The Nuclear Disaster Iconoclast
Those we've had are not nearly so bad as you've been led to believe.
Thanks for reading my newsletter that separates reality from bullshit in pop culture. Today we have a free preview, the full post is available to paid subscribers only. Hey, even science communicators have to make a living! If you enjoy my weekly work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber if you aren’t already:
1979: Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania. The worst nuclear disaster in American history.
1986: Chernobyl, Ukraine (USSR). A reactor explodes, sending radiation across Europe.
2011: Fukushima, Japan. A tsunami causes the meltdown of a reactor.
From these examples, it’s clear that nuclear energy is far too dangerous to ever be used!!! We must close down all nuclear power plants, immediately.
Or must we?
Twelve days before the Three Mile Island incident, Jane Fonda’s anti-nuclear movie The China Syndrome was released. At the time, there had never been a nuclear accident, anywhere, at least not among commercial reactors that people might have heard of. Nobody had ever been hurt or killed by it. Yet the movie planted a seed in everyone’s mind that nuclear energy was a thing to be feared. Previously, anti-nuclear sentiment and activism had been based purely on xenophobia and lack of basic science literacy — things that, it appears, will always be a problem for the human race.
Three Mile Island
And so the world was quick to panic when, as moviegoers were still in line holding their tickets, headlines erupted that Three Mile Island had suffered a partial meltdown in one of its reactors. Ever since, anti-nuclear activism has been fierce, particularly among anti-corporate types who are disdainful of science, and who see it as greedy corporations trying to profit without caring about the harm it does to people and puppies and dandelions.
In fact, if it hadn’t been for the movie, Three Mile Island might well have been seen as a great success story. A lot went wrong; it was a perfect storm of mechanical breakdowns and human error. A broken valve allowed coolant to leak out, while a badly design control panel tricked operators into thinking the opposite was happening, and they reacted by doing the wrong stuff.
In spite of all this, no radioactive material escaped the containment structures, as designed. Nobody was injured. Nobody in the public was impacted, and decades later, epidemiological studies are clear that there were no health impacts, either among the workers or the public.
Even in such a clusterfuck of errors, the safety systems worked as intended.
