LONG ISLAND PRESS

 Published April 15, 2004

Three Mile Island: 25 Years Later

 
By Miriam Goodman 

In the aftermath of the Three Mile Island accident, the worst commercial nuclear accident in U.S. history, officials from the nuclear industry and the government grew fond of noting that no one was killed or injured. But it is not a statement many people who were downwind of the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station near Harrisburg, Pa. in 1979 were likely to take lying down. 

The Three Mile Island (TMI) disaster, along with the concurrent appearance in theaters across the U.S. of The China Syndrome, a movie about a nuclear plant accident, changed the psyche of much of the American public about nuclear energy.

Today, it seems that many of the lessons of that time have been forgotten. We have a president fond of "nucular" power; his proposed energy policy even includes subsidizing the construction of new nuclear plants. We also face a threat of terrorism that could intentionally bring on a nuclear "accident." Although there is no operating nuclear plant on Long Island, residents here are threatened by the Millstone reactor in Connecticut and the Indian Point plant in Westchester.

Hence, on the 25th anniversary of the TMI disaster, it makes sense to review that near-catastrophe, to remind ourselves of how the industry and government failed the people, and how the people fought back to ensure their own safety.

 

    Three Mile Island, the nuclear plant on the shores of the Susquehanna

THE ACCIDENT

At the predawn hour of 4 a.m., March 28, 1979, a small malfunction at TMI Unit 2, which had been operating for only 90 days, initiated a series of events that would soon reverberate around the world. What started with a failed water pump and faulty valve culminated in a partial core meltdown.

As the accident was about to unfold in the enormous control room at TMI, down in the depths of the turbine building a pump malfunctioned after a technician's attempt to clean "gunk" out of a filter tank, according to The Warning: Accident at Three Mile Island, a well-received book by Mike Gray and Ira Rosen. Water stopped running into the steam generator, so heat was not being removed, and the pressure rose. That pressure tripped a relief valve to open, but instead of closing when the pressure fell, it remained stuck in the open position.

Because of the stuck valve, water was escaping instead of cooling the core, but the staff remained unaware of the problem for more than two hours. This led to a series of missteps which resulted in a tremendous build-up of residual heat in the reactor core, creating highly lethal radiation levels in the containment building and flooding the floor of the auxiliary building with radioactive water.

At the same time, a dangerous hydrogen bubble posed a threat of a large explosion, and it was sheer luck, not smart planning, that the explosion turned out to be small and just happen in just such a way as to minimize damage, according to Poison Power, a book by Dr. John Gofman, a medical doctor and physicist who had worked on the atomic bomb. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) does not acknowledge that there was any explosion.

The accident had put the state of Pennsylvania just 30 minutes from a total core meltdown. Radiation had penetrated the four-foot-thick concrete and steel walls of the containment building to the outside, and large amounts of radiation were exiting the stack. Radiation monitors in the stack went off the scale, according to Albert Gibson, an NRC staffer at the time. Many other monitors were faulty or damaged by the accident. At the 25th annual meeting of the Health Physics Society in Seattle, Andy Hull of Brookhaven National Lab, one of a team of scientists dispatched by BNL to aid Pennsylvania authorities, said radiation levels exceeded what the monitors could measure. He added it was impossible to predict probable population doses.

Confusion reigned in the control room, in the halls of government and among the commissioners of the NRC. Plant workers and the company, which was periodically releasing gases into the air, were not giving government officials timely, accurate information about either the damage or the efforts to control it.

"We are operating almost totally in the blind," NRC Chairman Joseph Hendrie says in taped conversations among NRC officials that later became public. "[The Governor's] information is ambiguous, mine is non-existent, and...I don't know, it's like a couple of blind men staggering around making decisions."

It was Hendrie who kept vacillating about whether to recommend evacuation of residents. Roger Mattson, head of the NRC Division of Systems Safety, and Joseph Fouchard, director of public affairs for the NRC, kept pressing the issue.

"I'm not sure why you are not moving people. Got to say it. I have been saying it down here. I don't know what you are protecting at this point," Mattson says in the transcripts. "I think we ought to be moving people." The chorus grew louder.

"The Civil Defense people up there say that our state-programs people have advised evacuation out to 5 miles in the direction of the plume," Fouchard adds a little later. When another commissioner suggests they need more data, he says: "Don't you think, as a precautionary measure, there should be some evacuation?"

Not until the third day, after the largest releases had occurred, was Gov. Richard Thornburgh advised to recommend that pregnant women and young children leave the area within five miles of the plant. But 200,000 residents had already fled on their own.

