Chernobyl Compared With The Three Mile Island Accident
Three Mile Island-2 was an accident of a completely different type from Chernobyl. Chernobyl was a human-caused power excursion causing a steam explosion resulting in a graphite fire, uncontained, which lofted radioactive smoke high into the atmosphere; TMI was a slow, undetected leak that lowered the water level around the nuclear fuel, resulting in over a third of it shattering when refilled rapidly with coolant. Unlike Chernobyl, TMI-2's reactor vessel did not fail and contained almost all of the radioactive material. Containment at TMI did not fail. A small quantity of radioactive gases from the leak were vented into the atmosphere through specially designed filters under operator control. A government report concluded that the accident caused no increase in cancer rates for local residents.
Read more about this topic: Chernobyl Compared To Other Radioactivity Releases
Famous quotes containing the words compared, mile, island and/or accident:
“The difference between human vision and the image perceived by the faceted eye of an insect may be compared with the difference between a half-tone block made with the very finest screen and the corresponding picture as represented by the very coarse screening used in common newspaper pictorial reproduction. The same comparison holds good between the way Gogol saw things and the way average readers and average writers see things.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“For now the moon with friendless light carouses
On hill and housetop, street and marketplace,
Men will plunge, mile after mile of men,
To crush this lucent madness of the face....”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)
“He is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“Thus he struggled, by every method, to keep his light shining before men. Surely the lighthouse-keeper has a responsible, if an easy, office. When his lamp goes out, he goes out; or, at most, only one such accident is pardoned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)