Workers Start Cleaning Up TMI Rubble

Workers at Three Mile Island on Tuesday began the delicate process of removing the once-molten fuel and other rubble from the core of TMI’s crippled Unit No. 2 nuclear reactor, the plant’s operator said.

Aided by long-handled tools and a closed-circuit video camera lowered into the water-filled core, workers placed a piece of fuel rod in a stainless steel canister, GPU Nuclear Corp. said.

Previously, only samples of the debris had been removed from the reactor.

About 100 tons of damaged uranium dioxide fuel and 50 tons of reactor parts eventually will be loaded into canisters, GPU Nuclear said. The canisters will be stored on site before shipment to a federal research laboratory in Idaho.

Will Take Two Years

“The whole operation of defueling the reactor is going to take 16 to 18 months,” Franklin Standerfer, director of Unit 2, said at a recent news briefing. “The shipping of the fuel will start next spring. That should take about two years.”

Unit 2 was crippled on March 28, 1979, in the nation’s worst commercial nuclear power accident. Up to 20 tons of its fuel melted, then solidified at the base of the reactor core.

The Unit 1 reactor at the nearby power plant was idle at the time of the accident and not damaged. It was restarted Oct. 3 after a 6 1/2-year legal fight by anti-nuclear activists to keep it closed.

Cost of $1 Billion

The cleanup of Unit 2 is expected to be complete in three years at a cost of $1 billion. The defueling, considered the heart of the cleanup, will cost up to $300 million.

The defueling work is being done by reactor operators perched on a rotating platform above the reactor vessel, about 35 feet deep. They are shielded from the core by about 20 feet of water and a six-inch-thick steel platform floor.

Dozens of long-handled tools and a giant vacuum system have been specially designed for the unprecedented project.