Text

Responds to Jf Dienelt Request During SW Porter 791005 Deposition Re TMI-2 Incident.Forwards Draft Transcript of SW Porter Tape Recordings Previously Provided to IE Investigators
	ML19322C516
Person / Time
Site:	Crane
Issue date:	12/05/1979
From:	Traviesodaiz; SHAW, PITTMAN, POTTS & TROWBRIDGE
To:	Frampton G; NRC - NRC THREE MILE ISLAND TASK FORCE
References
	TASK-TF, TASK-TMR NUDOCS 8001170845
	Download: ML19322C516 (52)
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George Trampton, Esquire

GC/T!I Special Inquiry Group

uclear Regulatory Commission

'l ashing t on, D. C.

20555

Dear George:

In response to the request of John r. Dienelt during the deposition of Sydney *. Porter, Jr. on October 5,1979, enclosed is a transcript of Porter's tape recordings previously provided to the NRC Office of Inspection Mr.

and Enforcement inv es tigat ors.

Sincerely, f.;f[-

!!atias F. Travieso-Diaz J p': r t Enclesure cc:

J. F. Dienelt, Esquire (w/o encl)

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W 300 T.'.PE #1 CO?lCERflitlG THE Tf4I IflCIDEtlT OF MARCH 28, 1979 Gd-A/ 7/6[q S lO h $

As early as 2:00 or 3:00 AM in the, morning the TMI Unit #2 Operations Staff knew that there were some problens with the plant.

Between 2 AM and 6:40 AM in t

the morning, the situation steadily deteriorated, finally resulting in the uncon-trolled release of noble gases from the Unit 2 Auxiliary Building vent,. which was.

released out via the main vent of Unit 2.

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At aporoxinately 8 AM in the morning I was called by Michael Buring, who is the coroorate health physicist located at Metropolitan Edison Headquarters in Reading, PA.

iTke asked me to make preparations to exoand the off-site radiological environmental monitoring.pronram...(indistinguishable) recall the expanded regime.* Early the next morning I increased the 'expar.ded regime into the present emergency sampling regime, which essentially monitors air iodines, and milks and water at all downstream drinkino water intakes on a daily basis.

I talked several times during the morning of March 28 to Mike Burino, oave him the answers-to several specific questions that he asked, and then called him about 11:30-AM and asked if they specifically needed my services at Three Mile Island plant.

He said that as far as he knew they did not need my services.

ixikanxnakrixifxixz2xidxh Then at about 11:30 I called and when I was told that my services as far as he kne-were not necessary, I asked oermission to go to the Salem fluclear Generating Station to meet three or four people who had flown all the way from Canberra Industrsfies in Connec to meet me at Salem and were down there waiting for me.

I then drove to Salem, which takes about an hour and three-quarters.

When I arrived at Salen there was a note waitir for me saying that I should go imediately to Three Mile Island fluclear Plant.

The telt phone call came from Jim Seelinger, who is the Unit 2 Superintendent at Three Mile Islar I called Jim and talked to him and he requested that I take a helicopter and get th'ere within a half hour.

Unfortunately, his request came just after the two helicooters tha*.

were at Salen t!uclear Generatino Station had already left to go back to flewark. I decide that I could be much nore useful to then if I had the flexibility of an automobile so I drive which took me approximately 3 hours3.472222e-5 days 8.333333e-4 hours 4.960317e-6 weeks 1.1415e-6 months .

I arrived at Three Mile Island fluelear Stati intheneighborgood4f7:00PM.

I had arranged when I was~ at Salem to have 150 respirat with about 500 id$ihe cartridges sent up by Salem duelear Generating truck to Three Mile Island plant.

I also arranged to have Janes Gueller, the Supervisor of Health Physics a Chemistry at Salem fluclear Generating Station and three of his best men come up in the Salem emergency van and bring with them complete nonitoring equipment which includes cal brated survey meters for each person, an air sacoling pump, and a dual channel analyzer for the analysis of iodine in air in the field.

In Immediacely upon arrivinc at Three Mile Island, I fa:mdxtkatxthe quickly found out that the two too health physicists, Dick DuBiel, who is head of the department, and Tom "ulavey, who is tMdin charge of the #2 plant, were both completely dedicated to the Unit 2 plant and did not have any time at all to think about a) the problems of #1 plant, or b) any of the people or equioment that were needed to help handle the emeroency.

These two fellows were under extrene pressure in Unit 2 Control Room to follow very carefully and exclusively the condition of the plant and to help respond to all problems in attemp to put the plant into a safe condition.

With these two key people out of the operating organization and for many hours at a time out of contact with anybody offsite, it was very inportant that I try to fill the r.ez::h breach and until we could get together an organization which could cope with all t I

Michael Burino asked megot to leave the office but to be raady to go to Three Mile Isla:

on a moment's notice.

I of course complied with this requesth

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problems and with all the support that was needed.

He faced a number of severe proble-on the first two days.

The first problem was that there was high levels of noble gase:

and we suspected that there possibly may.be also radiohalogens that were escaping from the Un/oer hour around the warehouse at times.These were producing hich radiation fields o it 2 vent.

300 me There was a very low wind speed, the noble, cases were being taken.into the plant vent of both units 1 and 2 *and' we had the condition where we were just dumoing out noble gases and then oulling them back in our i plant intake vents - plant air intakes, and essentially contaminatino our nlant with or ;

own discharce.

There was also probably sone low level leaks from the Aux. Building out' into the tu.rbine building and from one turbine building in Unit 2 to turbine building i ;

un3t 1.. I am not sure about this latter pathway, but it is suspected of having been

- present.

When I arrived, all of the normal health physics staff were in a state of near exhaustion.

They were very tired,. they were having difficulty-some of them making good decisions, and they just needed: help; so that they could think more about the problems that they were specifically' assigned to.

One of the fitst things I did was to take the Salem people who arrived about a half hour after I did, and to put them out in one of the four emergency teams which we-outside the building, usually three offsite and one onsite.

It is now the 8th of April and we have had a minimum of three emergency teams monitoring outside of the TriI plant on and offsite around the clock with no stop for al these days since the 28th when I arrived. One of the first things that I did was to tr3 to nake arrangement to have replacement pecole for these teans.

I called Bill Allen at Pennsylvania Power & Licht Emizk Susquehanna Station located in Beneick, PA and asket Bill to come down with four to six of his best people which he did.

The next thino I d was to establish a protocol for a routine series of measurements that needed to be made the on and offsite teams so that there was a little bit of order in priority'for which sanoles they should take when.

After that - and this was all happening on the 28th -

and it ran into the 29th, I didn't go to bed for about 52 to 55 hours6.365741e-4 days 0.0153 hours 9.093915e-5 weeks 2.09275e-5 months at that point.

T next item was to start sanpling air.

When I arrived at Unit 1 Control Room everyone in the Control Room was on respirators, which is very, very difficult for these poeole try to assess the situation, run the offsite monitoiing teams, watch the effluent discharge and act as the emergency command center.

I got air sanples taken and evaluated which v later to become a great problem in the Lithium drifted Germanium detector evaluation of sanoles, I might add.

After we went through several cycles of on-respirator, off-resoirator, I set up a SA'i-2 dual channel analyzer system in the Control Room and whenever the background wou; go uo quite high because of noble gases, we would run a air sanole and count the air sr richt there on the Sam-2 and on the results of that we would release people from respir and then we would send the charcoal over to the GeLi detector to get it counted and ver-P@o e

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l"1 the fact that the Sam-2 analysis was correct.

L One of the early techincal problems that we had was the fact that the noble gas it u

were so high in the charcoals thztxthis and gave so much dead time to the San-2 countir system that the San-2 counting system essentially was giving false positive informatio:

the amount of iodine in phe air.

I did devise a way to check to see if this was the c:

but there was no time to, train each and every one of the monitorinn teams which were r for 12 hours1.388889e-4 days 0.00333 hours 1.984127e-5 weeks 4.566e-6 months , each monitoring team was out for 12 and off 6or 12, and so because of thm decided that except in cases of very unusual circumstances we would have all the charer brought back and counted. We got a helpcipter to ferry over' people to the westshore fc

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monitoring teams /on the westshore of the Susquehanna River and to bring these air samples ba de forj5ounting at the station's gamma spectroscopy laboratory.

,.p One of the big problems was that the noble gases in the unit 1. building were so L i

that they essentially wiped out the ability of the station's lithium drifted gernaniu to count the air samples.

Probably more than 90'.' of the time in this system was uselt.

during the first couple of days.

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I sat down after having been there three or four hours and made a list of things had to be done in order to be able to continue to make an analysis of both the plant c ;

ditions and environmental conditions.

It was immediately obvious that the GeLi system within the olant had to be moved outside of the6 plant.

It was also obvious that there to be additional lithium drifted germanium camma spectroscopy systems bourght in from t outside and set up.

Since we had.both electricity and communications at the observatic-center, which cameto be known laterg;by-the way, as Trailer City.

At last count it lot.

to me like there were at.least 30 trailers there - it was obvious that this was where counting system should-go...-It m - W C 0 N 4-i.6 "w d :'Ot h 4 i-C In view of the-events in.the.-first week an'd a half of the Three Mile

-Island fluelear Power-Station incident which began on March 28, 1979 in Unit

2 plent.

The date today is the 8th of April and this is my first break, by the way, from the strenuous routine of trying to render. all these systems

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--that I possibly can during this.emeroency period.

I might add I have averaged c

abouT four hours sleep a night as I arrived many nights not cetting any at all.

Talking about some decisions which I made approximately at 8 p.m. which is only about an hour af ter I arrived at the_ Three Mile Island Station.

After getting thinos squared away, getting reliefs for the on and off-site monitoring team, setting un the sampline machine and trjring to find out about samole-taking, I called RMC on their emercency line and requested that they have their whole body counter set uo the next day at 6:30 a.m. so that the oncoming shift at 7 could be counted and that some of the people leaving that had extremely high exposures could also be whole body counted.

I also requetted that the energency var which had been designed for all types of emergency monitoring be set up with a Lithium drifted i

Germanium ~

d.etector and that this be also delivered the next morning at the Thre'e Mile' IsTand site.

RMC and its usually ocorly-run fashion jerked around in great confusion and didn't give much response at all.

1!e got a call about 6 a.m.

the next morning or so from Fred Rocco saying that at 8 a.m. the whole body counter would be there and at 10 a.m. that the-counting system would be there.

After talking to him and seeinq who he planned to man it with, it was obvious that Rocco was really'not capable of naking the decisions which needed to be made as to who should man this thino so I insisted very strongly that if anybody cosnq to arrive on the scene that Frazer Bronson was coina to be Jrgm,It was,RMC was en.

obvious that he did not have people of proper technical cualtty-si!r didn't know,occo itA but it was obvious to me that there was nobody of proper tec yhl quality ~ o be able to count samples for gamma emitters in the presence of hig changing back-ground fields which you cet from a noble gas plume.

This is a ve bifficult thing 3

to do and you have to have somebody that is extremely capable to be able to handle these kinds of changing backcround conditions.

Thus, I insisted that Frazer Bronson be there and he did come up.

Amazgly enough, Frazer arrived just about 2 in the afternoon of the 29th and the W5L., van still wasnTt there.

Rocco blew it againt and apparantly Kim blew it on the whole body counter because the whole i

body counter didn't start counting until late in the afternoon because the jerks locked themselves out of the thing and couldn't start it and there were all kinds d' PTkb m

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c fuel problems trying to jsmo start it because there Mi is also an electric fidd pump that requires a special voltage and nc/n'e knew what it was.

To sumarize the problems with RMC,- even so they were notified aoproximately 8 p.m. on the evening of the 28th that both the whole body counter was needed first

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thina the next day and the GeLi-Detector was desparately needed, obviously nobody.

did anythino all night long.

Everybody went home and oot a ocod niaht's sleep rather than putting forth where-they should have so -ti=B, as a result, the whole._

body counter not only wasn't ready to(tount for the afternoon but they had to

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take away. two TMI personnel to jump sf.ari.tfie truck and they worked on it for about three or four hours before they finally act the thing started which is ridiculous to tie up two TMI personnel during-the initial stages of a very serious emergency.

The truck was already at.TMI, it was just next 0% to the plant right under the plune and thus was useless and had to be moved and the problem was in moving it.

Finally, the TMI pers'annel wereiable-to pick the lock of the thing and get into the cab and they were able to hot wire it'and start it and.this thing was nved

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and instead of being readyl/ft/MA/'at 6:30 in the morning it was finally ready.

somewhere in the netghborhood.of 6-to ~8 the next evening which was really ridiculous.

The van which was parked down at Salem Nuclear Generating Stption which is about an hour and a half away from Philadelphia was not brought uq'that r:ight and fitted out and brought to THI the next mornino and it was not there at 10 o' clock Eft 4did as Roccb had solomly promised me.

As a matter of fact, the van did not arrive until many h6urs after Frazer Bronson arrived and I think the van counted its first samples after. dark rather than at 10 a.m. when we expected it to be there and ready to oo.

I find this proposper of RMC is to orovide emergencv servicea;ous when one thinks that the sole mission nd they are solely owned by the PUil-w utility andithe greatest '.hed of the entire PJ!! system RMC was jerking around for the better part of the day.

Thank God thet Frazer Bronson arrived.

He is a very capable professionalAnd he soon put things right with the counting van and with the whole body counter so that everyting was on a norn now and I feel quite releived now that he is there to ta e over the oeeration because it is very obvious that there is absolutely n one in Philadelphia that is capable of doing it at all.

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fNk Herbein made it ouite clear that my #1 priority was to"characterizehmkNh the source release term.. This involved characterizing both the noble gases and the halt,ogens leaving the TMI vent of Unit 2 during the entire incident.

The first. step in this was to have Steve Gertz ao change the environmental TLDs so we can get a new set in there.

I knew that the old set had been out.for at least a month and that it would be very hard to see two days' worth of accident exoosure on top of a month's nofmal exosure.Asit turns out it was on top of a whole quarter year's normal exposure and it was even harder than I expected to see this. We also polled the THI fence cost TLDs which are read by the THI TLD reader.

The statistics on these numbers was quite poor and did not prove to be (dffd/fidfA7 to0useful except to give us an upper boundary on the limits of exposure at the fence post for the firs t two days. -Normal environmental

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TLDs are put out and are beinn read every three days.which gives us enough I

exoosure for reasonably good statistics.

