Radiation Nation Page 10
If Met-Ed had sustained the most serious damage to its credibility, the NRC did not emerge unscathed. The poor communication between the plant, the commission’s regional offices, the governor’s office, and the Bethesda headquarters demonstrated just how weak the NRC was as a command center during a crisis.45 TMI was, in the words of NRC engineer Harold Denton, “the most serious accident in the life of the reactor program,” and it had taken the commission by surprise.46 The combined causes of the accident—mechanical malfunction, design flaws, and human error—had exposed a fallacy built into the Cold War culture of dissociation: the belief that reactor design could be perfected to the point that it could eliminate human error. As Denton later recalled, there had been a pervasive belief that machines could be so well designed that they “would not place a lot of demands on operators.”47 At the time of the accident, there was no NRC office devoted to the interface between machines and human beings. It was an oversight that, according to the Kemeny Commission, revealed “a persistent assumption that plant safety is assured by engineered equipment.”48 More broadly, the accident had punctured a hole in the modernizing, Cold War image of a sophisticated, high-end technology. Carolyn Lewis, who served on the commission, recalled her postaccident tour of TMI. “I was rather horrified,” she testified, “to find we had these large pipes with rags around them and yellow markings on the floor which said ‘Contaminated Water.’ I had had an image of a high, clean technology that was well looked after and well run, and I found something that really, frankly, looked like the underside of a 100-year-old house that I once owned.… It was not high technology.”49
The accident also exposed the dependency of elected officials on unelected technological experts. From the time he learned about the accident, Governor Thornburgh had sought to create what he called an “island of credibility” to which citizens could look for reliable advice.50 But this proved to be extraordinarily difficult. The poor communication between the utility, the state, and the federal agencies meant that Thornburgh was confronted with what he called a “kaleidoscope of signals.” Not unlike the operators in the TMI control room, the governor found himself inundated with uncoordinated information fragments. As the accident emerged as the biggest news story of the year, media reports coming into the governor’s office grew alarming. The real problem, as Thornburgh later described it, was “sifting out fact from fiction, hyperbole from analysis, cant from candor, and guesswork from solid reporting.”51 The challenge was compounded by the fact that neither the governor nor the lieutenant governor knew much about nuclear power. Prior to the accident, Thornburgh’s only source of information on the topic was We Almost Lost Detroit, a book that detailed a 1966 accident at Fermi-1, the first commercial breeder reactor in the United States.52 Neither Thornburgh nor Scranton understood either the workings of nuclear reactors or the health risks posed by radiation. “I am not a nuclear engineer,” Scranton responded to reporters when asked to explain the reactor’s alarm system.53 When Thornburgh was questioned three days later about why children and pregnant women were more vulnerable to radiation exposure than adults, he answered, “I’m not a medical doctor.”54 Furthermore, Thornburgh did not have the medical resources he needed. Gordon MacLeod, the state’s secretary of health, later recalled, “There was not even a book on radiation medicine in the department. Worse yet, the medical library had been completely disbanded two years previously for budgetary reasons. There was no bureau of radiation health in the health department.”55
Thus the three organizations directly involved in the accident—the utility, the NRC, and the governor’s office—appeared unreliable and unprepared. Underlying the confusion was a more elemental problem that captured the opacity surrounding the nuclear issue: no one could see inside the reactor core to assess either the nature or the extent of the damage. Nuclear engineers had relied on instrumentation to gauge the core’s temperature, and they could analyze water samples to determine approximate radiation levels. But because both temperatures and radiation levels were so high within the core, the containment building was too dangerous for inspection. Indeed, it would not be until late July 1980—almost sixteen months after the accident—that two engineers, clothed in protective gear and breathing through respirators, would enter the building to get the first look at the core.56
The accident thus created a crisis of visibility in which engineers, public officials, reporters, scientists, and the public were hungry for information about something that they could not see. One reporter was reminded of the Attica prison uprising, where “there was a story going on inside [the] walls and you couldn’t really see any evidence.”57 This is one hallmark of the Anthropocene. Ecological crises cannot always or easily be captured through visual means. The inability to see the evidence—that is, to see into the damaged core of the reactor—simultaneously intensified the public’s hunger for certainty and eroded their confidence in official sources. Meanwhile, as the crisis unfolded, new knowledge workers and public relations specialists arrived on the scene in order to manage it.
