Three Mile Island

Awesome! That touched some kind of video geek nerve, watching the original newscast.Wonder if the curfew helped anyone.I think I had been blissfully unaware of the definition of ‘evacuation’ prior to this.I love that they were smoking in their offices and on camera. The mics they used (teeny to huge). The cars. The graphics. Hell, the fonts.

I had forgotten how it used to be. While I don’t remember all that much about this accident, I do remember when you could watch the news and get facts. Not the “balanced” crap we get now.How refreshing, thanks Bob.

I was 9 years old when the TMI accident occurred and was living in Harrisburg at the time. I still live there. In fact, I can see the coolant towers of TMI from my office window every day.It was one of the scariest moments of my life. Our school closed early and we went to Ohio for the weekend. I remember worrying if my home would even be there for us to return to.Times have changed in the media and not for the better. If was not long after this that Cronkite was forced out of the chair at CBS in coup instigated by Rather. He brought CBS News down and should never be forgiven for that.

An interesting man in the TMI story is Vic Stello. He was a coal region guy from the Mount Carmel Area.Worked in a family pizza business while going to Bucknell.

Heh.

Also interested in the rate of death/illness within 20 miles of TMI as compared to 30 years later everywhere else.I was watching this as it happened and damned if it was in 50s-looking B&W. Is this just the video you came across or all that was saved? In 1979 most of us had color.Coincidence or not, my roommate’s (at the time) parents had moved to Lancaster area 2 years before TMI. One year after it, her non-smoking father (aged 45 or so) died very quickly of lung cancer. Interested in stats on this type thing.Thanks for covering this, Bob. Reminds me of why I marched on DC so angrily and still detest nuclear power.

DP -Serious coverup and white-washing so as not to frighten John and Mary Sixpack.Babcock and Wilcox should have never been allowed to build Nuclear Power Plants the way they did. I could go on for hours describing things that were just done improperly in the control system design. The important one was that the only way you could tell if the core was covered with water was to read the core temperature gauge and the core pressure gauge and then go look up in a steam table (hundreds of pages long) to see what percentage is steam and what percentage is liquid. This table lookup could have been done by a 50 cent TMS1000 microprocessor. In a control system crisis, the last thing you want is human operators having to look things up in 500 page books in order to make a decision. IMO, the designers of this system should have done jail time for negligence.IIRC, there was only a very slight rise in cancer rates in the region east and adjacent to TMI (downwind). The region of increased cancer rates only extended about 20 miles east. Young children and pregnant women were evacuated for 4 days after the event. Many others left to stay with friends or families for a few days even thought they were not ordered to. The cancer rate rise was less than expected probably because so many found another place to be for the week after the event. There was a sharp rise in a particular kind of rare cancer (but I don’t remember what kind) in a ten square mile area directly east and adjacent to TMI. A general mandatory evacuation was almost ordered. This was backed down to the mandatory evacuation of pregnant women and children under 5.The TMI incident was a series of accidents, none of which should have happened in a properly designed system (or even an improperly designed one such as what was at TMI). The only reason that the core did not melt was because a valve was opened for the wrong reason. The action that saved us from a Chernobyl sized disaster was another mistake (this time lucky).I was at Penn State University Park campus at the time (North and slightly upwind). The Dean of Engineering at the time was Dr. Nunzio Palidino. He was a highly regarded expert in Nuclear Engineering and was called down to TMI as a consultant the moment the accident happened. At Peen State we were privy to information that the general public never heard about. This was my first exposure to news being filtered to prevent panic or to keep the sheeple in control. (IMO, and I am not alone, people should have been evacuated). Dr. Palidino pushed for a general evacuation but people from the government were afraid of panic and backed it down to pregnant women and children. Palidino was head of the NRC for a while after TMI. He instituted policies that would make such accidents much harder to happen.Mental note: When they evacuate the pregnant women and young children, relocate your behind if you value it.

Most of what got loose at TMI were light gases of highly radioactive isotopes. These disperse quickly and do not present a long term persistent problem. Some radioactive iodine isotopes got into the local environment and since these do settle and persist the slight cancer rate increase is blamed on that. People that stayed in the area, particularly some farmers directly adjacent to TMI suffered from significantly elevated cancer rates. It is believed that the ones most heavily affected were outdoors plowing fields in preparation for planting and so were probably directly exposed to the gases that were being released. We are talking about 6 to a dozen individuals. I think the best source of information on the cancer studies and lingering radioactive residues is available at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster (F&M), also Penn State and U. Penn. have published results. F&M did much of the data collection for the studies with additional help from Penn and Penn State. Millersville State University should also be a good source of information on TMI since they are not very far away from TMI. They were still called Millersville State Teachers College at the time of the TMI event.

“Also interested in the rate of death/illness within 20 miles of TMI as compared to 30 years later everywhere else.”The official government studies have indicated no increase in cancer rates in the region. However, there are some private studies that dispute those conclusions. There were numerous lawsuits filed against the owners of TMI, but none were ever successful.As Sillyratfacedgit noted, most of what was released were light weight gases like Krypton that dispersed quickly. Krypton is also a noble gas and doesn’t bond with any of our tissues. This contrasts with Chernobyl, which released radioactive particulates like cesium (a bone-seeker)and the thyroid-seeker iodine-131.There was a lot of mismanagement at TMI back then, but the accident could have been a lot worse. When people say we don’t need a lot of government-mandated safety and environmental protections, I think of TMI. The only reason I am still able to live here in Harrisburg is because of government-mandated safety protocols. Had TMI been as poorly designed and operated as Chernobyl was, the region where I am posting from would be as uninhabitable as the region around Chernobyl is today. It was because our government decided that reactors should have silly things like containment buildings that we dodged a bullet that could have been far worse.

It’s well-known that Chernobyl wasn’t the first nuclear disaster in the Soviet Union. Just the first one that they were forced to publicly acknowledge.

IIRC, both the NM and WA accidents were on military sites, which is why the media gets away with calling TMI the “worst commercial nuclear accident in US history”.