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from.these TLDs is heir.g

, integrated with the meteorflogical data which is read out 8 Pihkard & Lows g... Cbmuter in Washington, D. C. Tom Potter has been working very hard on

.t %teitating the qs from the actual wind data with the TLD data which MN l

has its backnround carefully subtracted out and then taking a close look aphe times when we know there were what we call " puff releases" and in looking at the,

wind speed directgion and the frequency data along with the puff fr.equency data a three-way correlation was made and Tcm cane uo with.his best estimates for the source term.

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W g-The 29th of March I PJ kadiation Sonitoring. gad the filters renoved from the stack vent installed.

.,ystem HPR 2D from the auxilliarygent RMS Channel HPR 228.

Both of these monitors read after the massive firter bpnk that has been so effective in l e,v,@3. out the hallogens..

I set un a renime for counting these two filters and.later on suspected pdiffNdp-possibly something was comina fron the fuel handling building so I started a reoime about three or four dcys later of maybe four or five days later of counting HPR 221 B which is after the fuel handling building massive ff!ters.

All of these charcoals have been counted with the exception of two or three of them.that were so poorly mislabelled that we don't. know how to fioure out when they were on and when they were off the systen with the exception of one of them

-a very critical HPR 219 charcoal filter

.that was lost. Because of the loss and because of the near loss of two

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or three others, it was obvious.that~ something had to be done with sample.

_. coordination,'that is; cetting:the sample from the plant site to a staging area and from the staging,arearout.to thegcounting laboratorfddy.

Since there are s

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four GeLi Detectors,Jteo.-on-site and. two off-site, this is/ fairly complicated thing to do.

It is further complicated by the fact that the charcoal was taken i

from HPR 219 sometimes read as much as close to 100 Mr/hr gamma on contact.

It l

1s difficult to take activities that are this high off-site.

Ever since I was looking for high sensitivity for Iodine 131, and the VMI and TMI counters were off and knocked out with an extremely large noble pas plume, it was necessary to take them off-site most of the time.

I preferred to have them i;o to RMC for couttina all the time, however, this message just never got carried out especially in the early morning hours.

Even so, I was there and tryina to follow.fE.It is very difficult to follow all the actions all the time.

Because of all these problems, I set up a sacole coordinating system and not Jim Roy to come in and be ny assistant and to follow this samole coordination systen.

It required having coordinatino efforts of about four to six pe6ple per shift and then became more comolicated when things mo'ved from 'two shifts to three shifts a day so we were trfinq to coordinate eighteen people when you don't work for the companies 16 is en extrenely difficult thing. This problem finally got resolved by having the chief chemist from GPU come in and assign sample coordinators that were very high quality people mostly form his own laboratory thus, he had control of the people and we had high quality people who we could deoend on.

Hooefully, we won't lose any more samples and will.see that.they are properly labelled at the time they arrive at the processing center for distritr.: tion.

The procedure took a.long time to write, 'by the_way, the samole coordination procedure ind the coordinating 'of the samoles to the labs and the data back to the control rooms.

I spent a long time on the first drraft. Jim Roy worked on the second draf t and Ler.h -Orris (d /*

got into it and out it all together in even better shape and Lex and Jim drew a flow diagran and then we had the whole thing blessed by Charlie Harpman and finally by Dave Roth.

We are out of the woods on this one item.

I hooe I am not repeating myself here.

One of the next probidas was that of fMd/5fftd Pennsylvania State 46 water quality pecole calling and sayino that they understood that there was some radioactivity in our industrial waste treatment system and that we were to cease and desist dumoing this water into the Susouehanna River.

That we were told not to release anything inte the Susquehanna River.

This had a neoative effect uoan the olant because then all the sumps started backing up.

We didn't realize that 7

did say that they would allow us to dump into the River except that they

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"It was about 8:00 PM of the March 28th."

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" Fairly low concentration stuff and then they ran out of' 2

waste so they turn over and sta t processing a 2

tank and they put.in the 'high concentration stuff on the top and your recircuit sense is off the bottom and we're not committed to two 7

volumes or anything like that."

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"Richt - vie recirc 'for - well, I guess we recire for about a half a

-tank volune but of course we are recircino all the time we're filling so the only time we ever cet to the last stuff, the last couple

. gallons.is in the..first six thousand or four or five thousand gallons and we had that happen and what happens is that they take a sample and the. low activity., -

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hg G6UQuNbb The['date of today is th? 9th of April an

...The Three Mile' Island incident.

dictating what's happened in the previous 12' days.

Obviously something had to be dont

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cala the Pennsylvania Bureau of Hater Qua1ity down, and to give then some confidence '

we knew wbatwe were doing on the island.

It is also obvious that we could 'not tolerr negative press release about the dumping of water.

The Bureau of Radiological Health has been our friend throughout the whole thing, in that they:ve been understanding - t been touch and they have protected the public's interest, however, and they xiii were t ino to let us dumo but.they were coing-to out out a press release telling everyone abo.

this and notifying the downstream.w[ter comanies.

This would have caused a panic whi would have been, in my coinion,- would have led to mass hysteria and I believe, so the:

I nade the decision ~ that we would noh..under the conditions that the press release i coina to ao out. This is backed up by Herbein and it turns at that the Governor cal-and said that thP.xe they were not to dumo any more water.

Last Tuesday a meeting was set uo with the Pennsylvani Bureau of Water Quality, t Pennsylvaia Bureau of Radio' ogical Health, the NRC, GPU, I represented Petrdpolitan Ed l

For some stranne reason there were a number of people from FDA Bureau of Radiological !

there, which I never understood, walter Lyon, Chief of the Bureau of Water Quality in attended this neeting.

He had a number of questions wanting to know where all the disc pipes were on the Island, and wanting to have a fom set up where he would be notified c all the radioacitvity leaving C.e Island, not only from the normal radioactive discharg tanks, but also from the waste treatment systems, and the sumps leading to th-We alsnwered all the questions we could in a two hour meeting on Tuesday and then las'.

nesday we had another neeting at 10 AM.

Tuesday and Wednesday 1 had my office in Ardm:

preoare a series of handouts; also bring up naps and Environmental Report and other dat that I could be orecared to give an in-depth technical presentation of just what was hc ing and how we intended to notify the state of all the infomation it was asking for.

'.' alter Lyons seemed very apareciative of both neetings espicially the second one, an:

1 put very cuch at ease after we set un all the connunications.

He was breifed on what.

ram.ocical enviofnmental mnitorinc crocran was doing as far-as wa'ter san?lin was cr mr.d dm<nstream, he was tcid how he cculd ebtain the information which is beirr-sent

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'w g-routinely to the PA Burea u of Radiological Health.

The outcome of this meeting on Wc.

following, which was a week from the start of the incident, was that the NRC, that is

. Collins, the PA BRH, Bill Dornsife, Valter Lyons and some of his staff fron the PA Bur of Mater nuality, Potts renresentino Met Ed and of course, me representi.ng Met Ed, agreed that the data from the, not only from the normal radiological pathways but alsc

. from the industrial wasIe treatment systen and industrial waste filter system, would a' be transmitted on an approximatiely 4 hour4.62963e-5 days 0.00111 hours 6.613757e-6 weeks 1.522e-6 months basis to the PA Bureau of Water Quality.

It A>

~

also acreed that the industrial waste treatment system and the industrial (filter syster since they were presently not normaily maxitaxige monitored pathways of radioactive t:

y-Qgn ials to the radwaste of t,:.that,these-wo,uld be monitored every 2 hours2.314815e-5 days 5.555556e-4 hours 3.306878e-6 weeks 7.61e-7 months . y.~'Every 2 hours2.314815e-5 days 5.555556e-4 hours 3.306878e-6 weeks 7.61e-7 months .

- n..

we are monitoring the INTS and the IWFS,_ and calculating the percent ofimaximum permit.

n concentration after dilution with the. cooling tower blowdown.

This is calculated by

~ dividing the industrial waste blowdown flow by the industrial waste pump flow into the blowdown.

this dilution factor is a~ pplied against the actual INTS or IUFS concentratic of radionuclides.

This was done-fo$ about the first 12 days of the indicent for iodine and then it was agreed that this would -be discontinued, since all the iodine-133 has dc out.

It is now oresently beino done faxx very carefully for iodine-131 and has been si-

- ' teh start of the inedient.. This data is relayed once every 4 to 8 hours9.259259e-5 days 0.00222 hours 1.322751e-5 weeks 3.044e-6 months from when accr' priate to the PA Bureau of Water Duality via the teleccoy machine of the PA Bureau of Water quality which is 1acated up in the PA BRH's office, which is manned around the cic

...tieline which is open to the Bureau of Radioloolcal Health around the. clock is locat

~

in TMI Unit 1 Control Room, which is the emergency operations center for this event.

Irportant data is transmitted to the BRH via this telechone hotline and then is reconfi on the telecopier with specific data..

(Today is early monring, Friday the 13th of Apr' had to stop to fix a flat tire).(I did not transcribe this word for word!!).

In case i.

didn't come throuch clearly before, as o* the 29th of March, my two most imoortant duti were clearly outlined by Jack Herbein to be the following: (and, by the way, also oerse reinforced by Bob Arnold): !! to, on a daily basis if oossible,Y ne radiciodine se

~

higs@f@[l@Il39 M /?h f5) release term from the station vent, #2xtaxpxt g

n

,a e2 to update our analysis of the total gaseous noble gas disc ~ harge froithe station v'erc

.y

. pm

.,..g 3.2

~ y via back calculating from T1.Ds.

He are-also cetting occasional grab samples and analyzing those.

The grab samples are !

- potten infrequently. because the dose ass 6ciated with grabbing the sample and also becau:

of the fact that they are not really that representative of kah shat's going out the stt on a continuous basis. ~

~

. =.

p job is to continue to follow the liquid discharges and to prepare a summary every ottj p<

day for Arnold and Herbein on the radionuclides that have been released, the specific ag tivities of the radionuclides, and the. percent of maximum permissible concentration.in.

+

water that leaves the plant.

These ~are gone for all release pathways includina the IWFS:

x

-f' and the INTS.'

...the neutralizer tanki.

p-

._'d.y#4 job isito resolve-the differenhehin the different lithium drifted germainfun dete!

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counting labs or the differences between the different lithium drifted germanium detecte-1 counting laboratories.

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'I have also been working on resolving t' he differences between the RMC and SAI labs with

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the flRC labs.

It should be noted that the flRC counting laboratory has inferior equipmen

-comaared to SAI and RMC, who are both working for Metropolitan Ediosn right now.

I had Charlie pelletier and 2 Frazier Bronson personnaly talk to the flRC about the discrepanciq in some of the water data. Luckil) the water was sent down to the Maryland Department of Radiolooical Health and was given a third a independent analysis, which backed up the SA{

data and whowed that some of the flRC $ata was in fact incorrect.

j

'ty #5.iob, which was actually given to my home office, to Dr. Steven Gertz, to perfarn, i 7

to review the offiste radiological environmental monitoring data and to present a daily su$ nary report which talsk about trends rather than actual data.

The actual data is trar, mitted from the Ardmore officed of Porter-Gertz Consultants to the metropolitan Edison Reading headquarters office, where Barbara Beck and other people in Jim Mudge's gfoup assenble the data, give it a very cursory review, and teletype it out to the NRC via Mikt Burina in the TLD Trailer in Trailer City.

The data is then quickly disseminated to the P.RH, the f:RC, re, and to any other: interested government agencies that kn ow to go over t

[

the fiRC trailer to review the data.

... Jack Herbein has made it quite clear that all da is to be dieseninated to all parties' as~quickly as possible, with nothina witheld, and tt t

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3 Herbein only wants to know about something that is unusual and is liable to get the'att

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tion of the press, so that he at can be informed about it so that he can ganswer questi about it.

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2 36 - review the installed unit 2 radiation monitoing system data and attempt to interpt l 6

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this data. It.should'bE noted that one of the thinas that I did early on,into the accic,

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.was to write a.iadiation work permit. request to analyze the background contributions te )

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the iodine channels of the stack discharge monitors,' that is 'HPR 219, HPE 228, and HPR y

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.a What we did was to remove the iodine.cartridg'e from all three of these monttors and wit.'

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,the cump off, to'take-a(look at the11evels, and iteturned out that the levels were tge y;

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. same with the cartridae in and theartf,idge out, which shows us that it. is the ambient..

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y, background and/or internai contamination of the systen, that is giving 'us these extremt

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.,1 high nu,nbers.

57 - To perfom a oreliminary organization of the distribution of samples from the pair,-

to the 4 lithium drifted cermanium gaEa spectroscopy systems for gama analyxis of eac {

samo&e.

Obvious problem was thatxikk the sample distribution program, where the wrong samples were going to the wrong labs, and samoles often been cycled without being countt

~

we had a lot of this'in the firstlew days, and the ting was reorganized'several times..

Jim Roy spent a great deal of his first 3 or 4 days at THI working on this problem..

i8 - Assist the Unit 1 Control Room Emergency Director in interpretatio[of on and off site radiological data, and also I set up a famat for the industrial waste treatment at filter systems discharge data and set' up the formulas for perforning the MPC.....

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' TAPE 4 - PAGE 10

... looked at in much more depth and the necessary investigations would be performed an:

followed very closely by me.

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fa _ To fo11ow the offsite environmental sacole analysis program results and to ady'ise Herbein and/.or his replacement of any unusual results.

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11_0- To review the overall onsite health physics program for Dick DuBiel and make sure

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a that any special. requirements are immediately forwarded to the onsite health physics.

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support group for performance.. These special _ requirements include such thaings as..heci surveys for als;:h alpha, for tritium,' for the incfeased used of extremeity TLDs, and

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_w for making sure that thzx any significant TLD results are corrected for the Xenon-133 exposure.-

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QV' and ssf offsite eneroen@cy, survey teans was reviewed by m

11-The data from the o u -

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carefully for the first 3 or 4 days, and then much less carefully as the data began to become less and less significant..To review the data, I looked at the data.to see: a) whether it seemed reasonable, b) to try to calculate some source terms which was very difficult because of the variation in levels from hour to hour, and c) I took a look at the data to make sure that,1f anything was very high that we wnet back and tried to takc another sample there to reverify whether or not the situation was continuing and sl.alse l to take downwind air samples at significant times.

