Q: What training did it take to be a control room operator in 1979?
MG: A lot of people were under the impression that the operators in the
control room at Three Mile Island were incompetent or substandard or something.
Nothing could be further from the truth. These were among some of the best
operators in the industry. These guys were almost, without exception, Navy
trained. They had their nuclear power experience under Admiral Rickover in the
nuclear Navy. These guys all had responsible jobs. Gary Miller, the chief
engineer for this plant, was a man who was personally put in charge of the
construction of one of the first nuclear powered aircraft carriers when he was
in his 30s. And this is a brilliant engineer. And he was the guy who was
there at that plant, at Three Mile Island, almost at the time they dug the
foundation. So he was no, you know, newcomer who walked in that didn't know
where the door knobs were. This is a guy who had watched that thing come up,
you know, from the ground -- very, very intelligent man. He was misinformed.
Q: Is also true that all you needed to work at the plant was a high school
education level?
MG: Yeah. Well, you don't necessarily want the PhD. I mean I wouldn't want
Dr. Teller, for example, operating a nuclear power plant. Dr. Teller may have
a much better grasp of the fundamental physics than these high school graduates
who were operating the plant, but, that is a technical operation that you train
people for. And these people had been well trained. I mean they had been on
the Babcock and Wilcox simulator down in Lynchburg, Virginia. The team that
was on duty at Three Mile Island that night, the night of the accident, Ed
Fredrick, and Craig Faust and Gary Miller, these people were among some of the
highest rated performers in terms of their tests. And you don't need a college
degree. You don't have to be a physicist, but you do have to pass a series of
very rigorous tests and you have to be well-trained, particularly as a control
room operator. You've got to really know how to run that plant. And they had
been well taught and well-trained, but, as I say, they had been misinformed.
One of the most essential pieces of information had been essentially kept from
them because the designers of the plant itself did not realize that this could
happen.
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