Three Mile Island

The disaster at Three Mile Island thankfully did not cost any lives directly, but the notion that it didn't harm people is very much up in the air. Learn all about the worst nuclear disaster in the history of the United States today. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Josh Clark?

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• 1:38Speaker 00

  Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 1:49Josh Clark?

  Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. And this is Stuff You Should Know.

• 1:56Josh Clark?

  The Whoops Edition.

• 1:59Speaker 02

  That's right. You know, it's not at Whoops though.

• 2:01Josh Clark?

  Oh, I can guess where this is going.

• 2:05Speaker 02

  Stuff at Sea Voyage.

• 2:06Josh Clark?

  That's right. It's the most deliberate voyage ever created.

• 2:10Speaker 02

  Completely unaccidental.

• 2:12Josh Clark?

  That's right.

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  Five night, adults only sailing trip, it says. And we're going to be doing our live podcast from New York City to Bermuda, not the whole way, just like one time.

• 2:24Josh Clark?

  Right. Yeah, there's going to be other stuff too. We're going to be meeting and greeting.

• 2:30Josh Clark?

  And I'm guessing there'll be other opportunities to hang out with us, maybe, rather than

• 2:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:36Josh Clark?

  just the one meet and greet.

• 2:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. This all goes down October 2nd through 7th of this year aboard the Valiant Lady. And you can go check everything out at virginvoyages.com/stuff.

• 2:50Josh Clark?

  Very nice, Chuck. Uh, let's see. So you want to start talking about Three Mile Island?

• 2:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, the, uh, the nuclear, I guess it's, it's still the worst nuclear disaster in American history, right?

• 3:06Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I can't think of anything worse. I mean, as far as actual disasters go, it wasn't that bad. But how close it came to being like Chernobyl level is, is kind of breathtaking, actually.

• 3:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. And this all went down when I had just turned eight years old.

• 3:27Josh Clark?

  Yep.

• 3:27Speaker 02

  On March 28th, 1979.

• 3:30Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And really interestingly, um, just 12 days before this accident happened at Three Mile Island, a, a movie called The China Syndrome came out.

• 3:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:40Josh Clark?

  Starring Michael Douglas.

• 3:41Speaker 02

  Crazy timing.

• 3:42Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And Jane Fonda, which makes it even weirder.

• 3:47Josh Clark?

  Because The China Syndrome, if you've never seen it, it's a pretty good movie. I would say go watch it. It is, it was basically this. It was essentially what happened. What happened in the movie China Syndrome happened at Three Mile Island 12 days later. It's really bizarre.

• 4:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, and the term China Syndrome comes from, I don't know if it's a term they still use, but I guess it was a term back then for a reactor melting down and melting all the way through to China.

• 4:17Josh Clark?

  Yeah, pretty, pretty folksy term for something as horrific as that.

• 4:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, because you know, when you grew up in the seventies, everyone knows if you dig deep enough, you will reach China.

• 4:27Josh Clark?

  Sure. I tried a couple of times and gave up after a few hours.

• 4:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was, that was on the playground at least. But yeah, this happened March 28th, 79. When you said it wasn't as bad as it could have been, I mean, you're dead right because that means there were no casualties and they did avert that completely, that complete and total meltdown. But there's a lot of sort of, I guess skepticism still that like, hey, it was fine. There was the air spine and the everything around there is just fine and nobody ever got sick because of this.

• 5:01Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And one reason that it does pay to be skeptical of that, and you can't really blame people who are, especially people who live in the area, like in Middletown, Pennsylvania. Is that at the time, the atomic energy industry, including the businesses that ran the place, the businesses that built these places, the agencies that regulated it, all of them had nothing but Pollyanna-ish optimistic views of all of the amazing things that nuclear power could do and how safe it was. Like they were deluded as a group about the safety of, of nuclear power. And even throughout this whole accident, as it was unfolding, they were just like, no, it's not that bad.

• 5:44Josh Clark?

  Oh, it's a little worse than we thought, but it's still not that bad. And it just kept going and going like that. Every time something new came out, they were like, oh, it's a little worse than we thought. Finally, in the mid eighties, they were like, okay, this was really bad. It took that long for them to admit it because they were just that optimistic about it. They couldn't believe that this could happen.

• 6:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. And as we'll see, it was a combination of human error and poor instrumentation and redundancies that didn't work and stuff that, I mean, it's crazy. Like some of the stuff I was almost ready to read like, well, and this thing just wasn't labeled correctly. And that never happened, but it was getting a little absurd. At some point, when you were looking at all the sort of things that happened that led to this?

• 6:27Josh Clark?

  Yeah, totally. Agreed. Yeah, I think that was a consequence of that over optimistic view, too.

• 6:35Speaker 02

  Uh, so should we start as Night Ranger did at four in the morning without a warning?

• 6:41Josh Clark?

  Is that Sister Christian? That's the only Night Ranger song I know.

• 6:45Speaker 02

  No, it's the song. They have a song called Four in the Morning.

• 6:47Josh Clark?

  Oh, that makes sense.

• 6:48Speaker 02

  Four in the morning came without a warning. That's all I remember.

