‘Nobody at Three Mile Island was actually hurt or killed, or anything of that nature,” remembers John McGaha, formerly a senior executive of Entergy, a Mississippi company that runs and operates nuclear utilities. “Versus if you look at some of the oil and chemical explosions we’ve had over the years . . . ”
McGaha and other experts tell NRO that Americans are unduly afraid of nuclear energy — in part because of the media’s disproportionate, distorted reporting on rare nuclear accidents like Three Mile Island and the recent problems in Japan. McGaha says the most deadly consequence of Three Mile Island might have been how it delayed the advancement of nuclear technology in the U.S.
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Yes, officially, one or two incidents of cancer have been attributed to Three Mile Island. But even with those, there’s no way to know for sure. All of us have “a 16 percent lifetime chance of contracting cancer,” says Robert Henkin, professor emeritus of radiology at Loyola University in Chicago. So, he asks, “If that goes to 16.1 percent, how do you ever pick that out?” We can’t be certain there was any harm at all.
And yet the panic at the time outdid the current panic over the Fukushima reactors. “Governor Thornburg was debating whether he would evacuate 20 miles out,” Prof. Michael Corradini, chairman of engineering physics at the University of Wisconsin, remembers. And the newspaper headlines during the Three Mile Island crisis suggested much worse. “Strangely enough,” Professor Henkin says, Three Mile Island “was actually one of the great successes of the industry.”
It’s not remembered that way, of course. One reason seems to be that the terminology related to nuclear power has taken on sinister connotations. Consider radiation. Think of the panic that the headline “Radiation levels increase by 100 percent” could induce. But in reality, such radiation would be medically beneficial; it would promote “radiation hormesis” — the exercise of the immune system. “We get one unit of radiation per day. When we double that — they’ve done tests with animals — they show better health. It’s like doing pushups,” says Gilbert Brown, a professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Massachusetts–Lowell. That doesn’t prove we shouldn’t worry about much higher levels of radiation — but it indicates how our emotional response does not correspond to reality.
And how high are radiation levels in Japan right now? The International Atomic Energy Agency on Sunday said that radiation levels of 5.7 microsivierts per hour were detected at a 35-mile radius from Fukushima. This, Steve Kerekes of the Nuclear Energy Institue says, is “under what a nuclear-plant worker could be exposed to every day for his job” under the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s guidelines. And even that measure may overrate the risk. “They intentionally set the limits very, very low — at much smaller levels than are actually dangerous, to encourage people to be very safe with radiation,” Professor Henkin says. Comparing Japan’s current levels with the data derived from the decades-long Atomic Bomb Project, which followed people exposed at various distances to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki explosions, Henkin concludes the following: “The dosage that people had to attain to achieve above-average incidence of cancer in a population is orders of magnitude above anything basically anybody [outside of the plants] in Japan is experiencing right now.”
Here’s another example: meltdown. The nuclear experts like to call it “the M-word.” “We use the term ‘meltdown,’ and it conjures up this disaster,” Brown says. But a meltdown is not always a catastrophe. “When you say ‘car accident,’ people know it could be a fender-bender, or it could be fatal. Nobody just assumes it was fatal. It should be the same with a meltdown. There are many scenarios in which a meltdown happens and nobody gets hurt,” Brown says.
One study in 1990 indicated that there was no increase in cancer rates at Three Mile Island. A 1997 study indicated that there was. The 1990 authors criticized the 1997 study; here is the gist of their criticism:
Bottom line: There is no "fact" here. There are two studies, and the authors of the 1990 study duke it out with the authors of the 1997 study in grounds that are less than convincing. The jury's still out or, as the 1990 study authors put it: "What leads two groups of epidemiologists to attach different meaning or give different emphasis to essentially the same data is a puzzle that is likely to remain with us for as long as subjectivity plays a role in epidemiology. The best we can do is to state clearly and completely the assumptions we begin with and the reasons for the conclusions we reach. After that, it is up to the reader. Indeed, we urge readers of the critique by Wing et al. and our response to refer to our original publications before reaching a judgment [footnotes removed]."
P.S. I have a bias here; I am a fan of nuclear power. I think the risks are worth taking.
Some key facts up front: (1) I grew up within 100 miles of TMI at the time of the accident. (2) I am for more nuclear energy.
That said the spin that people are irrationally afraid of TMI because of media hype leaves out some important details.
