You Must Remember This
Just because a quarter-century has passed since the accident at Three Mile
Island doesn't mean we should shut up about it.
SARA KELLY, Philadelphia Weekly, March 3, 2004
"On March 28, 1979, and for several days thereafter--as a result of
technical malfunctions and human error--Three Mile Island's Unit 2 Nuclear
Generating Station was the scene of the nation's worst commercial nuclear
accident. Radiation was released, a part of the nuclear core was damaged,
and thousands of residents evacuated the area. Events here would cause basic
changes throughout the world's nuclear power industry."
--PENNSYLVANIA HISTORICAL AND MUSEUM COMMISSION PLAQUE DEDICATED IN 1999
IT WAS A GREAT DAY for a nuclear disaster. Unseasonably warm for late March.
Overcast with little wind. Static. Still. So whatever radiation leaked out
would be slow to blow town.
Of course it wasn't such a great day for the people of Middletown and the
other sleepy boroughs along the Susquehanna south of Harrisburg. In fact, it
was their worst day ever.
FOUR A.M., AND THE SUN wouldn't rise over the imposing Three Mile Island
Nuclear Generating Station for a couple more hours. A crew was busy doing
routine maintenance--flushing out a filter in a cooling system for the
plant's No. 2 reactor.
When the workers were finished, the few ounces of water that remained in the
pipes got sucked through the system to the air-controlled valves that ran
the main turbines. The turbines shut down suddenly, forcing a high-pressure
plume of steam into the air high above the island. Windows vibrated in homes
a quarter-mile from the plant, jerking residents awake.
Sensing the pressure drop, a safety mechanism stopped the nuclear reaction.
As pressure in the reactor increased, a release valve opened. But instead of
closing after pressure returned to normal, the valve remained open for more
than two hours, spewing thousands of pounds of radioactive sludge onto the
floor of a containment building and exposing some 5 feet of the reactor's
core. Tons of enriched uranium began hurtling toward meltdown.
THE SCARIEST THING about the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island was that
no one knew what it meant. It would take days to learn how close south
central Pennsylvania--and possibly even the entire East Coast, with ripple
effects felt around the globe--came to a radiation release so devastating it
would render the affected areas unlivable for as long as anyone could
imagine. And it would be years before scientists realized that while the
core didn't melt through the reactor floor and tunnel all the way to China,
its temperature had approached 4,300 degrees. Had it gotten much hotter,
uranium would've run like water.
Then there was the hydrogen bubble. The heat and steam generated from the
zirconium (yes, just like those beautiful fake diamonds they hawk on the
Home Shopping Network) covering the fuel rods started a chemical reaction
that produced hydrogen. And hydrogen, old-timers will recall, was what
turned the Hindenburg into a floating inferno.
Plant workers realized that hydrogen had been building up inside the reactor
for hours when internal air pressure shot up suddenly during an eight-second
explosion that shook the control room and packed the wallop of several
thousand-pound bombs.
Air monitors later revealed increasing oxygen levels in the reactor, a
likely result of radiation so intense it broke the chemical bonds that hold
water together. As hydrogen and oxygen levels continued to increase, so did
fears that TMI's Unit 2 would become an unstoppable 400-ton hydrogen bomb.
H-bombs are 100 to 1,000 times more powerful than atomic bombs. The A-bombs
dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed more than 100,000 people and
injured nearly as many. The potential for nuclear annihilation was profound.
Retired University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine radiology professor
Ernest Sternglass, a man many perceive to breathe rare air on the fringes of
the antinukes community, argues that all atomic bombings (including those
controlled tests staged in the South Pacific and the American Southwest
after World War II) contribute to health problems around the world. Don't
even get him started on nuclear power plants, which, he argues, do their
greatest damage on a daily basis, when things are running smoothly.
Despite the plant's and politicians' best efforts to maintain a cheery
exterior (showing about the most bravado of his presidency, Jimmy Carter
bravely--or stupidly, depending on who's talking--toured TMI during the
drama's height), things were running anything but smoothly days after the
accident, when Washington grew so worried about the bubble that it
dispatched a Nuclear Regulatory Commission team to TMI.
