Portal:Disasters/Selected anniversary/March 2008
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The Three Mile Island accident was the most significant accident in the history of the American commercial nuclear power generating industry. It resulted in the release of a significant amount of radioactivity, an estimated maximum of 13 million curies of noble gases (480 petabecquerels), but under 20 curies (740 gigabecquerels) of the particularly hazardous iodine-131, to the environment. It resulted, however, in no immediate deaths or injuries to plant workers or members of the nearby community which can be attributed to the accident. Public reaction to the event was probably influenced by at least three factors: first; the release – a few weeks before the accident – of a popular movie called "The China Syndrome", concerning an accident at a nuclear reactor; secondly, what was felt to be a lack of official information in the initial phases of the accident; and lastly, many of the statements made by political and social activists long opposed to nuclear power. Whatever the sources of the local fear and outrage, public reaction to the event is judged by some epidemiologists to have induced stresses in the local population that could have caused adverse health effects.
The accident began on Wednesday, March 28, 1979, and ultimately resulted in a partial core meltdown in Unit 2 of the nuclear power plant (a pressurized water reactor manufactured by Babcock & Wilcox) of the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania near Harrisburg.
Jack Herbein, Metropolitan Edison's then Vice President for Power Generation initially and erroneously called the accident "a normal aberration." The scope and complexity of this reactor accident became clear over the course of five days, as a number of agencies at the local, state and federal levels tried to solve the problem and decide whether the on-going accident required a full emergency evacuation of the local community, if not the entire area to the west/southwest. In the end, the reactor was brought under control, although full details of the accident were not discovered until much later.
Although 25,000 people lived within five miles (8 km) of the site at the time of the accident, no identifiable injuries due to radiation occurred, and a government report concluded that "There will either be no case of cancer or the number of cases will be so small that it will never be possible to detect them. The same conclusion applies to the other possible health effects."
The accident, however, led to serious economic and public relations consequences for the US nuclear industry, and the cleanup process was slow and costly. It also initiated a protracted decline in the public popularity of nuclear power, exemplifying for many the worst fears about nuclear technology. Later, under less emotional circumstances, this was all put in a more factual perspective for the public – both when it became clear that no one was killed or injured in this particular reactor accident, and by the relative comparison of TMI to the extremely severe meltdown and substantial loss of life resulting from the Chernobyl disaster.
