“The tremendous menace of this day and age is not the stockpile of nuclear weapons which human ingenuity has devised, but the grim fact that the men in charge of them are as mediocre as those who invented them are brilliant.”

Peter Ustinov, Actor

“Oh, my. Now I really know something happened at Three Mile Island! It must be poison gas. I just fell down. I had no strength to get up. I said, ‘Must I really die at Three Mile Island.”

Marie Holowka, Farmer and three-Mile Island survivor and cancer victim receiving chemotherapy 25 years later

To the 30-and-under set, a meltdown is what you have when someone lost in their phone conversation rams in the back of your pimped-out ride that you just washed, causing you to spill your bev all over your nice, new shirt. TMI is short for ‘too much information,’ and not ‘Three Mile Island.’

To those Americans old enough to remember March 28, 1979, the nuclear meltdown at Three-Mile-Island was, like September 11, a tragic day when America lost some of her innocence. On this day, public confidence in the safety of nuclear power was decimated in a cloud of toxic blue smoke.

The planets were certainly not in alignment on March 28 at Three Mile Island near Middletown, Pennsylvania. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), responsible for overseeing such plants, says an unfortunate, unlikely mix of things — equipment malfunctions, design related problems and worker errors — led the TMI-2 reactor core to melt and release its frightening brew of radioactive materials into the neighboring community.

Worker error, indeed — former control room operator Harold W. Hartman, Jr. told NRC investigators that the plant’s owner, Metropolitan Edison, had been falsifying primary-coolant, leak rate data for months prior to the accident, according to Three-Mile Island Alert, a nonprofit nuclear watchdog group and outspoken critic of TMI.

The NRC concedes that the Three Mile Island explosion was “the most serious in U.S. commercial nuclear power plant operating history,” yet claims that plant workers and members of the nearby community escaped without a scratch. The NRC finds a silver lining in the event, in that it brought about “sweeping changes involving emergency response planning, reactor operator training, human factors engineering, radiation protection, and many other areas of nuclear power plant operations {and] caused the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to tighten and heighten its regulatory oversight.”

Public health research conducted over two decades’ worth of data with TMI residents and workers has for the most part sided with the NRC’s claim that no lives have been taken as a result of the radiation, though stress-related conditions were definitively linked to the event.

Many TMI survivors, some of which have suffered from cancers of the thyroid and bladder — or the families of non-survivors, as the case may be — would disagree with scientists’ conclusions, however. Sam Retherford, a former TMI employee, died of bladder cancer just shy of the 25th anniversary of the explosion, according to an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer. He was convinced that he got sick from cleaning up the “hot stuff,” the article reported.

“In the back of our minds, we knew there had to be something with TMI,” his daughter, Tracy Long, reported to the Inquirer. “I just think they tried to hide a lot of that.”

Furthermore, there was no study of cancer conducted among the workers who did the 10-year, $1 billion cleanup, as the feds were unable to persuade the Metropolitan Edison to maintain a health registry.

While questions remain about what did happen, some scientists are clearer on what could have happened. “It is quite possible that in another 20 minutes or so, the lower portion of the reactor vessel would have melted, releasing hot molten fuel onto the floor of the containment building, posing an even greater, possibly uncontrollable release of radiation into the environment,” according to Bonnie A. Osif, Anthony J. Baratta, and Thomas W. Conkling. Professor emeritus of nuclear engineering at Penn State, who co-authored TMI 25 Years Later: The Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant Accident and Its Impact (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004).

25 years later, the TMI-2 reactor has been permanently shut down, and the radioactive waste, reactor fuel and core debris shipped off-site. The rest of the site sites idle, biding its time until it can be decommissioned. The last of the survivors’ lawsuits were dismissed or dropped by 2002, the records from the long-term health studies sealed, the $5 million public-health fund used to conduct research on TMI long gone. Two generations have already grown up free of the fading memory of Three-Mile Island, now a sidebar in 20th-century history textbooks.

Until recently, “no new nukes” was a dying slogan — simply because it was no longer needed. The nuclear industry was barely hanging on, it being to hard to turn a profit on nuclear energy than hoped, and public opinion was still down on nuclear energy, having not yet completely forgotten Three-Mile Island and its Russian counterpart, Chernobyl.

Yet according to a July 2005 article in Forbes magazine, the future of nuclear power is suddenly looking very bright again. “If oil prices stay high, if people worry about carbon dioxide causing global warming, if the Middle East stays violent, nuclear power may make a huge comeback in the U.S.,” writes Christopher Helman and his co-authors.

“The last five years fans of atomic power have quietly lined up the support of federal and municipal governments and have cozied up to General Electric and Westinghouse Electric…in service to an ambitious agenda: building perhaps 5 new reactors by 2015, a dozen by 2020 and 50 by midcentury.”

If this prediction bears out, one can only hope that the NRC is right in claiming that Three Mile Island was a blessing in disguise, teaching us an innocuous lesson about the dangers of nuclear power so that the worst-case scenario would never come to pass.

April Thompson

Related links: China Syndrome

Special thanks to Jan Blair