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Nuclear Atomic Nuclear Reactor Was Brought Online

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On December 2nd, 1942, the Chicago Pile-1 nuclear reactor was brought online. It was the world’s first, and the beginning of a movement that would come to shape the world’s energy resources for decades to come. Since that day, nuclear power has peaked at ten percent of the world’s total energy resources in 2011 (International Energy Agency), and has fueled not only power grids across the globe, but a heated debate about the viability, environmental impact, and ethical concerns of using nuclear fission and radioactive chemical reactions as a public energy source. The most widespread arguments against its use all revolve around a trio of disastrous reactor failures spanning the last three decades: the meltdown on Three Mile Island, the …show more content…

Barely a year later, on March 28, 1979, the second of the station’s pair of reactors had been shut down for refueling and routine maintenance, during which an attempt to clear a blockage resulting in a clogged instrument line which would lead to a shutdown of several different water and coolant pumps later in the evening. With the steam generators no longer receiving water, the heat and caused the reactor to perform an emergency shutdown. Within eight seconds, control rods were inserted into the core to halt the nuclear chain reaction. Because steam was no longer being fed into the turbine, however, heat was no longer being removed from the reactor. When the water pumps had stopped, three auxiliary pumps activated automatically. Their valves had been closed for routine maintenance, however, leaving them unable to pump any water. Closing all three valves at once was a violation of Nuclear Regulatory Commission policy, and one of the primary causes of the reactor’s partial meltdown (Mahaffey 329). When the auxiliary pumps failed to come online, a relief valve should have opened as a tertiary safety mechanism to release heat and pressure. It was prevented from doing do due to a mechanical fault, but poorly designed instrumentation made this difficult for operators to discover. As a result of improper training and complex instrumentation, it took several hours and a new shift of workers before

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