When measurements of radioactive emissions were finally made, they were only of gamma rays, not ingested or inhaled beta particles like Iodine-131, a highly toxic element that damages the thyroid gland but that would have been dispersed by the time measurements were made, according to Three Mile Island Radiation Alert, an activist group. With winds shifting direction, and at first blowing slowly, the radiation plume followed a convoluted pattern. Ground level radiation doses did not continually fall off farther away from the plant, but instead showed hot spots.

The NRC, however, based its estimates of radiation doses on equally diminishing dispersion by distance, admitting only that "very low levels of radionuclides could be attributed to releases from the accident." An NRC fact sheet offers detailed explanations of the accident, but just two short paragraphs on the health impact, claiming only that "comprehensive investigations and assessments by several well-respected organizations have concluded that in spite of serious damage to the reactor, most of the radiation was contained and that the actual release had negligible effects on the physical health of individuals or the environment."

On April 9, the NRC declared the crisis over. Although radioactive emissions were still above normal background level and the reactor was still not at cold shutdown, the governor rescinded his previous recommendation for evacuation.

Nearly half a million gallons of radioactive coolant water remained on the floor of the containment building. In June and July 1980, despite widespread public opposition, Metropolitan Edison, TMI's operator, illegally vented into the atmosphere more than 43,000 curies of Krypton and other radioactive gases.

Between 1990 and 1993, more than a decade after the event, the company evaporated 2.2 million gallons of accident-generated radio-active water containing toxic heavy elements. As described by Three Mile Island Radiation Alert, "TMI-2 remains a high level waste dump in the middle of the Susquehanna River." According to the NRC, "TMI-1 is permanently shut down and defueled. Its current owner says it will be keeping the facility in long-term monitored storage." But the site has never been completely decontaminated or decommissioned.

CHAIN REACTION

Levels of anger, fear and stress were high among residents of the area. Most of the radiation exposure had occurred before government officials—more inclined to provide reassuring information—informed citizens of the seriousness of the accident, and this largely conservative populace no longer trusted the credibility of the government or the nuclear industry.

Hundreds of residents complained of nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, metallic taste, hair loss, rashes, sunburned-like skin and lingering gastrointestinal symptoms. Genetic deformities were found in various plant species, according to Mary Osborn, a citizen-activist who recruited a botanist to do the analysis. In "In the Valley of the Shadow of Three Mile Island" in the March, 1989 issue of Sojourners, writer Joyce Hollyday told of veterinarians reporting deaths of, and very serious neurological damage to, cattle and other animals and a marked decline in animal reproductive success. Veterinarian Dr. Robert B. Weber, among others, offered unsettling observations as to the effect on animals. So did the local farmers.

"The animals are giving us clear signals as to what's wrong in our environment," dairy farmer Jane Lee told Hollyday.

In mid-August of that year, Dr Ernest Sternglass, a specialist in radiological physics at U. Penn Medical School, looked at the rates of infant deaths in the May monthly report from the U.S. Center for Health Statistics, and found that infant mortality in Pennsylvania had gone up following the accident at the end of March. Compared to 147 deaths in February and 141 in March, there had been 166 in April and 198 in May, an unprecedented rise of 40 percent. Yet the number of births had actually declined from 13,589 in March to 13,201 in May. Thus the rate of infant deaths per 1000 live births had increased even more, from 10.4 in March to 15.0 in May Yet, at the same time, the rate for the United States as a whole between March and May had declined 11 percent, dropping from 14.1 to 12.6 per 1000 live births.

The Kemeny Commission, a federal commission appointed by President Carter to investigate the TMI accident, recommended many fundamental changes in the organization, practices, procedures and particularly attitudes of the NRC and the industry. On health effects, the commission accepted the earlier reports of government agencies that effects were only psychological, with no "detectible" increases expected in infant mortality or cancer rates. The commission did not discuss requiring unlimited financial liability of the nuclear industry.

Because the industry had so much at stake, a battle of numbers ensued. Six-month post-accident vital statistics compiled by the federal government showed sharp increases in infant mortality in the 10- and 5-mile TMI area, and increases in infant hypothyroidism in three counties in the radioactive plume. The Pennsylvania Health Department then released its own figures, which found an abnormal number of thyroid problems in newborns in three counties surrounding TMI.

But the messengers of these bad bits of news suffered. Pennsylvania state health secretary, Gordon MacLeod, whose criticism of the long delay in releasing the figures was based on the importance of early detection of thyroid problems to prevent mental retardation, was abruptly replaced.

THE HEALTH

FALLOUT

The nuclear industry and some in the scientific community were not pleased when an independent study by Dr Steven Wing, of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, appeared in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, published by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. This 1996 study re-analyzed data from a 1990 Columbia University study of the health effects of the TMI accident, and concluded that lung cancer and leukemia increased substantially—rates were two to 10 times higher—among people who were downwind of TMI during the accident.