INVISIBILITY AND THE EMERGENCE OF BIOLOGICAL CITIZENSHIP
There was a crisis of visibility in a second sense. The most serious threat posed by the accident—the release of radioactive material into the environment—was not detectable to the eye. As the NRC’s public affairs officer, Karl Abraham, recalled, “You can’t see radiation, you can’t smell it, you can’t feel it, you don’t know when it’s coming.”58 Officials, journalists, and residents commented on this dimension of the crisis over and over. In contrast to the dangers posed by natural disasters, the damage from a nuclear accident could not be instantly assessed. Unlike floods, fires, and earthquakes that abruptly upend the landscape and claim lives, the accident left no evident destruction in its wake. One reporter described it as “a continuing drama, but not a drama you could pinpoint—there were no flames, no people dropping like flies.”59 Invisibility could mean ubiquity, exacerbating the fear because the danger could not be quantified. Some equated the risks of living near a nuclear reactor with those of living near a flood-prone river. As one woman reflected, “It’s just like the river. I’ve been through five floods at my cottage on the river across from the plant, and I’ve always gone back.”60 But most residents felt that the dangers posed by the plant were different from those caused by the flooding of the Susquehanna River during Hurricane Agnes (1972) and Hurricane Eloise (1975) because the release of radiation provided no visual or auditory warning.61 As one government document put it, the danger was one that “normal body senses are incapable of detecting.”62
Precisely because radiation eluded sensory perception, monitoring emerged as an urgent task. Initially, it was Met-Ed alone that was tracking radiation releases (a point that would assume significance later as some contended that exposure levels had been higher than the company claimed). But as the seriousness of the accident came into view, officials from the NRC, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the US Department of Energy, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), PEMA’s Bureau of Radiation Protection, and the state’s Department of Health and Department of Environmental Resources all began tracking radiation. In the process, the pastoral landscape of south central Pennsylvania was transformed as local residents confronted the possibility that their bodies had become repositories of radiological contamination. One reporter described the scene as something out of a science fiction story.63 Civil defense coordinators handed out yellow Geiger counters to volunteers, the FDA, Met-Ed, and the NRC placed approximately two hundred thermal luminescent dosimeters within a twenty-mile radius of the plant, the Department of Energy sent up helicopters to take aerial measurements, and respirators were shipped into the area for everyone coming and going from the island. In addition, both the NRC and the state’s Department of Health brought in portable detectors for the full-body counting of local residents, officials took samples of soil and milk from farms near the plant and tested them for Iodine-131, residents traveled to nearby Hershey Medical C
enter to have their thyroids checked, and the FDA ordered the shipment of 259,000 bottles of potassium iodide, which can block the thyroid’s absorption of Iodine-131.64
Meanwhile, hundreds of news reporters descended on the scene. Because radiation did not discriminate, these reporters became players in the story that they were covering. Journalists wore dosimeters on their lapels and hung Geiger counters from their car windows, editors provided their correspondents with radiation exposure badges, reporters were rotated in and out of the area to protect them from overexposure, and the Associated Press shipped in breathing devices and protective clothing for its staff. As John Emshwiller, an energy reporter for the Wall Street Journal recalled, “You feel you were in a crisis, but it was a crisis you couldn’t see, and you couldn’t quite be sure whether you were in a danger or non-danger area. I remember vividly standing in the observation center where the NRC had set up its command post—and I walked over to the river and looked across at this thing, and then the wind changed and it started blowing across at us, and I was thinking, ‘what’s it doing, and why am I standing here?’ ”65 National Public Radio’s Nina Tottenberg claimed to know reporters who had spent a year in Saigon and had refused to cover the TMI story because of the danger.66
FIGURE 2.2. Worker in Gas Mask Driving to Three Mile Island. Reprinted from Three Mile Island: A Report to the Commissioners and to the Public, Volume I.
FIGURE 2.3. A Red Cross Volunteer Receives a Full-Body Scan for Radiation, Middletown, Pennsylvania, April 11, 1979. Courtesy of AP Photo/Vathis.