I set up a system where a helicopter:

)

took teams over to the west shore of the river and then would ferry back the charcoal cartridges.so that they could be couteed in one of the GeLi systems so that we could get accurate infornation about the... air exoosure to a ogens from TliI releases.

We did get some false positive numbers using the SAM-2 kits because F the massive amount of Xe in the cartirdges.

I analyzed this problen and what-happened-was-that the result of the analysis was that so much Xe-133 on these air cartridaes that the small sodium iodide l

crystals in the Eberline SAM-2 dual channel analyzer portable kits were being swamped by the Xe-133 and giving us false positive readings n@ya in the iodine region.

We had all c l l

the readings that we made in the field checked with GeLi detectors and found that there l l

was aboslutely no measureable amount of iodine-131 being released even so se thoucht at t

first that there was.

I did set up th.t during the se'cond day of the incident, as-procer...

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for checkinq bhe dead time of the SAM-2 kits The problem was that there-wa since wt i

add 86.D had such a large number of people being rotated through the emergency [ monitoring jobs.

that it was impossible totrain all these oecole in a new crocedure which involved 100 at the dead gime to make sure that we could use the SAM-2s to begin with for field 'mor torng of radiciodine in'the air. 'THus is was necessary just simply to transmit the cc tridges agter the air sample was taken back to the-offsite GeLi detectors at SAI and E for analysis.- In looking at~ two weeks worth of data we say absolutely no radiciodi[1e -

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these short' term grab smaples, all of which were taken downwind in the highest part of plune.

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1 It's of. imoortante to note-that this observation has been reinforced by the' fact

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the amount of iodine in milk has been extremely low, far, far below the Chinese weapor.

of about a year to a year and a half ago, and that the iodine in water iias been extre-TD N low to negligible, and that the iodine in air has been extremelyfnegligible, and thest long tern samples that we're takling about, where we have much more accuracy than the term samples taken by the on and off site emergency survey teams.

@O which is certainly not.!IJ in priority, just about always #1 in,nriority, is to O

handle any bullets given my by Jack Herbein.

?!ow by bullets I Rean that Jack is the person that veers in on a problem and immediately wants to assigne it to who he believe is the best person to answer the problem and wants you to drop everything to work on it and set an answer or solution back to h'im as soon aspossible.

Unfortunately, I seem t a lot of these bullets, after I had already worked 15 or 20 hours2.314815e-4 days 0.00556 hours 3.306878e-5 weeks 7.61e-6 months in a day, and so the I just had to keen working until I was able to solve these.

H4-tostay in contact with the PA BRH, that is Tom Gerusky and Maggie Reily, in or:

to make sure that they approve, and thus the Governor of PA approves, af any discharger that webe making either out the stack or out the water-p4,ne, discharge.

35-to check on the high Ss-137 levels that were reportede to be in our sewage that r fsb goino off site.

Since this sewagepas about to be taken in tank cars off site, $ was generated many days ago, and the fact that more than likely before the incident even

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started, I absolutely couidn't understand how we had Cs-137 in the sewage.

The indicat

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problem yas when I took a_look at the actual gama scan done by the B&W GeLi detector system; This GeLi detector is located only'several hundred feet from the unit 2 vent.

It is in line of sight with it.

It turns out that at the time that this analysis ~was made on the sewerage sample,'that there was an extremely high background fron Xe-135,

.s and that the statistics _ of the count were within twice background and that the actual,.

. o frv computer. fit.for the peak search wasquite poor.

It was obvious again here that the.;.

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sample should[h' ve been take'n out:either to SAI or RMC for analysis and should not' have a

been oerfomred on site where we have. these technical problems right now.

Igot3 san $p.

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le

.. s from the same tank where we got theiositive Cs-137 sample,(which I didn't believe)1 e

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rand had them ocunted off site.

I don't remember ~ whether it was SAI or RMC that counted 7 them - it was one of-the two.

These--3' samples from that tank where we"had the false'p::

~

tive Cs-137 level showed that there~ was nothing above diez detectable limits in the sewerage at all, and that it was pe fectly all right to have it. taken off site.

This little' flap caused the another layer of paperwork for the plant, where the plant was re-quired to sample each tank of sewage', wait for a the GeLi detector results to get back, and be relayed to the BRH.- At that point we had permission to take the sewage off site from the tank that was sampled. Thi[~gives you a slight feel for the marcss of paper work for everythina that we have to do at TMI right now during this incident.

jQ6-Spend a little time reviewing the use of respirators.

I noted that there were an awful lot of pa' er cartridges being used, which is the wrong cartridge for radiciodne, p

which waws. the only reason we were useng respirators to begin with, if If I didn't mention before, ax during the first day of the outage I set up the SAM-:,

1 1

q dual channel analyzer portable kits in each of the 2 control rooms to that they could monitor the air samples for radiciodine to give us some relief is from being on res-4 piratiors in the control rooms..It was extremely difficult to operate a control with y

everyone in respirators, and so this be came a hiah priority iten for a while.

Now, of course after the SAM-2 analyzed the air cartridge for radiciodne, the cartridge was sent t

DJ over to the RMC off site counting' laboratory to be reanalyzed for radiciodine to cheke t MIY

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results which were obtain with the SAM,2 kit.

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- W 7.

A H7-Jim Snelintextal Seelinger called me and asked ma'to perform an analysis of the amount of raiodiodine which would: af) escape to the sample room and b) escape threough the fil.ters to the environment outside of Tl!I when we were performeng our collection of

~

a primary coolant sample.

I might add that several days before. Jim asked'me to do thi:

g I had given hirii a five step rpocedure for collection of the sample which would signiff-

'.g cantly reduce the exposure to both any one person and the total expsoure for collecting these-Namples. 'Ed Houser re ieved around 2.9 ren from the collection of the fin first

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primary coolant. sample after the incident..

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The careful analysis of this procedure sh we that this exposure should be cut down isignificantly, and in fact-it was_. I believe that

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the five people together received less' than 300 millirem for this procedure of collecit:

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this same sample abiiut 4 ~6r 5 days after the first sample was taken.

This factor of 10

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reduction was performed by using an idea I had to get the le,ad glass shield which was or at Hershey Medical Center in and pushing this right in front is of the sample sink, so that pecole had at least the protection factor from the she ld.

+

Notes (I want to put these down while my memory is still holds out.

With the lack of sleeo that I've had over the past 2' weeks - I have had 212-hour periods off during this time -

otherwise I've just simply worked at least 18 hours2.083333e-4 days 0.005 hours 2.97619e-5 weeks 6.849e-6 months per day and smal;u slept the rest of the time with no break except for these 212-hour periods, The 2 12-hour periods I have received during-from the 28th through the 13th of April.)

r^WIU g gr h, ~,

We were just about to perform the job of obtaining the second Unit 2 primary coolan.

l sample and NRC Inspection and Enforcement came in and said that they didn't want ut to collect the sample, because accordin5 to their calcutations we were going to. exceed the instantaneous fa: tax tech spec limit for iodine releases to the airborne environment.

This came up at 10:00 the of April 2910th,1979, when I had already worked

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about 18 hours2.083333e-4 days 0.005 hours 2.97619e-5 weeks 6.849e-6 months straight and was headed back to the Howard Johnson notel for some much-needed sleep.

I worked till 4 the.next morning and in adjudicatinc the NRC's, orablems, caking sure that^evervtikg was goir@~ td~go s oothly with'the s'anple taking? One of the

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higxnxsi big problems was that John Collins wasn't around, and I didn't have anyone fr:

his branch that I could get in touch witty right away to less any iodine re-duction factors due to the.............

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" '... Especially.since this procedure looked a's if it may have the potential for the S

release of up to 20 Curies of Iodine-131.

This is an extremely conservative number, that I came~ up wf'th, and the i'elease would not be to the enviornment bhere anyone

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w could breathe it - it would be to~ the water in the sampling rig itself.

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. sampling rio wedd-4t' was fitted out with a series of. absolute fitters and about

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.'1000 ces of. activated charcoal which was specially set up for removal ~of both organic

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CharliesPelletier prepared these 2 500 cc charcoal trains

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4 19.W e::2 and -I made sure that the plant. hackthen.for thissprocedure.. I talked with-John Collin:

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did agree to what we'ahPdiscussed and'I carefully documented all thisMA copy of-this analysis and the one'from the primary coolant sample taking should be passed-

[ttached to this feport along with an awful lot of other. documentation.

Misc. fote #3 Tom Mulleavey asked me to go back over the all of the radwaste discharges, or all of the liquid discharges, since th'e beginning of the incident to make sure that the one.

that were in orocress when the incident started were in fact properly scorded and that had waste release permits. for these.

I started on this, saw the enormity of the jot), a I handed it over t'o Bev Good.

I had some preliminary results that looked fairly good, lcc My like we in fact did have-the data that we needed and that it was just a matter of pullir it all together.

I haven't talked with Bev Good in the last 3 days,.because she was c^

2. of the 3, and however, I will soon, and will hopefully pull this together into a rep; n r. m p for Tom Mulleavey.

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Misc. Plote #A I should note that Jim Roy, about the 3rd day of the incident, came up,from Florid and came in and asked'me if he wanted me to ahve hime run a survey meter'ffor the off r energency teams.

I of course said absolutely not, that I needed him to help me perforr.

calculations and to follow, from a professional health physics point of view, many of :

'coerations going on during' the-incident.

And I cuickly went to Herbein-and-got Jim Roy

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assigned to Iie full time to help me with this, and he's been a great help.

By the wav_,_

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. TAPE 5-PAGE 16

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Jim is certified by the ABHP and is has a great deal of in-depth knowledge of reactor health physics, and was considered at ong time the too health physicist in the.US Army health physics program.L Three.to four days after Jim P,0y came on board, I found out tht fiSS had contacted Gordon kidd Liedy at Edgewcad Arsenal.

Both Gordon and Jim ^were Color in the US Army and.the.' top health physicists during their respective times.

Gordon is j' now retired from the US-APMY and was in the process of moving off of the Edgewood compou

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.and was available for a job 'such as this.

So now I have 2 experienced eactor health.

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physicists ilorkinp for me and they: spell each other 12 on and 12 off, approximately..

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- Ihaix They're both fine 1 workers andl.ithe;:y are working much closer to 18 hour2.083333e-4 days 0.005 hours 2.97619e-5 weeks 6.849e-6 months 12 hours a ay.

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_i f4isc. Note #5 i;g w

_gu Jack Thorpe from the GPU office in Parsippany has been given the job of coordinatin:

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all health physics consultants.

-I Yas' aksed to report directly to him, of' course except the Hebbein and Arnold bulltes.

dne of the first things that Jack asked me to do was to go to the _:30 P!! daily MP,C HP ta s force meating which was at that point held in Trail (

City.

I did attend one of these, put a fair amount of input into it, and made up a list' action items-for Jin and Gordon to' 70llow up on. -

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'4isc. Note #26

[ 4' -

The morning of the 13th of April Jack Thorpe came to me and asked me to go with him 1

to meet William iturray, who is the GPU Vice President for Communications.. Bill Murray i

told me that he had' thejob' ov gatheririg data together for the tirst of the orobably many !

senate committee investigations concerning the TMI unit 2 event.

Bill !!urray asked me th make un a graph for evidence in the Hart investigation committee probe which lists the folloiwng:

1. A list of all the major release times vs data with a short description of each i

event and try to plot this against the known xmai radioreleases. He said that he was especially interested,in iodine levels, so I'm attempting to make up a doubit bar chartwhich shows all of this information.

It's complicated and its the numbq

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of event ~s do not necessarily relatel to the Ecun_t[of_ radiciodine-which was ei 907

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y out of the vent.

Obviously this is a very ecapliented mechanism ( involved and

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it will be interesting to see what the result is.

Misc. fl0te #7

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f On the 14th Lof April we got waht's known in Met Ed ' lingo as a" double-bullet".

Bott Bob Arnold and Jack Herbein converged on me simultaneously and requested that I give tht

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'imediate information concerning iodine releases during the time that the HPR 219, which

,ze.

' is the final sta_ tion vent monitor, had been out of service while they were connecting up the new Eberline mointor which located outside of the buildings right next to th

. base of the station vent stack.

We proceeded to discuss a short one hour charcoal samol n.1 -

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that had been taken on the vent, and then to go with Jim Kline of SAI by'er to the new Everline monitor and maka sure that.the charcoal was propetly removed using good ~ health 1 1

procedures that woSidn't contaminate the area, and had it counted imediately and got th, report to both Arnold and Herbein.

I got another bullet in the middle of that job, whic essentially requested me to review a proposal to reduce the emeroency tz conitoreing tea from 4 to 1.

This proposal aksxhx had been forwardded by Les Tsaggaris who feletthat wel

~ were wasingx wasting manpower with these teams.

I carefully reviewed Lex's proposal, an saw that we probably were using too much manpower on these jobs.

However, I didn't agre

'with Lex that we should go down to 1 team only.

In view of the fact ahtt the xar radioiodine releases have been steadily increasing over the last 2 or 3 days, I thought that we have at least 2 monitoring teams in the field at all times, preferably one on site and one off site.

I also proposed that we have a helicopter available around the clock for logistical suoport so if the wind changes, the team can be helicootered over t1 the west shore, where there will be a truck waiting for them.

I worte out my recommendaJ tions, gave-them to Herbein, and in time for his 6 P.'s meeting with Arnold on the 14th.

After that I went on up and got the concurrence of both Dick DuBiel, the station supervig of health physics and chemistry, and also of George Kunder, who is the acting Unit 2 sup(

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intendent at the time.

iF gY@hy' l

l Misc. flote #8 u

l As I was about for waht I think is a much deserved rest at home, at about 9:30 in the evening, Sandy Lawyer came over and said that he ahd to have the calibration

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sensitivities for the new Everlina stack vent monitor.

I knocked out the calibration sensitivities for the iodine channel and for the noble gas channel, and te a short print-out data description of what each of the 3 channels was reading and what the printed-matter meant.

I also requested,'by-the way, that the engineering people working.on the set-up of this nonitor use the,available features of this system.1 By that I meant that a

.~

prograrr:ning the iodine channel to read out in c/m integrated over time, or c/m/m.

