Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania

On Wednesday, March 28, 1979, a series of mechanical problems and judgment errors at the nuclear generating facility at Three Mile Island (TMI), near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, led to the loss of a reactor's protective blanket of water. As much as two-thirds of the nuclear core was uncovered, causing the formation of a dangerous hydrogen bubble and a massive release of radioactive gas into the atmosphere. The plant director declared a site emergency and reported a "slight problem" to the governor at 7:40 a.m. By 9:00 a.m. President Jimmy Carter had been notified. The Associated Press issued a national news bulletin announcing a general emergency but stating (mistakenly) that no radiation had been released. Metropolitan Edison, which ran the TMI facility, denied the existence of any danger.

At 8:00 a.m. on Friday, when a higher-than-anticipated radiation level above a vent was recorded, staff at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission suggested an evacuation of people living near the plant. Fearing panic, the governor urged residents within ten miles of TMI to stay indoors with their windows shut. Only pregnant women and preschool children within five miles of the facility were advised to leave the area. Federal officials ordered the shipment to Pennsylvania of massive doses of potassium iodide, which, taken orally, saturates the thyroid gland and inhibits absorption of radiation. The mayor of nearby Middletown later recalled: Friday was the day....A lot of the kids thought about dying and wrote their last wills and testaments. Fifth and sixth grade kids! People were concerned. You could tell they were afraid because a lot of people who left town left their doors wide open, unlocked. They just put anything in the car and took off. . . . I had a bus set up in front of City Hall for pregnant women. But heck, most of the people who were in that condition left themselves. While nearly 150,000 residents fled their homes, President and Rosalynn Carter tried to reassure the stricken community by visiting the site. Ten days later, on Monday, April 9, Pennsylvania governor Richard Thornburgh announced that the danger of a meltdown had passed. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, equally eager to end the crisis, reported that the size of the hydrogen bubble had decreased. The situation was now stable, the officials agreed. There was no longer any danger of explosion. What had seemed an isolated event in one community grew quickly into a
regional phenomenon with international repercussions. The world waited, as one newscaster put it, while "the danger faced by man for tampering with natural forces, a theme familiar from the myth of Prometheus to the story of Frankenstein, moved closer to fact from fantasy." During the crisis, millions of people living downwind in the eastern states stayed glued to their televisions or radios. Ten days after the near meltdown, elevated levels of radioactivity were found in milk supplies several hundred miles away. People throughout the mid-Atlantic area worried for months about consuming contaminated dairy products, meat, vegetables, and even jams or jellies coming from the agricultural region of central Pennsylvania. Massive demonstrations against nuclear power followed the accident, concluding in a rally of more than 200,000 people in New York City. Closer to TMI, more than 1,000 people eventually became involved in legal claims of mental or physical harm. Protests and lawsuits against the plant's reopening continued for years, and its owner, General Public Utilities, teetered toward bankruptcy. Although steadfast proponents of nuclear energy argued that the events at TMI demonstrated that safety had prevailed even at the moment of the greatest potential danger, the scales had been tipped toward opponents of nuclear power plants.

The events at Three Mile Island capped a wave of community-based mobilizations against nuclear power. In 1975, a less serious accident at Brown's Ferry, Alabama, heightened public concern about safety. Broad coalitions, with members ranging from conservatives to liberals, from rural landowners to urban renters, formed to keep their communities safe from danger. Labeled NIMBYs (Not in My Backyard), community groups defeated referendums to fund new facilities or rallied around candidates who promised to shut down existing ones. If fewer communities wanted nuclear power plants, fewer still were eager to accept the radioactive wastes created by the process of making electricity. The economy itself helped slow the development of new plants. At the time of the TMI crisis, more than seventy generating plants had been built, producing altogether about 13 percent of the nation's electrical energy. Of the ninety -six still under construction and the thirty more planned, only a handful would ever be completed. The Shoreham plant, built on Long Island, New York, was never put into operation. New York City and regional authorities blocked its
testing, and courts agreed to mothball the project. News of faulty construction and building-cost overruns sometimes topping 1,000 percent and amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars made local governments hesitant to back new projects.

Many Americans woke from the dream of unlimited, inexpensive, and safe nuclear energy. To its promoters during the 1950s, nuclear energy had promised a supply of power so cheap that utility companies could "turn off the meter" on costs. Communities would bask in prosperity, advancing as quickly and dramatically as they had with the introduction of electricity seventy-five years earlier. As late as 1974 President Richard Nixon predicted that by 1980 the United States would be totally free of its dependence on foreign energy sources. But life in the United States during the 1970s disappointed experts and ordinary citizens alike, shattering such dreams of unsurpassed abundance. Now
faced with diminished financial assets, environmental disasters, discredited political leaders, and international defeats, many Americans lowered their expectations as they experienced the contraction of a society that had grown too large for its own resources. The cold war finally began to wind down, but international affairs remained turbulent. The Middle East, a major source of oil, was becoming the new battleground.