• 6:50Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 6:51Speaker 02

  But that's what happened. Uh, there was a small malfunction in the secondary cooling, uh, cooling system. And there was a mechanical, they still don't know if it was a mechanical or an electrical error. And the long and short of it was the water pump started sending water to the steam generators. And as you know, from listening, I mean, we've done episodes on nuclear energy and on, uh, the one, uh, the meltdown in Japan.

• 7:18Josh Clark?

  Mm-hmm. Fukushima.

• 7:19Speaker 02

  Like water and keeping that reactor core cool is the whole key to keeping things safe.

• 7:25Josh Clark?

  Yeah, exactly. Cause once it starts heating, it's really tough to get it cooled down again. And all sorts of bad things happen when it overheats. And I think by the time they had, um, shut the system down, by the time they finally intervened, uh, it was at 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit. It's a thousand degrees short of a total meltdown. Um, and just to kind of go into a little more detail, um, of exactly what happened. Cause you basically kind of got the point across. There was a, uh, fault in, I think, a mechanical or electrical part that kept the water that you needed to cool all that stuff from flowing in. That was the thing that kicked it all off.

• 8:11Josh Clark?

  But this, um, nuclear reactor, the control panel was, um, designed to sense like when it started to overheat. And it did overheat because there wasn't enough coolant and it shut itself down. And everything from, with that was working properly. The control rods went in. Nobody had to do anything. The system shut itself down because it was overheating.

• 8:33Speaker 02

  Right. So, so far, uh, so good in a certain sense.

• 8:37Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 8:37Speaker 02

  Uh, but things really kind of went pear shaped after this, as you used to say, a lot. You don't say that much anymore. I miss pear shaped.

• 8:45Josh Clark?

  Oh, I'll try to bring it back then.

• 8:47Speaker 02

  I'm bringing it back. So they had to lower the pressure in the system. Um, so a pilot operated relief valve opened. And that's great. This thing should have stayed open for about 10 seconds or so, just to let a little pressure out. Uh, and it was designed to close automatically when it returned to normal. It did not close automatically. It got stuck, but they didn't know that it got stuck. That was the big problem up front.

• 9:12Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and that caused another problem. So first of all, remember it's overheated because there's not enough water. Now the pressure's lower in the, in the whole reactor. And lower pressure means that water will boil at a lower temperature. So the water's boiling more and more. So you're losing more and more and it's creating more and more steam. That's also raising the temperature. That's another thing that the operator should have noticed, right? Or they did notice. They were like, oh, the temperature in the reactor is really going up. But they all generally agreed that it was just wrong. There had been problems with that pilot operated relief valve for apparently weeks. And they, rather than fix it, they were just falsifying the information and dealing with it, like just living with the problem.

• 9:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. And we should point out that there were two, um, nuclear reactors there, uh, TMI. And not too much information.

• 10:04Josh Clark?

  No.

• 10:04Speaker 02

  Three Mile Island one and Three Mile Island two. Uh, they built these things in 1968 and, uh, TMI one opened in 74. And TMI two in 78 and TMI two, the one that had the issue here had only been open for three months. I think, yeah, just about three months when this accident occurred. So it wasn't even online that long. And so it must've had that leak kind of from the get go, it sounds like.

• 10:29Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I think you're right. Cause yeah, it must not have ever worked properly and they just didn't really know it or care.

• 10:37Speaker 02

  Well, they already cut the ribbon with those giant scissors.

• 10:39Josh Clark?

  Too late.

• 10:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:41Josh Clark?

  So the, the system again is like, guys, I'm going to run another security, um, safety thing. I'm going to, I've, I've noticed that things are really starting to go pear shaped in the reactor. And I'm going to start sending in emergency coolant. So the system opened up its own valves to let in emergency water flowing into the reactor. Try to cool things down. That, um, actually helped make things worse to an extent where like water kept like bubbling and boiling. And it was now spilling out of the open relief valve out of the reactor, which is not good. But it still would have helped keep things cool sooner.

• 11:23Josh Clark?

  The problem is the operators again were like, that shouldn't be happening. The pressure seems fine in here. Uh, and now there's a water flowing in. We got to turn off these emergency pumps and they did. They turned off the emergency pumps and that was the final straw. The system was like, I'm not helping anymore. You guys are on your own.

• 11:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. So the water level, the, the water level is dropping, which is, uh, very key to keeping that thing, you know, stable and cool. And it actually exposed the reactor's core, the top of that thing.

• 11:55Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 11:56Speaker 02

  And once the core is exposed, that's very, very bad news. That happened, I think everything started at 4:00 AM, uh, night ranger time. And then at 6:00 AM, this is two hours later. Uh, an operator finally was like, wait a minute. That release valve that was supposed to close automatically, uh, looks like that thing didn't close. So he ordered it to be closed off, but a hundred thousand liters of coolant had already leaked out of the system at this point.

