Nuclear Power's Public Opinion Rollercoaster from Three Mile Island to Fukushima

TEXT ON SCREEN: March 28, 1979

ARCHIVAL (ABC, 11-14-88):
NEWS REPORT: Civil defense officials are urging you to take cover.

ARCHIVAL (CBS, 5-1-79):
ANNOUNCEMENT: Please stay indoors with your windows closed.

NARRATION: In March of 1979, Americans awoke to a nuclear nightmare.

ARCHIVAL (CBS, 3-30-79):
WALTER CRONKITE: The potential is there for the ultimate risk of a meltdown at the Three Mile Island atomic power plant outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

ARCHIVAL (CBS, 4-1-79):
ANCHOR: In the worst case a massive amount of radioactive material could be spewed into an area of 5 to 10 miles in diameter and 20 miles downwind.

NARRATION: The president tried to quell the panic…

ARCHIVAL (CBS, 4-1-79):
REPORTER: The president’s trip here was a dramatic gesture.

ARCHIVAL (NBC, 4-1-79):
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: Within in the next few days important decision will be made.

NARRATION:…but the accident had fundamentally changed the nuclear power industry.

ARCHIVAL (CBS, 4-7-79):
PROTESTOR: What we have to do is call for an end to the nuclear age in its entirety.

NARRATION: Now, more than three decades after Three Mile Island cast a shadow on the atomic dream, is America again ready to embrace the promise of nuclear power?

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: If we don’t have nuclear, it’s gonna be a much hotter planet.

THREE MILE ISLAND: LESSONS FROM THE NUCLEAR DREAM

NARRATION: One morning, Nuclear Regulatory Commissioner Victor Gilinsky received some startling news. Mysteriously high radiation and pressure readings were coming from a new nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island.

VICTOR GILINSKY (N.R.C. COMMISSIONER, 1975-1984): The technical experts tell you, “There’s gotta be something wrong with the meters. Gotta be not working properly.” Well, it turned out the meters were right.

ARCHIVAL (ABC NEWS, 3-28-79):
ANCHOR: An accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, which is located on an island in the Susquehanna River, ten miles from Harrisburg.

ARCHIVAL (NBC, 3-28-79):
ANCHOR: The cooling system broke down this morning, some radioactive steam escaped into the air, radiation was detected a mile away from the plant.

NARRATION: The plant’s controlled nuclear reaction was supposed to create steam that spun a turbine generating electricity. But on this day, a sudden cascade of problems left the reactor’s operators scrambling to regain control. Some officials began to fear the worst. Molten uranium melting through the bottom of the reactor. What scientists have dubbed the China Syndrome, as if the fuel could melt through to the other side of the world.

A new blockbuster movie had already primed the public for such a catastrophe.

ARCHIVAL (“THE CHINA SYNDROME,” 1979):
The China syndrome. Only a handful of people know what it really means and they are scared.

NARRATION: As federal regulators and the plant’s operator, Metropolitan Edison, struggled to stabilize the overheated reactor, they were confronted with a new worry. A potentially explosive hydrogen bubble that had formed near the top of the reactor core.

ARCHIVAL (NBC, 3-31-79):
REPORTER: It prevents the use of the reactor’s ultimate safety system, increasing the risk of a meltdown.

ARCHIVAL (CBS, 4-1-79):
ANCHOR: If the bubble burst, then what?

VICTOR GILINSKY: There was a tremendous scare that the reactor could just blow up.

ARCHIVAL (CBS, 3-30-79):
ANCHOR: The simplest solution, having a man open that valve to release the trapped gas is impossible, heat and radioactivity would kill anyone making that attempt.

NARRATION: Gilinsky still can’t believe one of the ideas floated.

VICTOR GILINSKY: It was suggested to my amazement and horror – that we send in terminal cancer patients. I remember the very distinct feeling that senior people are giving you advice that which, if you took, would send you right off the cliff. The idea of the men in white lab coats, who were supposed to know, and they’re standing there scratching their heads. That, I think shook the public.

ARCHIVAL (CBS, 5-1-79):
JOHN HERBEIN (METROPOLITAN EDISON): I don’t know why we need to tell you each and every thing that we do.

ARCHIVAL (ABC):
It’s a lot worse than what they are telling us. Typical lies. They ought to close all those nuclear power plants down.

