Forty-five years ago today — March 28th — Central Pennsylvania suffered a historic tragedy when one of the nuclear reactors at Three Mile Island experienced a partial meltdown.
The accident, which occurred at the Generating Station along the Susquehanna River on March 28, 1979, went down in history as the most serious nuclear power plant accident in United States history.
According to the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, researchers were able to determine that the meltdown had “negligible effects on the physical health of individuals or the environment” — but that’s not to say there weren’t any lasting impacts.
The accident prompted tighter regulations on nuclear power plant operations, as well as sparking fear in the hearts of those living in Central Pennsylvania and beyond.
Here’s a commemoration from the Pennsylvania Historicdal Society:\
Three Mile Island Anniversary
Thursday, March 28, 1979, is a day forever etched in the memory of most Pennsylvanians and many Americans. During the pre-dawn hours, events swiftly unfolded at a nuclear power plant on an island in the middle of the Susquehanna River near Harrisburg that would lead to the worst commercial nuclear accident in the nation’s history. In the days that followed, Three Mile Island (TMI) would become known across the world.
The nuclear accident was a result of technical malfunctions and operator error. The crisis lasted for several days and prompted the evacuation of thousands of residents. The scope of the physical accident was relatively small, but the impact on the country’s nuclear power industry was enormous. #Historymatters #pennsylvania #pennsylvaniahistory
And 12 days before the Three Mile Island accident the movie The China Syndrome premiered. However, 9 years before, on July 17, 1970, the Humboldt Bay Nuclear Power Plant suffered a Blackout Loss-Of-Cooling-Accident, resulting in damage to 10% of the fuel elements in the nuclear core and the purging of a large amount of radioactive emissions which passed over the residences of several thousand Eureka residents. It lasted only 18 minutes, but Eureka came within 60 minutes of a meltdown. The Joint Committee on Atomic Safety, the Nuclear Regulatory Agency, Pacific Gas & Electric and the Humboldt County Sheriffs Department kept it secret, alerting no one. Why? A total of 59 commercial nuclear power reactors were then under construction in the U. S. It would have been bad for business.
Wow, Tom! Did not know that.
It’s also the anniversary of the infamous Collier Park Riot of 1971.
I lived in Philadelphia when Three Mile Island happened, and I begged one of my closest friends to flee the two hours with her family – to my house. She didn’t, though she did leave the area to a friend’s about a half hour away.
Today, she is dealing with a blood cancer, but who knows if there is a
connection.
Hello Tom
I’m Janice Christine Paul. I was 9 during the ACC
IDENT that Summer morning. It’s been brutal living in my body and becoming disabled far too soon. Lost my dream of becoming an older Hospital Intern, maybe LA General ER…I’m prety tough. By the time I’d completed my USF Graduate Degree, I was too exhausted, and unwell to attend my first day of Medical School. Me!, an older student moving to Montserrat! Yale was my first of many applications! I’m learning challenged from an Optic nerve issue. They taught in small groups. The Professors change and the group was stable…cool stuff. I adapt well.
Bless you Tom for your words and the work you do.
Im 64, and I just received notice that my broken genes once insignificant, are now of significance, link link link. I know there are many of us going down rabbit holes searching or answers, hoping for early detection, maybe root cause. My book, not completely finished is titled: Had They Told Us: A true story of Hope and Deception
Feel free to share. One plant is one too many. I’m spreading the good word…power in numbers.
Hi Tom,
We have not met. I know you as rileytaxevader i believe. I’m taking your work and from others to hold them accountable. My teeth are being tested, our tree rings and even urine. I lived a mile down wind and acquired many, upwards of 15, autoimmune diseases. DNA still in the test mode. I can’t thank you enough for your work. I think I even pulled up the math you calculate at 18 minutes. I was contacted by JML films. They found us and want to tell our story. I just want you to know what you share is making a profound difference. Im now working with Joe Mangeon as well. Small world. Here’s to improving 2026 as best we can. Poster Child Still Alive. I can’t stand down.
And over the last 45 years, coal power in the U.S. killed more than a million people, sickened millions more, ran up hundreds of billions in medical expenses, released thousands of tonnes of heavy-metal toxins, and billions of tonnes of CO2, and devastated the mountains and ecology of Appalachia. But I expect there will be no historical marker for that.
Ever since my early opposition to nuclear power, I’ve been keeping an eye on all sources. Now it seems to me that there are really no perfect options but nuclear – nuclear needs to stay in the mix.
