Oops.

What's that gage for? "Dooa"

I used to work for GPU, the company who owned TMI. The story I heard from some of the people in the Nuclear division involved a pair of valves that should have been manually opened. The designers figured that the odds against forgetting to open the valve were 1000:1, so forgetting two valves had odds of 1,000,000:1. That is small enough that a procedure was not developed for this event.

But the valves were only a couple feet apart, so forgetting one would almost always include forgetting the other, so a procedure should have been developed.

Fortunately since the Chernobyle incident an international organization has been developed and the best minds in the nuclear field put their heads together to come up with regulations and safety that are now that practice world wide. Essentially if you work for a power plant in the USA and want to transfer to Russia you won't have to be retrained to work in that power plant because all the processes and skill levels are the same.

That is not even remotely possible. Russian designs are completely different and work on different principles and have different operational restrictions.

As far as I am concerned, if you work or live anywhere near a Russian designed reactor, you are living on borrowed time. The Russians were criminally incompetent.

http://insp.pnl.gov/-reports-pocketbook-russia.htm

When they Chernobyl incident occured they were grossly incompetent. More like they weren't taking the program seriously enough to ensure precautions were followed.

The link I provided gives examples of Russian developments to improve the safety of their pre-existing nuclear plants. New plants are built to international specifications.

You'll notice with the improvements taking place there is U.S. involvement.

Here's the overview graphic from the TMI process:

The control valves are labeled HCV, which I would tend to interpret as Hand (Hl) Control (C) Valve (V).

But the accompanying description clearly indicates that the valves failed in one position or another automatically. So the valves are remotely controlled.

Maybe the H means something else? Or just that there's a hand operator in addition to the control actuator?

Any insight?