Once there, workers jury-rigged a "hydrogen recombiner" and installed
150,000 pounds of lead brick to shield the device, just in case. The bomb
threat quickly dissipated, thanks mostly to the venting of radioactive
emissions into the air and radioactive sludge into the Susquehanna River.
While most locals expressed relief when they heard the hydrogen bubble had
been popped, few fully knew at what expense.
EVEN THOSE MOST DIRECTLY affected have a tough time recalling exactly where
they were or what they were doing when they got the news. "It wasn't like
hearing when Kennedy was shot," says retired three-term Lancaster mayor
Arthur Morris, whose understanding of how events unfolded on that fateful
spring morning in 1979 was little better back then.
After all, he adds, he wasn't convinced anything significant was happening
till enough information leaked out. And even then he couldn't be sure.
"If you hear there's an accident at TMI, you don't know what that means,"
says Morris, who still lives in Lancaster. Though the city is a relatively
safe 23 miles from TMI, it has a vested interest in what happens there since
most of its drinking water comes from the Susquehanna below the plant. But
as far as he knows, says Morris, the water's always tested normal.
AN ORAL HISTORY PROJECT Dickinson College professor Lonna Malmsheimer
coordinated shortly after the accident revealed a surprisingly apathetic
public. Many interviewees from the Carlisle community surrounding
Dickinson--which is also some 23 miles from TMI--didn't realize there'd been
an accident until a day or two after it happened. Some hadn't even known TMI
existed.
Locals who recalled enough to talk about the partial meltdown's impact on
the community during interviews in 1979 have even less to say about it now.
They're hardly hesitant to talk about it, they say. Sure, tens of thousands
of people evacuated, but for them it wasn't that big a deal.
Nancy Mellerski, a professor of French and film, was in her second year at
Dickinson when the accident happened. In an interview Malmsheimer conducted
shortly afterward, Mellerski, like most of the 400-plus others interviewed
for the project, kept the conversation light.
She and her husband stayed in Carlisle, resisting the temptation to leave
even as concerns over the hydrogen bubble drove off many of their fellow
professors, Dickinson students and local residents.
The main reason they didn't leave, she said at the time, was that they
didn't want to move their pets. "They were holding us hostage," she laughed.
Interviews from both then and now suggest that while TMI's potential victims
were largely concerned about the prospect of a hydrogen bomb exploding in
their own backyards, freakish fantasy scenarios often dominated
conversation. Perhaps these diversions helped people keep their minds off of
more likely threats.
ASIDE FROM THE ACCIDENT itself, the problems most commonly associated with
the partial meltdown involved poor communication. In a quarter-century of
retrospect, it's been learned that Gov. Dick Thornburgh and even President
Jimmy Carter, who toured the plant just four days after the accident (to the
fiendish delight of the Saturday Night Live writers who penned the famous
Pepsi Syndrome skit), didn't know the full story.
Most of the interviews conducted with locals at the time involved humor born
of fear. It didn't help that The China Syndrome--about a TV reporter
investigating a conspiracy to cover up safety lapses at a nuclear power
plant--had just been released, and even received a big box-office bump after
the accident.
In her 1979 interview Mellerski spoke at length about jibes she endured from
friends and family who lived outside the area. Most were about
mutation--that the couple would wake up one morning to find that their cats
had grown into saber-toothed tigers.
Both Children of the Damned and Godzilla came up in conversation. There was
a joke about using a hot dog like a canary in a coal mine: When it cooked in
your hand, it was time to leave. There was another one about putting X-ray
film under your pillow at night. And some inscrutable poop joke that brought
new meaning to "nuclear waste."
Twenty-five years later, Mellerski says she rarely thinks of the accident.
She can't remember a single one of those old meltdown jokes--which is no
one's loss, surely.
But she does say plant safety did occur to her on the terrifying morning of
9/11, when the third hijacked plane went off the radar somewhere over
central Pennsylvania. The thought still sends shivers.
THE TMI VISITORS' CENTER might as well be a highway rest stop: a couple
short brick '50s-style bathrooms and a historic marker. Except the road in
front is no highway, and you hardly need a plaque to know what happened
here.
In the shadow of four concrete cooling towers--almost 400 feet each--this
squat earth-tone building sits shuttered. Instead of twin stalls and a
cold-water sink, there are barren chrome clothing racks and other lonely
reminders of the storefront's mercantile past. Hard as it may be to believe,
this was Three Mile Island's gift shop not too long ago.