Look at the damage being caused by electric cars – being touted as THE answer.
Drive less would be the answer, in smaller, fuel efficient hybrid cars.
Former anti-nuke here as well. I trusted people I should not have because they were an accepted part of the larger environmentalist community. I think future historians are going to look back and wonder; what could we have been thinking?–opposing nuclear and helping coal. What a strange notion of environmentalism.
I expect we’ll never have a perfect form of nuclear, but for particular things like powering large ships and removing enormous amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere, it could easily turn out that we’ll never have anything better.
Okay Nicholas – you have been writing the same-like comments for 2 years now, always pro-nuke. Give it a rest.
Good time to evaluate media monopolization mega-mergers into the 5 mega global conglomerate media corporations that control 96% of everything; Newspapers, magazines, book publishers, cable networks. Cable companies, internet service providers, national cable news networks, satellite radio, satellite television, local radio and local tv stations, and all the film studios.
Unless Americans demand trust busting protections, we’ll never see another “Erin Brockovitch”, or a “China Syndrome” again that would move the public to action. For that matter another we’ll never see another “Big Lebowski”, or a “Dazed and Confuse.”
Most harmful are the stories suppressed for profit or politico-corporate gain that willfully attempt to dumb down the public more and more.
The beautiful thing that I have been witnessing for the last year or two is that most Americans are adapting. Frequently now the public is becoming more adept at recognizing narratives over actual news and increasingly we are no longer buying into the PR firm crafted BS corporate narratives.
With the help of people like our neighbors that gather here on the OB Rag, we will continue to inform and promote the engagement needed for effective civil discourse in our communities. Together, in ways both small and large we are all helping to bust down the backroom doors and bypassing the politico-corporate censorship apparatus and doing our part to create a well informed electorate.
Thank you Frank Gormlie, Geoff Page, Mat Wahlstrom and all of the contributors and investigative activists that keep this honest publication, the OB Rag, up and running to keep informing San Diegans, well. Thank you for providing a moderated platform to share ideas, ask questions, debate issues and collaborate to solve problems that in many cases are being manufactured by the politico-corporate complex that we find ourselves fighting against rather than representing us.
If The China Syndrome moved the public to action which constrained the development and use of nuclear power, the chief beneficiary of that would most likely have been coal power–which is orders of magnitude worse than nuclear power. (Some leading anti-nukes of that period actually argued that we don’t need nuclear because we have abundant supplies of coal.) There may not have been a willful intent to dumb down, mislead, or harm the public, but misguided or uninformed good intentions can still produce the same result.
Some sold us on “we’ll figure out that pesky problem of safe storage for radioactive waste” (that has a half life of 27,000 years.) Some 45 years later we still don’t have a lock on that one either.
Selling nuclear energy as some kind of “clean energy alternative by implying there is little to no downside, including the most volitile byproduct waste ever created by mankind; radioactive waste that in itself has been known to cause a multiplicity of cancers, globally, is pretty much provably absolute malarky. Always has been always will be.” And it will never end, literally.
“It’s a societal problem that has been handed down to us from our parents’ generation. And we are—more or less—handing it to our children.
– Gerald S. Frankel, materials scientist, Ohio State University
Opposing nuclear energy does not make one pro-coal, nor does it excuse away the numerous legitimate reasons coal has been a horrible alternative, for centuries none-the-less, that you have mentioned.
The real alternative energy is solar, but the inherent problem is political.
Solar cannot be centralized and distributed cost effectively over a network of power lines to the grid at a high enough profit margin for the corporate power monopolies to make a more concerted effort.
Individual solar on the other hand has proven more and more 100% achievable off grid with the advancement of storage technologies. Best for the environment, but that cuts Edison, PG&E and SDG&E and the political parties out of the loop,. So with that goes easy party money campaign donations.
Single family home solar has proven 100% off-grid sustainable for all of my friends that have installed systems.
Now the state has cut solar useres off from selling their own power back to the grid, and subsidies have ceased as the result of California State legislation. So much for” environmentally leading the way for the world”
It is another reason why the City(s) is/are approving developments of grid-dependent-high-density-luxury-rentals by the tens of thousands and building at triple time speed.