In this way we ~would be.able to monitor the' rate of rise integrated by time of the iodine

=

./

p channel and could establish setpoints and alarm snipoints in a meaningful manner:; With w,_

..g the nicroporcessors installed in this, fancy new Eberline system, one h's this capability a

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quiteeasily,anEIthink~Its"fooTislIn'ottouseit.

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I experienced a great deal of difficulty in getting the charcoal filters removed from the stake vent process nonito in a proper manner with all of the data being re-

.~. :.

corded accurately.

As it is, I decided to ao in.last night on the 13th of April about 11:00 in the evening, and bhange al1~4 stack sanples in the Aux Building and, Fuel

~

Handling Building.

I also decided that. as-lona as I was going to go through thehour

.+

to hour and a half preoaretion of putting on the. oxygen breathing apparatus, the two

.,~w..

pairs of coveralls, and the plastics on top of them, along with rubber af boots and two '

pairs of booties-and 3 pairs of gloves and 2 hoods, that I should spend.enought time in

.3 there, that is 2 or 3 bottles of air ~ time, to also perfom a preliminary decontamination on one of the iodine samolers to bee if I could bring down the extremely high levels of

+.

background that we've been seeing on these monitors.

This might seem like a rather sin <

thing to do, but it's extremely awkward and difficult to move with 11 all of this pro-tective clothing on and wearing tbe heavy oxygen breathing apparatus with the big bottle l of air on your back.

Ir's extremely similar to carrying the very heavy scuba diving equi l r:ent that one carries being all ready to jump in the water and then being required not t hace the buoyance of the water, but just to simply walk around on land with this whole ri In any case, I went in, changed the 4 sampels which were HPR 223, which is the down=

on.

stream Aux Bldg vent; HPR-222 which is the unstream Aux Cuilding vent monitor; HPR-2218 which is the downstreamFuel Handling. Iodine-conitor; and HFA-221A which is the downstre?

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--.4

% a t w ne w r W oa frM il fdlP -

- _ _ n-y.

.from the monitors, I proceeded to decontaminats HPR-228 by spraying the charcoal holde-and then the entire inside and the head of the sodium iodide crystal with tri-chloro-ethylene in a spray bomb.

After each spraying, I xxs would wipe it out carefully and I had a bag to put the rags in, and after using up 2 or 3 rags, I would change gloves so that they'wouldn't cross-contaminate everything.

The results on this decon were ve:

interesting.- First of all, the monitor had been reading somewhere around 600,00 c/m.

A week ago Ilperformed the' experiment of taking the cartridge out, closing up the shiel, again, ank lookihg at the background, and this didn;t change the backgroanii - we had tF same amount of activity with-the cartridge on and the cartridge off.

However, I ha

~

observed that the ambient background levels had dropped from about 200 to 300 mr/ hour.

all the way' down to around 5 to 15 mr/ hour.

However, with this drop in the ambient beckground there was no drop in-the amount of activity that was shain kowing on the io:

. process monitor.

Thus, I decided that there must be a fair amount of fixed contaminati or noveable contamination, that was causing this extremely high reading.

The decontact tion brought the numbers down from 600,000 c/m all the way down to 20,000 c/n.

The nu-bers stayed at 20,000 c/m for half an hour until the pump was turned affx on.

Immediat after the p' ump was turned on the numbers started to rise and it went bac5: up to somewhe between 150,000 to 200,000 c/m in a half an hour.

The results are a conclusion ha that draw from this decon experience is that there is a great deal of iodine probably plated out on all the sampling lines, and that this iodine is ouite mobile.

Getting these stack iodine-process monitors back to some Eind of normal onerations is going to be a long ar.

difficult process.

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These. notes are dated Aoril'17,1979, and have to do with items I worked on on Monday the-1Gth' and Tuesday the 17th of April.

I.s, tarted work at 8:00 in the morniIg on the 16th of April, working with Gordon Liedy on the gaseous release ' terms, especially the iodine and also on accudulation of the liquid release data.

g n r ~~ ' > 7U m

- +

In several flaps during the early morning hour (s 'of' Monday, the 16th,'due to a DOE

.m air sample ~ foy, iodine which ha'd been miscalculated by a factor of, I don't know, some

~

60 to 100.

These people came, roaring in, apparently gave the informatior$ to the State

... ~

1

~.

- and also to the Mayor.of Middletown,.without first a) checking with anyone at the eithe-

-T 7

-- ;.Q; 7 3y 7

the site, or checkina with the NRC/ or b) having anyone even look at that calculation

~

n

'-- to see if-they were correct.-It-turnsout that' they made some large ar.ithemetical erre and that the whole thing was a paper tiger.

However, in the meantine, Tom Gerusky had

~

been ousted out of bed.at 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning, Tom of course is the Mead of the BRP withir DER for PA State.

The mayor of Middletown was called in the middle of the night, and apparently -everybody got all unset and all ready to take some kind of protec-tive action.

At that point, the HRC had checked the calculations of this fellow from DC and found out that he was all wet and that he had really created a mess on no good data at all.

The DOE method is' to take a large canister of charcoalko samole through a largE j canister and then to put this canister in a Marinelli beaker and count it on a Geli detet tor in a Marinelli beaker.

The orablem with this is that no one else,$ne of the other

.u six lithium drifted germanium detectors, the one NRC and the five that are working for

~

TMI, none of these other 6 are calibrated for counting charcoal on a Marinelli beaker.

Therefore, no one can cross-check against DOE for their calibrations.

This is poor, anc I made a recommendation that DOE be asked to use the same system as the other 5 GeLi detectors use, that is counting the charcoal canister directly, rather than pouring the charcoal in a Marinelli beaker.

Even thouoh DOE thinks that they achieve higher sensi-tivity this way, when one takes the activity which is distributed in the first half cent meter or so of charcoal, and places it richt on the detector head itself, and when one takes that and distributes it thoughout a whole Marinelli, I'm not so surFthat you real' cain very much at all by the time you finish this nrocess, and you very well micht add

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_,y,

.. g.,

a non-homogenous distribution which'means that there is no way. in hell that.you'ra going to be calibrated for.that.

I cave Dave teneroff (?) the series'6f very soecific questions to ask tE5 DOE people about this, and I asked Dave to make sure that he asked these questions in the presence of the flRC, s~o everybody kI1ew what was going on and everybody knew what our concerns were.

I haven't heard back from Dave Lemeroff as to how well he did on this.

I kind of wonddr if Dave has enough technical knowledge to really be able to properly 4.% ~

ask these cuestions.

I wrote then all -out for him, so hopefully at least he understoot the questions. 'It'ssomethinoeks.a:c..-e 'again as to whether or not he got satisfactory ' ansi..

nW%qw :

or understood the answers._

~I will: check on the resolution of this question in another 1 or so to find out what-bappened E

~ ' ~

~ "~

This whole thing, from the start of this tace,'is orobably note #10 or ill, I've it

[Itisactuallynote#d$,soIvillfollowthecorrectsequence-d.h.r.]

count.

!!ote #11

,Q V 7. '

B E' ' " Wl00

[k.D a il, J N d u u 2=>

Early in the morning on the 16th, I got another bullet ~from"Herbein.

Jack Herbein called me in and asked that I check on VAR-748, this is the condenser vacuum pumo discht nonitor, which is a noble gas nonitor e'ssentially.. It is set up such that the condenser vacuum pump discharge goes through'a samoling canel then through the VAR-743 fon chamber monitor., then through a set of charcoal filters, and from there on out the vent.

This VAR-743 is located on the basement level of the Unit 2 Turbine Building.. 'I went down an:

cersonally ran through the sample tr n so that I would understand exactly shere the see charcoal samoles had been taken, and then I checked on the analysis of the one charcoal sample that I was familiar with an~d had just been taken off, and found that essentially there was no detectable iodine in that sample.

Af ter I got all this together, with the help of the Unit 2 shift supervisor, Joe Swatzik (?), I then gave the data to Jack Herbei l Jack was relieved that there was nothing poing out of this flow path, and requested that l we set up a continuous charcoal sampler on this condenser vacuum discharge line, and tha I' we change the sampler daily.

He danted it more often, but I talked him into backing do :

to daily, because of the large sample load.

I asked DuBiel to do this, and Dick said he

~

would,however[I oncit about 6 or 7 hours8.101852e-5 days 0.00194 hours 1.157407e-5 weeks 2.6635e-6 months later, and DuBiel had cone off-shift, h

-n 3

39 3..

3.y_

left the site, and had forgotten to do this, so I then checked Jith Tom Pulleavey, whc pronised me he would do it, and that he would put it into the HD lon.

I've got to re-menber to check back on this to in fact'make sure that it has been done, and t' hat we counting this charcoal sample.~

There are some problems with this charcoal' sample, be-cause of the fact, because of the incredible amount of moisture that is in this line.

Thewe-needs-te-be-set-up-she-klad-ef 1

_ There, nee ~ds to be set up some kind of moisture separator so that we don't ruin the m

charcoal with moisture.

DuBiel had.some ideas on this and I'll have to check back wit:-

' him to see whatha-p9enedr.what happe'n'ed.

]b M=

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-q'F*"7

- HOTE #12 '

M

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- '. _ ' ~

Late in the morning of the-16th-of' April, I got another bullet fro [Herbein sayin he wanted me to no over and take a look.at the Eberline stack monitor, which is now the new channel HPR-219.

I thought that the stack monitor was reading high, and that was unduly alarming. Both the commission and a lot of the plant pecole that were lookir very closely at it.

One of the first things that I did is talk to Jim Klein on the ch:

at this point, and ask him if he would not calculate a setpoint, a rate of rise setpoin that should be in the units. of c/m/m-for pCi/cc.of activity.

jim did this and in about I don't know, 6 or 7 hours8.101852e-5 days 0.00194 hours 1.157407e-5 weeks 2.6635e-6 months later, gave me the number of 1.66 c/m/m per pCi/cc.

However before he had finished his calculations, we had a trauna on our hands..The HPR-291 went from its usual numbers which were so ewhere between 1 and 5x10 it jumped up to 4x10-6 As a natter of fact, it had been reading around 1x10-7and then it jumoed alnor a factor of 20 there.

This upset everyone, including the shift supervisor, because of

. fact that during the time that this rise took place, they started to vent the make-up t:

In the event of the nake-up tank, the' gaseous monitors on HPR-228 and also 221-A rose ve rapidly.

The only thing that gave me a clue that we did not in fact have a large iodint release, even so HPR-219 said we did have one, was the fact that the HPF.-228 iodine che stayed absolutely solid and did not move durino this entire time, even so the gaseous v way uo.

It was this peice of information that I was able to show people and calm then down.

Harold Denton himself happened to be in the Control Room at the -time that PPR-215 sqarted to rise, and he was not upset, but he was anxious about this.

Mr. Denton came

,y m g.a c-y 2.,:

=

over and introduced himself. to me, very nicely said that he had heard about.the work I l was doing from John Collins, and asked me to' explain why the HPR-219 was not correct.

I spent some time; told him about the flim paths, dxolained to him that 228 had not see any iodine increase, and told'him that as far as I knew, the calibration that was used HPR-228 was conservative by a factor of wesewhaere-somewhere between 2 and 3.

This

\\

seemed to allay some of.his anxiety.

At this point, I gave the information to Herbein

~

' about-HPR;228 and'.that khe fact that I didn't believe the 219, and took the charcoal off

~

cersonally. The, charcoal had been running for only about 2 hours2.314815e-5 days 5.555556e-4 hours 3.306878e-6 weeks 7.61e-7 months and maybe 10 or 12 mir.

~

I took the~ chaEcoal off, dutifully.,_ logged the thing into the sample coordinator on the

=

l, ; -:<._.g;g., 7.

Y'.

Unit 2 Turbine Hall Deck, and personally carried it down and first had RMC and ther. S'.:

W.

T-count it.'.The charcoal-told;us ihat-over-the past 2 hours2.314815e-5 days 5.555556e-4 hours 3.306878e-6 weeks 7.61e-7 months , even so HPR-219 was readinc 4x10-6 for nore than an hour's time, the charcoal told us that in fact the level of iof as averaged over 2 hours2.314815e-5 days 5.555556e-4 hours 3.306878e-6 weeks 7.61e-7 months was ~approximately 2.9x10-7 uCi/cc.

It was welcome news, becau:

I was fairly sure that we were not seeing the massive amounts of iodine ~.33 that Eberlir HPR-219 nonitor was telling us we were seeina.

I immediately telephoned these results t.

Herbein, actually I didn't get him, but I got one of his aids who took it into him, beca.

he was at that point at thef 6:00 meeting.

This charcoal was on from appr,oximately 4:00

- J WQ M 6:00 in the evening on the 16th.

F ^ _'

7 w. lg.,

i At this point it was obvious that someone had to shend a lot more time with the HPRc channel.

I sat down with Jim Klein, who had b een working on the sensitivity calculatica and told h'im about the problem.

Jim seemed upset that I was working on the problem at i and said only one person should be working on this oroblem.

So, instead of getting Jin more upset by saying te-Herbein-that that Herbein had told me personally to do it, I o

him that he was more than welcome to handle this, and I handed over all the data I had c:

the charcoal and the data on what the HPR-219 was reading, and asked him if he wouldn't c_

up, oull the data off for the 1 hour1.157407e-5 days 2.777778e-4 hours 1.653439e-6 weeks 3.805e-7 months in question, or actually the 2 hours2.314815e-5 days 5.555556e-4 hours 3.306878e-6 weeks 7.61e-7 months that the chare:

was on, and come up with a specific sensitivity data for that time and then try to get i-touch with Eberline to adjudicate the problem.

By that time I had called Eberline, gott.

the nanes of the specific people that should be contacted, the most knowledceable ones it the company ~concernino this "PIM-2" Eberline monitor which we call HPr-219 at TitI.

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I gave Jim Klein all this information and he said he would take the ball-from there..

!!ote #13 It was ~about 8:30 or so, mayba 9:00,'by the time I got back over,to the Observation Center to check in with Gordon-Liedy and Jim Roy, who had just come on board.

I discuss the problems that we had had with them, and then we sat down and started to wark on.

~

_c:

r///n/n//?) report data, and we spent some' tine working on that.

I gathered the lates.

environmental data, and the notes, the daily notes that Steve Gertz has been puttinkou't, which is what I call a-cuick and dirty summary of the important itens in the environmento n ^-

monitoring regime.

