Remembering the Three Mile Island Meltdown
Thirty years ago, the word "meltdown" was seared into the American consciousness when the Unit 2 reactor at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant near Harrisburg, PA melted the radioactive fuel rods in the core of the reactor and began leaking radiation into the environment in the early morning hours of March 28, 1979.
Radiation leaked from the damaged reactor for days as government regulators scrambled to get radiation monitoring equipment into surrounding communities. The Governor of Pennsylvania eventually ordered an evacuation of pregnant women and children. The accident at Three Mile Island sent the nuclear industry into a tailspin. Already staggering under the weight of over $100 billion dollars in cost overruns, the meltdown showed Americans that not only was nuclear power expensive - it was also dangerous. The nuclear industry turned a multi-million dollar asset into a multi-billion dollar liability overnight, and demonstrated that both the government and industry were thoroughly unprepared for the accident and its aftermath.
But now that memories of the meltdown and the ensuing panic have faded, the nuclear industry and those in their employ are claiming that that Three Mile Island was really a success story and that the radiation was contained.
Remarkable! When you're being paid to promote a "nuclear renaissance," I suppose you have to dispose of some problematic facts. Contrary to the claims of the nuclear lobby, the Three Mile Island accident spewed radiation into the environment for days and crippled the U.S. nuclear industry. The question that has persisted since the accident isn't whether radiation was released but how much radiation was released.
Even the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC) fact sheet on the Three Mile Island accident acknowledges that the meltdown resulted in a significant release of radiation. According to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 10 million curies of radiation escaped the damaged reactor core (a "curie" is a unit of radioactivity that denotes how many radioactive atoms in a particular collection of atoms are giving off radiation; 1 curie = 37 billion atoms giving off radiation). However, independent and unbiased nuclear engineers who reexamined the accident estimate that as much as 150 million curies of radiation may have escaped to the environment.
According to government reports on the accident, the radiation monitors went off scale before 8:00 a.m. on March 28, eliminating the only direct means of assessing the quantities and rate of release of radiation from the reactor. This information was vital to an accurate evaluation of the consequences of the meltdown.
The Department of Energy (DOE) later dispatched a helicopter to take measurements in the radioactive cloud escaping the damaged reactor core. The radiation detected by the DOE's helicopter indicated that the atomic plume could be detected out to a distance of 16 miles from the reactor. Yet the nuclear industry and their lobbyists would have the public believe that the release of as much as 150 million of curies of radiation into the communities near Three Mile Island was without consequence. Don't believe it.
Despite the government and nuclear industry denials, a peer-reviewed study conducted in 1997 by Dr. Steven Wing of the University of North Carolina found that lung cancer and leukemia rates downwind from Three Mile Island were two to ten times higher than cancer rates upwind of the accident.
Even the nuclear cheerleaders at the NRC acknowledge that "exposure to any level of radiation is assumed to carry with it a certain amount of risk." The scientific community generally assumes that any exposure to ionizing radiation may cause undesirable biological effects and that the likelihood of these effects increases as the dose increases. The NRC's fact sheet on the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation states that, "any amount of radiation may pose some risk for causing cancer and hereditary effect, and that the risk is higher for higher radiation exposures." There is no such thing as a "safe" dose of radiation.
On this 30th anniversary of the accident at Three Mile Island, it's important that we remember the meltdown and its aftermath. As nuclear corporations attempt to resell reactors as clean and safe, we must remember that Three Mile Island revealed the truth about the nuclear industry. Not only is nuclear power expensive; it's also dangerous and deadly.
- Jim Riccio is the Nuclear Policy Analyst for Greenpeace in Washington, DC.
More information on the abysmal economics and dangers of nuclear power can be found on the Greenpeace web site. http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/campaigns/nuclear
The government documents referenced in this article can not be found on the NRC's web site but have been posted online by Dickinson College. http://www.threemileisland.org/resource/index.php?aid=00027
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How many people have been killed in France lately by nuclear meltdowns?
Wonder why.