• 12:25Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Highly, highly radioactive water just spilling out. And eventually it was pumped out of the reactor containment, uh, building into other buildings. So that they were flooded with contaminated water. It was quite a mess. So these guys have now figured out the main issue. They've closed the relief valve. Now they can put more coolant in and they started to do that. But you said that the top of the reactor core is exposed. That is never supposed to happen. The core should never be exposed above water. And because it had been now pumping coolant and was not necessarily doing the trick. It certainly wasn't doing it fast enough. And they realized about 40 minutes after they figured out that what the problem was,

• 13:10Josh Clark?

  that the core was really screwed up. Because remember all this time, for those two hours, Chuck, they were just like, oh, hum, everything's fine. They thought their instruments were messed up or that everything was working correctly. And finally, between 6:00 AM and 6:40, they're like, this is really, really, really bad. And five minutes after they figured that out, radiation alarms started ringing around the plant, which if they didn't know it was bad before, those alarms certainly confirmed it.

• 13:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then about 11 minutes later, and this is almost 7 o'clock, this is almost three hours later, they finally declared a site emergency. Right after that happened, you know, they tried to, and you know, partially, part of the problem here was due to the, it being in the 1970s and you can't get a hold of someone via cellphone like in a moment's notice. That's where this kind of comes into play. They tried to get in touch with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, kind of immediately. They called, the office wasn't open yet. And so they had what, you know, these things still exist, but what used to have a lot more back in the day is like an answering service, like humans had answered the phone and forwarded the call or call up the doctor or whoever they need to call and say, hey,

• 14:23Speaker 02

  I got, I think what's probably a concerning message that you probably need to get right away. So they tried to do that. They tried to call the regional duty officer at home, but they were like, no, he already left for work. And so this guy's in his car now, dun, didum, dum, listen to the radio on his way to work.

• 14:39Josh Clark?

  He's listening to beautiful music on the AM dial.

• 14:42Speaker 02

  He probably is. And the long and short of it is, it finally, like, I think it takes nearly forty minutes to even finally make contact with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And like, time is crucial at this point. Like, every second matters.

• 14:58Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and the reason why they really needed to get in touch with the NRC is because they didn't know what to do. They weren't really trained for a situation like this. The NRC was the body that had this information they needed to figure out how to handle this. So very quickly, word starts to spread, hits DC, the local journalists start showing up. Eventually, national journalists started showing up. And by nine AM, everybody knows that there is a big, big problem at Three Mile Island. The problem was, no one knew how bad it was.

• 15:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:34Josh Clark?

  Because on the one hand, the first people to start addressing things was Metropolitan Edison, the power company that ran, and I believe owned Three Mile Island, both TM1 and 2. And they were just lying their faces off. They just said whatever they thought what people wanted to hear. And they would even do it in private, like the governor Dick Thornburg and the lieutenant governor William Scranton. They were just lying to them about how not a big deal this was from the outset. So they proved that they were just untrustworthy from the outset. And they got quickly pushed aside as far as the people who were really trying to handle this problem went. They were like, you go stand over there, we'll deal with you later.

• 16:19Speaker 02

  For sure. They, on the 28th, they briefly considered evacuating the area. This is FEMA, they're on the scene now. But they said no. And then the governor, like you were saying, Governor Thornburg, he declined to evacuate again on March 29th because they're getting reports that there was no radiation that had escaped and everything was like completely contained. Finally, on March 30th, the governor got a report that said, all right, well, some radioactive gas has escaped the reactor. So he said, he makes an announcement like, all right, all pregnant women and preschool children need to evacuate and like, get out of the area. And that caused a pretty big panic.

• 17:00Josh Clark?

  It did. I think 140,000 people left. Did you see the, the American Experience, the PBS documentary on this?

• 17:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:08Josh Clark?

  It's called Meltdown at Three Mile Island. So a lot of people were panicking and leaving, but there were also a lot of people around there like, they can, they can take my house out of my cold, dead hands. I'm not leaving.

• 17:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, that always happens.

• 17:20Josh Clark?

  Right?

• 17:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:21Josh Clark?

  But so there were people that stayed, but a lot of people left because they were scared to death. No one knew exactly how bad this was. And so I think a lot of rumor and unsubstantiated stuff was really spreading very quickly. At the same time, there was no one who really knew how bad it was that could say, that's not true. That's not true. I can unequivocally say this is how bad it is. So you really couldn't say like, don't worry. It was, we don't think you should worry. We hope you don't have to worry. But there was nothing that they could really reassure the public with at this point.

• 17:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. All right. That feels like a great time for a break, if you agree.

• 18:01Josh Clark?

  I agree.

• 18:04Speaker 02

  So they are trying to get this thing cooled down. And then very quickly, another problem would pop up and we're going to address that right after this.

• 18:29Speaker 03

  First thought is like, wow, how are we going to do all this?

• 18:31Josh Clark?

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• 21:47Josh Clark?

  Okay Chuck, so where we last left off, Three Mile Island TMI 2 reactor had reached a different shape of a certain kind of fruit. Things were going badly, in other words, right?

• 22:00Speaker 02

  Not yes, it's bad, but I'm just glad you're saying it again.

• 22:03Josh Clark?