It's a shame, says Eric Epstein, head of both antinukes organization Three
Mile Island Alert and of the nonpartisan EFMR Monitoring Group, which takes
hourly radiation readings at more than a dozen locations around the
plant--including right here at the visitors' center. "I used to get all my
Christmas presents here."
Then there's the plaque. Five years ago, at the 20th anniversary of TMI's
partial meltdown, the incident officially became part of Pennsylvania
history. Still, there's something strange about seeing the words "worst
commercial nuclear accident" rendered in old-timey type beneath the
commonwealth's stately equine crest.
But in the end it's just another head-scratching monument to the tension
over the years between the folks who argue that the key to avoiding even
more harrowing nuclear accidents in the future is never forgetting what
happened in the past, and those who just want it all to go away.
"In the last 25 years we've been lucky," muses Epstein.
FIVE YEARS AGO, in time for the 20th anniversary, this joint was jumping.
We're not talking street carnival, exactly, but for a nuclear accident
anniversary, things were about as festive as they can get.
In those simpler days of early 1999, the gift shop was hopping. A PR flack
for the plant's then-owners took a reporter to lunch in an employee
cafeteria and even convinced her to thrust her hand into the innocuous
waters of a TMI cooling tower. (Five years and still cancer-free!)
She toured the island's undeveloped south end, where plant employees watched
wildlife and stocked their arrowhead collections. And she heard about
efforts to install a fish ladder and to send a Civil War-era skeleton found
on the island to the state historical society for analysis.
That was then. This is 2004, and TMI may be no less salubrious, but it is a
whole lot less friendly. And that can't bode well for the region's future
safety.
Now, except for a couple cars and a full bin of outgoing mail from the
plant--including important-looking packages addressed to the Chicago home
office--tucked away in a makeshift mailbox with a door that doesn't seem to
close, the visitors' center's parking lot is empty.
A plant spokesperson traces the current media-unfriendly environment to
heightened terrorism risks since 9/11. Yet company mail is left in an empty
parking lot, and locals tell tales of civilians accessing the island by boat
or by simply driving past the guard booth. And on at least three occasions
since 9/11, the plant's warning sirens have proven defective during tests.
The visitors' center is a straight shot across the river--within a bazooka's
range, adds Epstein, sunnily--of TMI's matched sets of twin towers.
ERIC EPSTEIN WON'T SHUT UP about Three Mile Island. Lots of locals feel the
way he does about it. But few can stomach the fight.
Ask him about the plant and he'll invoke Kafka or Carville. Ask him if he's
always so hyper and he'll direct you to his ex-wife. Catch him on the phone
before your morning coffee and you might as well give up.
The man has energy. So the obsession makes sense.
The plant's most vocal critic since even before the accident, the frenetic
44-year-old has managed to turn his TMI obsession into an all-consuming
career. His funny, often manic approach to the subject has made him
famous--or infamous, depending on who's talking.
Epstein's become so well known he's now trying to parlay his name into a
stint in the Pennsylvania Senate. Without TMI, he'd have no chance. As a
Democrat here, he may still have none.
Born in nearby Harrisburg, on whose outskirts he now lives, and radicalized
by his college days out west, Epstein started the watchdog group TMI Alert
in 1977, three years after the island's first power plant went online and
two years before its second started up, partially melted down and was
shuttered for good--all within a couple months in early 1979.
It's not hard to see why Epstein returned to his Pennsylvania homeland.
Picturesque even during winter's steel-gray depths, the Susquehanna River
Valley's all rolling hills and manicured pastures punctuated by the
occasional hardwood stand.
Holding its frosty tinge for more than half the year, the land still betrays
its pioneer days. From the tops of the silt-rounded hills down to the slow,
shallow riverbanks, human progress seems an afterthought. Acres of organic
contours under a winter-white sky.
Then, over almost any high hill within 10 miles of the plant, the quartet of
concrete towers rises like a salt shaker outcropping from the Susquehanna's
center, breaking the bucolic spell. Though they're not directly involved in
energy generation, the towers remain, in most people's minds, a sobering
symbol of nuclear power.