Maybe the technology of today is more advanced than that of 2 or 3 decades ago.
Duh.
"How many people have been killed in France lately by nuclear meltdowns?"
Neither lately, nor at any time, has anyone in France, or out of it, been physically harmed by a nuclear meltdown. At all. Meanwhile, the major non-nuclear sources of energy routinely kill. Among them, the fossil fuels provide both the deaths of a few people, and significant revenues -- e.g. those documented at http://www.opec.org/library/Special%20Publications/pdf/WGW2008.pdf to a great many people.
200 thousand people have been killed by Nuclear technology.
France dumps it's nuclear waste all over the planet.
A France Reprocessing plant burned out of control, releasing vast amount of radiation.
How do you KNOW it hasn't caused excess cancers: Killed people?
You don't.
Why do you want to increase the risk Global Thermonuclear war triggered by a terrorist or a failed state, for energy we can get elsewhere?
DuganS1: Here are some reasons why nuclear power is dangerous: 1. Chernobyl. (and you might also look up Fission Stories by Russ Kick if you want to see how a basketball, a porno magazine, or a school of jellyfish have almost caused meltdowns in the U.S.) 2. Spent fuel rods and the waste that comes from nuclear reactors continue to be radioactive for thousands or millions of years, and we have no place to store any of it (unless we can store it in your backyard, DuganS1). 3. Terror!sts and people like A.Q. Khan who sell nuclear technology to terror!sts and rogue/failed states seek the byproducts of the nuclear energy industry to further their political goals (see d!rty b0mb). If we were to finally find a place to store all the waste (like Yucca Mountain), loading it all onto trains and cruising through our towns late at night is exactly the kind of target the terror!sts would love to see us do. It would mean a rolling d!rty b0mb, and they could just choose whichever point on the journey would be most destructive. If our military can't keep it's weapons out of the wrong hands, I doubt the nuclear industry can keep radioactive materials out of the wrong hands.
Next up: Debunking "clean" coal.
Nothing is completely safe. People crash their cars and die every day. Airplanes crash. Coal mines collapse and trap workers inside. Boats sink. Electrical workers get electrocuted to death. etc. etc. For the nuclear power industry, one accident in the past 30 years tells me it's pretty safe. And we need more nuclear energy to take pressure off our supplies of fossil fuels. We need to built more nuclear power plants, period.
Why risk global thermonuclear war, triggered by terrorists or a failed state Bomb?
You seem to have death wish. You want completely unregulated markets, which crash and kill people, leading to world wars, and you want to risk the end of all life for electric we can get from other places.
Why? Even Coal won't suddenly end all life.
What does "global thermonuclear war" or "a failed state bomb" or "deregulation" have to do with building some more nuclear power plants in this country?
Nuclear energy is the best source of power, ever.
It has its best location - the Sun.
Please, keep it there.
And there is a Fission Reactor at the Earths Core,
another good place for nukes.
The Dresden bombing killed more than 100,000 people, about the same lethality as
the Nagasaki bomb (80,000). Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been rebuilt and with
larger populations than ever. Question: which kills more people yearly, radioactivity or
non-military explosives? Think construction/mining accidents involving dynamite.
Japan who suffered Hiroshima and Nagasaki is expanding their Nuclear Energy program
(30% total energy use in 2005, 40% by 2010).
The Chernobyl accident contaminated Pripyat River which feeds into the Dnieper River; in
a few years the water was deemed safe. Many animals at the time of the accident
died or were sick of radiation poisining. The next generation had a number of defects.
Subsequent generations were judged defect-free.
Question: which kills more people yearly, radioactivity or hydroelectric power?
Question: which one threatens Global thermonuclear war triggered by a terrorist or failed state Nuke?
I don't want Nukes OR Coal. But Nukes are worse.
We don't need to risk all life on earth for electricity.
over 200,000 people have died from Nuclear technology, The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Some try to convince us we can separate the Energy technology from the bomb technology.
We haven't yet.
