Remembering Three Mile Island

Kennedy Maize

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On March 28, 1979, I started a new job as a reporter for The Energy Daily, coming from covering energy and environmental issues for one of Congressional Quarterly’s publications. It was an auspicious day, as I couldn’t appreciate at the time.

During that day, I looked at wire service accounts (there wasn’t an Internet, and the wires—paper output clickety-clacking out of remote printers—were all we had) and read about a problem with a nuclear reactor near Harrisburg, Pa. That night, at a dinner party, a friend asked me about what was going on in Pennsylvania. I basically brushed it off, saying it looked to me like a minor event, but that time would provide more meaning.

Not a minor event, as it turned out. It was a small, but unanticipated and persistent loss of-coolant accident (LOCA) at Three Mile Island (TMI) Unit 2. The event would occupy much of my time for months and years to come. The loss of coolant befuddled the operators, who could not find the stuck-open valve that was responsible for the uncontrolled heating of the reactor core. TMI would turn the nuclear power industry on its sometimes too-thick head, as reactor operators, utility engineers, and Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) regulators could not suss out what was happening to the reactor core as it lost coolant, heated up, and melted fuel. I’ve been covering TMI, one way or another, ever since.

Truth Was the First Casualty

As the event unfolded, it revealed the dirty management secret of nuclear power in those days. The people who ran the business were blinded by nuclear mythology and unable to either recognize the truth about the event at Harrisburg or acknowledge its significance. This sort of accident couldn’t be happening; therefore, it wasn’t. All of the industry’s accident planning was geared to large LOCAs. TMI was not something they had contemplated.

Setting aside the convenient lying by General Public Utilities (GPU) executives—and the Metropolitan Edison subsidiary officials who actually ran the reactor—look at the broader nuclear industry’s dancing and shadow-boxing with the media about the extent of the damage to the plant. At first, they said it was a minor incident. No harm, no foul.

Then, as the regulators began to dig into the event, and it persisted, it was a major accident, but there was no fuel damage, and the reactor would be back in service soon. Ho-hum.

Oops! There was fuel damage (not melting), but that could be managed. Never mind.

But it turned out there was fuel melting. Then it turned out that 90% of the nuclear fuel had been damaged or melted. This was unprecedented—the most catastrophic light water reactor accident in history. It was impossible for the nuclear industry to extract its radioactive feet from its mouth.

To this day, the industry, and the general media, which has no understanding of these issues, calls the TMI catastrophic accident a “partial meltdown.” It was, in fact, a core meltdown of major proportions that completely destroyed the reactor and turned the $1.4 billion plant into radioactive rubble. Let’s call it what it was: a reactor meltdown.

Fortunately, the safety systems prevented the meltdown from breaching the containment. The accident could have been far worse. There was no “China syndrome” of molten core melting through the bottom of reactor vessel and into the ground. There was no containment breach. But the accident was plenty bad.

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