It’s called the pilot-operated relief valve, and it sits atop the pressurizer attached to the Unit 2 reactor of Three Mile Island.
It is often referred to as PORV, and something went very wrong with it that early morning in March 1979, the result, along with other failures, leading to the worst accident in this nation’s experience with nuclear power generation.
As the company that is dismantling Unit 2 – TMI-2 Solutions – proceeds with its work, the valve, it seems, is highly prized as a historic artifact, not quite on par with a very odd memento housed in a museum billed as “Alabama’s Smithsonian.” The Berman Museum in Anniston has among its collection Adolf Hitler’s silver tea set. (How Hitler’s tea set wound up in Alabama is a mystery. The head of the museum told a reporter in 2021, “That’s a good question. Next question.”)
Anyway, the PORV is an artifact associated with horror – not nearly on par with the horror inflicted upon civilization by Hitler – as its malfunction contributed to an accident that scared the bejesus out of nearly every living soul within 10 miles of the three-mile-long island in the Susquehanna River.
Within days of March 29, 1979, thousands left the towns in the shadow of Three Mile Island’s cooling towers. Goldsboro, a northern York County river town smack dab across from the plant, was a ghost town in those days of uncertainty and terror.
The PORV played a key role in the accident. Long story short, it opened when it was supposed to release pressure from the reactor and then it didn’t close when it was supposed to maintain the flow of cooling water to the overheated reactor core.
It is considered such an important artifact that the Smithsonian Institution asked Energy Solutions whether it could have it to add to its display about the TMI accident.
The company has received a number of requests for material from the plant to document its place in history, Joe Lynch, the company’s director of regulatory affairs and licensing, recently told a community advisory board monitoring the decommission of the plant.
TMI-2 Solutions has reached an agreement with the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Pennsylvania State Historic Office to preserve certain artifacts from the plant, which is eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places. (Which makes sense when you consider that much of history involves tragedy and horror.)
Lynch told the panel that the company’s agreement, along with a license amendment approved by the NRC in August, “balances the need to preserve the reactor’s history while allowing TMI-2 Solutions to continue carrying out decommissioning work,” according to the non-profit professional organization the American Nuclear Society.
TMI-2 Solutions, under the agreement, has committed to preserving the reactor control panels and donating them to a museum where the control room can be recreated. Other items the company plans to donate for posterity include a model of the reactor building and the reactor core, photographs, maps and signs.
“A lot of artifacts that we can provide in the short term, we are going to,” Lynch told the board. “The larger things are a few years out into the future, but we do have an inventory that has been requested of us.”
One of those requests came from the Smithsonian for the PORV.
It was denied.
“It is very contaminated,” Lynch told the board, “and is not something that we would very readily donate to anybody."
As Unit 2 is being dismantled, the owner of the Unit 1 reactor, Constellation Energy, is seeking permission to reopen that reactor, recently reaching a deal to sell the 837 megawatts the plant produces to Microsoft to power its artificial intelligence efforts and data centers in the mid-Atlantic region.
Columnist/reporter Mike Argento has been a York Daily Record staffer since 1982. Reach him at mike@ydr.com.
This article originally appeared on York Daily Record: Smithsonian asked for TMI valve at center of the '79 meltdown. Here's the answer it got
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