Wing was accused of anti-nuclear bias, but his work was supported by the journal's reviewers as scientifically sound. Wing maintains that the TMI studies undertaken through official channels were not objective because of a priori assumptions, and did not include evidence from citizens who believed they were affected in the questions, design or analysis of results.

The most recent health study of TMI, a 2002 University of Penn-sylvania survey of 32,000 people within five miles of the plant, found no significant increase in cancer deaths due to radiation, but did acknowledge some increase in lymphoma and lung cancers. But this study relied on previous government and industry-sponsored studies in the early 1980s, which were based on inaccurate dose projections and incomplete data. Among the surveys they relied on was a 17-year-old Pennsylvania Department of Health survey which had been criticized as flawed by epidemiologists at Harvard and Penn State Universities.

The U. Penn researchers contended that the long period covered (1979-1998) made their 2002 study stronger than others because "cancers would have developed by then." But the latency period for cancer is often much longer, as verified by an ongoing study of Japanese atom bomb survivors: New radiation-induced cancers keep appearing in each update of that study since exposure in 1945.

NUCLEAR

LONG ISLAND

The TMI accident galvanized the anti-nuclear power movement nationwide, particularly on Long Island. On June 3, 1979, 15,000 protestors demonstrated on a Shoreham beach in a day-long steady downpour, in which activists struggled to keep their pamphlets and persons dry. It was the beginning of the demise of the Shoreham Nuclear Power Station.

With Shoreham cancelled, the danger of nuclear power on Long Island was removed. But even today we are not free of risk from a potential nuclear disaster. Twelve miles from Suffolk's North Fork, across Long Island Sound in Waterford, Conn., is the problematic Millstone 3 reactor, which has a history of serious safety violations. If the wind blew radiation toward the Island, not only would lives be at stake, but contamination of the land would cause severe economic damage to our core East End businesses: farms, vineyards and fisheries and tourism. Furthermore, because the Nuclear Regulatory Commission requires only a l0-mile radius for evacuation planning in the event of an accident, most of Long Island is not included in Millstone 3 disaster planning.

But the greatest threat to the New York metropolitan region is from the Indian Point nuclear plant in Westchester County. Activists have long called this facility "a disaster waiting to happen" for numerous reasons. More than 20 million people live and work within a 50-mile radius of Indian Point, which is only 35 miles from the heart of Manhattan. In 2002, the NRC ranked Indian Point 2 the worst-run of the nation's 103 nuclear power plants.

Indian Point is also among prime terrorist targets. The NRC has warned that the housing for the "spent fuel" pools at the site, which are highly radioactive, are not designed to withstand the impact of large jetliners like those used on 9/11, one of which flew directly over the plant. The recently re-certified evacuation plan assumes there will be several hours of warning before a release of radiation, ignoring the very real possibility of spontaneous evacuation.

The amount of irradiated fuel that could be released from Indian Point is many times that which escaped from Chernobyl—the worst nuclear disaster in history. That 1986 accident, in what was then the Soviet Union, contaminated an enormous area which is mainly uninhabitable and will remain so for generations.

With prevailing winds from the northwest, an attack or accident at Indian Point would likely send its toxic air toward New York City and Long Island. According to studies by Brookhaven National Lab and the NRC, a large release of radiation from Indian Point could contaminate the Hudson River and the nearby Croton Reservoir, the source of New York City's drinking water, and cause thousands of immediate deaths as well as hundreds of thousands of future cancers.

More than 300 elected officials, including Legis. David Denenberg (D-Merrick), have called for closure of Indian Point, in addition to a growing number of members of the public. The economic damage, unquestionably, would be horrendous. The nuclear industry, since its inception, has been relieved of unlimited liability for economic losses due to a serious accident. Under the 1957 Price-Anderson Act, the industry would only have to pay a tiny fraction of what would be catastrophic costs, most of which would be borne by U.S. taxpayers.

Three Mile Island's owners, along with their insurers, have paid an $80 million settlement for a legal suit over health, economic and evacuation claims. As part of the deal, the court records were sealed, further keeping citizens in the dark. But the TMI fallout has dragged on. More than 2,000 long-running personal injury suits were dismissed in June 1996, because, the judge said, the plaintiffs had not been able to prove that radiation from the accident was the cause of their conditions.

As long as human error and Murphy's Law are factors in human endeavor, an unforgiving technology like nuclear power, which produces radioactive poisons that pose the danger of irreversible harm on a gigantic scale, remains an ongoing threat.