2. How was the responsibility for the control panel design at Three Mile Island be executed and how could it have been improved?

America's worst nuclear power plant disaster occurred in the mid-1970s in TMI, when operators misread computer control panels. Prior to the mishap, Lockheed Space and Missiles Corp. conducted a survey and found that very little human engineering was applied to existing control boards. The survey quotes the following comment from one designer as typical: "I have no pride of designing the layout of these boards. The client has to live with them. Nobody here cares that much. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NCR) is only interested in knowing whether or not there is a certain function covered on the boards -- either in front or in back." At TMI's Unit 2, the reactor drain tank indicators were behind the control panel, which could have told the operators that the electromatic relief valve was leaking, and their significance was not recognized. The most repetitive phrase heard by the survey investigators during their interviews with panel designers was "client preference," a polite way of telling that the utilities were designed, what they ordered. The others had similar comments, "There is little appreciation of the fact that plants are man-machine integrating sys- tems. Insufficient attention is given to the human side of such systems, since most designers are hardware- oriented." One industry study divided the control panel problems into two categories. One into those that can be altered without changing the boards and the other type are those that will require completely new control boards.