  So it went, it went from bad to worse, actually. They're like, they wouldn't call it a meltdown. It took years before they officially started calling this a meltdown. It was an accident. It was a problem and issue, that kind of thing. But on top of that, the reactor having huge problems. They now realized that there was a hydrogen gas bubble that during this two, three hours of the accident had developed because it got so hot that the zirconium tubes that held the fuel pellets, it reacted with the steam that was being generated. And it actually tore the water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen, and the hydrogen just started to build up.

• 22:46Josh Clark?

  Well, obviously, if you listened to our Hindenburg episode, you know that a big bunch of hydrogen gas in one place is very, very dangerous, especially when it's in the middle of a nuclear reactor.

• 22:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, so all of a sudden, there's this more concerning problem. They're like, if this thing explodes, you know, if this gas bubble explodes, it might rupture the actual building that this thing is housed in. And we're in real trouble if that happens. So from, I think, well, we should say that the World Nuclear Association, they say that that never would have been possible. But of course, they don't know this at the time. And who knows if it was possible or not. But for March 30th, this couple of days later, through April 1st, they managed to decrease the size of that bubble by venting that thing out and, you know, basically kind of slowly just reducing the size of the bubble. But this is also, if you're venting, you know, melting down,

• 23:43Speaker 02

  I guess they don't, what'd you say? They didn't call it a meltdown. It's having a tantrum, I guess. You're releasing that stuff in like more radiation into the environment by doing so.

• 23:52Josh Clark?

  Right, but they really had no choice essentially. It was either that or let the thing blow up. So they did, they managed to get the bubble under, under control. And on April 1st, Jimmy Carter, who was president at the time, I didn't know this, he was a trained nuclear engineer. So he was essentially the president to be in charge for this to happen. You knew that?

• 24:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, he, yeah, I knew from my visits to the Carter Center. And I read a book and I've seen a documentary. He's, he's one of my guys, one of the smartest dudes we've ever had in the White House.

• 24:26Josh Clark?

  Oh, I know, he was a fantastic president. It's a shame. So he was president at the time and he was like, you know what? I, I'm going to come there. I'm going to be shown touring the plant. Rosalind's going to come with me. That will reassure the public that it's fine. It's under control. The problem was, according to that PBS documentary, at the time, it was not a certainty that the hydrogen bubble wasn't going to blow up while the president was there. There are two dueling mathematicians who had conflicting results about whether the bubble was going to blow up. And so Jimmy Carter like took a real risk. So did Rosalind Carter. By going there to tour the plant, they had to wear yellow rubber boots. Because again, there's really highly contaminated radioactive water

• 25:11Josh Clark?

  that had spilled out of the coolant on the floor. It was a big deal, but apparently it had the, the impact he was looking for. And the public started to calm down.

• 25:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't know if you could get, if they would let a president do that these days.

• 25:25Josh Clark?

  Yeah. It was the seventies, man. What can happen?

• 25:29Speaker 02

  It was, yeah, just put on these booties. So he obviously orders a committee to convene and investigate this thing. It was, ended up being called the Kiminy Report because it was led by Dartmouth College President John Kiminy. And they, the NRC ended up coming out of this not looking so great. We'll get to why as we go, but they really took it on the chin. The training program, like Met Ed was like, hey, we trained up our guys as well as we were able to and to meet your standards. Like, we did everything you told us to do. All your requirements were met. It was the NRC, apparently, who like had lax requirements.

• 26:13Speaker 02

  And, you know, when it comes to like emergency training and stuff like that, they were really ill-prepared.

• 26:18Josh Clark?

  Yeah, these, these guys were fully trained, but their training hadn't prepared them for that. And that was the NRC's fault. The NRC showed that they weren't prepared to handle this either. Like, it was just really poor planning, again, based on over-optimistic ideas about the safety of nuclear energy, right? So the NRC also conducted its own examination. They're like, yeah, we should probably do a little better. There's a lot of confusing stuff in training. I think there was this one passage that said, insert key into the control panel. Turn key to the left, break off the key in the control panel and eat what remains of the key. That was part of the safety training.

• 26:59Josh Clark?

  Anyway, they were like, we also have to say, though, it wasn't just us. It wasn't just the operators, but the design of this stuff is pretty nuts, if you ask us.

• 27:08Speaker 02

  So, one of the big problems was why it took so long to realize there was a problem. Like, all that time was going by when things were leaking out. And, you know, the NRC again took it on the chin. They found that their training requirements weren't, weren't good enough. And that the operating procedures were confusing during an emergency. Like, from what I gathered from the documentary and by reading up on this was that like, they, they were trained to run the place and like, Turn the keys and push the buttons.

• 27:38Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 27:38Speaker 02

  But if if something went wrong, that's where they really, really failed to know like what to do. So they were at, you know, while this emergency was unfolding, they're misinterpreting data that's coming through. And they're making bad decisions based on that. Uh, they, you know, you mentioned earlier that the water started boiling really violently. That caused the coolant pumps to shake really hard. And they thought they didn't know that's what that was. They thought they were overfilling and the things were shaking because it had too much coolant in there. And that the pumps, you know, were going to be damaged because of that. So, you know, just to not even know that, like, hey, by the way, if this thing really starts boiling hard, the pipes might shake, like, they didn't even know that could happen.

