1:01: CJ: "17 minutes ago emergency sirens went off at the [already missed the name of the station, San Something Nuclear generating station]. The main feedwater pump failed.
17 minutes is awfully fucking fast for the president to already be getting briefing. Little to no chance the NRC has their shit together that fast after an emergency is declared. We'll give them the benefit of the doubt here and assume the writers know the sirens didn't go off until way after the pump failed even though they probably don't know that. Oh, and by the way, I can't wait to find out how a main feed pump failure is going to lead to an emergency. Some stations can stay at 100% without one main feed pump, others need to go to a lower power level, but all that I know of can stay online. Maybe they mean they lost all main feedwater pumps, like TMI. Of course if that's what they meant then this is a really shitty brief she's giving the president.
1:13: The reactor scrammed and a valve got stuck closed that blocked all coolant flow to the reactor.
1:24: We could be looking at a full scale nuclear meltdown. FEMA estimates the plume will cover all of San Andreo,population 42,000.
Well shit. The meltdown is for sure going to happen thanks to the magical isolation valve. But what I didn't realize was that a full scale nuclear meltdown will also magically make the containment building disappear and also give the radioactive particles wings so they can fly high enough up to form a plume. That's some magic fucking fuel right there. Designed by Satan himself, I reckon.
1:53 The initial steam release was loud, so CNN is already running rumors of an explosion.
Because you know, every single steam release from every other unplanned shutdown wasn't the same volume. Except that, well, they were.
3:54: The Republican candidate for president pushed the regulators to issue a license for the plant 25 years ago. He helped get that plant online.
If there's one thing the NRC is known for, its helping politicians get MORE nuclear power.
5:35: Two new developments on the recovery effort. They're running a temporary feed line that bypasses the valve. And they're activating the residual heat removal pump.
First of all, in 2006 BDB flex wasn't a thing so bypassing a valve with readily available temporary equipment also wasn't a thing. And also I'm curious how exactly we're building an what sounds like a full scale line (not just hooking up a hose) that connects into one piece of pipe with pressurized water looking for somewhere to go and another with highly radioactive water at its boiling point. This seems completely reasonable. Second of all, we're just now activating the heat removal pump? That wasn't the first fucking thing we did? Or second thing we did after trying to safety inject and getting cock blocked by the magic valve?
5:55: Now we know why the plume is a concern. A second valve is stuck open that's releasing radiation into containment. If that gets too high they'll have to pump radioactive gas into the aux building where apparently the biggest risk is one bad weld that could release it to the atmosphere.
These assholes really need to get their shit together on this valve maintenance program.
6:19: The president has ordered the NRC to take over control of the plant. CJ is wondering why plant workers aren't taking her calls right now.
Maybe it's not because of the "chaos" you speculated about, but actually because they're doing their fucking jobs. And Mr. President, I don't think you're the fucking dictator so you can't just take control of a private plant. And even if you could, the NRC doesn't exactly know jack shit about how to respond to an event operationally. But sure, see how that shit works out for you.
6:41: The president, while acknowledging that he has no technical information about the current risk factors, is ordering evacuation of the surrounding area. "A few fender benders is better than a generation of babies with thyroid cancer."
Making decisions without information is generally what we want out of our leaders so I completely understand this move. And he's right, it's just a few fender benders. No fatal accidents, no deaths resulting from trying to evacuate the severely ill and frail from hospitals and nursing homes, and no long last psychological effects from forcing people from their homes for absolutely no reason.
7:05: The president is now the Czar of the situation.
Sorry, I forgot the president could change titles and become a Russian dictator. I take back everything I said about him not having the authority to make the highly technical decisions for the private company.
9:04: State and local authorities (who frequently practice nuclear emergency drills) recommend a 10 mile evacuation, while FEMA recommends 15. The president says he'll set up the state and local command post at 10.1 miles and they then change their minds to say 15 miles.
I can't even. The stupid. This isn't how decisions are made.
9:35: The president is making his statement and we now know that the initial problem occurred 32 minutes ago (meaning that initial 17 minute statement should not have been given the benefit of the doubt). Somewhere in between, we'll call it 25 minutes, we were told that one foot of water had already boiled off which uncovered some amount of the fuel that I don't remember. I think it was an absurdly high number like 1/8th, but I chose to ignore it.