Yhis daily summary was given to Arnold.

I had left one seasy copy..

3g: -

.e I

for him with an a de of his about:2." days earlier and apparcntly he never got it.

I gues:

' ' the copy got lo. c

-nobody-seems to knomhhere it is now.

So Arnold seemed delighted wi.

this quick an! dirty summary.

The sumnary has no numbers in it - it just talks about tr' It says 2 ttings: a) what. are we measuring on a daily and on an every-three-day basis, a.

b) what are the significant results; and so the whole thing is about a half a page at, mo:

and Steve Gertz is putting the summary out each and every day.

This summary was given t Arnold, he was happy with it. It was given to Herbein, he was happy with it.

Then Sandy ;

Lawyer came along and wanted a copy,.liked it, and said he wanted a copy for himself and for Jack Thorpe as well as Arnold and Herbein, so nou it turns out that we need 5 copies of this thing, plus a file copy.

The 5th copy goes to the TMI data center.......

se mggre

- e p-r gs u.-

. TAPE 7' PAGE 25

~

T-d

~

...the. work on the environnental data and the work on theeffluent data on the 16th

=

took me uo til about 1:30 on the 17th to'get everything resolved'so I, felt that In 9

could go home, get a cood nicht's sleep, and then go to Salem the next day, flote #14 -

This _ note is.for the 17th of April,1979.

InthborningImadeseveralphonecali.

to the-sM.e to find out how things were going, how the problems had been adjudicated th; night be' fore, I found that things ~had calmed down a little bit.

One of the things ITdic find out was that the night before actually, was that we needed to be mo're specific'in

< s.J :m

.u. g.Jic.e -

. e t.s..

r_

our liquid effluent path dose cai ulations to manc He were doing some rough calculatic

..Z ' and it was obvious 2to.ms..that since t'he-environmental levels were essentiilly non-exis- -

tent for nost nuclides,. and quite low for tritium, that there was no real dose to the

_ environment.

However, it was obvious that we had to document this in a much more coher and legible manner for the worlid to look at.

Therefore I soent some time on the phone on the morning of the 17th with Steve Gertz, giving him the format of the data that I wanted, and also telling hin specifically what I wanted listed and what references to use, etc.

tie not a_Il this toaether-and cane out.with a fairly reasonable document - an actual technical report - complete with references, and all the important data in it, as well as the projected doses to the maximum individual, to the averane-individual and also is man-rem.

It is.most important that 'this be done for. the drinking water pathway, which is the one that I think people are most interested in.

p g n o ny fM t:0TE 515

~

\\ N:

~~

Aoril 13, 1979.

I spent about 4 hours4.62963e-5 days 0.00111 hours 6.613757e-6 weeks 1.522e-6 months in the office this morning - I only expecte-l to spend 2 (I started at 7:00 AM).

Actually, I spent 5 total.

I got a series of phone calls from people at the plant and talked back to them.

The main thing I did was to ret the format for the continuing dose to man via liquid pathways reports of Steve Gertz's -

I got that squared away.

Also got a number of thex other menos out that were, that neede: i to be gotten cut.

1-s p en t-a-fa i r-ape sa t-e f-time-en-the-sh ea e-thi s -se rn i n s-wi th-

-!IOTE #15~

~

I scent a fair anount of time on the phone this mornina with Charlie Pelletier -.

. IAPE 7 - PA4E"26-X

^

~

9 '-

getting things squared away as far as working on the Eberline HPR-219 monitor.

Hopefull

~

Charlie s 9oing to take this most of this chore over and get things squared away.. We're far from out of the woods on this problem right now.

fiOTE' 417

..p I.spenti.a -lot of time on the phone talking to Gordon 1.eidy and getting information

.on where weitiood on the up$ ate of the liquid and gaseous effluent data.

= - ~.

f!0TE #I8' '

2:

'~-:-

It is ' obvious to me that we nee'd more help-I spent. a fair amount of time talking'

-?.

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=-

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_. to the-people' Les Slabackblast night.an'd he'll work for' us.for about a week and a half.

3;z.y.

f

~

I'm now pursuing the idea-of also having Tom Jenckes come up and work for a week.and a

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- ~

~'"

half to two weeks.

Hopefully the work of these 2 people will take some of the pressure

-:.1

.W

'off and make it easier on everyon3 else so w can begin to work somethsng close to a

.=

normal 12 hour1.388889e-4 days 0.00333 hours 1.984127e-5 weeks 4.566e-6 months day.

2 ~

It's now about 9:00 in the evening of the 20th of April.

An editorial note is that in the last 2 days since I last dicta'ted into this thing, I worked one 20-hour day and p+x No, make'that 28-hout ay, as a matter of fact.

So, I'm obviously one 25-hour day.

d suffering from lack of sleep now, and have decided just to drive hone, even so it's an

.a.

hour and a half drive, versus 20 to 25 minutes to the motel - just so _I can get a really

/94 good night's sleen and the~ phone won'.t bother me.

p K' $\\

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?!OTE 819 2.

D t

Les Slaback will be starting 8:00 PM this coming Sunday night.

I spent a fair amount of time talking to Ton Jenckes - I talked hin into coming, I talked his wife into letting him come.

Rosemary was actu$11y very gracious about the whole thing, and thoug it would be great experience for Tom, and then Tom said that he was having some problems with his boss at Pacific Gas & Electric.

So, I' called the boss and spent about a half hour talking to the boss, explaining to him how important it was that we have soneone wi'.

Tom's knowledge and unique understanding of the TMI plant and also the plant staff.

Howe

~

ever, Ton Jenckes' boss absolutely would not cooperate, and held steadfastely to' the i '

~

ocinion that Tom was much more 'needed there, in order to put cut all the brush. fires thef

m the TMI accident was causing them, and he's scared to death that it's going' to keep DIablo Canyon from getting it's operatiny license.

There is, of course, a great deal of merit to this argument and I could not convince that ~him that Tom 'was needed more where we are than back.where he is now.. Thus Tom Jenckes will not be comir$g in the -

forseeable future to help me out.

~

g f?WM]

?!0TE #20 e JO"

~ The 18th'of April I spent a faih amount of time ' coordinating the activities of the 5 GeLi detectors.now on site.

Each-These GeLi detectors are as follows: Science Applications, Inc. has' two at the south end o[the island in a trailer with RMC; RMC has q

'one GeLi-detector in the SAI trailer; there is a fourth GeLi detector which is the de-tector b$I5'nging to B&k hich is in a krailer 'which is just northwest of Unit 1, parked richt next to the cire water pumo house.

The fifth lithium drifted germanium detector is the detector that is normally housed in the Unit 1 HP countino lab, and belongs to Three. Mile Island-Met Ed, and is now temporarily been moved out of there because of the high Xenon levels during the ehrly days of the incident to the circ water pump house itself.

It has a rapidly constructed and not particularly good shield around it.

One of the najor problems has tseen that a lot of low level samples have been' going to the

, B&W and the TMI Geli, which are not at this moment set up for low level counting.

The B&W detector is only a 5% Geli, the TMI is probably closer. to a 10%, however, but it doesn't have a good shield-around it at this moment, and probably still might be a littlt bit contam'inated from the some of the early hich level sanoles that I was couriting.

Aft looking at a number of the results from the counting, it was obvious to me that xn TMI i unnecessarily penalizing itself because of the high minimum detectable activities for iodine-131 in water.

Therefore I put out a memorandum which was signed by Dave Lemeroff and also b

'can't remember his full last name - it begins with an "H".

Don is the supervisor in charge of the GPU chemists and is running all, or is in charge of all of t people who are acting as samale c ordinators, who in turn are in charge of all the pecol that are runnning samples from the point of takina the sample to the counting labs and t'

~ returninq the data back to the sanple coordinators.

I set up-se a criteria for ::izx siz-

, TARE 7 - PAGE 28

~

.6 of liquid sanples, made a long list of which liquid samples were importgant to be count'.

down to low levels of iodine-131, set up a criteria that if we were going to count thest samples that are going off site they should be counted to at least 5x10-8 pCi/cc of iodine-131.

flow setting this as the low level of detection means that SAI, for a 1222E 1000 milli-liter sample, has to put it-thes put the sample through a resin column, whic;

~

only takes 'a.few minutes.actually.

RMC must repour the sample into a 3 liter Marinelli

~

beaker and count it that way.

Except for these 2 labs, whidh includes 3 Geli's tacether;

~we

~

i there-ar-no other GeLi's on site can present.fy count down to the lower limits of detect-3

=. -:

957 needed for water samples.being dumped on restricted areas.. I wrote a memo concerning~

this which should be documented as part of this note.

The memo was circulated to all

-x 9 G, ;

-,.. s..,. ---

ap--

persons involved.

, a, n n' f!OTE #21 4L

=

In the middle of my usual 3:00 PM ::cordinating meeting, which is held in the SAI-PJ trailer each evening, on the 19th of April, another fire drill started.

In reviewing ti data, which I try to do once a day, review the general data and the results 'that they'rt cetting, I noticed that the east clike, which is a, just simply that, a dike that receivt

~

rain water run-off from the eastern part of TMI,'I noticed that the east dike was readir

~

somewhere around 2 2x10-7 pCi/cc ofhodine-131 ShmMbard to believe that this was a 2.

correct analysis and requested RMC to recount the sample.

As Murphy's law would have it.

the sample I wanted to be recounted had been recycled back to the processing center and took a while for the thing to return. In the meantime, I had another sample taken of th:

east dike, and that was counted by PJtC, and that one also came out to roughly the same 11x10-7 pCi/cc of iodine-131.

It was hard to believe thE amount - somewhere around a n 3

this much activity was really there, so I started on a witch-hunt in which over the next hours I never left the SAI-PJ1C counting trailer.

Both SAI and PJ!C changed the plastic l

l covers of the Geli detectors, performed bare detector backgrounds. Then I liad then bott use drinking water in brand new sample containers to check iodine.

This is especially imnortant for Pl!C since they re-used the !!arinelli beaker.

It turned out, as I susnin:

suspected, that one of the Marinelli beakers that RMC was usinc. was contaminated.

So the

--s

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performed a new background-check with a brand new beaker with drinking water in it, and !

we got a reasonable background for iodine-131 at that point.

By this time, the new east dike samples had come in, and R",C counted it, got roughly the sane activity, somewhere

~

around 2x10-7 pCi/cc for iodine-131, and since I didn;t believe that, I 'the'n had them t!

split the sample with SAI.- SAI took its normal.1000.cc sample and put it rheug-throug!

resin column, so that they can get down to around 3 x 10-s pCi/cc as mininum detectable-

.activil:'y. "SAI got approximately the same activity - somewhere around 1.8x10-[pCi[cc... /

.a s.. -

This point, just for a final check, I had RMC recount the sample and perfom a 5000 minut

,.2.,

count, versus the usual 1000 minute count.. Their number came up thi same,,so at thati;;

e point I began to believe the-number..I walked up and talked to the pad people in Unit

.. s c.

w controlroom,toldthemwh'atIwasdoiNg7andalsoinUnit'1 control' room [lGdpeoplegc out and try to look and see if there was anythina running into the east dike from the ru off pipes.

The 3 runoff pipes that enter into it were found to be dry at that point, sc that was a fruitless venture.

I notified Unit 1 control room of this, so that in case t east dike was discharged, one would understand that we had to enter this into the equati.

for insuring that we do not gxe dump greater than maximum permissible concentrations of water in unrestricted areas; Simultaneously I had samples taken of the east dike runoff

..T which is a little channel ~between the east dike and the gate valve, and left orders.for :

sa.le to be taken at the river side of the cate valve pipe.

It turns out.that the river was fairly high at that point, the river level was fairly high, and that the sample that was taken at the river side of the pipe was essentially river water and showed.that, it was down pretty low - 7 or 8 x10-8 pCi/cc.

I was still not comfortable with Rf!C.......

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c This.is about 10:00 Pr! on Friday evening, the 20th of April 1079, and I'm continuin'

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the dictation of S.11. Porter, Jr.'s chronicle of tihe Tt'I accident which -tarted early ir.

Jb the norninq of March 28, 1979 in Middletown, Pennsylvania.

f:0TE #22.[SWP said note #21, but it is actually note #22 in proper order.

dkfl..,,,

About 9:00 in the evenino on-the -19th of Aoril I was,iust cleaning up some last-minute paperwork, making sure that r,ordon Liedy and Jim Roy had olenty o' nuidance as,to

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wg what their priorities were, and what needed to he done ov2r the next 24 hours2.777778e-4 days 0.00667 hours 3.968254e-5 weeks 9.132e-6 months , when I cat n;s.. -

a telenhone call fron Jack Herbein. -Jack said' that it was absolutely essential that-I

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. drop everythinq that I'm doing right now and woik on a renort.of the 1.iquid releases, el u..zq(;:

the linuid releases from the beginnino of the accident, and that this had to be oiven to

~

Rob Arnold. sone time this eveninq. c..I imediately set about to pull together what.we had and I found that, as I suspected, that there were nany holes in the data.

Luckily, Lex Tsangaris was there and he was a person I could use~fn order to qet the strip charts tha'.

were naeded in order to fill the holes -such as, for the early ' days what was the coolinc water blowdown flow, or the coolino tower blowdown flow, and what was the surio nunns on i industrial waste systen flows durino the times in question.

He were pullinn the data to-cether and Bob Arnold himself cane down and stayed and gave me more snecifically what he va n ted.

He was very interested in the period from the 28th of itarch throunh the 2nd of Anril.

flow these were the early and very hectic days cf the accident, and obviousiv it is very difficult to net all of the information that is needed.

We went back over the Unit '

and Unit 2 Control Lons aaain and there was a nreat deal missinn from those.

So we had '

co back to the strip charts, we had to go back and try and search out records.

Lex and worked throuch the niqht on this pro.iect and at 7:00 the next morninn, the norninq of the-20th, that is this norning, we finally finished.

I nut in some 26 to~28 hours straiaht t Three !111e Island, and was pretty exhausted, went hone, slent for about 5 hours5.787037e-5 days 0.00139 hours 8.267196e-6 weeks 1.9025e-6 months and then d

u care; jack in and not embroiled in a couole more fire drills which I'll talk about later.

r0TE.di23 J

The first thinn I did when ceninn in at about noon on the 20th, back to Three itile Island Dlant, was to see Dick DuSiel, who I couldn't reach that eveninn be' ore, nor could

n.

n. q,....