• 28:19Josh Clark?

  Right, exactly. Like you said, they were trained to operate it, basically. One other thing to say about the system too is in that documentary, I think the guy who wrote the China Syndrome, he was interviewed a lot in it. He was saying that like, if they had done nothing, the system would have taken care of itself from the outset.

• 28:38Speaker 02

  Oh, interesting.

• 28:38Josh Clark?

  It was when they intervened those two times that that threw that safety sequence off. And that's that, so it really truly was a combination of all sorts of different stuff. The complexity of the system, human error, malfunctions, poor planning. Uh, and there's a sociologist named Charles Perro, who calls this a normal accident, which is basically an accident that is essentially inevitable because it's it's accidentally designed into the complex system. Somehow, somewhere, all these things are going to come together and cause an accident. That's what happened at Three Mile Island.

• 29:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, uh, if you're waiting for your Homer Simpson moment, uh, wait no further. Because one of the things they found when they did, you know, the big investigation, was that there was an operator there that had a large belly, sounded like he had a big beer gut.

• 29:32Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 29:33Speaker 02

  And his beer gut was blocking the view of some of the panel indicators. And like, they literally didn't see these things because of Homer Simpson standing there in the way. There was a printer, a computer printer that malfunctioned that was recording like real time data that got jammed for 90 minutes. Just the communication with like wearing face respirators and masks and all that stuff. Like they, they just weren't able to, to talk, you know, in a, in an effective manner while this is all going down.

• 30:03Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And that computer printer that was giving them that real time information being jammed for 90 minutes meant that the data they were working from was 90 minutes old in the middle of a meltdown. So like these guys really just had no genuine clue what was actually going on. They didn't even seem to suspect anything was going on in part because of that 90 minute old data they were working from.

• 30:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. So if it wasn't bad enough already, there are two more big factors here. And just how sort of janky this thing seemed to be laid out. The control room didn't have any direct measurements of the water. Like we kept talking, you know, earlier in act one about, you know, the water levels and they didn't, you know, they thought it was filling up too much, so they shut the water off. But they, this was all happening because it didn't have just direct measurements of the water levels. So they didn't even know, they were guessing at how much water was in the system. And then the second one, big one was that automatic release valve has an indicator light in the control room. It shows, you know, it was supposed to close automatically, but I think you can also order it to close.

• 31:12Speaker 02

  And eventually they, they tried to order it to close, but it doesn't actually show whether it's closed or not. The indicator lit up when it was ordered to close, not confirming that it was closed.

• 31:25Josh Clark?

  Right. But they took it like that. They took it to mean like, oh, well, the light's on, the thing's closed.

• 31:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. Ask the guy with the big belly blocking the screen.

• 31:33Josh Clark?

  Exactly. So, I mean, like that's a, just nuts that like all of this was happening. Just the sequence of events. I mean, if you, if you went back and did it all again, surely it couldn't possibly follow the same steps because it was just so intertwined with all these different weird things.

• 31:52Speaker 02

  Oh, for sure.

• 31:53Josh Clark?

  So there's a lot of, you want to talk about the radiation that may or may not have been released?

• 31:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, because I mean, that's one of the biggest, uh, obviously issues at hand is like, how much of this stuff is getting out to the local community in Pennsylvania?

• 32:07Josh Clark?

  Right. Yeah. And like you said, to, to get rid of the hydrogen bubble, they definitely vented radioactive gas into the air. That's just, there's just no two ways around it. They also had to do that a couple more times during the cleanup, as we'll see. But, um, the, the EPA, the NRC, Pennsylvania itself, the Union of Concerned Scientists, just countless different organizations, including non-governmental organizations, have conducted all sorts of studies. People have done meta-analyses of these studies. Three Mile Island is a very, very heavily studied area to find out exactly what happened. And essentially, almost everybody

• 32:48Josh Clark?

  agrees that there was not enough of a radioactive release to actually affect human health or the environment. And it seems to be one of those times where it actually is true. I can barely get it out, but I think they might be right.

• 33:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, they claimed that there was, uh, like the radiation was about the estimated levels of a, um, like a chest x-ray. Um, the Department of Energy said it had negligible effects on public health and the environment. Uh, I guess we'll, we'll end up talking about the lawsuits later, but, uh, because there obviously would be some. But, you know, they, there were some interesting things like, uh, I think the, uh, Forty-three percent increase in infant deaths in the area around the time of the accident.

• 33:34Josh Clark?

  Uh huh.

• 33:35Speaker 02

  Uh, there was a study in ninety-seven that found increased cancer rates in the area. Uh, there was a twenty-seventeen study that found a correlation between thyroid cancer and living in that region. But in each of these studies and in each of these cases, they're like, well, you can't absolutely prove that was the absolute cause.

• 33:53Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and, and these were, these studies are few and far between. Most of the other studies are like, I didn't turn up any statistically significant correlation even.

• 34:02Speaker 02

  Right.

