The Age of Radiance (56 page)

A
s fears of being incinerated by thermonuclear war subsided in the twilight of the Cold War, worries of an attack from a very different source intensified. On the banks of the Susquehanna River on March 28, 1979, at 4:00 a.m., pumps moving steam to the electrical generator and returning water to the nuclear reactor in the thee-month-old Unit 2 of Metropolitan Edison Company’s Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station (TMI), which warped and woofed electricity for the residents of Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, stopped functioning. This triggered an automatic shutdown of the turbine, and a reactor SCRAM—control rods automatically inserted, and all fission halted. The safety procedures worked, and everything was as it should be.

The radiant core, however, remained hot. Auxiliary coolant pumps engaged, but Met Ed workers had violated a federal rule by shutting those pumps’ valves for maintenance without in tandem shutting down the reactor. As the steam built and pressure increased, a valve automatically opened to release it, and then shut as it was designed to do, according to the indicator lamp in the control room. But that lamp was broken, the valve was stuck, and through this leak, unknown for several hours by anyone, thirty-two thousand gallons of the core’s liquid coolant evaporated away.

In the reactor, steam pockets created both additional heat on the fuel plates and pressure on the instruments, which misled the operators into thinking adequate water was available. In time, that steam combined with fission into an atomic heat that eroded the fuel rods’ zirconium cladding, and they began to crack open (uranium dioxide pellets look like black versions of the silica desiccants packaged with electronics to reduce moisture). The radiation monitor flashed—but the operators, not seeing any
reason why this should be happening, decided this instrument was the broken one. At 4:15, radioactive coolant began to stream into the containment building, where a sump pump drove it to a building outside the containment dome’s walls.

The staff believed that turning off the circulating coolant would then be the right thing to do. It was not. By 6:00 a.m., the top of the core was fully exposed, and the nuclear heat began to melt the fuel rods’ sleeves, greatly irradiating the escaping coolant and creating an ever-growing cloud of volatile hydrogen. At the same time, the control room changed shifts. One of the new arrivals noticed the stuck valve, but by then, thirty-two thousand gallons of coolant, three hundred times as radioactive as normal, had leaked out in twenty-five minutes, striking emergency detectors. Radiation alarms rang throughout the complex. Unknown and unsuspected by the estimated twenty to sixty employees now working the control room, twenty tons of rods had already melted and were pooling into a radioactive lava.

To an outsider this cascade of human incompetence might seem Three Stooges laughable. But in fact this series of small, seemingly unrelated acts, combined with a control room festooned with over six hundred alarm lights, meant, in a serious accident, so many alarms were ringing or buzzing or flashing that practically no employee could grasp the underlying problem, or its solution.

Following federal regulations on radiation alarms, Met Edison declared a general emergency, meaning area residents faced a
“potential for serious radiological consequences.” This required an appearance by Lieutenant Governor William Scranton III, representing the state of Pennsylvania, who passed along the utility’s assurances at a morning press conference that “everything is under control.” That afternoon, he admitted that the crisis was “more complex than the company first led us to believe.” After learning that Met Ed had vented the plant’s radioactive gases without informing them, state regulatory officials asked for immediate intervention from the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission. One of those commissioners later said,
“We didn’t learn for years—until the reactor vessel was physically opened—that by the time the plant operator called the NRC at about eight a.m., roughly one-half of the uranium fuel had already melted.”

On the following day (March 29) an NRC spokesman told the public that the “danger was over.” In fact, those at the site faced a terrifying conundrum. Control room instruments showed that the reactor had been pressurized by two atmospheres, which meant that the steam hitting the zirconium cladding had produced hydrogen. The released gas had formed into a bubble,
which if it came in contact with oxygen could, like the
Hindenburg
, explode, breaking through the containment shell—that iconic dome of nuclear power in the United States that protects a plant’s neighbors from radiant infection in case something goes wrong—and release untold amounts of radioactive gas. Emergency-cooling expert Roger Mattson explained to the NRC,
“They can’t get rid of the bubble. They have tried cycling and pressurizing and depressurizing; they have tried natural convection a couple of days ago; they have been on forced circulation; they have steamed out the pressurizer; they have liquided out the pressurizer. The bubble stays.” They were stymied. Mattson argued that to shut down the reactor, the pressure had to be reduced, but lowered pressure could expand the bubble, which might force all the core’s water out and lead to meltdown.

For two days federal officials had accepted Met Ed’s assurances and grossly underestimated the danger. Now that they knew what was really happening, they overcompensated. The Food and Drug Administration woke chemical-manufacturer executives in the early-morning hours to immediately requisition a quarter million bottles of potassium iodide, which fills the human thyroid gland so that it won’t sup the radioactive iodine, which is the most dangerous human carcinogen in a damaged reactor’s by-products. The NRC then advised Pennsylvania governor Thornburgh to evacuate pregnant women and preschoolers from a five-mile radius and announced at a press conference that a full evacuation of between ten and twenty miles might be necessary to prevent harm from radioactive effluvia, especially in the case of young children. The Environmental Protection Agency immediately sampled the area’s soil, water, and plants for contamination, including the milk of cows and goats and the tongues of white-tailed deer (which concentrate residue from the leaves they lick—the first sign of polluting fallout).

