Nuclear Whistleblowers Protected the Public from Disaster. Now We Must Protect their Right to Speak Up.

A new Netflix documentary released this spring, Meltdown: Three Mile Island, traced how brazen nuclear safety violations in the Three Mile Island (TMI) cleanup threatened a full meltdown that would’ve taken out the East Coast. It was prevented only because the top three engineers leading the cleanup process blew the whistle. Their story illustrates how freedom of speech can and has changed the course of history.

Whistleblowers are those who use speech to challenge abuses of power that betray the public trust. The TMI near-miss puts an exclamation point on why those with the courage to speak out deserve gold standard legal rights against retaliation.

In the U.S., too often those rights are fool’s gold. The U.S. pioneered whistleblower protection, but our laws are so dated compared to global best practices that now; in key respects, they are dinosaur rights when compared to countries in Africa, Europe, and the South Pacific. The stranger than fiction truth revealed in Meltdown vividly illustrates why this is unacceptable.

After the 1979 partial meltdown at TMI, the red-hot radioactive debris left behind had to be cleaned or removed. The owner, General Public Utilities (GPU), hired the politically connected Bechtel Corporation to finish the job quickly and obtain government approval of the effort. Larry King as project manager, Rick Parks as procedures chief, and Ed Gischel...

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