I reach Ton Mulleavy, and cet a. hold of the 1621 liquid waste discharne permit forns.

I knew that these had nost of the data on then that I was lookino for, and in fact they did..

The nroblem was that there were 3 or 4 of these forms that were nissinn, that were not in Len Landry's in-box, and were also missino when I went back to the H.P., Uni.t 1 H.P. lab and tried to find then.

There was also the natter of one of the liquid releases. I belie-it was #50,.in which the chen tech, Hr. Joe Heidel, had crossed ihn a lin throunh a numbc which was ~about 2.6x10-5 pCi/cc of iodine-131 in the waste evaoorator condensate tank B car =a soectrun analysis.

He crossed out. the line and essentially stated that there was nc

. iodine in this sanole.

I didn't feel;that I could take this data out of the. list that 8 7:'

we had given Arnold the nicht hefore without discussino this directly with Joe Heiriel.

It gW/-

.; took about an hour. ' fnally cot a ho_ld.of DuGiel, tried throunh several o_ ecole and no ' he' f

p finally qot hold of dup.iel and Dick cave ce Joe Heidel's hone nhone nunber ani! nernission call Joe in or at least talk to Joe about it, and oive Joe a hour's oay for disturbinq hi:

durinq 'hh week's vacation because Joe was off for a week at this noint.

I yas very nieasantly surnrised when tryino to trace down this acoarer.t discrepancy in the liquid release forn at Joe's reaction.

I thoucht he would resent nv callino hin.

To the contrar he felt that his services:,were needed.

I told hin what I was doing and how important it v

~

and he said the only way he could adiudicate it, his menory wasn't that nood about what he hannened back some IS days beforehand, so he said the only thino he could do was to come i y to the plant and no over the record with' me.

So Joe cane in, and 15 ninutes later after I

.a 3 talked to him. e.nd we met in DuBiel's office.

I showed him the records. He said that yes, in fact.there was, that those numbers were backqround, which was sort of incredible to ne.

h I knew backnround was hinh at B&t',

I didn't it was that hich..

And so he made a notat on the liquid release forn which was the. documentation that I needed, that the iodine nur'-

M g hers were in fact insenarable from backcround. And thus there was no detectable iodine ir.

that sample.

Joe Heidel next very kindly helned ne find sone of the missinq ' liquid releas pernits.

1.'e found all but one, and on that one I was able to find in the Unit 1 Control I Shif t Supervisor's Lon, where the liquid had been in fact discharned.

So I not the dates and times of discharne, but no analysis.

'Je huntad down, talked to the sacnle coordinator Wnd couldn't find it in any of the samnle coordinator's ' hooks, 'and so we kent buntinn

e n,

7,...

o a

and went down to %H labs ~, and had them look throuqh their loos.

Na Thare was no record of this, so we went over to the Till GeLi and looked throuch their lons,.and there was no record there.

At this point I called SAI.;.who I thoucht minht have done the liquid samol and asked them to look throunh.their log, even so the samole coordinator loo.ked throuqh a the results.

I could not find that SAI even had a sanple longed in for the B waste evap-orator condensate st.orage tank sample analysis.

Mr. Heidel was very helnful xd in showi:

- me sner.ifically how one has to track all this down, even calld'down to the radwaste' nab

~

and had them look down there to make sure that the release form wasn't still down there, and it wasn't. -4!e went back down to the Unit 1.H.P. lab lon book at the Unit I controlE

. ? GSGhi.

point, went throunh that and found that the release had been legned -in,L as a natter of fa -

but had not been, there was no cony of the release oermit in the !'.P...lon. jock, which there should have been.

I will still continue to look for this missinq, I believe it's release #53, data which is missina, but that's only one out of about 35 liquid and caseou release nernits that I had gone through dur-ino the day, and unly missinq one otit of 35 is a damn nood hattinn averace, if one considers the confusion that a true emercendy does generate.

What I intend to do is, if af ter the end of another week or. so I cannot find the. data here, I.just sicoly am goino to averane up three or four samnles on either side e this in B tank, pick an averace, and use the maxinun flow for the time that they could hat dunned - that's 27 callons per minute as a naxirun that they're allowed to dunn these tan) at - I'll use 27 callons ner minute and assune that 27 gallons' per ninute with this averaq arount of iodine vas in fact dunned out.

that I don't have to resort to this

~

crystal-ballino averarle nethod, but if I have to, I have to.

HOTE F24 0

ll (QH; n

d At about 6:Of I nade the nistake of coin.g up to the food tent.iust to 'nrab3a coke and a piece of fruit in order to sustain ry stomach on my way hone.

Ididn'tevenceting the food tent before I had about 5 ten minute conversations with different neonle wantinq i n'o rma tion.

essentially bid.w one bru/ before I even not in toget ny coke.

At that coint I didn't feel like a coke and not a glass of nilk.

nn my way out of the food l tent, Tom Potter of Pickard & Lnwe ?, Keith Poodward, the O.

fron Pickard ? Lowe, be iu - ed on ne and demanded that I sit and talk to them.

I told 'then that ii l sa t down I '

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never net un anain, I was so tired at this' point, and so they could talk to me on ny way

_ ualking over to the car.

Fell, that didn:t work - they still took about a half hour to 4

~

minutes of ny. tine.

The content of this particular flan is that it turns out that RML-7, the liquid radwaste pit monitor, had gone into low alarm or alert alarn somewhere inlthe

,ye neichbor hood of.9:15 in the morning on March 28, 1979.

This alarm had been noted down 7.;

in the' Unit}2 loqbook, and by the way, even though this is a Unit I nonitor, the liquid from both! Unit'l and Unit 2 are discha' ced at a sinnie point throunh this monitor, th'ereft r

w.;

there is an alarn disolay in both Unit 1 Control Roon and Unit 2 Control Roon.

7#

as if the comon bai:knround, or the average backnround, and it's irkhe neichhorhood of a few

' %g.

-. s.2M.?,

.:?'-

humdred counts ner minute..for this ' channel, however, at about 9:15 theaakegreun4 on 3/2'

m n the back 'round, of this channel went up, to about 1100 counts per.. minute _br.ir. fly, and then 9

dronned back down~ again.

This coincide'd with a time period where the insstrial waste

g. -

treatment systen was dischargina.

Therefore everyone was afraid that there was a laroe m.

discharce of iodine in the industrial waste treatnent system, which had essentially been p.:.-

unnonitored except for RML-7, and since we had no samnle o# this, everybody was all unset.

Even so this is a, there is a slicht'cossibility of this, I pointed out to' Tom Dotter that during this time there was a waste evaporator condensate s'toraqe tank which had been croce-sannled and analyzed, and was beinq dumped in a nroner nanner, which had a great deal of cobalt-53 and cobalt-60 in it, in excess of 1000 pci in the tank of each cobalt-59 an l cobalt-60.

Since the I-namma is so large for these com. cared to other nuclides, such as iodine, it occurred to ne that this is probably what RML-7 saw.

So i suqnested that Ton pursue this a little further, get the response curves for RML-7 sampler, and detector sys.

and work up a story on this, because this looked to ne to be the nost likely answer to thi.

question.

I was so tired then I was about fallinn on my face, and so I.iust excused nysel-from the gentlemen, even so they still had P,0 nore quest'ons, and asked then to talk to re in the rornina, on Saturday morning.

Mf25 D

i t

L'hile I was there, kr4(mthW

..; i t h "vtrhm also oicked my brain about WDL-4?9.

This is the condenser vacuun rumo discharqe caseous r"onitor.

I didn't really net the full information cnnecrninq what the flap was that he was workinn cn.

It seaned.te ne a little unusual that

v

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>w a meteorologist that is not at all familiar with the radiation monitorino systen within the 'nlant and especially not with one in the Unit 2 turbine buildinn, would.be vorkina on a flap concerning that.

However, I did answer Keith 1loodward's cuestions concernina this and I alerted him to the fact that there was in fact a charcoal cartridce that Yias 39u put on in the systen prior to the qas reaching the noble cas WDL-728 sa'mpler.

I also inforned him that this charcoal was being read out approxinately once per day, anc that I had checked out and that yesterday I saw the results for the day before, andy,

'that essentially as far as I could see for the last 2 or 3 days there had been no iodine.

released via this pathway, and thus 'I didn't expect any to' be released

~ '

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the future,'

.since there was no history o# this.

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D*"D f[F'gQil e

'!OTE F25

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Two times today, that is on the 2bth, when I was at the Bril can spectrosec,y lab and also at the T!il tennorary gamma snec lab which is in the circulatinq water punn yh house,-I discovered that there were no sannles beinq counted.

I took it unon nvself to look ir the BfM log for the day and saw that they.had only counted a fee sanples all day lona.

I relayed this infornation to the sanple coordinator, to the sanple coordinator's boss, Don Hetrick, and to Jack Thorne, Jack was.v.ery concernied about the oroblen' but seenei not to know which way to ao, didn't know step one to take in order to solve it.

So I pursued it further, found out that there was in fact.,,which had mysteriously anpeared sayinn that all air samples and all water samples were to be sent to the P.MC and SAI labs.

w This is a misinternretation of my earlier statements which I said that all discharne water p

sanoles or all water sannies for water that is qoing to be taken of' the T'11 site, needed to go to those labs so that they'd have a nroper f tDL, and that I wanted all HR charcoals to no to those labs for countinq so it would have sone consistency in this very important sannle.

However, the other sanples, and there are certainly many, many others, could no t these labs.

There was sone question in ny mind as to whether the BW lab conNi count the air sannles down to a reasonable one-tenth of MPCa for iodine-131 in air, but ! certainly think that they should try.

I did no back to the EtJ lab a third tire today and finallv cauqht their nama spactroscnpist, discussed the croblem with hin, and he nrnnised ne that he u uld channe the cover on both his crystal t and the one 'out in th? circ water nrn hous

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M I[INNIhhII which belonns to T!!I, and do backqrounds on bot [okthose andgopSnWith Pt0

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D for iodine in charcoal and also iodine in water for the Titi crystal.

In the neantine.

I talked anain to Don Hetrick, and he promised ne that a ah number of samples were bein:

sent.over to these laboratories for counting.

1!e have sort of a crisis right now in,,

countinn because one of the two sal GeLi detectors is down, and we have no ideiwhen it

'x will be up aoain.

This.is further conpounded by the difficulty that the Three Mile <.

Island people are findino in being able to man their own GeLi detector b~ecause of the mans nany. jobs goinq on that require the chen techs supervisors.

Af ter in ' depth discussions T

with the BMl people, it turns out that they do have, down in their Lynchburo, Virninia'

.. _ =.7.T V:-

W

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.w.

headquarters., a r. ore sensitive detector, and they also have neople that can.run it, and :

think that mayt'e.the-thing-to do is. to. cet then un_here with a.counle_neco.le to run,that.

so that we have sone more capabilitiies in these areas.

I don't really pnfer BT over SAI or Pf'C, however, RitC still leaves a lot to be desired in their orocrans that they're using and in the people that they now have running these detectors, now that Frazier Bror has none back to Chicano.

I lean toward the BW proposal, since they are faniliar with plant and the plant people, and since the nlant does use the PMr procram for their qarra

~

snectroscopy analysis.

I also learned that the Unit 2 n li system which has never been e

put on line needs to be cranked uo, and I think tihis will be a great thino for the GD!

oecole to do, is to not only brino their own low level system up, but also furnish the nannower to calibrate and debun the brand new Unit 2 systen.

The Unit 2 systen has been around fnr some time and has never been set un and proven to onerate because of lack of.

trained nannower to do this.

The thing cane in just as they were plannino their outace I quess, and they just never got around to doinn it.

I nuess there's no tire like the present to use the couiprent which we have on site alread..

I will follow up on this and l hoepfully I can rake snne pronress on this Saturady, which will be the 21st of lipril.

I believe that one of the problems with the l'DLs on the TMI nresently installed system whi,

is in the cric water pumn house is that there is a very poor shield around it and thus th backaround is hiqh for cettinq down to low levels.

So I

l'ed the SE chamist, who # hr actually be runninn both of these thin 7s of ten, if he wouldn:t cet me a backcround for a liter battle of rater e.d - I know that they're calibrated #cr.that volune - and take a l

i

.:;,y

.~

. s.

look at it and see whether or not shieldina was necded in order to cet a coo f."DL for a tansan thousand second count.

He stated that he would do that, especinally since he was still waiting for some samples to com'.in for him to count.

So when I.lef t, he e

was checking into this, and also recheckina his own l'DLsi.

First thing Satur. day morning o

I'll no down and see wh'at the resolution of all this is, and see if we can't get some _

rrore help, because apparently the sample load is really backed up down at R'fC-SAI.

fl0TE #27

^ '

I got a call today - this is the 20th of April - from Tom Potter askinq aboist theI infornation on water releases.

A historical note.is that much earlier Tbn Potter decided

'J Ma u

that he would do the dose to man from. the caseous releases and we would be doino it fron the water releases.

Andsso I asked Tom what he needed all this infornation for, and.he-told me that.he had been asked by Arnold, or no by Pob Long, to draw a granh of the daily iodine-131 liquid discharge versus time, so Bob Arnold could understand what all this datt I tol.d bir' that we were in the process of d6ing this, and that it was a little silly was.

to have both neoole workinn on this, and he anreed.

So, we did have all the deta there,-

and we had some rough things drawn,-and I gave the.iob to Gordon Liedy, told him it was

1 job, reassioned a priority 31 several hours later and nothinn had been done on it, and lef t about a couole hours aco very tired and with the hopes tha t. Gordon would not this acconnlished tonicht before he leaves.

I think he leaves about nidniqht, gets relieved around nidnight, by Jin Roy.

So we were charced with the job of a) making this daily '

9 iodine into the liquid discharge path sunnary and then gundating it each day so that Arnold was kent anprised of what's hannening.

An addendun to this particular note is that I did receive the veekly update of the off site emernency radiolonical environmental r'nnitorinn program fron Steve certz and distributed this to Arnold and to Herbein. I also received the daily, for the 19th, the daily update of the radioloaical environmental monitorino prod results which are not numerical, but just tolked ahnut neneral trends.