Some compare deaths from routine operations of nuclear power plants, as if the waste would not last a million years, as if the risk of a terrorist dirty bomb or nuclear bomb was not increased by increased use of nuclear power.
This is the same short sighted thinking that allowed AIG to issue Insurance without reserve.
Shortsightedness with nuclear technology is truly apocalyptic in it's consequences.
What are the odds that a single terrorist nuke, will trigger a world nuclear war?
We can get our energy from solar and wind. Do no believe those who say otherwise.
Just so we're all clear on this, according to your 'research':
1. Nuclear bombs and nuclear power plants are one in the same?
2. The AIG "melt down" portends a nuclear power plant melt down?
3. Terrorists are awaiting the building of more nuclear power plants so as to implement the development of a nuclear weapon?
While I genuinely applaud your altruistic and studied concern for humanity and its environment I cannot accept the assumptions that we are destined to "shortsightedness" and hence apocalyptic disaster with respect to the nuclear power industry and, therefore, can never derive benefit from it. Nor is it plausible to think that a terrorists only access to nuclear materials lies with continued development of nuclear power facilities in the US. More likely, the missing weaponry from the failed USSR is more the suspect. Even more so, it is unlikely that the rest of the world would follow suit whether we ceased power plant development or not. The reality is that, in this world, nuclear power is here to stay, like it or not. Given the apparent nature of your commitment, fervor and tenacity, it might be better applied to insuring that the nuclear power industry is adequately monitored so as to eliminate any valid concern regarding shortsightedness and incident.
Wow, that's lame. If we don't do it somebody else will.
The AIG folks thought the housing bubble would never burst. They had computer models that proved it.
If Nuclear power technology is no dual use for Bomb making,
why do we care about Iran's Nuclear POWER refinement activities?
This batch of pro nuke trolls seems to have an PR agenda: use what ever argument you can, false or not, to win. So you probably are paid by the nuclear industry.
Potassium-40 occurs in natural potassium (and thus in some commercial salt substitutes) in sufficient quantity that those salt substitutes can be used as a radioactive source for classroom demonstrations. I have my students to use cheap geiger counters to assay potassium in their experiments; they get all freaked out. The proportion of Potassium-40 in your body is the same as in the salt substitute.
In a human body of 70 kg mass, about 4,400 nuclei of 40K decay per second.
More people (> 100) died in the past 10 years installing and maintaining Windpower in the US than from Nuclear Energy worldwide.
More people died of melanoma (from Sun exposure) than from Nuclear Energy. In the installation of
solar energy systems, how many people will die of heat stroke, melanoma? How many will be
disfigured by basal cell carcinoma? How many will suffer from cataracts from UV overexposure?
Production of PV panels uses a lot of toxic chemicals. How many people will die from cancer secondary to the exposure to said toxic chemicals?
"died ... maintaining Windpower ...
In the installation of solar energy systems, how many people will die ... from UV overexposure?
Good points. The Sun is very handy for workplace illumination, but does include deadly rays, like those of nuclear waste in its early decades, so those people who refer to that stuff as "toxic" are on rather thin ice if they do otherwise than say sunlight is also toxic.
If you look at the recent ~200-gigawatt spate of gas-fired power plant construction, and understand that each plant full-power year of operation uses about $250 million worth of natural gas, and that this includes $40 million in royalties, plus drives up natgas prices in other markets where it is taxed, you will understand that the many nuclear plants that were stopped in the construction phase would, if they were operating now, be depriving government of several billion dollars per year in natural gas revenue. That is the money that drives antinuclear casuistry; plus, maybe, a little from the gas suppliers themselves.
So your later points about chemicals from PV plants are, in themselves, not good, and also not to the point. Wind, solar, conservation are all *tokens* beloved of the gas interests. Wind turbines kill a lot of people per gigawatt-year, but the main death-dealing their proponents intend is from the fossil fuels that back them up, and financially sustain, through government cheques, those proponents.
Some man made radioactive elements have half-lives well over 10,000 years. The pyramids aren't even that old. Who's got the scientific solution that is sure to last 10 millenia?
