Q: What was your impression the first time you walked into a power plant?
MG: The first time I walked into the power plant at Zion, Unit One was
finished and Unit Two was under construction. So it was the perfect moment to
see the finished product and how it was put together. And the man who took me
through the plant was named Jack Bytel, who later became the model for the Jack
Lemmon character in the movie "The China Syndrome," Jack Gudell. And Bytel was
a gung-ho nuclear power plant chief engineer who really understood this
technology and had great hope for the future and believed that what he was
doing was, you know, a moral energy crusade to save the country. And I liked
this guy very much, but when he took me into the control room and I looked at
this and I could see here is a room -- it's 90 feet around -- dials and buttons
and gauges and alarms -- and here are these operators at this console. And a
lot of the instruments aren't even visible. In order to get to adjust
something, you had to have a guy on one of the back panels reading the gauge
while -- so the other guy at the console -- you know, I mean it was not
designed like an airplane cockpit is what I'm trying to say. This was
primitive lay-out in an ergonomic sense, you know. And then we went next door
to the plant that was under construction and I'm looking at this place and the
pipes are big enough to walk through. The pumps are four stories tall. There
is nothing in this whole operation that is anywhere on a human scale. And all
of this stuff is right off the drawing boards. And there's 90,000 miles of
wire in this thing. And all of it's got to work pretty close to perfectly.
And I looked around there, as an engineer, and I said to myself, "These boys
are in trouble," because, as I say, it's all right off the drawing board.
Even today, nuclear power in this country, as we speak -- we elected a free
enterprise model, which is our tradition. We turned it over to the public
utility companies. We said, "You guys know about how to make electricity.
This is just making electricity with atoms. You guys will run it as free
enterprise." As a consequence, instead of one design, as the French had, one
carefully planned design where all plants were relatively the same and each
operator can go from one to another and understand what he's seeing and so
forth, we turned it over to different companies. Babcock and Wilcox, General
Electric, and so forth, all these different designers designing totally
different plants. And turning it over to some several dozen separate utility
companies. And the problem is when you have that kind of individual design and
individual ownership -- there were two problems. The first problem was that
they scaled this thing up from the hundred-megawatt demonstration plants, to
the sort of laboratory proof of concept nuclear power plants, to these
thousand-megawatt super plants like Zion and Dresden and Three Mile Island,
without anything in between. So in terms of aircraft design, which was my
specialty, this would have been like going from the Piper Cub to the 747 with
nothing in between. You can't go from fabric to titanium without making this
aluminum -- middle step here. And that's basically what happened. So they
created a monster in the literal sense. These monster plants were something
that, as events proved, they did not understand clearly.
back to Interview Transcripts | next
|
PBS Terms of Use Privacy Policy
Pledge Your Support
Stories to Go