‘Dodged a bullet’: how whistleblowers averted a second US nuclear disaster
This article features Government Accountability Project’s whistleblower client, Rick Parks, and was originally published here.
Shortly after 4am on 28 March 1979, a pressure valve failed to close in the Unit 2 reactor at Three Mile Island, a nuclear power plant on a strip of land in central Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna River. The technical malfunction, compounded by human error – control room workers misread confusing signals and halted the emergency water cooling system – heated the nuclear core to dangerously high levels. The film The China Syndrome was still in theaters, starring Jane Fonda as a television reporter investigating cover-ups at a nuclear power plant whose meltdown could release radioactive material deep into the earth, “all the way to China”.
Three Mile Island – still the worst commercial nuclear accident in US history – was no China Syndrome, but it got terrifyingly close to catastrophic, Chernobyl-level damage. As the Netflix docuseries Meltdown: Three Mile Island recounts, Unit 2 came less than half an hour from fully melting down – a disaster scenario that would have sickened hundreds of thousands in the surrounding area. Two days after the accident, an explosive bubble of hydrogen gas was found in the reactor. The plant’s operator, Metropolitan Edison, tried to downplay the risk of radioactive releases, but panic ensued; more than 100,000 people fled the surrounding area. Plant...
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