On day three, an AEC representative arrived, decided that an incorrect formula had been used in assessing the bubble’s risk, and directed efforts to burn away the hydrogen out of the containment towers and extinguish the bubble. Met Ed vented 13 million curies of radioactive gases, which included less than seventeen curies of the iodine-13 that can trigger thyroid cancer—meaning no danger to the public unless the skies were filled with rainstorms and everyone stood around faceup with their mouths open. Even so, Governor Richard Thornburgh broadcast an alert that farm animals should be covered and only given stored feed, and that everyone within a ten-mile radius of TMI should stay indoors. Walter Cronkite’s lead story for that evening’s CBS evening news began,
“The world has never known a day quite like today. It faced the considerable uncertainties and dangers
of the worst nuclear power plant accident of the Atomic Age. And the horror tonight is that it could get much worse. The potential is there for the ultimate risk of meltdown at Three Mile Island.” Hearing this, alongside conflicting reports from the utility, from Thornburgh, and from federal officials, 140,000 Pennsylvanians fled.

On Sunday, April 1, while Thornburgh accompanied President Carter to inspect the plant (as a lieutenant in the navy’s nuclear submarine program, Carter had done graduate work in reactor technology and nuclear physics), the EPA announced that the accident did not elevate radiation enough to cause even one additional death among the area’s residents. This reassured the public, many returned to their homes, and five days later on April 6, Thornburgh announced that the “crisis had passed.”

In its aftermath report, the NRC insisted that no one had been harmed: “Estimates are that the average dose to about 2 million people in the area was only about 1 millirem. To put this into context, exposure from a chest X-ray is about 6 millirem.” It would take two years before the reactor could be inspected with remote-controlled cameras, which revealed that half the core had melted, and 90 percent of the fuel rod cladding had dissolved. Yet, its containment shell had worked, the reactor vessel’s walls keeping its radioactive effluvia from infecting the outside world.

Though it had no effect whatsoever on human health—the evacuation posed more danger to the public than anything leaking out of the plant—Three Mile Island shocked both the American people and Washington’s nuclear powers. Before TMI, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission believed safety meant equipment design, maintenance, and doubling-up, with every crucial mechanical component having a backup. Though part of TMI’s failure was the stuck valve and its broken indicator light, the real danger lay with poorly trained workers, corporate mismanagement, a warning-lamp and buzzer system that overwhelmed human comprehension, and government ineptitude. The lesson learned by American citizens, meanwhile, was that, when it came to nuclear power, the utility companies didn’t know what they were doing, and neither did local or national bureaucrats, and when it came to public safety, the evidence was plain: no one was in charge.

In a remarkable coincidence, a movie had been playing in American theaters for twelve days before the first sign of trouble on the Susquehanna.
The China Syndrome
told the story of TV journalist Jane Fonda and nuclear plant employee Jack Lemmon facing meltdown because of a California reactor’s inadequate coolant, which would render an area “the size of Pennsylvania permanently uninhabitable.” The film’s title came from the fear that uranium
melting from an unquenchable atomic fire could burn through a containment building’s concrete flooring, then dig its way, lavalike, to China. In reality, meltdown could burn through the floor and contaminate the local water table, rendering local territory unfit for agriculture as will soon happen on the other side of the world.

The movie started with Fonda’s PowerPoint-like explanation of how a nuclear reactor produced electricity, which was very likely the first time many understood exactly what happened inside an atomic power plant. Americans had been introduced to nuclear science from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and now they would learn about nuclear power from Three Mile Island and
The China Syndrome.
The combination of movie and meltdown triggered an outburst of public activism, with sixty-five thousand marching on Washington in May 1979, followed by a series of Madison Square Garden “NO NUKES” concerts, and two hundred thousand gathering in Central Park in September; three years later would see the largest protest in American history when an estimated 1 million gathered at a Central Park no-nuke demonstration on June 12, 1982. One of those speaking to the 1979 crowds was
China
’s Jane Fonda, whose activism in turn inspired Edward Teller to publicly lobby in favor of nuclear power, until he suffered a heart attack . . . which he blamed on her:
“You might say that I was the only one whose health was affected by that reactor near Harrisburg. No, that would be wrong. It was not the reactor. It was Jane Fonda. Reactors are not dangerous.”

In the wake of TMI and
The China Syndrome
, the containment dome—the prominent safety feature of American nuclear power plants, which had kept Three Mile Island from contaminating an area the size of Pennsylvania—became ominous, and mythic. Electrical generating stations that everyone drove by without a second thought now seemed to deserve many second thoughts, and nuclear power in America, begun from a science fiction novel,
The World Set Free
, would be strangled by a science fiction movie,
The China Syndrome
. Physicist James Mahaffey: “The nuclear power expansion was already dead years before the TMI disaster, and TMI was merely the last nail in the coffin. . . . Nuclear power went into a coma. Electrical power delivered in the United States by nuclear reactions stopped in 1977 at 20 percent, where it has remained ever since.”

A few years after TMI’s meltdown, engineer Stanley Watras was working in eastern Pennsylvania on the new Limerick reactor when, one morning,
“all the alarms went off,” he said. “Sirens went off. Red lights went off. It came out on a digital display that I was highly contaminated throughout
my entire body. So, obviously, that kind of set me back.” He was scrubbed clean, checked with dosimeters, found to be decontaminated, and allowed to go home for the day. But when he came back to work the next morning, it happened all over again, and it kept happening for two weeks. Finally Limerick nuclear physicists agreed to inspect his house. Watras: “They took air samples, little grab samples. It was the standard norm back in 1984. They took these samples down to the chemistry lab and they found out that it was that the place was highly contaminated with background radon radiation.”

Radon is a naturally occurring gas rising from the decay of uranium and thorium beneath your feet. In a horrible irony, it would turn out that the area surrounding Three Mile Island was four times as tainted with radon as the US average. Though many residents are convinced to this day that the disaster contaminated their lands, workers were in fact never irradiated by TMI; instead, they were contaminating Three Mile Island from their radon-tainted basements.