(1) ConEd was patently dishonest in their portrayal to the public and to Governor Thornburgh of the what was happening at TMI and the dangers involved. They simply lied with a straight face about the dangers of what was going on at the time. People who were alive at the time remember that, and even people like myself who are pro-nuke are not totally confident in private utilities willingness to do the right thing.
(2) I suggest people read Perrow's "Normal Accidents" to learn about what happened at TMI and why. The reality is, for much of the accident, controllers had no idea what was wrong or why (the problem started with dirt in a pipe that triggered a shutdown of the cooling system leading to a stuck valve and a LOCA). Indeed, operators took many steps that were exactly the wrong ones to take because of incomplete information and understanding of the system.
Other problems were recognized only in the nick of time, including the creation of a hydrogen bubble inside the containment vessel (which we've seen multiple times in Japan)...which was denied by the head of the NRC as even a possibility.
Anyway, the fundamental issue is that with highly complex and difficult to understand systems, systems with potentially fatal consequences of failure, people are naturally leery of them because humans are fallible. If we want nuclear energy to take off, it has to be explained better and it has to be demonstrated that the companies that operate the plants can be trusted.
A slight correction. The hot metal REDUCES the water to form oxygen (which oxidizes the metal) and hydrogen. The water thus OXIDIZES the hot metal to form metal oxide and hydrogen, rather than visa versa, as Mr. Shaffer wrote. The sense of Mr. Shaffer's argument is not changed by this slight error, but only shows that Mr. Shaffer is a journalist, not a chemist.
It should also be pointed out that it took a pair of HUGE natural disasters to cause the problems in the first place. A major 9.0 earthquake followed by a massive tsunami isn't going to happen in say, the middle of Iowa for example. This was an extremely rare occurrance even for Japan.
I don't really remember things the way Tolt did. I remember abject panic and ConEd not knowing what the heck was going on. I will say they were dishonest when selling the building of the plant; saying electric bills were going to be so cheap, etc, etc. Anyway, years later, it's kinda laughable to be back in the spotlight. And as I post this, I'm looking at the TMI steam cloud out my window.
A little-known but fascinating development in the wake of TMI was the rise of INPO, a private institution supported by nuclear utilities that often demands higher standards of safety than NRC. INPO sounds like it should be an industry shill, but it has turned out to be anything but.
This really shouldn't surprise us. An accident at one plant is a threat to every utility that runs a nuclear plant. This gives a strong economic incentive for nuclear utilities to support something like INPO that makes sure their competitors aren't cutting corners in a way that could hurt the whole industry.
We have remarkably advanced and safe designs for nuclear plants now. None of them are actually generating power, because we haven't built a commercial plant since TMI; we're still using pre-TMI technology, though retrofitted with some significant improvements. Ironic, that.
Disclosure: I'm not a nuclear engineer, I don't have any affiliation with INPO, to my knowledge I don't own any stock in nuclear utilities, but I do work for an outfit that sometimes does reactor research, and I'm pro-nuke.
Build lots of new safer plants soon. We need the energy and the new designs are safer.
This is what we do with automobiles, planes, trains, you name it. Learn from mistakes, improve, continue.
In the energy sector we have been held hostage by environmentalists for too long. They want perfection which causes stagnation which results in little or no improvement. We need 75% or even 50% or 25% improvements coming frequently rather than 99.99% improvements that never come or take ages to come.
Some twenty years ago I was working in a coal mine. About noon the Miner Operator (man who operates a Continuous Miner ) and the boss were injured when the rib bounced (bursts outward due to added weight from roof settling). The slab of coal that blew out was approximately forty feet long six feet wide and two feet thick. The boss jumped forward, but was still hit by the edge of the slab which shattered his ankle. The operator (my good friend) was hit and covered up from the waist down. Somehow he only suffered severe bruising, but no broken bones.
After first-aid was administered they were loaded up in the back of the man-trip (pick-up truck) and hauled out of the mine.
I stayed in the section and proceeded to eat my lunch in the kitchen. Pretty soon the safety guys came in, looked everything over in order to see if anyone was at fault, and what could be done to prevent future accidents of this sort. They asked me my opinion.
Since I felt the men weren’t doing anything wrong or haphazardly, I stated we should immediately start pushing for the country to switch from predominately coal fueled electrical power production to nuclear.
My humor wasn't appreciated though they could not find fault with my suggestion, since no matter what type of work you perform, how safe you are, things can go wrong, the unexpected can happen, or the expected can be more severe. All we can do is prepare for possible danger as both of these men had done. They were standing as far from the rib as possible, with their jumping shoes on, since they knew bounces could be expected, however one this large was rare for the type of mining they were performing.