People could design and build a containment for the saltshakers in the *Titanic* that would have a very good chance of preventing any salt escape in the first 10,000 years.
After that, they might salt the ocean. Deeply buried nuclear waste is the same: coals to Newcastle, baby pee in the ocean. Read M. King Hubbert's "Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels". He treats the problem honestly.
"Not only is nuclear power expensive; it's also dangerous and deadly."
It's all relative: Overall nuclear power is nowhere near as dangerous and deadly as power from coal. It's also an essential part of any effective package to combat global climate change in the medium term. Even Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace eventually came round to that conclusion:
http://www.physics.harvard.edu/~wilson/energypmp/greenpeace.html
Regretably, Mr Kessler's article is close to Republican fear and smear, and in scientific terms like the Pope commenting on condoms and AIDS.
PS. I do have a PhD in Chemical Engineering, but have no connection to the nuclear industry and am a member of the Sierra Club.
Except for those pesky proliferation problems resulting in Terrorist Nukes decimating our cities, nukes are fine, well, actually nukes still suck,
Coal will never allow folks to create nuclear bombs, will it?
Coal's radioactive emission are 1/1000th of the radioactively produced in a single reactor.
Roof top solar and eliminate the need for coal and nukes, forever. Cheaper, safer, less grid load, faster. Sorry to all your folks who work in the Nuke industry, but really, there will more and safer jobs in solar energy.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste
Plus, what's the difference in quantity between fission waste and coal ash? Hundreds, thousands of times? I'm still for going solar, but I get tired of all the nuke hating.
As for the claims that meltdowns will do harm to many, i suggest you actually look at how a containment building is constructed and how the reactor vessel is made, then use your brain and think what it would take to actually melt a foot or more of steel, then make it through anywhere from 4 to 12 feet of steel and concrete. Even if it could those barriers alone would give time to prevent its eventual release to the environment. I agree that Three Mile Island was a big mistake by the operators of the plant. But just as your car has improved in the last 30 years so has the nuclear industry. Constant improvements in equipment, monitoring, and training have taken place. Documentation and observation of everything we do is constant to make sure no one makes an error that could compromise the safety of the plant. As for comments about the managements of these plants cutting corners to save money, are absurd. A typical nuke plant today makes over 1 million dollars a day in profit while operating. Do you think they would intentionally jeopardize that and risk turning it into multi-million or billion dollar piece of junk? The NRC is are not in the pockets of the utilities like some people claim, I have personally seen plant managers and vice presidents shake in their safety boots when inspectors come around.
Just like AIG, right?
The Systemic risk is what you miss.
The systemic risk for nuclear power is truly apocalyptic.
That's why the Government has to insure the insurance companies that cover nukes.
Apocalyptic may be a bit of a stretch . . . Also, I think there's a bit of a difference between the risk of real world operations of a single facility by engineers and unionized workers, and the risk associated with computer models of complex interdependent global financial markets. Scope comes to mind as being slight more constrained in the latter.
After reading all these posts from the anti-nuclear crowd I really need to speak up. You people have no clue what your are talking about. I have been in the power industry over 30 years. Both Nuclear and fossil plants. Fossil plants scare the heck out me, they are dirty, dangerous, and a menace to the surrounding communities. This means coal, oil, and gas plants. Give me a nuke any day. If the claims about radiation exposure were true then I would probably be long dead and buried. The amounts of radiation coming out of a plant are so small its amazing they can measure them. I often have problems getting into a plant because of the radon I pickup on my clothing never mind gettting out of a plant with anything. The waste as you people are worried about is another ridiculous point. First it is not a liquid, or anything that can easily dissolve and get into the water table. I know because it is my job to inspect that waste or fuel after it is used in the reactor. Yes it can be dangerous to you if you mishandle it but it wont hurt anyone outside the room. It is in a ceramic form sealed in non-corrosive tubing, imagine sealing your tile floor in stainless steel, do you think that will leak into the environment?
