Controversy

(13)

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URGENT (WITH NUCLEAR)

NRC NOW SAYS GAS BUBBLE ATOP THE NUCLEAR REACTOR AT TMI SHOWS SIGNS OF BECOMING EXPLOSIVE

AP Press wire (1)

On Sunday, April 1, 1979, the new headline story was about the potentially explosive gas bubble forming inside the reactor, which prompted even more residents (and even some reporters) to scurry out of the area.  Met-Ed responded by using an industry-accepted but highly controversial method of disbursing it: scrubbing it “clean” (with purifiers which may have been at full capacity before this method), and then releasing the gaseous pressure into the atmosphere.  (2, 3)

Studies in the aftermath of this release have been contradictory: official reports indicate that area residents received no more than 8 millirems of radiation (about the same amount as an X-ray), and persons downwind of the gaseous release no more than 100 millirems (an average yearly dose from background radiation).  (4) 

 However, conflicting studies have shown a marked correlation between the accident at TMI and the rate of cancer, diabetes, leukemia, and other diseases, which has instigated anti-nuclear sentiments in the decades following the accident. (5)

(15)

Even scientists are skeptical of the efficacy of nuclear power with respect to the dangers that such power has.  Conclusions from the N.R.C.’s official reports show that the prevention of the plant’s meltdown was due to inadvertent actions by the operators – the same operators whose actions also put the core in danger. (6) Regulation up to the point had been sparse – there was no standard for control room layout, emergency procedures or practice with alerting civilian defense.   The N.R.C. has been accused by the very industry it is supposed to regulate as “not knowing ‘sophomore nuclear engineering,’” and continually failing to keep up with developments at TMI during the accident. (7)

There never was a very close correlation between what was happening to the reactor and what the N.R.C. though was happening.

-          Commissioner Bradford (8)

If the operators had simply stopped acting once they realized they had been working under faulty instruments and were essentially “flying blind,” the Unit 2’s core would have melted down within 20 minutes.  It would have been self-contained in a ball of melted glass (the bedrock), over 100 feet into the ground.  Some experts believed that this timely burial would have been preferable to having to clean up surface radioactivity and transporting the waste across the country to safe facilities. (9)

In the aftermath, the N.R.C. came under fire by both presidential and congressional commissions and has significantly changed regulation procedures.  (10)  However, in 1979 alone, 11 nuclear plant plans were scrapped and largely replaced by coal plants.  (11)

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The legacy of the TMI accident is that the United States has not realized its nuclear potential: from 1981 to 1984 alone, 51 nuclear stations were scrapped. (12)

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Citations:

(1) Mike Gray and Ira Rosen, The Warning: Accident at Three Mile Island (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 243.

(2) Mark Stephens, Three Mile Island (New York: Random House, 1980), 214.

(3) Daniel F. Ford, Three Mile Island: Thirty Minutes to Meltdown (New York: Viking Press, 1981), 248.

(4) William Keisling, Three Mile Island: Turning Point (Redmond, Washington: Express Publications, 1980), 148.

(5) Stephens, 228.

(6) Ford, 253.

(7) Ford, 248.

(8) Ford, 250.

(9) Stephens, 228.

(10) Gray, 270.

(11) Stephens, 230.

(12) Cancelled Nuclear Units Ordered in the United States. [online] Accessed on April 21, 2011.  http://clonemaster.homestead.com/files/cancel.htm

(13) Keisling, 44.

(14) Gray and Rosen, 155.

(15) Robert Del Tredici, The People of Three Mile Island (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1980), 46.

(16) Keisling, 26.

(17) Del Tredici, 5.