I guess if you assume the magic valve blocked SI and both main feed and aux feedwater and the engineers decided not to start heat removal pumps until around that 25 minute mark, then the boiling timeline kind of makes sense. But the timeline of how fast the response is moving outside of the plant and the repair effort timeline are coming from some sort of bureaucracy free bizzaro world.
9:52: We now learn from looking at a graphic on a tv screen on our tv screen that this is a boiling water reactor.
The simplified graphic of how a BWR works pulled from google images only shows one main feed/main steam line, thus the real plant is the same. Got it. Now things are making more sense.
10:12: Donna: "I don't understand why they put a nuclear plant so close to a population center." Santos: "They're all near population centers. Otherwise they'd lose too much power in transmission."
Santos gets the award for first factual statement of the episode.
12:45: In the situation room, there's now a discussion about whether to start venting to atmosphere or letting a hydrogen explosion take out the aux building. What's the best way to speed up the evacuation? According to CJ it's to tell people that they're about to start pumping radioactive gas into the atmosphere.
Because obviously causing mass panic will speed up the evacuation process instead of slow it down.
12:59: Who gives the order to vent? "We've taken control of the plant sir, that would be [the President]?
Everybody knows the only person that can make technical decisions at a power plant is the United States Czar.Why did the Czar himself have to ask that question?
13:53: Government spokespeople are preparing for what to say if it turns out this is all the President's fault.
At least they're assigning the blame to the correct person. Technical failures are the fault of the country's one and only approver of all technical decisions.
14:51: The evacuation is about one third complete with a conservative estimate of 700,000 people currently on the freeways to leave the region.
That's a pretty fucking huge number considering we've already been told the only nearby city has 42,000 citizens. But wait, there's more! It looks like the President is about to put on his engineering hat again!
15:25: Our Czar and Savior is waffling on whether or not to vent, but just in case he makes the call, he has a direct line to the control room.
Because, you know, in the middle of a core meltdown with radiation getting out of containment the operations crew has time to chit chat with Washington.
15:26: "Vent it now."
Shit's about to get reeeeaaaaaal.
15:55: We just got an expert answer to the question "What do we mean by acceptable dose?" Apparently it's the amount of radiation the human body can safely absorb. But we have to remember that it will also get into the soil, then the food supply. Sometimes radiation instantly kills cells, sometimes it just damages them. Our Czar and Savior, Josiah Bartlet has astutely made the deduction that damaged cells means cancer.
We learned earlier that the "acceptable dose" is 500 mRem. Not only does this government statement go against its own policy that there is no "acceptable dose", the acceptable dose from a more reasonable point of view would be much higher, especially when you consider that no members of the general public are sitting on the top of the vent stack and so it's going to disperse quite a bit before getting to them. Of course that doesn't really matter for TV. In this scenario, once radiation gets out, it's magically the same dose everywhere.
16:14: We just vented and it's 569 mRem above the stack.
Holy shit, we're all going to die!!!!!!!
17:06: The winds are changing direction so we don't know what direction to make people drive. It's no longer clear if we're all going to die or not. The EPA says above 500 mRem is unacceptable, but its not Our Czar and Savior's place to say if that's dangerously unsafe or not. Meanwhile we're now up to 1 million people fleeing our town of 42,000.
The government's response so far can best be described as #KillingIt
18:54: It's just been confirmed that the Republican candidate for president is the sole reason for the plant's existence because of his lobbying efforts 25 years ago.
Yeah, that makes perfect sense.
19:41: Turns out we're not actually in a meltdown yet. It takes 12 things going wrong to start a meltdown and only 5 or 6 things have gone wrong so far.
Did you hear that guys?!? Turns out the only way to have a meltdown is if 12 things go wrong. Doesn't matter that the core has been at least partially uncovered for several hours now, we're not melting down.
23:37: The temporary pipes that apparently at some point in the past got coolant moving into the core again are starting to crack. We need to send men in to containment to repair them by hand.
Just so much to process here. So at some point we managed to build a temporary bypass line, which I guess is why we're not melting down. Either we did this without the help of people to actually build it, or we just didn't care that people died doing that the first time around, but we're going to care this time. And oh yeah, we're going to send human beings into a containment building that is currently filled with so much radioactive gas that it can't hold any more without breaking. People ain't gonna survive long enough to get to the pipe, let alone fix shit.