• 34:03Josh Clark?

  Um, so the, I saw that the highest exposure during cleanup with a peak in nineteen eighty-nine was point nine eight REMs. And that is a tenth of a chest X-ray.

• 34:15Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 34:15Josh Clark?

  Um, and that onsite, the EPA found onsite, so at the Three Mile Island reactor, the radiation that in the environment was what you would get from flying on an airplane per hour.

• 34:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:28Josh Clark?

  So it really does seem like there was just not that much of an exposure. Again, I'm quite sure if you go to Three Mile Island and talk to some of the older residents, they will tell you otherwise because the, the, a lot of people reported, especially right afterward, that they were suffering from vomiting, nausea, hair loss, rashes. And I'm sure that people just have dismissed them over the years as like, it's placebo effect or nocebo effect or something like that. So.

• 34:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:57Josh Clark?

  I mean, if you believe that your, you know, wife or husband or mom or dad or kid died of cancer because of this nuclear accident and everybody's telling you like, no, it's, it's fine. You're, you're hysterical overreacting. I can't imagine.

• 35:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:12Josh Clark?

  Not being deeply bitter about that, you know?

• 35:14Speaker 02

  Of course. Uh, speaking of deeply bitter, I think that triggered another ad break.

• 35:20Josh Clark?

  Oh, okay.

• 35:21Speaker 02

  Uh, and we'll be back to finish up on Three Mile Island right after this.

• 35:44Josh Clark?

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• 36:54Josh Clark?

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• 37:13Josh Clark?

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• 37:54Josh Clark?

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• 38:30Josh Clark?

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• 39:05Speaker 02

  All right, so they had resolved this bubble issue and they got to cool this thing down. And that's really the main thing, that reactor core that had been exposed. Like, everything is super hot. So they, first things first, they really just need to get it cooled down. So they worked on that for, for a while. Finally, on April 27th, I guess this is almost a month later, they said that it was in cold shutdown. They had reached that point where water was less than 100 degrees Celsius at atmospheric pressure. And so they could start cleanup. And that was it for TMI 2. That thing shut down and did not reopen.

• 39:40Josh Clark?

  No, it didn't. Three months of energy production and that's it. It's crazy. And it is still actually technically under cleanup today. The cleanup effort started pretty much right out of the gate. I think it was in 1979 that they first started. But I'm sure the first couple of years. Were like, okay, what are we gonna do?

• 40:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:03Josh Clark?

  Part of the problem was is they couldn't see into the reactor. They couldn't tell with what kind of a problem they were dealing with. And it wasn't until the eighties that they started getting actual video confirmation. They put like video cameras in to the reactor and saw that the core had partially melted down and that not only that Chuck, the the the nuclear fuel, the uranium had molten uranium had melted down into the bottom of what's called the vessel, the container vessel. The basically the last thing between the the the uranium, molten uranium in China is this vessel.

• 40:42Josh Clark?

  And it actually had not been expected to be able to stand up to something like that. And just by sheer luck, it it did. It did not leak, but it definitely could have. And had that happened, it would have been catastrophic had it gotten out. So three cheers to the containment vessel.

• 41:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. The the cleanup, I think they, yeah, they started in seventy nine. And eleven years later, by ninety was when that whole first phase was done. Uh, they had like most of the nuclear fuel had been removed by that point. And about a hundred and fifty tons of radioactive materials. Uh, I feel like we talked about this kind of disposal before in other episodes.

• 41:24Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 41:25Speaker 02

  Uh, it may have been the the disaster in Japan, or maybe it was just one on nuclear, like bearing nuclear waste.

• 41:31Josh Clark?

  Yeah, it was within, I think it was twenty twenty five. It was a good one, but we talked about that that place in Washington, the Hanford Nuclear Site.

• 41:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, this stuff, uh, or the time at least, um, they went to it went to the National Engineering Laboratory in Idaho for storage. Uh, but then you still had all that water. You had about, uh, two and a quarter million gallons of bad water. Uh, that took another few years. So that wasn't fully cleaned up until nineteen ninety three. Uh, like you had to evaporate that stuff.

• 42:00Josh Clark?

  Right, which means you got gas on your hands, radioactive gas again, and that's where those further exposures happened throughout the eighties.

• 42:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:09Josh Clark?

  I think nineteen eighty-two and nineteen eighty-nine were the worst, but even then they were less than a milligram of exposure, which again is about a tenth of a chest X-ray, right?

• 42:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:18Josh Clark?

  So finally, the cleanup of TMI-2 is completed in nineteen ninety-three, but even that is still, like I said, it's still ongoing because they were just like, we got ninety-nine percent of the nuclear fuel out of there, out of the reactor. Isn't that amazing? We're just gonna call it done now. And so there's still one percent left, and there's a company called TMI-2 Solutions that is currently cleaning up that remaining one percent of fuel from the reactor.

• 42:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're solutions-based. That's what they do, Josh.

• 42:53Josh Clark?