So,I'didpersonalk cive to Arnold and leave on Herbein's desk, both the weekly dose to men in nan-rems update l which is throuch the 7th of April, and also the 19th of A.nril verbal undate of the trends (

M S

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.iD__I_E F29 It-is now early in the corninn, 6:00 N1 nn the morninq of Monday, the 23rd o# Anril 1 76

^

On Saturday, (sic-the 22nd was Sunday dkf) the 22r.d of April, I snent aonroxinat_

hours on the phone durinq the day with both Jin Roy and Gordon Liedy folloQina what t.

was hopening at it'I.

Thinos have slowed down considerably, and it looks as if the 3 hours3.472222e-5 days 8.333333e-4 hours 4.960317e-6 weeks 1.1415e-6 months that I snent in the office, plus about the /- hours I s,nent on the phone certainly was sufficient t there was no need for me to drive all the way fron Ardnore to T'ti. -

The data taking for both the liquid and gaseous releases seemed to be cocinc along

~

smoothly now, with no creat hitches, excent for the problem that I.sooke about earlier concerninn the use of the T'1T reLi The nan that was runnino the B?!f lithium drif ted

'ernaniu' detector did not nerform the "DA neasurements which I had pers5 lly requasted hin to nerform.

It was difficult for ne to understand whv not, since when I last s=w hi-he was.iust leavino the B&P countinc trailer with an empty one liter rolyethelyne bottle in his hand, and he was about to ao fill it with distilled water # rom the lab and then tc count it.

He called and left a nessane that he was leavina early Saturday rornina

~

and tt he had not nerforEei the "DA neasurement because of the fact that "he could "arinelli beaker".

I realize that there is a verv short supply of ifarinell.ai heakers and that's why I had asked him to use the liter coly bottle.

I will be followinc un on this first thinn this nornina.

I also spoke for about 3 hours3.472222e-5 days 8.333333e-4 hours 4.960317e-6 weeks 1.1415e-6 months off and on xi durinq Sundav to both Jim Roy and Cordon bildy iust following what was hanneninn and fiving ceneral oriorit' for their work.

y w w Q}[

ggyl r

g D d nn7 pp Op ud Jw It is now the 25th of Anril and I an dictatinn technical note !27 (actually it is !2%

dhf) and the topic is the work that I perforned on t'onday the 2'3rd of Anril.

I lef t the h-at about twentv ninutes before 6 in the norninn and drove directly to T.'ll.

(Jpon arrivinc, f Qlco-ed Mr. Slaback who had cone in the nicht before, and had comnleted nost of his re-cuir-ents for a radiation work nernit status.

Les Slaback is a hichly quali#iei health nhysicist, beine both cortified hv the Anerican Roard of Health Physics and also he is on dard c' IMith Physics 6anel for recertification o#

, 1 -n - i c e.

professiomi heal tS 'h'. sici"- 1 I

I

. - m 3.q,.

r les had many years of experience in reactor health ohysics, is an extren?ly competent nathematician, and is a very diligent and hard worker.

I feel quite lucky to have hin workino directly for me.

The problem is that he can only afve me a week and a half of his time.

Jin Roy worked till about 1:00 Pr! on the afternoon' of the 23rd, said his good-byes and left.

Jim will not be returning.

I snent several hours debriefina Jim.P.c-and,iust discussino thinos with Jin and Gordon Liedy and Les Slaback.

Les.had only slep.

~

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about 5 hours5.787037e-5 days 0.00139 hours 8.267196e-6 weeks 1.9025e-6 months the night before and other than that, he arrived at 8:00 Pli on Sunday eveninn, and other than that he spent the whole tine sinnly qetting on board with ~the....

problens and the routines.

As I stated before,. Jim Roy left about 1:00 P'i and is re-.

turnina to his Tampa Florida home, where'he will try to resune the consultinn business

~

that he was startino before he was called un here.

lt0TE _#_3_9_

One of the newest problems with the HPR-228 and the HPR-2218 is that the air flow seems to be sinnificantly different from the starts and stops of the one or tuo'rfay air samples that are taken on those 2 monitors.

This points up the fact that probablv tha pumns are acina, severely now, and they nay be unreliable.

ity innediate answer to this question is, use the extremely accurate and reliable cas neters which.iust about everv

. electric utility has in their laboratories.

I had a duscussion with several peonle about this on Monday the 23rd and on Tuesday the 24th I had an in-denth discussion with Dave Lemeroff dn this and sunnested that he personally pursue this since ha does vinrk for "et Ed directly and that be cet at least 5 calibratei air nunnsdown to T"I in ediatelv.

It vculd r.ct be too difficult to attach these since there are a number of flexible rubber hose joints within the radiation monitorino sannling svsten.

3 MOTE _ *3,1_

@ MJM*'

Durinq the drive down, or over to Tf'I from ny Pynnewood home early on the nornino of the 23rd, there vas a review of a press release nade by the covernor of PA in which he stated that he had absolutely no inforration conernino the liquid discharges from T'il, vAvn and further that e he visited THI, he had not been told or nada avare of the fact tha t th v vere discharginq radioactive raterial at the tire I feel this is a hinblv g

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inaccurate staten:nt. and is contrary to the facts and to the nrinted record.

As tha earlier tapes indicate, I have held naybe half a dozen telephone conversations with "r.

.Valter Lyon, Head of the PA Bureau of Hater nuality concerning the data that we are teleconying approxinately every a hours' to hin, so that he always has updated data on tr radioreleases from TMI. lie held 2 face-to-face neetinos with Mr. Lyons and his staff, and the !!RC atte.nded both these meetings, as well as the' PA DER BRH oeople.

This data

. ~:

is available to both.the BRH, who actually have the telecopier and imediately take the data down to the PA Bureau of 'later. nual i ty.

Thus on an onooing basis da'ta is teleconied to then.' This started somewhere around the 4th.or 5th of Anril.

Cefore that tire, the hutline was used, which was nanned 24 hours2.777778e-4 days 0.00667 hours 3.968254e-5 weeks 9.132e-6 months a day-to relay data.

I called Mr. " alter ~

a.S

. Lyons inmediataly upon arriving at Tiil, sonewhere around 3:00 in the.corninn, and dis.

cussed the 'act with hin that the Governor was down at the senator Hart's comittee hear-inns and that thz he was mistaken about this, and that f!r. Lyons should contact the Gove-imediately and oive him the facts on this point.

Ife said, !!r. Lyons said, he k.ould cal' ne back if he was noti able to ad,iudicate the coint.

Pe did not call ne back within 2 de so I assure that this thino has been taken care of.

7m q

t!0TE E32 f@

n U

m

~

Investigation of the east dike sangle item.

1.'e have a' out 4 or 5 days worth or data b

on the east dike nov, and it's obvious that there is activity nf varvino frem about a to 5x10-8 all the way to to 2x10-7 uCi/cc in the east dike.

Ife have at Inast 2 sannles ner day on this dike, and so we know it's real.

I cot another call from Herbein's of# ice ask

' for a meno on the e'ast dike problem.

11e also continue to take sannles from the east dikt runnoff area, which I call the east dike channel, which is the cemented area in between

'the east dihe and the cate valve which allows the water to run throuch down in the river l'y rovoht assesstent of the quantity weeninq from the cement dike itself is soccubere be-tween l'1 and 100 cc/ hour.

It looks as if the east dike every day has a little nore water in it, and is probably rore than likely coning from the linit 2 cooling tower A, which is the eastern coolinn tower, and i' the wind is blowinq out of the vest, it literally blour water just out of the cooling tower onto the crcund, and it inst sinnly qoes throwb the a tcr runoffs i~ to the dije,. or it could bo sone n' the l'oit ? cooling tower basin snilW n

J

~

2,

,.m 7

which also runs into the east dike.

The other theory that I have on this is that thh it's nossible that when it rained durinq the hiqh iodine output of the niant, that we had just simply the rain acting as a filter and pullino some of the iodine out of the air, a then it ran off into the east dike And obvious.ly, the other theory is that,when the plume hit the coolinn towers, the cooline towers acted as a filter for it, and picked.,d~c.

W a fair anount of the iodine in the. plume and then of course this part of this nakes its y

.E way'into the east dike. These are only theories, but they are the only possible ones thas

- 7;2 we can find, or think of at _this point.

In any' case, there is a snall weenoff - we know-that the cate valve doesnt close completely and,so therefore there is 'a ninute anount of

- w%

fodine-131, certainly below PPCs' and a 'very ninute arount, slowinq nakinn its wav aut to.

the river.

Thus I cane.up with the idea of puttino a small 2" fire hose.out there.and runninn about one callon a ninute of dilutinn water in the east channel between the east dike and the cate valve to the river.

In this way we a use enouqh water so that we can always cet sanples of it - we were runninn out of san 91e water several tines

'nnt nore nud that samnle in a few of then - and this also allows us to be able to say to th world that we are dunpina at below detectable activity as fai as these trace arounts o' radin-

, iodine are concerned.

I did call Margaret REilly of the PA State Deet. Evnron. rEscurces, ilRH told her about the diluting water that we were nuttinh in, so that we a) could qet sannles and b) unuld put it in at very low concentrations - below detectable - and she saf that this nrocedure was fine.

"e wrote un a nero to Herhein on the topic of the east dikq tellino him all of the above, and to a fairlv wide distribution list.

hhIhl

10TE F33

~

3 ga a

o

_ Poth (?) brouqht up the very tinely tonic o' the nuality assurance nro,ran for the lithirun drifted ecrnaniun detectors thet we nnu have nn site.

I discussed this at the daily 3:00 staff nectino that I have with ny neople and 'also with the S'll and P."C neople that are sunervisino the lithiun drifted qermanium detector o.nerations.

On the evenino of the 24th at 3:09 D, les Slaback ca e with me as well as neetin1.

Janes Klein frnn SAI, Jack Davis fron P."C. Steven Kin, who is the executive Vico r'residen t ;

of D"C (I don't how what the hell he's doinn bere - h? certainiv isn't e.ontributinn anv-thinn). and Lei' Pooth ' rom t"C.

Ve disc'rssed nane al N nre lers a~i s:'ecifically discuss:

_,. v.

~

the definf tfons'that the two laboratories use for mininum detcctable activity, how it

' was calculated, and the snecifics involved with this.

Jim V,lein knew exactly how SAI did this, Jack Davis really didn't have nuch -idea how~it was done for RifC and Steve Kin had absolutely no idea and tried to bullshit his way through the questions. The.' discussion.

.e.

was left with the fact that the ocoole at RMC would co check out the computer nronran ane.'

s fiqure outliust what they were doinn, because it was obvious that none o#

t then really 2 5

~ knew.

(I.'n discus' sing..itist how tiie' connuter identifies a.neak and what tha statistics jrc for the identification of what's known as a non-neak.).

As luck would have it, about -k 4;:.

nidnicht or so-of the 24th, I got. a phone call.vith sone sannle results first fro 4'D."Cl.

W-

~

. c.ny:::.

T.rg' ~

~~

and then I got sannie results from SAI8hich were a factor o' 200 less for the' sane w

y sannle.

This is something that obviotjsiv has tc. be res'alvad.m I talked _.to both.oLthen...

asked then to both recount the samnle acain, cet together, #ind out what.the nroblem was, and qet back' to me.

I left Tf4 about 1:30 to quarter to two, on the nornino of the 25th April, and still had not heard back from then.

e <'-

ysq 0 q

!!DTE_Ma K

I-diseussed-the-fe4ine-seesies-sa mlina-at-the-tea-et-the-Unit-2-vent I discussed the sannle that's ta' ken for iodine species nonitorino at the ton of the Unit 2 vent with Jin Klein. of SAI.

Me-stated-that-4==e44at'ely-attar-the filtar-ehange in-the "wx-Faildina-91ensm fan 4-by-the-way,--sae-et-the r41ters-had-?-days->pfere beer ehanaa4-and The filters a few days aoo had been chanced in the Aux. Buildinc Dienun, one of the two filters, and' the one of the filters has just been channed infkhe Fuel Handlinn Buildinq Dienums.

Jim Klein took a'snecias sanple o## of Hi'R-214.(that is the new Eberline systen) late on the day of.the 23rd of Anril.

He didn't have the results

'tyned un yet, but I did see then hand-written and annarently the old nixture which was better than 807, nethyliodida is now chanced to only about T~, nethylindide, and rouably 30~ HDI and 30% elenental iodine.

Anparently the reason for this is the new filters are nuch nore efficient, and there's no denassing of the new filters as there nrobably was in the old filters, and the material stayed on the filters for a while icnr tine, chanced pH, went to the rethyl stane and'th n the methyl was.danassiqn from the old filters a;-the i

..: J tha t i s 'the 'tI5eory).

Jin has nro ised to nive re a reno that Charlie c lletier was '

e

v. -. m.

cornosinn to.ne aborit tha different iodine snecies that ha's been findinn over.the last week and a half or so.

!!OTE #33 I had a discussion with Jin Klein on the 24th of Anril concerninq the HPR-219 u_

calibra tions.

As I had sunnested several tires, #inally screone not on the ball and 5-5 had Eberline send un a nood man who really understood and could debuo the new Eberline@

HPP.-219 " pit $" stack. sanoler.

Jin clains that the nas monitor is well calibrated and

.~ ll working quite well.

I now have to ao get sore.of this data and see if.I can work backwar to qet sone kind o# feel for the amount of noble nases that are being released from the

.c VRt.

vent.

.lin Klein states that. the iodine monitor is--somewhat calibrated.- but-still is readi

'off a bit, and t.aeds sone rore work on it.

Popefully this calibration can be acenmplishe soon with the new man from Eberline plus the. sales manaqer, Pob Richards, has been un her for almost a week now.

mI' "[O, P Y.

c' M r

Q{g3unhm.W ' '

fl0TE 36 ua At the 3:On HP staff neetinc we were tasked with a new iten on Anril the 2ath.

We were asked to idantify all the new fodine release pathways.

Snecifically asked to review the nonitoring that was being.nerforned during the can-nun onerations.

The cae-gun operation is sinnly a larqe resin bed that water is filtered throunh in order to decontaninate it.

It's the vent fron this oneration which needs to be closely controlled.