THREE MILE ISLAND IS ACTUALLY two power plants--Unit 1 and Unit 2. The
former is still generating power that feeds into the grid most of us tap for
our electricity. It's changed hands a couple times since the accident,
landing most recently with AmerGen, which, like PECO, is now owned by
Chicago's Exelon. Unlike its predecessor, AmerGen sees little need to broker
positive community relations in the wake of 9/11.
Running a power plant is serious business, after all. Especially when your
plant's the nation's most high-profile--conveniently located a dirty-bomb's
toss from the Harrisburg International Airport. But why talk dirty bomb when
the Nuclear Regulatory Commission already admitted that TMI's reactor
buildings couldn't withstand the direct impact of a jet the size of those
that struck the World Trade Center?
FirstEnergy, which gained fame last August when a large portion of its
northeast grid failed, causing blackouts in New York and beyond, owns TMI's
cooked Unit 2. The company wound up with this ugly hunk of nuclear waste
through a merger deal and is simply holding onto it till either another
ownership shuffle or till Unit 1 closes and the whole island can be retired.
Epstein doubts the damaged reactor will ever be disassembled, the land
beneath it returned to its natural state. It's not clear that would even be
possible.
There are two big barriers standing between TMI and a clean slate: money and
technology. Did we mention money? Lots of it.
The federal government mandates a fund for the decommissioning of the
nation's nuclear power plants, but there's nowhere near enough money in the
pot to cover the astronomical expense. Power customers have already been hit
up for more than their share of "stranded costs" since the industry was
deregulated last decade. How much more will they have to ante up to restore
a wild Three Mile Island?
But why bother arguing how to pay for it when we don't even know how to do
it?
The dead reactor sat untouched for years after the accident, the full extent
of damage to its core a mystery. In the wake of international notoriety that
made Three Mile Island the butt of endless corny jokes, TMI Unit 1, which
had been shut down for refueling and maintenance at the time of the
accident, couldn't restart till the Nuclear Regulatory Commission determined
the plant's then-owners, GPU Nuclear, would operate it safely.
As Unit 1 restarted in 1985, workers first ventured into Unit 2 to begin
defueling--a process that dragged on for eight years and that remains
incomplete to this day.
Asked to describe the photos he's seen of the mess in Unit 2, Epstein says,
simply, "nuclear nachos."
TMI's Unit 2 is among the most toxic spots on the planet--a nuclear waste
site so hot no one's been close enough to find out exactly what's happening
inside. Nor will anyone for decades, at least, after its sister plant is
decommissioned.
Though about 99 percent of the fuel has been removed from Unit 2, cleanup
will have to wait till Unit 1 is retired--which could be some 30 years from
now, if AmerGen's license gets extended by the requisite two decades.
What happens till then is anyone's guess. Lacking adequate cash for a
complete cleanup, it's seeming increasingly likely that Unit 2 will wind up
"entombed" in a massive concrete sarcophagus, a gift that keeps giving to
hundreds--maybe thousands--of future generations. Assuming human life lasts
here that long.
Till there's the proper technology and the money needed to employ it, little
will be known about the full extent of damage to Unit 2. The concrete is
getting old. Cracks have been reported in metal samples taken from the
bottom of Unit 2's reactor vessel. There's some speculation that rainwater
is soaking into the reactor basement through holes too small to see. And if
water's getting in, isn't it likely that at least a little radiation's
leaking out?
AT THE BACK END OF THE LOT, behind the TMI Memorial Rest Stop, sits the
plant's training center. Though PW was allowed inside it five years ago,
when GPU was still in charge, it's now off-limits. True enough, with its
colorful flashing buttons, and switches and dials direct from the Atomic
Age, it could only make the nuclear power industry look even more outdated
and dangerous.
But danger, at TMI, is clearly in the eye of the beholder.
In the space between the vacant visitors' center and the training center
sits a dead vegetable garden surrounded by a chain-link fence. On a sign
that describes the "Terrestrial Environmental Study Area," "GPU Nuclear" has
been crossed out in black magic marker.
The Terrestrial Environmental Study Area is a plot the size of a parking
spot that TMI plants yearly to test radiation levels in locally grown
produce. Never mind that the visitors' center sits between the plant and the
garden, and that the winds from the plant usually blow in another direction.