  They are, and I was like, oh, wait a minute, they own TMI-2. Why would somebody buy a reactor so that you can pay to clean it up? And it turns out there is a bunch of, not even taxpayer, ratepayer money that Metropolitan Ed had basically added to people's bills as like a tax to set aside to pay for cleanup. And I think there was something like a billion dollars of that left, and I guess that TMI-2 Solutions was going, has been receiving that for cleaning it up.

• 43:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, that when they were protesting Met Ed, they had signs that said, first you try to kill us, then you want to bill us.

• 43:31Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 43:33Speaker 02

  This, this kicked off a lot of, I mean, this nuclear energy was at a probably all-time public low, obviously after Three Mile Island, like things were kind of humming along and then people really, really turned against it.

• 43:46Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 43:47Speaker 02

  There were a lot of protests, you know, when Jane Fonda shows up that you're in big trouble, and she and her husband at the time, Tom Hayden, did just that. It did lead to, I mean, silver linings, it led to one of the great concerts of all time, the Bruce Springsteen No Nukes concert at Madison Square Garden in nineteen seventy-nine. Brought the, you know, musicians band together and formed the Musicians United for Safe Energy, Muse, and they just released that in twenty twenty-one, and I just want to say, I know you're probably not a big Springsteen guy, but if you're a fan of The Boss, watch, don't just listen to it, watch the concert film of the No Nukes show, and it is-

• 44:30Speaker 02

  Peak, peak Bruce Springsteen. Unbelievable show.

• 44:35Josh Clark?

  1979?

• 44:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's incredible because it's before Born in the USA and all that. So before he was in state, or I guess this is MSG, but before he was at like that level of huge. But right after Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town, he was still young and hungry. And it's just like, it's an incredible, incredible show.

• 44:52Josh Clark?

  That's awesome.

• 44:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:54Josh Clark?

  I have a Bruce Springsteen anecdote if you want to hear it.

• 44:56Speaker 02

  Sure, let's hear it.

• 44:58Josh Clark?

  Backstage, one of our Bell House shows, I was meeting the boyfriend of one of my friends and he was from Jersey and he was telling me this story about how he and his friends were at a pool once and he looked over and he's like, and there was Bruce. And I went, Willis? And this guy looked, I was serious too. The look of just like contempt that fell over this guy's face for a second before he could regain himself.

• 45:24Speaker 02

  Bruce Willis.

• 45:24Josh Clark?

  He was like, no, Springsteen. I was like, oh, okay. It's like, I feel equally about the both, you know?

• 45:31Speaker 02

  At least you didn't say Box Lightner.

• 45:35Speaker 02

  That would have been really weird.

• 45:36Josh Clark?

  That would have been so much better. Oh, boy.

• 45:40Speaker 02

  Keep that one in your hip pocket. If anyone ever just throws out a Bruce story again, say Box Lightner?

• 45:44Josh Clark?

  Okay, you got it, buddy. He was on V, wasn't he?

• 45:47Speaker 02

  Oh, sure. I don't know. I don't remember.

• 45:50Josh Clark?

  And Scarecrow and Mrs. King.

• 45:51Speaker 02

  Okay, Scarecrow. Or was he in Tron? No, he wasn't in Tron. That was, that was a different guy.

• 45:55Josh Clark?

  That was Jeff Bridges.

• 45:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, but the other guy, the main guy.

• 46:00Josh Clark?

  That was Bruce Springsteen.

• 46:04Speaker 02

  Who, who am I thinking of? Never mind. We got to finish this one. People are going to be so mad at us. They're screaming at us right now.

• 46:08Josh Clark?

  All right, sorry, sorry, everybody. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is going to send us a letter.

• 46:13Speaker 02

  I know. So not because of a lawsuit that we're filing, but people certainly did. There was the fact that they falsified those leaked test results that you talked about without fixing stuff. And they issued a report to the Department of Justice in November of 1983. They indicted Met Ed for that falsification of the leaks. And they had to pay a huge fine of $45,000.

• 46:39Josh Clark?

  Yeah, you're like, okay, well, this was $1984. How much is it today? Still just $140,000 today.

• 46:46Speaker 02

  For falsifying leaks of nuclear material.

• 46:49Josh Clark?

  Yeah, for sure. And just being general jerks during the whole, you know, crisis.

• 46:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:55Josh Clark?

  But they were like, okay, well, we're also going to help set up a fund for the Pennsylvania EPA to take care of this area for years to come. We're going to give it $1 million. Again, you're like, okay, it's $1984. Nope, just $3.1 million. So all told, I think Met Ed officially paid out something like three, less than three and a half million. There's a group called Three Mile Island Alert. They're a nonprofit that is essentially watchdogs about Three Mile Island. And I don't think that they feel very good about Metropolitan Ed. But they say that Met Ed has paid out lots more than that in civil and personal injury lawsuits to settle those.

• 47:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, settling them because there was in 1996, there were, I think, a couple of thousand active cases for like, you know, exposure, obviously, to the radiation. And a judge said, all right, let me pick 10 of these and try them as a group as a test case to see if we, you know, if there's merit to the whole thing. And the judge ruled against the plaintiffs, you know, citing what I would, I talked about earlier. Like, you can't, there's not enough evidence to cite a direct link between the cancer that you have and the radiation that you may or may not have endured.