I cave this.iob to les Slaback, and on the eveninn of the 24th of A9ril Les Slaback went out. reviewed the situation, came back, gave re a few o' the details and said tnt he vou m ite a letter or a nero to ne concerninn this.

Pe scered to feel that the situation was ret.-cnably well in hand.

NOTE F37 I was asked to evaluate reducing the sannle requirenents for the Geli detectors, esoecial' the li'19id sannles.

I aqain talked to "arqaret Eeilly about this, and she stated tSat it was really Palter Lvnns' requirerents and not bers and that she would he arenable to re-duc ir. : the l'!T". and IWS sarole requircrents to sorethino sinnificantiv less tS=n one scr71e everv two hours.

(Phich is what we're c'oinn richt no:.4).

"argaret Peilly nromised

ya ;

g.-

9., c TAPE 8 - PAGE 43

.a to talk to l' altar Lyons and see if she could nersuad in this sanple frequency load. --End of this iten f e hin to no alo

,,,, j y

'.'f,

!!OTE #33 or now, I'll oick:itf uo later- -

w..

F, I was asked by Tom Peterson and also by Fred Grace to s

J

.. c:.

procedure for the pronhylactic use'of KI for stabl evaluate the new 6rocosr-

,.j I 'took a look at the procedure, it's essentially thee iodine 4

e.

wrote with a few enbellishments on it and a few forms sa

,. 4 It looks nood to me.

I see reason why it shouldn't be implemented irrediatelv En;l

?

Crace wants to net this thing aop o However. I understand that Fre ved by the T!*I lawyers.

j

]

about this - it nicht'take us forever.

.I.'n. a li:ttle. annrnhensiv Z_. _

M0TE #39 I had a call from Steve Gertz at the office who ha

?

also' to Barbie Beck concernino reducinn so~e of the freq tc flichael Surino ant e

the present enernency radiolonical enviornmental no it uencies and tynes of sannlinc Actually, what was nroposed was that we will no f orino proaran #or offsite T"I.

n P

rom 3-day to 7-day periods for TLD nonitorino, and that we would not do gama scans of the daily nilk s no canna scans or strontiun-90 analysis of the dailv nilk n es unless -

tained qreater than 10 pCi/l of iodine-Ill

. samples unless the rilk con-These ideas seened reasonable, and pro

'to ne.

I was inforced that Bob Bores had been contacted acreeable to all of these.

erning these and he was t'arnaret Reilly and was unable toI tried 3 or a times durino I finally got her home around 0:

evenina, and had a ocod hour and a half discussion with h 30 or 10:03 in the channes in the radiolonical environmental monitorino procra She raadily anreed to ther er.

n and asked ne to send her c note about it.

I have dictated this note to Dana, and it should have b todav, the 25th of Acril.

een six sent off (It was-dkf).

N9TE #9 DMb NNO I not a nhone call fron Al n ier, who was the chief ':RC

~

r enforcement and insnection nan on site for a whiln.

Al stated that he ms nowin the haad of tu tnan.

The nission o' this taan is to cather #

. natic,

? cts and onininne ea----

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-v,;7r e c.c.

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w.c. 7 -

r NPC called nai I received a ' call. from Bill Carley sayina that he wanted tio scheitrie this treetin$ and that the interviews were whole-heartedly endorsed by T.*li nanagement.They asked ric if I' could come on sorietime in the af ternoon, of..'........... '

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Tf"E o - f' AGE E5 This is Sydney ". Dorter, Jr. Dictatinn side o' the chrcnicle of, thh THI accident en

's ta rtine; early in the nornino of the 20t'h of March,1979.

It is now the eveninq o# thc 25th of Anril and I'n recountinq the events of the 24th of Anril.

!!GTE #40

-Continued pr u,,,$. 7, n g 3-x

.3.

9 i.

The NRC wanted ne to cone and.ta.1k to.then on he 23rd.

I balked at that and final conpronised on the, to say that I'd cone for the morninn of the 2ath fo SEIR session.

The session started at 8:00 An and, actJally didn't start until about 8:2 W so, and castinued-because of the fact that Bill Barley wasn,'t.there an&we wer Y

aitint for him.

The session continued until almost 1:n0 in the af ternoon, which really hell out of the morninyfor ne.

The next scheduled session fa yas for 12:00' noon on Thursday, the 26th of April.

I had worked till about 2:00 A*1 in the nornina of the 2 and then was pretty pronpt. I stopped in trailer 8115 to pick up some files and and arrived at about ten after 8 at the flRC investfoation, trailer, which is outside of the South Iasixx Construction Gate at the south side D

uestioners were Thonas Essio, who is in charqe of the I'.E Environmen peonle of Recion 3, and Dale Donaldson, who is in charne of amounq oth

, enernenc nianninn at Peofon 1 I&E for the flRC. Also present was an ex-FBI nan who was now called i

!!RC investinator.

He's the one that had me duly sinn a very lenalistic Diece of inform stating that I was willingly giving this s.tatenent and that I had no problen cussion of all these natters.

I had asked that someone from Ti'I, l'etropolitan Diison, be there with ne, and Bill Carley was that person who was there with re from Met All in all, the questions were fairly good.

Sone of the tinnas I could not renenber and they kerI

'askino ne and askino me, and I kept sayino "I don't renemberI don't remenber".

Butasird from that, those annoyances, the q :estionino went fairly well ar.d I ans e

a nd honestly as I possibly could.

t The thrust of the questions as I can renenber then is t they were very interested in establishinq the fact that I had mde assessrents of tha i

dost off site individuals and that the PA DRH, DEP. personnel were awarn of all t On aad c" site teans were gatherin1. because o' the fact that this was bein r* relayH thre-tbc hotline continualld, and esnecially in the first 3 to a days tha t Dr. p?' Pas Fe"t un t' i

m.

.m

. - m,7 7

date on a continual basis with all the c'ata that we were oatherinn,.that there vere no hiqh levels of exnosure in the environment from anythina cominn fran T"I, and that we did not even benin to aoproach 10% of an EPA action level (and 'by the way, the Pk State has. adopted in toto the EPA action level as their guidance for when to take pro action).

I made the noint I believe aqain and aoain, that I was amazed that there wa's$

e/acuation of people of certain persons within the 5 nile radius, as far as I was concern:

.9 ani as-far as I know the State was concerned, and also as far as I know the Region 1.IR M.

ceanle were concerned, there was absolutely no reason to take any protective actions }. "~..

whatsoever, at that point.

The other major point that cane up again'and aqain was the-e-.

..e d:ki ~

fact that the installed nrocess radiation tonitoring system on the stack. vent'was of - ~

" -little or no use.

The only thina that we.could use it for'durinn the-entire-sc<1uence 'o' events un until and includina the 3 weeks of the accident, the only thinn that we could use it for was the sacole pum.n to cul'1 samples throuqh a charcoal filter and then we wc*

take the charcoal filter off site to a low background area and count' it.

A nuiber of questions were also asked concernina the a' 311 ability of the off site radioloqical environnental nonitoring proqram data.

I stated that the samples were taken o#f at the first tin on Thursday the 29th of April and that results benan to be available on the norning, or sonetime, I wi:;r sure-when, on the 30th of April.,

They questioned me carefully about the timinn I told them I'd have to cet back to then.

Since that tire I've talked to Steve Gertz and apoarently he called me sonetine before 9:00 in the morninn and discus'. sed the results of TLDs and the air iodines and air and water with me.'

He aise around 11:00 A!' called this data into Bob Pores.

Durino my meetino with the t'RC on Thurr -

at 1:00 P" I will oive this timino infornation to then.

'itnTE !al ON It was obvious on Pednesday and Thursday of last week that the !Mt.'~and the T"I GeLi i

detectors were not beino fully utilized.

In discussino this with several neonle I found that there was a mixuo and that they were not beinq sent any air samnias at all.

I nut a ston to that.

linuever, there was another basic proble, an ' that is that there "ere not e,cunh nennie available to run the T"I Celi detector ar7und the clock.

The oth'er proble' is tha t the !".N ':eli detector-is only a 5" detector and has a 'verylot' sn si tivi ty,

1

.=

+

and is not useful for about 007, of the sa"nles now haino cenerated from the plant.

This is not to say that it won't be useful in the. future - there are coinn to be a lot of hot saroles that th'eys're coinn to have to count sooner or later.

In any case, the decision wa s made, and unforkunately no cne talked to me about it at all, Dave Lemeroff made 'the decision arbitrarily frca what I can see, to move _ then entire TifI trailer un on the Uiii.

m 2 Turbine Hall deck.

This disturbed ne a bit, because it neans that hot sanples which.a:

X.

.h taken down essentially on the around floor have to be walked through Unit I to Unit 2.'s the sanple sink and then up the stairs and out on the Turbine Deck floor. :F extremely hot sanples I think this is takinn a calculated risk on havin one.contamina ti

.,n incidences, and to ne it:s.iust noor' procedure..However, the decision had been made and the dann thinn had been hauled un there by the time I fou.ni out about it,. so.I asked a'e -

1 i

neople~ about it and was told that it had been done, so I finured, we

-there's no use in rockinn the boat now.

In talking to Don Hetrick it seems that they want to take both the Unit 1 and the Unit 2 lithium drifted nermaniun detectors and also set theri,up on th Unit 2 Turbine Deck floor.

The one olitch in this whole thing is the fact that the. unit 2 GeLi detector has never been set up and calibrated.

It's been sittinn in a packinq crate for a nunber of nonths now.

My stronn reconnendation to Dave Leneroff and to Don Hetrick on the 24th of Aroil was that i. hey get the peonle from BW ebo wrote the cronrars ani did the original trainino, get them back here and set the syster un.

I made it known that I was not available to do this, and that I vo.rld not vork on the GeLi d' tector syster e

clwhere I didn't have some access to the program. That's the nreatly annoyinn thinq about t

[

"this proqram is that you have no way to get in to chance it whatsoever.

I think these U

. proprietary nr'onrens are ridiculous when one thinks of the statr. of the art of the nrnora-E ~i 9G(that are available connercially riqht no'i that are not proprietary.

The other ridiculous noint is that the instrumentalon which MW has recommended to the lant is antique as far

@@aslts sneed is concerned - it takes 2n ninutes to count a samnle and then another C

(5Q.inutes' to read out the dann thina.

New instru tentation takes less than 5 minutes to it out, and it's beinn read out siruitannously uhile another sannle is beir.n reau counte'

'teither the Unit I nor tha 'Jnit ? 9eli's are canable er both stirrinn s ectra and sinul-ar'cously analysinn snectra.

They pay a very dear crice for noinn alcno with P..~, on 'this

,x.

. m...r.

y '. '

r and that orice is that they tie up their systems much, ruuch lonrar than is necessary if they would have bounSt state of the art equinnent rather than erhat M'! reco$ ended.

In any case, since they.are stuck with this equinnent, and they' have it and its' needed now, I think the better part of valor is to qet sone knowledneable peonle here from B7J.'

to set up & calibrate Unit 2 and to help nan these 2 units around the clock, and if' i:

7 :.

a person were really sharn and well organized, actually one person could run three detec tors if ihn)cmxa the consoles were close by each other, one could run three detector's -

.M simul taneously.

In retrospect, I should have done what ny comon sense told me to M6EE_

3 weeks ago,.and that is to take Canberra up on.his offer of a Scorpio system.

The Scorpio systen can easily onerate-4 GeLi detectors sinultaneously fron one singlb console while analyzinq a 5th snectrum.

~

Analysis time is usually 5 min'stes ordess-for the Sco~

ts.,

This one person would not be busy all the time and yetgunnino 4 GeLi detectors.

systen.

The other advantaqe of this Canberra Scorpio system is that it has ennugh nemory so thet one can store about ?00 spectra in the memory ar.4 thus the nore inportant snectra could

s tored and the data could be reanalyzed at a later date and looked at further.if innortar Enounh of' that editorial note, and back to the realities.

I 'had nentioned this earlier and was told, "well, we hhve, we're not using Unit 1 TMI Geli much and Unit 2 is still sitting in a' crate - there's no use. in buying a new one'.'

CertainlyI'stea areat deal of nract cality to that thounht.

However, I just hone that they cet the f#,'! people in here to bring that idea to fruition so that we do in fact have usable systens with nualified peonle to run then.

The SAI and the RMC neople are yeary now, and they do need a reducti in samle loed.

However, what's actually hannened is there has been an increase in samrJ load because of the jerkinn around of the 04! necole and the lack of peonle to,run the T" M[N c, o -

p

~ Unit 1 Geli.

phQt L,C ~L NOTE fa2 As I discussed in an earlier note ahout 4 or 5 days aco - Lex Tsannaris and I worked

~

all nicht in cettinn a oreliminary report to Arnold on the number nf. Curies dumped from tha beqinning of the event via the liquid natheiay to the envic&ent.

This data nas rath.e rounh and over the last 3 or 4 davs both ny peonla end Lex Tsan wris have been vortinq r

% rd in refininh the datm, en "ondav niaht, the 23rd o# l'o ri !, Lex Tsannarris discovere?

~

-=

.g.w.n

,, v

7 ;..

=

.,z..

a verv sinnificant error in. part of the liquid data, the I'lTS and I'e'FS data yhich hid

'.been sunnarized for us by the nuclear ennineers up in the Unit I control roon.

Ariparently the nucicar enqineers had not'niven us what tre had asked for.

Pe had asked for the iodine specific activity in the sumn samples before dilution.

flow they did

.g.

a colunn narked " iodine-131" however, they did not nark it that this was s.;Q nive us l

Thus we went on our nerry wa

~ iodine-131 after credit had been taken for dilution.

v

- thinkin1 this was undiluted iodine numbers and anplied a second dilution factor when~ite.;

-,2 u JE- '

should' not have been appli.ed.

Thank Aod Lex Tsaccaris caught this and he reevaluated 'T the numbers and. the numbeFs went up q'uitie sianificantly.

lie were somewhere between 10 to C,' : :.

- m.l:. :

' t;;;.;

_ :_. w

.Ei nilliCuries and it turns out that;the ro'und nunber un to the 17th or 18th of Anril

.;.. as somewhere_.around 200..to 250 w

_(ta.negat qets very quiet. and indistinou-2--

~ dk f. ) Several lessons have been learned (Tape ends at #1P0 or thereabouts, dkf)

~

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ML19322C516

Text

Dear George:

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