ARCHIVAL (ABC NEWSs, 3 -30-79):
REPORTER: They have heard so much contradictory technical jargon from officials that the first casualty of this accident may have been trust.

NARRATION: On the third day, high radiation readings of controlled release of gasses from the plant caused the governor to call for an evacuation of pregnant women and children.

ARCHIVAL (3-30-79):
DICK THORNBURGH (PENNSYLVANIA GOVERNOR): I am advising those who are particularly receptive to the effects of radiation. To leave the area within a five-mile radius of the Three Mile Island facility.

NARRATION: Three Mile Island was not the future that was envisioned when nuclear power emerged decades earlier as an alternative to coal-fired electricity.

ARCHIVAL:
Here before us is a tremendous potential. Let’s think for a moment about the possibilities of the future.

ARCHIVAL (DISNEY-TOMORROWLAND, 1957):
ANNOUNCER: Tomorrowland – the promise of things to come!
GENIE: Here with my right hand I give you the magic fire of the atom!

ARCHIVAL (A IS FOR ATOM, 1953):
Here in fact is the answer to a dream as old as man himself, a giant of limitless power at man’s command.

SPENCER R. WEART (AUTHOR “THE RISE OF NUCLEAR FEAR: 2012): The complex of images around nuclear power is quite unique. There’s nothing outside religious imagery that is so strong, so pervasive and involves so many hooks.

ARCHIVAL (A IS FOR ATOM, 1953):
Nuclear energy isn’t waiting to help people everywhere in some brave new world of the future. The peaceful atom is here and now.

SPENCER R. WEART: Nuclear scientists had all kinds of visions of a new society – energy would be practically free. We’d have nuclear-powered flying cars. The deserts would be conquered. We’d build cities in the arctic wastes, there was an explosion of wonderful ideas about how things could be improved.

NARRATION: All of this had been part of a concerted effort following World War II to dull the image of the atom as a tool for war.

ARCHIVAL (ATOMIC ENERGY CAN BE A BLESSING):
ANNOUNCER: Yes, this is atomic energy at work. Not as a force for evil, but as a force for good.
PRIEST: Just think of all the things that can be done.

NARRATION: The pitch worked. Increasingly powerful reactors, like those at Three Mile Island, were scaled up quickly – with regulators telling the public that nuclear power’s safety was assured.

ARCHIVAL (STREAMLINE):
The plant is operated by highly trained people who are assisted in their efforts by the most sophisticated technologies available.

VICTOR GILINSKY: They really believed that major accidents were essentially impossible.

NARRATION: Three Mile Island proved that nuclear power’s experts were wrong.

ARCHIVAL (CBS, 5-1-79):
REPORTER: What are the dreams?
CHILD: About The Three Mile Island. People start moving out. There’s lots and lots of traffic. Then all of a sudden it blew up.

NARRATION: Twelve days after the sirens of Three Mile Island turned the communities around the plant into ghost towns, all public advisories were finally rescinded and the 140,000 people who had fled were told to return home.

VICTOR GILINSKY: It was only realized how severe it was five years later, when they opened up the reactor and discovered half the fuel had melted. Which went way beyond anything that anyone imagined before.

NARRATION: No one died at Three Mile Island and in the end it was never proven that the radiation releases created any lasting harm. Some of the fears, like the hydrogen bubble were later shown to have been unfounded. But the meltdown itself could have been much worse were it not for several timely discoveries, including technicians realizing a crucial pressure valve had been stuck open, an initial contributor to the meltdown

VICTOR GILINSKY: It would eventually have eaten its way through the bottom of the pressure vessel, and from then on, all bets are off. It’s kind of like you’re beyond anything that’s been studied.

NARRATION: The image of the disaster would continue to linger in the 70 nuclear reactors that already dotted the landscape.

ARCHIVAL (CBS, 5-1-79):
DICK THORNBURGH (GOVERNOR OF PENNSYLVANIA): Not all the promotion in the world can erase memories of central Pennsylvania as the place where the worst fears of modern man almost came to pass.

ARCHIVAL (NBC, 5-6-79):
REPORTER: There was an anti nuclear movement before Three Mile Island, but now it has a new following.

NARRATION: The cleanup after the accident took more than a decade and cost almost 1 billion dollars. And despite a host of reforms to shore up nuclear safety, the lesson to many seemed clear.