• 48:14Josh Clark?

  Right. So this is one of those, I think, instances where I, that I'm convinced because

• 48:23Josh Clark?

  there's just so many different people and groups of people from all different sectors of our society who have looked at this and said, it actually wasn't as bad.

• 48:31Speaker 02

  Right.

• 48:32Josh Clark?

  Could have been really bad, but it's not as bad as people fear.

• 48:35Speaker 02

  Right.

• 48:35Josh Clark?

  That's why I buy into the idea that it wasn't that bad. That's not to say that there weren't people who acted as whistleblowers. And in particular, if you saw a Netflix documentary called Meltdown, going Three Mile Island.

• 48:51Josh Clark?

  There was a whistleblower named Rick Parks, who was a supervisor in the cleanup crew during the eighties. And he blew the whistle because he was saying they were using this crane that was in the reactor to basically dismantle the reactor afterward, even though it had gone through the meltdown. It seemed very unsafe to me. I didn't like how they were testing it. So if like throughout the eighties cleanup of Three Mile Island, that's the most scandalous thing a whistleblower comes up with. It seems like it's about as on the up and up as something like this can be.

• 49:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. He claimed in that documentary that they like retaliated against them and that someone planted drugs in his car during a random drug inspection. There are other people that have come out and said, hey, that documentary is a little misleading. He did raise concerns about that crane, but they didn't ignore them. He just didn't agree with how they handled it and just take that documentary with a grain of salt, basically.

• 49:50Josh Clark?

  Yeah. So there were, I think, like you said, nuclear power was just humming along and then it just nosedived after, after Three Mile Island. And I think there were 51 planned nuclear reactors that were canceled in the United States alone. Like this had global repercussions. Between 1980 and 1984, 51 of them were canceled. I think I saw on the end of the documentary that was in 1999, they said zero new ones have been ordered since Three Mile Island. I saw a hundred had been potentially, but regardless, the upshot is the reason why nuclear energy is not widespread, especially in the United States, is because of Three Mile Island,

• 50:35Josh Clark?

  almost 100%.

• 50:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. Kind of strangely, a couple of years ago, Microsoft. Signed a 20-year deal to purchase power from TMI1, starting a couple of years from now, in 2028. And everyone's like, that's weird. Why is Microsoft buying a bunch of power? And like, oh, they're using power generated from that to fuel the data centers for AI.

• 50:59Josh Clark?

  Yeah, which I think we talked about that in the data centers episode and the getting rid of nuclear waste episode.

• 51:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, it feels kind of like a full circle moment.

• 51:08Josh Clark?

  For sure. So let's leave it at that, huh?

• 51:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure.

• 51:12Josh Clark?

  All right. Well, we came full circle, which means we automatically triggered listener mail, even though we have no indicator light to tell us as much.

• 51:23Speaker 02

  That's right. Hey, guys. This is from Nathan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania guy. I'm a former academic who never lost the love of learning. Your shows, both old and new, brighten my daily commutes with fresh knowledge and an open curiosity that genuinely warms my heart. But that's a very nice setup for a correction. Very gentle correction on Thomas Hobbes, guys. He didn't actually assume that all, or, and this is from our humanism episode, by the way.

• 51:48Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 51:49Speaker 02

  Hobbes didn't actually assume that all or even most people are inherently bad. Instead, he argued that some people will do bad things sometimes and that the rest of us cannot know who, when, or where. Hobbes would point out that we lock our houses at night and our cars in parking garages. And we do this even though we have laws, courts, and police officers. It's not about human evil. It's about rational caution in an uncertain world. And there's a little bonus here, guys. Hobbes lived an absolutely wild life. He was a scribe for Francis Bacon. He met Galileo in Italy. He tutored the future King Charles II in math and spent years in heated disagreements with Descartes through the mail. In fact, a few years after Hobbes died, Oxford University held a public book burning that included his work.

• 52:34Speaker 02

  That spectacle prompted John Locke to leave Oxford, hide his manuscripts, and flee to Holland for five years.

• 52:40Josh Clark?

  That'll do it.

• 52:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's Nathan from Pittsburgh. I always love the extra info.

• 52:45Josh Clark?

  Oh, I do, too. And thank you for setting us straight on Hobbes, too. We didn't mean to misrepresent him.

• 52:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure.

• 52:52Josh Clark?

  Because he can stick the leviathan on us.

• 52:54Speaker 02

  If we don't want that.

• 52:56Josh Clark?

  If you want to be like Nathan from Pittsburgh and send us a cool email like he did, and maybe even butter us up first. We like that kind of thing. You can send it to [email protected].

• 53:11Speaker 00

  Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 53:25Josh Clark?

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• 54:06Josh Clark?

  Hosted by Andrew Stratton, these perspectives highlight that life is more than a moment, a condition, or a tough day. Living with a rare disease can be challenging, but it does not define the Voices of VivGart. In these episodes, they share their stories, from diagnosis to working with their care team on their treatment plan. Listen to Voices of VivGart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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