Q: What's your general reaction when you think about Friday?
RM: It was a hectic day. It was a hard day. Friday was a hard day. There
were developments that were rapidly moving. There were differences of opinion.
The media had come out in force. Press conferences were being prepared for.
We had begun to understand the severity of the damage to the core. We weren't
sure about the peripheral systems, whether the waste gas treatment system was
gonna hang in there for us. We weren't certain about the reactor coolant pump,
whether it was gonna continue to function and circulate coolant the way it was
supposed to. The temperatures in the core were not dropping. They were
staying high and we couldn't fully understand why that was happening. And
then, of course, the hydrogen bubble. How do we get rid of the hydrogen in the
primary coolant system? I think we learned at the emergency center Friday
morning, early, for the first time, that there had been a hydrogen explosion in
the containment on Wednesday afternoon, that it had not been reported back
through the communication channels to the emergency team in Bethesda until
Friday morning. And that compounded the concern with where we were at. Where
were the people who had done more analysis of severe accidents, who understood
better than most what the implications were of a hydrogen explosion? We knew
that there was a lot of hydrogen in the reactor coolant system by then. And
all of these things came together to make it a very hectic and demanding day on
Friday.
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