Three-Mile-Island and the Future of Nuclear Power

Thirty years ago this week, residents around the Three Mile Island nuclear power generating facility near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania awoke to an ongoing accident in the second generating station at the plant. Over the next several hours and days people would be barraged with confusing information about what WAS happening at the plant, what HAD happened at the plant, and if there was any danger to residents in the area. The governor ultimately did order pregnant women and pre-school children evacuated from the area and more than 140,000 people left. During the following days, radioactively contaminated Noble Gases were released from the generator, but very little of the highly dangerous Iodine 131. Several different epidemiological studies have been done of area populations over the years, with the latest results published in 2003. This most recent study confirms that only a tiny possible uptick in cancer risk appears to be evident in the exposed population, although the researchers felt that the population should continue to be followed.

Dickinson College, located in Carlisle, PA , had to decide during the crisis whether or not to cancel classes as a result of being located in the potential evacuation zone. Today Dickinson maintains an excellent web site about the events at Three Mile Island. The site includes a virtual museum which offers an excellent timeline and sense of events. PBS's The American Experience did an episode on the events entitled Meltdown at Three Mile Island (available in the library). As with most of their episodes, an accompanying web site offers lots of useful and interesting information about events. The Washington Post assembled this interesting collection of information on the twentieth anniversary of events. Finally, this essay by Gary Weimberg in Jump Cut does a good job of looking at the profound impact that the coincidental release of the film The China Syndrome about a nuclear reactor accident (available in the library) 12 days prior to the events in Pennsylvania had on how people perceived not only the event itself, but nuclear power in general.

When people think about nuclear reactor disasters, if Three Mile Island doesn't come to mind first, it's only because Chernobyl does. The explosion and fire at the number 4 reactor at Chernobyl that resulted in a radioactive cloud of contaminants spreading over areas of Europe and leaving whole sections of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine (link to map to experience long-term closure as "exclusion" zones). In an unusual turn of events, Chernobyl is becoming something of an extreme tourist attraction. You can view the starkly beautiful photos many visitors have taken on the web. Some examples can be found here, here, and here. The other fascinating fact about Chernobyl is the complex situation that has developed regarding wildlife in the exclusion zone. Many large and rare animals have made surprising and abundant reappearances in the absence of human intervention, and in fact a herd of the radically endangered Przewalski's horses were reintroduced into the zone as a result of this observation. But before people get too excited, more recent evidence suggests that smaller, surface-dwelling creatures, such as insects and spiders, and the numbers of animals total within the zone are actually lower than their partial abundance would lead people to believe, while the number of deformities is higher, indicating they have been negatively impacted by radiation.

So what does all this mean for the future of nuclear power? Well, despite safety concerns, the fact that nuclear power does not generate any carbon means that it remains part of the overall picture of future power plans. The Union of Concerned Scientists makes this assumption in its analysis of the nuclear power industry and appropriate nuclear power regulation. To get a sense of nuclear power worldwide, view The Virtual Nuclear Tourist, which addresses many concerns about nuclear energy and is written by a nuclear engineer. For a more detailed and complex analysis of the future and potential of nuclear power, review this MIT analysis, The Future of Nuclear Power.

And finally, what about the holy grail of nuclear energy, the fusion reactor? It may be closer than the skeptics think. A practical plant is under construction in France, while a prototype has been at work in the UK for some time.