Three Mile Island example

Three Mile Island is a small island in the Susequehanna River in eastern-central Pennsylvania. On it sits a nuclear power plant. The closest towns to the plant are Middletown and Londonderry Township, and Harrisburg, the capital of the state, is only 10 miles to the northwest. On Wednesday, March 28, 1979, the nuclear power plant had an accident, the first such accident at a nuclear plant in the United States.

According the factual summary given by the judge in a subsequent legal proceeding, a minor malfunction, compounded by a stuck valve and human error in misreading the problem, caused the reactor core to be damaged. In other words, there was a meltdown.

During the days that followed this event, different officials, such as the mayor of Middletown, the governor of Pennsylvania, the officials at the plant, and the leaders of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, debated what to do. A few days after this valve incident, a small gas release occurred. Confusion over the veracity of information and technical problems dominated communication among these officials and between officials and the public.

Data on radiation releases or danger of explosion was scanty. An evacuation was discussed, and was eventually recommended for pregnant women and very young children. As Philip L. Cantelon and Robert C. Williams report in their book, Crisis Contained: The Department of Energy at Three Mile Island,

“Garbled communications reported by the media generated a debate over evacuation. Whether or not there were evacuation plans soon became academic. What happened on Friday was not a planned evacuation but a weekend exodus based not on what was actually happening at Three Mile Island but on what government officials and the media imagined might happen. On Friday confused communications created the politics of fear. (9)"

A mass evacuation took place, and an entire community lived in fear that their lives were about to end. According to a story told by an NRC engineer who attended Catholic Mass in Middletown the Sunday after the release, the priest gave all the parishoners absolution, a sacrament reserved for those facing death (10).

Conflicting information and poor and overly technical communication continued. Not until President Jimmy Carter visited the site, flying into Harrisburg and going out to the plant in a yellow school bus, did people begin to believe that it was safe.

From the vantage point of the present, it seems as though the actual hazard at the site was always fairly low, though the outrage was always fairly high.

This seems to be due to a combination of factors:

• the dread of nuclear radiation
• the early withholding of information
• communications exclusively containing scientific jargon
• conflicting information from officials and experts

The judge's version:

“A minor malfunction, or transient, in the nonnuclear part of the system would evolve a series of automated responses in the reactor's coolant system, and during all of this, the relief valve on top of a piece of equipment called "the pressurizer" would become stuck open. Owing to continued misreading of the symptoms by the operators over a 2 1/4-hour period before the relief valve was closed and the turning off of an automatic emergency cooling system, the reactor core would become partially uncovered and severely damaged.” (8)