Newsom abused the unilateral power that was lavished upon him when the State Assembly and the Senate cut and ran in the face of the protracted public emergency that was the pandemic, when he unilaterally ordered Diablo Canyon re-opened. His unilateral stroke of the pen re-opening Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant was basically free from any discernible scrutiny by either house of the State legislature. And, ironically the plant’s re-opening occurred almost simultaneously more or less with the Japanese Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant beginning to dump radioactive waste water into the Pacific Ocean.
Last I checked, the Pacific Ocean current takes that radioactive waste from the shores of Japan East, now reaching the shores of a beach near you in the Great States of California, Oregon, Washington, and Alaska. Not to mention Mexico and Canada.
Most of spent fuel (around 95%) has a half-life in the billions of years, because it is just uranium. Many anti-nukes believe spent fuel has been causing cancers globally, because that’s what they heard from other anti-nukes, but that doesn’t make it knowledge. There’s no scientific evidence to support the belief, so it’s really more like of an article of faith.
So far, the cumulative death toll from nuclear power spent fuel has yet to budge from zero. We haven’t decided yet what we are going to do with spent fuel, but this is a small and non-urgent issue, and we are still in the process of developing options. It would be dumb to make a hundred-thousand year commitment right now, when we are going to have new options in just another decade or two.
“Opposing nuclear energy does not make one pro-coal,”
Anti-nukes didn’t have to be pro-coal in order to be useful to coal. Back in the heyday of nuclear power opposition, nuclear and hydro were the only clean alternatives to coal, and hydro was geographically limited and hard to develop. So where nuclear development was constrained, coal was most likely the chief beneficiary.
“The real alternative energy is solar, ”
Solar wasn’t a viable alternative decades ago. After a long time of supporting it while it was not competitive, it has finally become a viable option, as has wind, but now they are not enough. We are to a point where even halting all fossil fuel emissions will not be enough. Warming will actually increase once we eliminate the combustion particulates which are masking about half of our actual warming potential with their shading/cooling effect. If we actually want to halt and even reverse warming, we have only two options now. Either do something to reduce sunlight heating, or reduce the greenhouse effect to release more heat. And the only significant greenhouse gas we can durably remove from the air is CO2 (which could also help combat ocean acidification), and to remove a trillion tonnes of CO2 quickly is almost certainly going to require industrial-scale removal and a lot of clean energy. Better forms of nuclear currently being developed could be particularly useful for that, because in addition to producing electricity, they would also produce a larger amount of heat energy–which could be used by direct-from-air CO2 capture systems. For many applications, we might even prefer to skip making electricity and just use nuclear for its heat.
Diablo Canyon is not being re-opened because it was never shut down. (Palisades is the shut-down nuclear power plant which may be re-opened.) For Diablo Canyon, this will just be a short extension on its service life. As for the treated water release from Fukushima, the only significant isotope in that water after treatment is a tiny amount of tritium, and you won’t detect an increase in tritium along the Pacific coast. In fact, over the next 30 years of the release operation, tritium levels along the Pacific coast, and in the whole of the Pacific Ocean, will be decreasing (assuming no nuclear wars during that time).
Hey, thanks for giving the nuclear industry’s perspective.
You speak of “the” nuclear industry as if it is monolithic. Developers of new nuclear technology are trying to address the problems with old-tech nuclear. They feel it is a dead-end technology, and their goal is to displace old-tech and leave it behind. The old-tech industries disagree with that view and are doing what they can to preserve their business model and delay and undercut the development of nextGen nuclear. As for myself, I’m on the side of science, reason, and good engineering, which means I think there are both good ways and bad ways to develop and use nuclear energy. I also think being well-informed about the differences makes me both a more effective advocate for the good ways and a more effective critic of the bad ways.
“Solar wasn’t a viable alternative decades ago.”
It is “now” and the U.S and the State should be doubling down on converting single family homes to solar, instead the State just cut subsidies and made selling power back to the grid more difficult.
I am all for innovative technologies, after we have properly addressed cleaning up the atomic mess that the innovative nuclear technologies of 50 years ago first.
There are no known peer review studies for short, medium or long term exposure to tritium on ocean biodiversity.
“I am all for innovative technologies, after we have properly addressed cleaning up the atomic mess that the innovative nuclear technologies of 50 years ago [made?] first.”
I’m guessing by “mess” you don’t mean a disorderly and untidy jumble of things (since spent fuel storage is very orderly) but rather a situation with many difficulties. So, if you had it your way, the new solutions we are developing to solve the difficulties with spent fuel would be banned until after we solve the difficulties with spent fuel, In other words, these solutions would be prohibited so long as we need them, and would only be allowed after we no longer need them. Do you think most people would find that position reasonable?