GPU's 1998 Radiological Environmental Monitoring Report listed nothing but
normal levels in the cabbage, tomatoes and sweet corn grown that year.
(AmerGen wouldn't supply a more current report.) Much more interesting are
the report's "rodent results," derived from autopsies conducted on three
mice--yes, three--found around the plant.
Two of the three mice were deemed radiation-free, while the third,
reassuringly found in a plant lunchroom, contained a radioactive material
that "may be due to Three Mile Island Nuclear Station and/or fallout from
prior weapons tests." Too bad GPU's no longer around to explain where
weapons tests were being conducted near Harrisburg. (Hello Professor
Sternglass!)
The report concluded that, based on a sample of three dead mice, "rodents
are not transporting radioactive materials to unrestricted areas." Oh, and
the plant also called an exterminator.
THERE'S LITTLE DOUBT THAT, thanks in large part to the accident at TMI,
there will never be another nuclear power plant built in the U.S. But that
doesn't mean a reduced risk of nuclear disaster in the future. If anything,
it means higher risks as licenses for aging plants are renewed past their
intended life span (about 40 years), capacities are increased, already
overworked staffs are slashed and public accountability decreases as
terrorism fears increase.
AmerGen's license to operate TMI's Unit 1 is set to expire in 2014. But if
TMI's like nearly all the 102 other nuclear power plants now running in this
country, its owner will likely apply for and receive an extension that will
allow it to keep producing energy for another 20 years. By that time the
technology it employs will be almost a century old. And though its
infrastructure will be only about half that, that's still a decade longer
than the plant was designed to last.
Whether the accident at TMI killed or sickened anyone who lived nearby
depends on whom you ask. Since those who like to blame the plant for health
problems tend to be dismissed as cranks in this conservative enclave that
James Carville famously called (and Eric Epstein repeatedly recalls)
Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between, there's pressure to
deny.
It's little wonder that Epstein's other pet obsession is the Holocaust. His
mission with both issues remains the same: He wants to make sure no one ever
forgets.
WILLS ARE STRONG IN THIS PART of Pennsylvania. And change is slow in coming.
The promise of free energy, good jobs and economic growth never quite panned
out for little Middletown and the tiny riverside boroughs that overlook
TMI's portentous towers. But that same stubborn mindset is what keeps locals
from admitting they've been duped.
In a conversation at the 20th anniversary, a nurse and now-former Middletown
mayor who was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in 1992 claimed her
disease was caused by the hair dye she used for 24 years. She's happily
cancer-free today, but she still refuses to cast blame on anyone but
herself.
"People deal with the issue by not dealing with it," says Epstein. But even
he's not so quick to blame TMI for every illness in the region.
All of us are exposed to low levels of radiation every day, from rocks, soil
and the sun. How much radiation exposure a person can safely endure remains
up for debate. But the bottom line, says Epstein, is that radiation exposure
is cumulative--meaning once it's in your body, it's there to stay. So of
course it's important to limit your exposure--"unless you're a dickhead."
Within a couple years of the accident, the plant paid out $20 million in
health claims to more than 15,000 local residents who claimed damages of all
kinds--including economic--from the accident. An additional $5 million was
set aside for the notoriously poorly administered TMI Public Health Fund.
Then in 1985, the year TMI's Unit 1 was restarted, GPU paid out more than
$14 million in settlements. But most of the health studies conducted so far
seem unusually interested in linking increased rates of disease and death to
the stress of merely having survived a nuclear panic.
Ten years after the partial meltdown GPU estimated that two cases of cancer
could've possibly resulted from the accident. But the defunct company (it's
now part of FirstEnergy) quickly contradicted itself, claiming that "those
cases would be undetectable among the 541,000 cancers that will occur
naturally in the 2.2 million people who live in the TMI area."
Since the effects of radiation on the body take so long to surface and can't
easily be traced back to one particular cause, it's impossible to know
exactly how much blame to heap on TMI. And few have the time or attention
span to keep up the fight.
That's why Eric Epstein won't shut up. As grating as his shrill harangues
may seem to those who are their targets, were he not here to remind us what
happened on one great day for a nuclear disaster, the rest of us might not
remember.
