In “Stronger Future for Nuclear Power” ( Physics Today, February 2006, page 19), Paul Guinnessy surveys plans for refurbishing, expanding, and building new civilian nuclear power reactor facilities in numerous countries. In the US, passage of the 2005 energy bill marks the federal government’s readiness to put the national credit card behind the nuclear industry. Tax credits worth $3.1 billion and the renewal of legislation mandating that the US taxpayer assume all corporate nuclear liability in excess of about $9.3 billion 1 represent a nice vote of confidence.
Some observers attribute these ambitious plans, after 25 years of drought in investment in nuclear power, to a gradual dissipation of the fear that followed the 1979 Three Mile Island accident. Arguably the more important factor in the drought was that when all costs are accounted, nuclear energy is not cost-competitive with fossil energy.
The reason that well-informed and intelligent people are still talking about Three Mile Island emerges clearly from two major new scholarly works published in 2004. The first, by J. Samuel Walker, 2 was sponsored by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The authors of the second book, Bonnie A. Osif, Anthony J. Baratta, and Thomas W. Conkling, 3 chose the 25th anniversary of the accident as an occasion to evaluate its impact.
Both books describe the TMI accident as a watershed event. The story of how that accident happened—how it could possibly have happened—emerges not so much as a technological who-done-it as a loss of the public’s confidence in the people who own, operate, regulate, and oversee the nuclear power enterprise.
Woven throughout the technical details is the unmistakable thread of facts manipulated and people misinformed. The 1979 Report of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island documents that what the technical people knew minute by minute had been concealed from the media and public officials. Repeated assurances of “no danger,” continued even after TMI station manager Gary Miller had declared a “general emergency,” which includes in its official definition “the potential for serious radiological consequences to the health and safety of the general public.”
Osif and coauthors remind us that before the accident, the nuclear industry believed it had designed “accident-proof plants … thanks to the many safety features engineered into each reactor” (page 32). Now, 25 years later, as those same assurances are being repeated, perhaps they are losing credibility.
What went wrong at TMI was not primarily a technology fiasco but a character flaw in management and regulation. Lessons learned from the technical failings may well have led to some technical improvements. However, one could easily suspect that the character flaw is intrinsic to the political–industrial complex; consider, for example, the sequence last year that started with the coalmining industry’s lobbying for and obtaining a lowering of national safety standards and ended with the needless deaths of 17 coal miners.
The TMI accident happened not because a pump failed, but because the management—staffing, training, maintenance, and a sense of public responsibility—failed. For more than two hours on 28 March 1979, reserve coolant injection that could have saved the plant from a major catastrophe was manually throttled because the problem was misdiagnosed. And two of the technical failures leading to the accident—the stuck pressure relief valve and the clogged polisher—had occurred before and had not been properly addressed. Even with the redesign of the failed gadgets, TMI remains an icon of a profit-driven industry cutting corners.
One would expect that the decision to give unparalleled government subsidy to the nuclear power industry would be made after public discussion and input from the best scientific and technical authorities in the country. Instead, decisions have been made in a political setting. Even the possible future directions for nuclear power generation were chosen in a casual and cavalier way. As far as anyone not on the inside knows, no one was invited to the Vice President’s Energy Task Force in 2002 who might have supported funding for development of Carlo Rubbia’s thorium reactor. 4
Walker recognizes in his book that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has tried hard to improve its regulatory function. (See a review of Walker’s book in Physics Today, February 2005, page 63.) However, TMI continues to be discussed because we have not yet come to terms with the fact that it was allowed to happen.
Rather than disparage those who raise concerns about nuclear safety, physics educators might try to present students with facts not colored by free teaching materials paid for by those with a financial interest in biasing materials used in schools.
The lay public is not as stupid as some experts would have us believe. For one thing, there are out there in America some 2500 young adults who have an appreciation for the complexities of nuclear power, which they gained in a physics unit at Huron High School in Ann Arbor, Michigan. 5 In that unit they learned to think for themselves, to shy away from a decision to be simplistically for or against nuclear energy, and to apply knowledge about how a reactor works, from control rods, primary coolant, and emergency core cooling system, to pressurization, relief valves, and loss-of-coolant conditions.
