gummy bear plus i mean nobody's wearing

eye protection up there it's bad insufficient side access that's a bitch of a cabute yeah that's what we need the Dyson sphere for that's yeah that's the otherwise we're just citing them for like flagrant violations just go up to the sun ride a ticket and take an immediately burst into flames and you're about to say something in the new burst into flames god i flagrant violations is just making me think of like mine disasters we should do a mine thing sometime oh we need to do a mine thing that'd be fun yeah up a big branch fucking don blankenship kills the 30 people oh yeah i then runs for governor mm cocaine mitch fucking don't a fucking jackass might be the best case of like the worst bad guy we've seen since the san pung department store whereas this one we don't

really have anyone we can blame for this right like i mean unless we want to throw the entire like uh night shift of uh this one unit under the bus i mean it's like literally everyone did everything wrong it's like babcon we're caught so like hey we don't need to get assistant detective this valve's actually open or let's just wire the indicator light across the solenoid i'm sure that'll be fine and night shift we're just like hmm what's going on the reactor should we investigate no let's just do everything wrong it's probably outstanding work all right we got a car alarm oh yeah you hear that damn cars running everything car bad train good they know you've got me on the show they're gonna murder me for my support of tram buses no tram bus is good

no no no no no no no no no tram bus i i would say just regular tram good but that's because that's from me going to college in croydon um oh yeah the croydon tram it's funny because because it was a tram they didn't actually have to install like train protection devices on it so that means that when one driver was like overworked he came out of a tunnel like 50 miles an hour too fast and then went around a bend and like five people died that was fun just overturned the whole thing another future episode perhaps so yeah um trams trams goods trams good uh nuclear power good uh solar power good if you're in space i'm tired of hearing about it it's good if you put it on your roof or if you if you're or if you're in the sahara like dysonsphere dysonsphere wind power good

if you want to annoy donald trump yes just like get a wind turbine just tie donald trump to it and just leave him there he'll come down eventually when his body rots enough hyd hydroelectric power quite good your hydro put the hydro is good hydro is good did you hear about though there was this like russian dam where they turn the turbine shut for maintenance and the whole thing just ejected itself through the ceiling that was that was a fun good lord oh we gotta do that one you gotta yeah but but obviously the next episode is about the tocoma narrows bridge of course i've forgotten to put in the slide for that pathetic so i'm gonna gonna have to do that in post curses you ruined everything get together just just draw no just draw it in with john madden like john madden in the

bridge i could just john madden yeah you gotta oh no everything's everything's everything's gone i have to write over this one that's fine i'm just like i mean how how would you yeah three mile on the observation center closed you the bridge i like this car a lot of it's still fucking going that's actually that the very precise a precise diagram of the like the wind interaction yeah is it just fucking yeah guys i was gonna make i was going for that's debris but you know oh almost the bridge is made of spaghetti spaghetti debris well that was the problem was um yeah just like the first bridge to be made out of pasta what is uh suspension cable other than just a bunch of spaghetti put together into one giant spaghetti we're just pasta cable just recording this while

we're all hungry i mean i mean i agree i agree i agree a danger ravioli uh and up next on bpc ravioli of danger directed by steven mothat and somehow managed to objectify the ravioli all right okay that's the hour um anyone got anything to pitch before we go listen to trash future we're very good and also well no by the time this is out you will have lost your chance to register to vote in the uk for our upcoming election between socialism or brutalism if you didn't i'm very disappointed in you tell us vote labor yes vote labor vote labor uh go watch my youtube videos uh contribute to our patreon for the grover house episode which will hopefully be up by the time this is up um where we will be talking about um

the grover house the the poorly built um addition to one man's home which became internet famous um and which we culturally appropriated which we got cancelled for apparently yeah yeah which we got cancelled for because we are apparently not worthy of talking about things on something awful yeah you are not true artists you cannot appreciate it also do you know one thing i've learned if you complain about nuclear industry enough they'll invite you to their annual conference that's literally what i'm doing next month nice you go going to nuke con yeah i'm gonna suggest they call it that it's actually just nia annual convention i'm just like you need to call it nuke con just you know if you register early get an extra like half hour in the ball pit

the ball pit's now try so few granules though hate the room parties at nuke con like those elevator party people just give you like uh they give you like a chunky uranium come in we're a chunk of rmbk keep sake rmbk yeah the pencils are made out of recycled rmbk this graphite is literally too hot to handle selling like hotcakes a pencil so sharp it's to die for they'll give you to give you lead gloves to handle it or slow down your inevitable death don't worry about it yeah i have to do my clip my pitch uh follow my twitter at old man anderson and i'm not sure i did it earlier so leo manerson pronouns he him uh die in a hall transphobes yes oh uh lindsay do you have anything to pitch please say something vote labor okay very good and nuclear power is good actually

ESBWR or get out it's it's both enhanced and simplified economic and simplified economic and simplified because they're like hey the economics nuclear power they get criticized a lot let's just say it's the economic simplified like that that'll solve everything it's the more better yeah react to get the marxist nuclear reactor sees sees the means of atom smashing all right are we good we good i think we're good all right bye everyone bye