“There are no known peer review studies for short, medium or long term exposure to tritium on ocean biodiversity.”
Here’s what we do know. Tritium is produced naturally on Earth at an average rate of about 410 grams per year. Tritium also continuously decays away, so the global equilibrium value for natural tritium averages roughly 7200 grams. Atomic bomb testing released probably more than a half-tonne of tritium, and we did not detect any tritium effect on marine life from that. We don’t even know to the nearest hundred kg. how much was produced, but direct measurement of samples indicates there is probably around 8 kg. of bomb tritium still remaining in the Pacific. And the amount of tritium which will be released in the Fukushima discharge operation is capped at 0.06 grams per year. It currently takes about 75 minutes for that much Pacific bomb tritium to decay away, so tritium will be disappearing from the Pacific much faster than Fukushima will be adding to it.
What we also know is that tritium decay energy is exceptionally weak. When a tritium atom decays, it ejects an electron at roughly 5.7 kilo-electron-Volts, and it emits zero gamma rays. Compare this to the decay of potassium 40, which ejects an electron at an average energy around 1330 keV, and about 10% of the time emits a 1460 keV gamma ray. By any measure, each potassium 40 decay is far more destructive, and adult humans typically have around 4,000 to 5,000 potassium decays per second going off in their bodies, and many fish have up to 10 times as much potassium concentration in their bodies. And vastly worse than potassium, fish bioaccumulate *natural* polonium 210, which is intensely radiotoxic, and that is the isotope which packs by far the largest radiation dose in fish like tuna–as it has done for as long as tuna have existed. It’s hard to imagine how a trace amount of a very weak isotope like tritium would have any effect on sea life which has always lived with far more potent sources of radiation.
“As small modular nuclear reactors come closer to reality in the U.S., managing and disposing of their highly radioactive waste should be a national priority. Forty years after the passage of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, there is, “no clear path forward for the siting, licensing, and construction of a geologic repository” for nuclear waste, according to a recent U.S. National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine report.” – March 2023 Scientific American
Hypocritical to have it both ways. You’ll list all of the deficiencies of the emerging electric car technologies in their current state and to argue against converting to electric because of coal. Your argument also degrades if not eliminates the contributions to cleaner air overall as the result of replacing those CO2 emmitting vehicles and getting them off of the road. While you argue for emerging technologies in nuclear fision that will never be cost effective, timely, and may or may not even be relevant in the emerging age of fusion, Chernobyl, and Fukishima are the realities of an unpredictable living earth, ecology, and the “trust us, we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it” mentality that has festered now for over 50 years +.
“The U.S., which led the way on managing nuclear waste in the 1980s and 1990s, has now fallen to the back of the pack. As of Mach of 2023 about 88,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel from commercial reactors remain stranded at reactor sites, and this number is increasing by some 2,000 metric tons each year. These 77 sites are in 35 states and threaten to become de facto permanent disposal facilities. Without a geologic repository, there is no way forward for the final disposal of this highly radioactive material. Storing it in pools and dry casks at reactor sites is a temporary solution; it is safe for decades, but not the millennia needed to isolate this radioactive material from the environment. The present U.S. policy of indefinite storage at a centralized site is not a viable solution, as it shifts the cost and risk to future generations.”
You are partially correct that some good news is that there is already a clear strategy for managing and disposing of this highly radioactive material. However your not forthright about the bad news, which is that the U.S. government has yet to seriously follow that plan in 50 years.
I used to compete with Japanese surfers on the tour. The beaches and surf along the coast are so radiactive, humans can only expose theselves for short periods of time while being heavily monitored. Before Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant the surf was known to get epic along that coastline.
You mean to tell me you’ll grab a board and paddle out to show everyone how safe that tritium and God knows whatever else is being dumped in the Pacific, is?
One more thing, as per my friends, why would any Japanese citizen believe anyone, telling them, “oh yeah folks just a little radiation, nothin to it, it’s totally safe.”
On a related issue- lately there have been studies that show that electric vehicles produce MORE (!) air pollution than gasoline vehicles do. I’m not one to post or click on links (I work fraud), but the articles are easy to Google. Not counting production, these vehicles are about 30% heavier than their gasoline counterparts, which increases tire and brake wear releasing more particulate matter into the air vs. a gas burner. Also, heavier vehicles cause more deaths via accidents. And nobody talks about the nuclear energy used to recharge and produce electric vehicles since many areas rely on nuclear to provide part of their electricity. I know that there is no stopping the future take-over of electric vehicles, but they are certainly not what a lot of people think that they are.
