Download PDF - Oyster News 66 - Oyster Yachts

what to do, I don’t know how this plant
operates, I’m sure you guys do, and can
tell each other what to do. But I do know
about people and building teams, and
organization, so maybe that will be
helpful. But I’m going to learn more from
you than you’ll learn from me. That was
the start of a fabulous relationship,"
Wallace says. "I learned a lot, and I know
I made a difference."
About that time (March 1979), the
reactor at the Three Mile Island nuclear
plant in Pennsylvania established a
prominent spot in America’s history of
catastrophe with a reactor core melt
down. A combination of equipment
malfunctions, design-related problems,
and worker errors caused what was
categorized at the time as the most
serious of accidents. But the walls of the
core were not breached. There were no
deaths or even injuries to plant workers
or members of the community.
Under the gun, the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission reacted with a series of
policy revisions that staggered the nuclear
power industry. Since the Three Mile
Island melt down in 1979, not one license
has been issued for the construction of a
new nuclear plant in the United States.
Several new plants had been licensed
and were under construction at the time
of Three Mile Island. Many were never
completed, testament to the extreme
difficulty caused by the Regulatory
Commission’s frequent, confounding,
and costly re-readings of rules and
codes. Byron and Braidwood were two of
the plants in various stages of
construction. Given Wallace’s experience
in the initial stages of those plants,
Commonwealth Edison assigned him as
project manager of both in 1982. It was
perhaps a bit more excitement than he’d
been looking for. Wallace was suddenly in
charge of a work force as large as 7300
for six years during nuclear energy’s
most trying time. When the two Illinois
plants were nearly completed (April,
1986), the reactor at Chernobyl in the
Ukraine exploded, killing 50 people
immediately, thousands more from
radiation, and spreading thirty to forty
times the fallout that occurred after the
bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It was nuclear power’s worst day.
"I was horrified, but not surprised,"
Wallace says. "My submarine experience
gave me a perspective on how Russian
nuclear submarines were designed and
operated, with a low concern for human >
www.oystermarine.com 59