23:50: Well we just learned that the current dose in containment is 5 times above our 500 mRem acceptable limit and we're going to send in two engineers from the NRC to make the fix.
Well. In case I didn't mention it before, I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt that their units are actually the standard unit of mRem/hr since not having a time component makes no sense to be talking about dose fields. So I guess that means containment is only 2.5 Rem/hr. That is very survivable, the engineers will be fine. That's not actually even somewhat remotely possible in this situation because that's an extremely low dose for on contact with a coolant system that isn't broken, but sure in this magical fairy tale where everything else is way worse than real life, we can make this one thing way better than real life. And now for the best part, instead of maintenance people that are qualified to cut and weld and otherwise build and repair pipes, we're sending in two engineers that typically aren't allowed to actually touch anything other than a keyboard and not only that, but we're sending in engineers from the NRC instead of the actual system experts. We're all truly going to die now.
25:03: We're now told that the pipe isn't actually in containment and it is being repaired by other people. The engineers are actually going in to try to manually open the stuck valve.
Okay, this is interesting. So it seems the pipe isn't actually in containment and other technicians are fixing it. The engineers are going to manipulate the stuck valve which is in containment. So what this means is that there is piping that is entirely outside containment that hooks into a cooling line on either side of a valve that is in containment. That makes perfect sense. In MOTHERFUCKING BIZARRO WORLD. Also, remember this is a BWR. People can't actually go inside primary containment in a BWR (#InstantDeath) so I'm assuming they're talking about secondary containment, but their lack of specificity is creating a clusterfuck in my mind.
29:38: The engineers just got the valve open to restore cooling water after 17 minutes in the containment building. The administration is thinking maybe they should go after the other valve releasing the steam and try to close it. Their stay time was 15 minutes.
By my calculation they got 0.71 Rem each or about 71% of the dose they would get from an MRI at the hospital. So yeah, they're both pretty safe, but this is bizarro world where the doses are crazy low, but the consequences are crazy high so somehow they've already exceeded their stay time. We could send in another team of unqualified individuals to go after the other valve, but I have a feeling this asshole is about to tell us that's not an option.
30:05: "Do you really want to expose another team?" We're told it'll take 5-10 minutes and exposing another team is apparently dangerous so our Czar and Savior gives the order to go after the other valve.
This team has survived 17 minutes so far, so why risk exposing another team to a completely survivable 10 minute job when these guys can obviously do it faster because they're already there. Forget that they didn't brief on this job so it probably won't be faster and forget that in this world they're already on the edge of death.
30:40: The engineers couldn't stop the steam leak because of corrosion on the valve. They're finally pulled out after 32 minutes.
No need to rehash whether or not they'll survive, we've pretty much covered that clusterfuck of brilliant mathematics. A valve that's too corroded to close, however, is the first thing I actually believe about this scenario.
33:05: Both engineers have been hospitalized with one in a coma. Pressure is rising in the aux building, we might need to try using a second team to close the valve."15 minutes and out."
Oh, now we give a fuck about letting the people survive.
38:10: Our Czar and Savior and the Republican candidate are in a little argument about whose fault this is. Republican is blaming the Czar because it's his NRC that dropped the ball and the Czar is blaming Republican because he says all nuclear is too risky. Republican has been saying for some time now that everything has risk and more people die from coal plants, oil refinery accidents, and driving.
I mean, the NRC sucks, but it's not their fault a company violated their rules, but the Republican is making completely valid points and keeps getting treated like the bad guy.
38:50: Czar is interrupted mid-rant about how no regulation could make nuclear safe to be told that the second team closed the valve and all is well for now, but that one of the engineers from team one died.
I really wanted this rant to continue because he provided approximately zero evidence, but was successfully persuading me of his position because of his yelling and righteous indignation.
39:41: The crisis is officially over. The remaining radiation is below acceptable levels.
I assume they mean outside the plant. Inside they still have two buildings full of the stuff and nowhere for it to go. But let's not worry about that. There's only 3 minutes left and most of that is credits, we can't possibly try to deal with the issue now.
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