The heavy particulate air pollution for electric cars can be worse than the best gasoline cars where they get their electricity from coal power. Where they get it from nuclear, hydropower, wind, solar, and/or geothermal, they will be cleaner. Most electric cars are sedans, and they are heavier than similarly-sized sedans, but most trucks and full-size SUV’s are even heavier. Electric cars have less brake wear than combustion vehicles of the same weight because they do a lot of regenerative braking. I expect the sales of electric vehicles will continue to grow, but I have doubts they will displace all combustion vehicles. Occidental petroleum bought Carbon Engineering last year. Carbon Engineering has technology for pulling CO2 out of the air, and Oxy would like to develop that with the goal of one day offsetting all the CO2 from the oil they produce. Carbon Engineering has also shown how their captured CO2 can be combined with hydrogen to produce a synthetic hydrocarbon crude of mixed-length molecules, from which synthetic fuels can be refined, and other companies are also investigating synfuels. These could operate as drop-in replacements for fossil fuels, and the inputs would basically be air for the CO2, water for the hydrogen, and energy for the extraction and processing. If future forms of nuclear can supply that energy, then any gasoline or diesel powered vehicle could effectively become nuclear-powered when they use the resulting synfuel.
Here in Humboldt County, we have the 44feetproject.com. It deals with the 37 tons of nuclear fuel assemblies buried in casks 44 feet above sea level, opposite the entrance to Humboldt Bay. Should a Cascadian Subduction Zone earthquake occur, with a tsunami on the level of Fukushima, there could be an erosion of the land and the casks could rupture. May, might, releasing radiation. But there has already been 13 years of the release of deadly radiation. It’s already happened! The stored fuel elements there 44 feet above Humboldt Bay have, and continue to kill people. Many dozens of people have died of cancer, or are living with cancer, who lived downwind from the Humboldt Bay Nuclear Power Plant between 1963 and 1976, when it was shut down. Including children who attended an elementary school only 800 yards downwind from the reactor. In 1977, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission released NUREG-0172, Age-Specific Radiation Dose Commitment Factors For A One-Year Chronic Intake. Prior to this date, all radiation exposure levels were factored on adult males and females. This report updated exposure levels to include infants, children and teens. Guess what? Their exposure levels were much lower than adults. The Humboldt Bay Nuclear Power Plant released millions of curies of airborne radiation, over a population that never agreed to be exposed in this gross experiment. The living survivors continue to suffer. This is the hidden crime of nuclear power generation. As John W. Gofman, M. D., Ph D showed, there is NO safe level of ionizing radiation. Period!
Not should but when the Cascadia Mega-quake hits just like it did in the year 1700. There was no warning for Japan unlike the 2011 monster since of course they didn’t feel the shaking, but the survivors of the giant tsunami from this side of the ocean built monuments 5 miles inland to warn their descendants to NOT build anything closer to the ocean than those.
Obviously they didn’t listen. And they put nuclear reactors on the freaking coastline, too. Now they are rebuilding while our fault is getting ready to unleash another 9.0+.
I remember evacuating from MB for the tsunami expected after the Anchorage quake…this one will be orders of magnitude worse.
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This showed up today but then some of us have known about this coming problem for years:
Analysis Warns Climate Crisis Threatens US Nuclear Reactors
“Climate change is expected to exacerbate natural hazards—including heat, drought, wildfires, flooding, hurricanes, and sea level rise,” the report reads.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/analysis-warns-climate-crisis-threatens-us-nuclear-reactors
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And I meant to post this one here but accidentally put it on the Fuku thread, so if nobody saw it there:
45 years after Three Mile Island, we need a ‘No Nukes’ comeback
As Biden sinks billions into nuclear energy that are stuffed into his ‘Infrastructure Bill,’ members of the historic Clamshell Alliance are reuniting to spark a new wave of anti-nuke resistance.
https://wagingnonviolence.org/2024/03/three-mile-island-45th-anniversary-no-nukes-comeback-clamshell-alliance/
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sealintheSelkirks
More bad news for the promoters:
Banks Won’t Save Nuclear Power
https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/04/03/banks-wont-save-nuclear-power/
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sealintheSelkirks