The near-meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Middletown, Pennsylvania, has confirmed to the hilt the insistent warnings by opponents of nuclear power that catastrophic accidents are an ever-present danger of this energy source.
The accident gave the lie to the claims of such hireling-scientists of the nuclear industry as Dr. Norman Rasmussen, whose government-sponsored "Reactor
Safety
Study" (repudiated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission just two months ago) contended that the chances of a catastrophic meltdown were on the order of once in a million years.
By exposing the true dangers of nuclear power for all to see, the Three Mile Island accident has dealt severe blows to the credibility of the nuclear industry. Nonetheless, the Carter administration remains determined to keep existing plants in operation and to continue to support the building of new ones.
What Happened
The accident at Three Mile Island began at around 3 a.m. on March 28. A water pump failed, but the reactor did not shut down immediately. Pressure mounted. A relief valve opened but then failed to close. Intensely radioactive water spilled into the concrete-and-steel containment building.
The cooling water in the reactor dropped to a dangerously low level, briefly exposing as much as twelve inches of the highly radioactive and intensely hot uranium fuel elements. Some of these were badly damaged, releasing more radioactivity into the containment.
Had water flow not been rapidly restored, the entire fuel assembly could have melted, collapsing into a fiery mass on the floor of the reactor and burning its way through to the environment. A wide area of eastern Pennsylvania might then have been turned into a radioactive wasteland. Thousands would have died almost instantly, and tens of thousands more would have faced cancer or genetic damage.
The danger of such a meltdown was thought to have been averted within hours of the first sign of trouble. But radiation inside the containment building mounted, reaching levels a thousand times the fatal dose. Gamma radiation streamed through the containment walls; radioactive steam was vented to the surroundings; and hundreds of thousands of gallons of contaminated water were dumped into the Susquehanna River.
Radiation levels within three miles of the plant reached 25 millirems an hour on the first day. This compares to the maximum "safe" dose set by the government for the general public of 170 millirems a year (a figure that is coming under increasing fire from radiation biologists).
According to Dr. Ernest Sternglass-an expert on low-level radiation damage-the radiation released from Three Mile Island during the first day alone "correspondled] to a major fallout pattern from a bomb test."
"The government is giving us the same fictions as in the bomb tests," Sternglass declared, "that it is insignificant. But in a matter of hours people ... are getting nearly a year's dose of the normal background radiation."
Troublesome Bubble
For two days, officials of the Metropolitan Edison Company, which operates the plant, tried to minimize the danger. "There was nothing there that was catastrophie or unplanned for," said Met Ed Vice- President John Herbein in a typical comment on March 29.
But on March 30 it was made known that a possibly explosive bubble of hydrogen and other gases had formed inside the reactor vessel. This posed the danger that cooling water to the still extremely hot fuel assembly might be blocked. There was renewed danger of a meltdown. State and federal officials began to speak openly of the possible need to evacuate the area. Pennsylvania Governor Richard Thornburgh urged that children and pregnant women be evacuated from the area within five miles of the plant.
But the government wanted to avoid a full-scale evacuation at all costs. Not because it wasn't necessary-indeed, the danger was so great that a precautionary evacuation should have been organized at the outset-but rather because the Carter administration and Pennsylvania officials feared the consequences for the public attitude toward nuclear power. Evacuation would have concretized the atomic threat for everyone living anywhere near a planned or operating nuclear plant; that is, for a substantial portion of the entire U.S. population.
Fortunately, the gas bubble was eventually brought under control. On April 2, officials announced that the danger of a meltdown had become "remote." But the situation during the previous four days had come perilously close to unleashing radioactive devastation across hundreds of square miles of some of the richest farmland on the eastern seaboard; poisoning the water supplies of Baltimore, Washington, Philadelphia, New York City, and countless smaller cities and towns; and contaminating the lower Susquehanna River and Chesapeake Bay with deadly nuclear wastes.
The U.S. government's role in the Three Mile Island accident has been to orchestrate a cover-up—one that began long before the March 28 "general emergency" at the power plant.
At the beginning of this year an NRC inspector filed a report pointing to problems with the Three Mile Island cooling system. His recommendation for a more extensive probe was overruled by his superiors.
The reactors at Three Mile Island were built by the Babcock & Wilcox Company. In 1977 a B&W reactor at the Davis-Besse nuclear plant near Toledo, Ohio, experienced an accident uncannily similar to the one at Three Mile Island. A valve failed to close, spilling 11,000 gallons of radioactive water. That leak was brought under control before more serious damage could occur.
Similar problems have also arisen at other B&W reactors. "If anyone had been paying
Mile Island attention, Three wouldn't have happened," said former NRC staffer Robert Pollard.
Despite such warnings, the NRC voted April 6 not to order precautionary shutdowns of the eight other B&W reactors in the United States. These "can continue to operate without danger to the public health and safety," NRC Chairman Joseph Hendrie said in a letter to California Governor Edmund Brown, Jr.
Evidence has also come to light that "human errors" that allegedly contributed to the Three Mile Island accident may have resulted from exceedingly heavy work loads forced on the plant's employees. Maintenance crews reportedly worked ten-hour shifts for almost six weeks without a day off during the period leading up to the accident. The NRC was aware of this, but took no action.
With immediate danger of catastrophe apparently past (although the reactor remained at high temperature and pressure as of April 6), the government stepped up its efforts to soothe the public. Health, Education, and Welfare Secretary Joseph Califano declared April 4 that persons living near the plant faced no additional cancer risk. This flies in the face of a report issued in February by Califano's own department, which concluded that "existing knowledge is insufficient to provide an unequivocal answer to the lowdose question.
In fact, there is no way of knowing how much radiation was absorbed by persons in the vicinity of Three Mile Island. "Monitoring of radiation levels in residential areas ... has been so haphazard that the exact cumulative dosage to residents may never be known," Walter Pincus reported in the March 31 Washington Post.
Before the Pennsylvania accident, President Carter had been planning to use the "energy crisis" to press for accelerating nuclear development and "streamlining" reactor-licensing rules. But he dropped all reactor-licensing rules. But ne dropped all references to such plans from his April 2 energy speech. Instead, he said only that "the recent accident... has demonstrated dramatically that we have other energy problems."
Carter also promised to set up an "independent" commission "to make recommendations on how we can improve the safety of nuclear power plants."
While Carter's commission studies what additional "safety" gimmicks can be tacked on to a technology whose inherent dangers are becoming clearer than ever, the 70 nuclear plants currently operating will be allowed to remain at full power; the 100 or so plants under construction will proceed toward completion; and the 500 to 1,000 additional plants deemed necessary for the year 2000 by the Energy Department will remain on the drawing boards.
But Carter will face a fight before such reckless plans can be achieved. Three Mile Island has brought home to millions of American working people the urgent need to shut down the entire nuclear industry.
Antinuclear activists now have both the opportunity and the responsibility to carry their campaign to American workers and to their mass organizations, the trade unions.
A powerful working-class antinuclear movement will put the responsibility on Carter and his government to:
• Shut down all nuclear plants;
• Provide accurate information on all radiation dangers;
• Grant full compensation to all victims of the Three Mile Island accident; and
• Provide jobs at full union-scale wages, and retraining where necessary, for all workers displaced by the shutdown of the nuclear industry.
Working people in the United Statesand in other countries threatened by nuclear disaster-are now more ready than ever before to join in such a campaign.