"First it is not a liquid, or anything that can easily dissolve and get into the water table. I know because it is my job to inspect that waste or fuel after it is used in the reactor."
Really? Just goggle reactor generates liquid waste
to prove that wrong.
So you pro nukes folks bait and switch: The "once through" is a disastrously wasteful dead end.
Wait, you say, We have these new experimental liquid thorium reactors.
Hey wait, I thought you said it wasn't a liquid?
Again you are misinformed. Just the fact that you cant spell google shows it. ALL commercial reactors in the U.S. are light water reactors using uranium enriched between 2-5% in ceramic pellet form encased in non-corrosive metal, period. Any water that has been contaminated is run through resin beds to clean and purify the water. So yes there are NO liquid wastes coming out of those plants. Experimental reactors, reactors used to produce plutonium, or other test reactors I cannot comment on as I have not worked on those. However that is not what we are talking about, we are talking about commercial reactors, those that would be built to create power. And its not liquid thorium, the thorium is solid. You must be thinking of liquid flouride which is not the fuel or the waste. Do us all a favor and start growing your brain and use it.
AMEN! Guys, I have been a consultant to Heidelberger Kraftanlagen, a German company that builds plants. If you have a problem finding a U.S. company that can build safe nuclear plants, let me know, Heidelberger can do it and has a history of no melt-down whatever. And PLEASE do not tell me that it cannot be done, I know it can.
Why do you Germans keep selling rogue states reactor technology?
it has been decades since Exxon Valdez and the slaughter in Bophal, and yet both multi-nationals have fought to escape any responsibility with their massive legal teams and public relation onslaughts. My problem, among others, is who would pay for any accidents?
"My problem, among others, ..."
One real problem is enough. If they're all something other than real, then yes, it's good to have a portfolio of them. Also known as whack-a-mole; read an AGW "debate" some time.
" ... is who would pay for any accidents?"
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf67.html
BS, the governmnet is the insurer of last resort, just like AIG.
http://www.nuclearpowerprocon.org/pop/Price-Anderson.htm
As far as I'm concerned, promotion of nuclear energy is tantamount to a promotion of the Jim Crow Laws in the South, apartheid in South Africa, and every other Devil's advocate position that the right wing loves to take.
The reference to Steve Wing seems to be from a press release at
http://www.unc.edu/news/archives/feb97/wing.html
The peer-reviewed paper is Environmental Health Perspectectives 105(1):52 and free on PubMed. He did not do a study, per se, but a critique of work done in 1990 by the group assigned to look for a relation between cancer rates. The peer-reviewed paper itself does not say cancer rates downwind are two to ten times those upwind; you would have to subselect from the support that statement.
The 1997 re-analysis gave essentially the same numerical results as the original study, but different conclusions. This resulted in a lively exchange of letters to the editor, also available on PubMed, resulting in the disclosure that the re-analysis was requested and paid for by attorneys for plaintiffs in a class-action suit.
The original 1990 study was pretty serious work, and actually did find some cancer rates to be relatively higher in the downwind locations, but "overall ... no convincing evidence that radiation releases ... influenced cancer risk". A longer-term followup published in 2003 [E.H.P. 111(31):341] came to similar conclusions.
Searching PubMed for "cancer coal miners" is sobering.
Interesting post. All full of emotion. All based on lies.
The 15 Million Curies is a made up number based on nothing.
The 5 Million Curies is a made up number based on nothing. The actual release was 43,000 Curies of radioactive Krypton, and possibly 20 Curies of radioiodine. Significant quantities without a doubt, but nowhere near the millions cited in the screed.
There is only one heavily contested epidemiological study showing an increase in cancer deaths downwind of TMI after the accident.
The maximum radiation exposure as a result of the accident to anyone not on TMI property (the protected area) was roughly one millirem (less than a chest x-ray).
Please, don't be a sheep. Find out the real facts. They're available.
Daniel Kessler is either lying outright or doesn't know what he's talking about. There is no third option.
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