three mile island - anonymous - Arvind Gupta

317 Pages·2004·2.57 MB·English

THREE MILE ISLAND

THREE MILE ISLAND
A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective
J. Samuel Walker
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley Los Angeles London
• •
Published 2004 by The University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored
in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or
by any means, without the prior permission in writing
of the University of California Press, or as expressly
permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the
appropriate reprographics rights organization.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Walker, J. Samuel.
Three Mile Island : a nuclear crisis in historical
perspective / J. Samuel Walker.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn0-520-23940-7 (alk. paper).
[1. Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant.
2. Nuclear power plants—Accidents.] I. Title.
tk1345.h37 w35 2004
363.17'99'0974818—dc21 2003010137
Manufactured in the United States of America
13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum
requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r1997)
(Permanence of Paper).
Contents
List of Illustrations / vii
Preface / ix
1. The Nuclear Power Debate / 1
2. The Regulation of Nuclear Power / 29
3. Defense in Depth / 51
4. Wednesday, March 28: “This Is the Biggie” / 71
5. Thursday, March 29: “The Danger Is Over for People Off Site” / 102
6. Friday, March 30: “Going to Hell in a Handbasket” / 119
7. Saturday, March 31: “You’re Causing a Panic!” / 151
8. Sunday, April 1: “Look What We Have Done to These Fine People” / 173
9. The Immediate Aftermath of the Accident / 190
10. The Long-Term Effects of Three Mile Island / 209
Notes / 245
Essay on Sources / 287
Index / 291

Illustrations
1. Antinuclear demonstrator, 1979 / 23
2. Swearing-in ceremony for NRC commissioners, 1975 / 35
3. Three Mile Island, looking northeast / 49
4. Schematic diagram of TMI-2 / 72
5. Control room of TMI-2 / 75
6. Richard L. Thornburgh and William W. Scranton III / 81
7. Victor Stello Jr. and Joseph J. Fouchard / 97
8. Three Mile Island plants, looking east from Goldsboro / 103
9. Jack Herbein and Walter Creitz at a press conference, March 29, 1979 / 105
10. NRC commissioners at a meeting, April 4, 1979 / 110
11. Harold R. Denton / 120
12. Thornburgh announcing an advisory evacuation, March 30, 1979 / 138
13. Family arriving at the evacuation center in Hershey, Pennsylvania / 139
14. Helicopter taking radiation readings / 152
15. Denton speaking to reporters, March 31, 1979 / 157
vii
viii ILLUSTRATIONS
16. NRC chairman Hendrie at a press conference, March 31, 1979 / 163
17. Paul Conrad cartoon, “The Unthinkable” / 166
18. Early stage of Trailer City / 175
19. President Carter arriving at the Harrisburg airport, April 1, 1979 / 180
20. President and Mrs. Carter and others in the TMI-2 control room / 183
21. Roger J. Mattson and Denton / 188
22. Students posing with a letter they wrote to Denton / 196
23. Demonstrators at an antinuclear rally in Washington, D.C. / 198
24. Cleanup operations at TMI-2 / 230
Preface
This book is the fourth in a series of volumes on the history of nuclear
regulation sponsored by the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commis-
sion (NRC). I am the coauthor, with George T. Mazuzan, of the first vol-
ume, Controlling the Atom: The Beginnings of Nuclear Regulation,1946–
1962(1984), and the author of the other previous volumes, Containing
the Atom: Nuclear Regulation in a Changing Environment,1963–1971
(1992) and Permissible Dose: A History of Radiation Protection in the
Twentieth Century(2000), all published by the University of California
Press. My original plan for this book was to write a comprehensive his-
tory of nuclear regulation during the 1970s, a time when many complex,
critical, and controversial policy issues were weighed and debated. The
culmination of that book, I thought, would be a chapter or two on the
Three Mile Island accident.
Once I began to conduct research on the accident, however, I realized
that it required a book of its own. The issues it raised were so important
and the drama it created so absorbing that I wanted to provide a full ac-
count of the crisis in 1979 as well as its historical background and long-
term consequences. The drawback to this approach was that other ma-
jor issues of the 1970s were necessarily shortchanged. I have covered some
of those questions in my book Permissible Doseand in two scholarly ar-
ticles that draw on my research on nuclear regulation during the 1970s:
“Regulating against Nuclear Terrorism: The Domestic Safeguards Issue,
1970–1979” (Technology and Culture42 [January 2001]: 107–32), and
“Nuclear Power and Nonproliferation: The Controversy over Nuclear
Exports, 1974–1980” (Diplomatic History25 [spring 2001]: 215–49).
But the topics I discussed in those publications and some other significant
regulatory issues receive little or no attention in this volume. I regard this
as a reasonable trade-off for focusing on Three Mile Island, which remains
ix