Caught a program on Times Discovery channel, it was about 3 Mile Island and the nuclear reactors. It seems that the plant was designed with safety precaution upon safety precaution, as usual human interaction almost wiped out half the state! What happened was that about 1k worth of parts malfunctioned, the pumps were siphoning off water from the core (literally tons of uranium) due to a stuck valve in the reactor chamber. So without looking at the dials and stuff (the one that told the story was covered by an article of clothing, duh) what did the engineers do? They immediately shut off the water pumps thinking there was too much water!
What made things worse was the fact that the people who designed the place were 300 miles away in Virginia, and they knew what the problem and solution proceedures were, yet they could NOT get through, why? They had only two telephone lines going into the control room! Duh!
When people did get through and inquired about what was going on, the usual answer was "I don't know," or "hold on a minute." Minutes turned into a mighty long time. It was hilarious to look at the people in the control room, they looked like burn outs from a Grateful Dead concert, and these peeps were running not one, but two nuclear reactors?
All that mess that happened could have been avoided if they had just let the system run itself as the failsafes were many, such to a degree that it was accident proof, but it was all for nothing because people freaked out and wanted to get their hands on different controls and fluck with the computer's problem solving ability. There were literally thousands of pages from inquiries to and from the computer, and all the computer could say after human interference was spit out ? marks.
What was really sad was seeing Edison Electric lie to the public about the truth during the whole affair. Gotta love those energy company types!
Here's a link to one of my favorite channels:
http://times.discovery.com/
Topic: Human interaction can be dangerous! (Read 1305 times)