To make a long story short no matter what we use to fuel our wonderful standard of living, there will be blood (worked that in). We survive because we learn from inevitable accidents and then do all we can to avoid them in the future.
@Ned, well said. Too bad the know-nothing, do-nothings run this country and most of the world.
I am a Nuke Operator, and we have safety and emergency preparedness drilled into us. Even with the constant training, we are taught that when it hits the fan you rely on our operator fundamentals.
Too few people know that you can engineer and plan and study til the end of time, and nature will inevitably throw you a curveball, at which point you pray and think, in that order.
Nuclear power suffers from having been developed in the age of government supervision of utilities. There is no reason, other than it being a government regulated project, that a nuclear plant has to cover 100s of acres, take decades to build, and cost tens of billions of dollars.
How are aircraft carriers powered? Why couldn't this be done at a local level? The answer is a political one--not a scientific or technical one.
I'll be a contrarian voice on this one. I'm an engineer, although not a nuclear one, so I do have some basic understanding of the issues at hand.
I don't disagree with most of what the other commenters have said. Nuclear power plants are built and operated by serious people who have safety foremost in their thoughts at all times. The industry is constantly learning from past mistakes and improving their systems. The safety record for the industry is really quite exemplary. All this is true.
The problem here, which I think the general public understands at some vaguely conscious level, is that machines always fail eventually. And if a nuclear plant fails, the result can be truly catastrophic.
I don't remember what went wrong at Chernobyl, but what's intriguing about both TMI and Fukushima is how banal the problems turned out to be. And yet in both cases we came within a few inches of catastrophe. While it's comforting to note that in both cases the operators were ultimately able to avert catastrophe, the fact remains that they almost failed to do so, and did so only with the amazing heroism and self sacrifice of many of the plant workers. Just a few days ago, the Army was trying to cool the plant by dropping water on it from helicopters. Those are not the actions of people who are remotely in control of the situation. Rather, they are final acts of desperation. We got lucky here, and we should have the humility to recognize this.
As with most engineering failures, the biggest problems are the unexpected ones. At Fukushima, the big stuff survived and the small stuff failed. And we discovered that the small stuff is just as critical as the big stuff. But this doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone ahead of time. The biggest potential threat turned out to be the spent fuel pools, which didn't even have containment structures around them. They were thought to not be dangerous enough to need them.
The author claims that the Fukushima problems are unlikely to happen in the US. I don't see why. The Japanese are great engineers and amazing at construction. They are serious and dedicated. And they seem to by and large have the most advanced technology in the world. Yes, it's true that we're unlikely to have a tsunami in Iowa, but there's something else we haven't thought of that will happen. I used to live in North Alabama, which gets many tornadoes, and we had several nuclear reactors managed by TVA. If a tornado hit one of those plants we could easily get a Fukushima.
This tsunami was twice as high as the plant was designed to withstand. That suggests that the experts were not able to accurately predict potential threats. Why should we suppose that our experts will do any better? It's not that they're incompetent. They're not. They're good, competent and serious people. It's just that you can't always figure everything out.
As a Conservative, I've always been a little puzzled by other Conservatives' support for nuclear energy. It's very non-economical and would never survive commercially without massive government subsidies. And there's a hubris to it that ought to trouble us. I think a fundamental aspect of Conservative thought is a humility in understanding the limits of our abilities to control things. The Progressives believe that if they get enough smart people together to plan things out, they'll be able to make just about anything work, while Conservatives understand that usually it just doesn't work, because you can never really figure it all out.
Nuclear reminds me of this dynamic. Yes, on some conceptual level you can explain why you should be able to keep all these balls in the air. But the common wisdom understands that eventually you're going to drop one of them.
DavidJordan: The media may have told us that we were inches from catastrophe in TMI, but the truth is something entirely different. Even with 40 year old designs, the worst that can happen with a western design nuke plant is a few square miles have to be cordoned off for a few decades.
Even Chernobyl, in which there was no containment vessel, the core used graphite as a moderator (western designs don't use graphite). Whe the reactor over heated the graphite burned, both removing the moderator allowing the reactor to go critical, and adding energy to the reaction. the result was that much of the core vaporized and was ejected into the environment. Even though Chernobyl was pretty much the worst case scenario, life has returned to the area around the reactor only 30 years later.
You are allowing the scare stories put forth by the media to color your opinions.
WHile you may be an engineer, unless you have actually studied what goes on in a nuke plant, then your engineering knowledge is of little value.
