Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective J. Samuel Walker U. of Calif. Press, CA, Berkeley, 2004. $24.95 (303 pp.). ISBN 0-520-23940-7
As one would easily guess from its title, Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective is about the highly publicized reactor accident in late March of 1979 at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station (often abbreviated “TMI”) near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The author, J. Samuel Walker, is a professional historian employed by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).
The first three chapters introduce relevant issues preceding the accident: the public debate about the acceptance of nuclear power, the evolution of the elaborate federal regulatory system, and a brief summary of the engineered defenses against reactor accidents and the various challenges to the adequacy of those defenses. The heart of the book is the next five chapters, which give a play-by-play account of the accident. The chapters each deal with one of five days during the crisis and are succinctly titled “Wednesday, March 28” through “Sunday, April 1.” The final two chapters deal with the accident’s immediate aftermath and long-term effects.
The book contains little technical information, and many of the technical explanations that do appear range from inadequate to misleading to incorrect. Innumerable existing published papers and documents would be much more useful to a physicist seeking technical information. The book is largely about the personal interactions among the plant’s operating staff; the actions of the plant’s owner, Metropolitan Edison Co, headquartered in New Jersey; and those of the designers of the nuclear steam supply system, Babcock & Wilcox Co, whose headquarters are in Virginia. But more important, Walker details what was going on behind the scenes involving NRC personnel at the site and in Washington, DC; the Pennsylvania government and White House officials, including President Jimmy Carter; the several hundred media reporters who roamed throughout the area, constantly filing stories; and the residents who lived near the site.
From 28 March to 1 April, news reports contained a serious dearth of information from often contradictory sources having varying degrees of credibility. This situation led to suspense and excitement; at different times, it suggested a wide variety of evacuation scenarios that ranged from no evacuation to pregnant women only to the whole population, including people at various distances. Misinterpretations by the media substantially added to the confusion. For example, the radiation level at the discharge point at the top of a tall air-discharge stack was reported as the radiation level on the ground in a populated area. The mismatch in communication between scientists, who habitually shy away from flat statements like “impossible” or “inevitable,” and news reporters who wanted nothing but flat statements and who ignored phrases like “highly improbable,” was a constant problem. At one point, the NRC chairman jokingly said to his fellow NRC commissioners, “Which amendment guarantees freedom of the press? I’m against it.” His statement was widely reported and came back to haunt him.
Confusion about the accident was rampant. For instance, the possibility of a fire burning hydrogen gas was magnified by some scientists and reporters into a hydrogen explosion, which requires much higher concentrations of hydrogen, and was even interpreted by some media outlets as a nuclear hydrogen bomb. Information presented by technical experts as highly improbable, worst-case scenarios was again interpreted by some reporters as expected occurrences. The confusion extended to all levels—even the governor of Pennsylvania, who had to make decisions about evacuation, misinterpreted what he was told directly by the NRC chairman.
The five chapters that give a play-by-play account provide excellent reading for anyone interested in people’s interactions with each other during a crisis. It is difficult to put Walker’s book down in the midst of his exciting narrative; such literary momentum will surely motivate one to continue reading the final two chapters about how people dealt with the accident’s aftermath.
Since Three Mile Island is a history book, the first three introductory chapters chilled me with the reminder that journalists write the first draft of history. A large fraction of the footnotes refer to newspaper and magazine stories. As is common practice in news outlets, initial reports based on very limited information are often discussed in great detail while the final resolution of the issue based on extensive solid information is ignored. For example, the book discusses at great length the controversy in the early 1970s over whether the emergency core cooling system was adequate. The debate was instigated by the system’s apparent failure in small-scale, crude mock-up experiments. However, no mention is made of the very large-scale tests and related analytical studies that indisputably established the system’s adequacy well before the TMI accident. Moreover, in following the practices of many journalists, the author attributes as much credibility to antinuclear activists as to experts in nuclear science and technology—even though the activists have little scientific or engineering education and have never published in scientific or technical journals.
Because it is a history book, Three Mile Island shows us that journalists not only write the first drafts of history but also heavily influence the final drafts.