ARCHIVAL (CBS EVENING NEWS, 4-26-97):
REPRESENTATIVE EDWARD MARKEY: Nuclear power is dead as an industry in the United States. It died at Three Mile Island.

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER (PRESIDENT, BREAKTHROUGH INSTITUTE): Three Mile Island looks like so long ago to millennials. In some ways it looks like something your parents talk about, and worry about.I remember this “Saturday Night Live” skit where Jimmy Carter goes into the reactor to try to save it.

ARCHIVAL (SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE):
Mr. President, You’re glowing!
DAN AKROYD: Don’t touch me. I’m a nuclear engineer and I’m pretty worried right now.

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: …And turns into this gigantic radiated man.

ARCHIVAL (SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE):
DAN AKROYD: This experience has not changed my commitment to nuclear power.

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: …And it all seemed sort of exaggerated.

ARCHIVAL (CBS, 4-1-79):
ANCHOR: One government study estimated in such an event 45,000 would be killed, a quarter of a million injured.

ARCHIVAL:
If it would have melted down it would have probably wiped out the entire Eastern seabord.

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: It all just sort of seemed way blown outta proportion.

NARRATION: Michael Shellenberger is among a new wave of environmentalists who began to gain prominence over the last decade. Their views — recently featured in the film Pandora’s Promise — are strikingly different from the types that led the news in 1979.

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: I think it’s fair to say that the concerns that young environmentalists have are overwhelmingly around living in a hotter world and that those pretty seriously outweigh their concerns around nuclear. The idea that you can power a world of 9 billion people, all of whom are gonna live energy-rich lives, on just solar and wind is a delusion. It’s a dangerous delusion.

NARRATION: In 2010, support widened for nuclear power.

ARCHIVAL (ABC NEWS, 2-16-10):
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Nuclear energy remains our largest source of fuel that produces no carbon emissions.
REPORTER: Obama announced roughly 8 billion dollars in loan guarantees to break ground on the first new American nuclear plant in three decades.

ARCHIVAL:
To break through from this 30 year slump. We are really talking about a nuclear renaissance.

NARRATION: Although it continued to confront economic headwinds such as cheap natural gas. The industry weathered expensive safety improvements, pushed plant performance, and developed a host of new theoretical designs that promised a bright future for a power-hungry public.

Then, in 2011….

ARCHIVAL (ABC News, 3-13-11):
CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: First an earthquake, then a tsunami, then a nuclear disaster.

ARCHIVAL (ABC, GOOD MORNING AMERICA, 3-13-11):
ANCHOR: The Japanese government now says two reactors are in partial meltdown and four more are at risk.

NARRATION: Gilinsky had been raising concerns about nuclear power since Three Mile Island. And the disaster at Fukushima – which culminated in a series of hydrogen explosions, three simultaneous reactor meltdowns and a substantial release of radiation – heightened that unease.

VICTOR GILINSKY: Chernobyl was pretty much dismissed here because it was not US technology. Then you get to Fukushima. It is U.S. technology. That’s a big problem. It’s triple Three Mile Island squared.

ARCHIVAL (PBS NEWSHOUR, 3-23-11):
MILES O’BRIEN: Before the meltdown in Japan, American support for nuclear power as an alternative to fossil fuels had reached a new high. But that support appears to be evaporating quickly.

VICTOR GILINSKY: Fukushima. showed that when radiation gets out, you may have a certain amount of land that’s off limit, effectively, forever. And the economic impact is enormous.

NARRATION: Nuclear energy is still confronting the same issues that have dogged it for decades, from investment capital to worries about nuclear waste. But scientists continue to push boundaries in the search for new ways to deal with our constantly growing energy needs.

ARCHIVAL:
KIRK SORENSEN: Thorium is a naturally occurring nuclear fuel. It’s so energy dense that you can need a lifetime supply of energy in the palm of your hand…

ARCHIVAL (BBC):
In a normal nuclear reactor, you take an atom and split it. What they are going to be doing here is taking pairs of atoms and then forcing or fusing them together.

SPENCER R. WEART: There is no good source of energy. The only thing that’s worse than not having nuclear energy or coal-fired energy is not having energy at all.

VICTOR GILINSKY: You have to step back. It is the first major, new energy source since fire. It is an impressive thing. The question is, is it good enough? Do we need it now? And, do we want this technology?

(END)