45 1972 Power Burst Facility Reactor The PBF, which began operations in September 1972, was part of the reactor safety testing that started with the SPERT program. PBF was a larger and more sophisticated reactor designed to simulate various kinds of imagined accident scenarios caused by rapid power changes within milliseconds. It subjected test fuel to transient bursts of energy far surpassing the capability of previous reactors, simulating severe fuel rod burst tests and loss-of-coolant accidents. Data from its tests were used to develop and validate fuel behavior codes for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and to forecast what responders at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island should expect.The reactor was shut down in 1985 and disposed of in 2008. “ Using the PBF simulation, we told them what their core would look like….When they finally got a look at it, the core lay pretty much exactly as we had predicted.” — Beverly Cook, INEL engineer, on how PBF informed Three Mile Island responders