Extensive radiation monitoring meant that both residents and journalists were subjected to protocols normally confined to nuclear industry workers. Every TMI worker who entered a contaminated area of the plant wore a personal dosimeter, a device used to measure the absorbed dose of ionizing radiation. Everyone who worked on the island was also issued a thermal luminescent badge, which gave off radiation-level readings when heat was applied to it.67 These safety procedures transformed the bodies of workers into objects of routine surveillance. Every industry employee had what was called a radiation bank. In any given year, the worker was permitted to absorb a total of five rems of radiation. If the worker absorbed less than that amount, the balance could be carried forward into the future, just as, in the words of a New York Times article, “an investor on Wall Street carries forward a long term capital loss.”68 Because low-level radiation exposure had become such a routine part of their lives, some plant workers shrugged off the danger. One TMI worker who had been exposed to a large dose of radiation during the crisis boasted to a reporter, “I never felt a thing.”69 Another equated the risks of working in a nuclear plant with those of “a miner going into a coal mine.” We’re exposed to this all the time,” he noted with aplomb.70
The same could not be said for most local residents. For them, the accident constituted a breach. They had trusted the safety assurances of the nuclear industry, only to be faced with a near-disaster. They had seen the plant as a source of cheap electricity; overnight, it became ominous. They had to confront the possibility that radiation—something they assumed would remain sequestered within the reactor’s containment building—was now entering their farms, their homes, their food supply, and, most frighteningly of all, their bodies. The accident thus transformed local men and women into what anthropologist Adriana Petryna calls “biological citizens,” that is, citizens whose relationship with the state is mediated by a set of concerns about biological health and illness.71 While this citizenship mode becomes more acute during states of emergency, it arguably applies to all citizens in the atomic-cum-ecological age.72
Biological citizenship revolves around access to information. In the first days of the accident, the men and women who lived near the plant were hungry for credible reports. Very quickly, both the governor’s office (where a citizen information and rumor control center had been established) and local radio stations were deluged with phone calls. At its peak, the rumor control center was fielding several hundred calls an hour.73 Should people leave their homes? If they did, would they ever be able to return? What were the symptoms of radiation sickness? If there were a meltdown, would the fallout be as bad as at Hiroshima? How long would food and water supplies be contaminated? Rumors circulated. Would a meltdown render the area uninhabitable for one hundred years? How would people retrieve money from their savings accounts? Had radiation contaminated the gasoline supply?74 For many residents, the greatest fear was that they would leave their homes and not be able to return. One man recalled, “the worst mental anguish was suffered over the weekend—time spent wondering if the situation would be stabilized or if we were going to be faced with a meltdown, have to leave our homes, valuables, and property behind and most likely never return.”75 The fear was compounded by the fact that officials had few answers. As one local recalled, what worried her most was “the fact that they didn’t seem to know what was going on. They were the so-called experts, and they couldn’t seem to handle it and that’s what started getting me nervous.”76
EVACUATION, THE PANIC MYTH, AND THE REHABILITATION OF THE STATE
The state’s ultimate response to the accident propelled pregnant women, young children, and the unborn to the center of the Three Mile Island story. On the third day of the crisis, Thornburgh advised—but did not require—all pregnant women and preschool-aged children under the age of five living within a five-mile radius of the plant to leave the area.77 How did he arrive at that decision? From the time they first learned of the accident, both Thornburgh and Scranton realized that an evacuation might become necessary. Because of the flooding of the Susquehanna River in 1972 and 1975, local residents were no strangers to evacuations, and civil defense personnel had experience coordinating them. But in the case of a nuclear accident, the issue of evacuation was complicated by several factors. First, the twenty-mile radius around the island was jurisdictionally complex. It encompassed no fewer than seven separate counties, each of which contained dozens of municipalities.78 In addition, individual counties and municipalities were at different stages of emergency planning at the time of the accident. While the state had a general evacuation plan for people living within five miles of the island, as mandated by the NRC, the nearby towns of Middletown and Royalton lacked completed evacuation plans.79
Indeed, the Kemeny Commission later recalled that it found “an almost total lack of detailed plans in the local communities around Three Mile Island.”80 This meant that as the accident was unfolding, local civil defense planners were filling in gaps in preexisting ones or crafting new plans on the fly. At the height of the crisis, the NRC warned that an evacuation of everyone living within the twenty-mile ring might be required. With that warning, officials found themselves planning for a large-scale removal of 650,000 people, thirteen hospitals, and a prison. Like Met-Ed and the NRC, civil defense coordinators were blindsided. As a police officer remembered, “This was something that nobody had ever thought would happen! Nobody was [ready for it], really. They could say they were, but where the hell would the decontamination centers be? What hospitals would treat as many people as were in this area if they were exposed to radiation, to combat the loss of white blood cells? What hospitals in the area would have anywhere from 100,000 to 500,000 pints of blood for transfusion? There were no answers. There is no way in hell that [we] could have been prepared properly to deal with such a large contamination.”81 The state was caught off guard as well. Gordon MacLeod, the state’s secretary of health, recalled that Pennsylvania’s health department, which lacked a specialist in radiation medicine, had done no planning for this scenario.82
Both the jurisdictional complexity of the area and the lack of preparation were obstacles in the way of evacuation, but there was a third complication that gave Three Mile Island its paradigmatic character: the elusive nature of the radiation threat. Radiation exposure would not follow the cartographic path of five-, ten-, and fifteen-mile radial rings around the plant recommended by evacuation
planners. If a plume of radiation escaped, its path would depend on wind direction, a simple fact that was nonetheless overlooked in evacuation planning. One man who lived in Carlisle, located approximately forty miles west of the reactor, mocked the notion that radioactive emissions could somehow be contained within a twenty-mile radius. “What are they going to do?” he asked. “Have people stand up on the border with fans and blow it back?”83 The NRC’s Harold Denton, who recommended evacuation at one point, later told the Kemeny Commission that he had not realized the challenges it entailed. It was only after meeting with the governor that he learned how difficult it would be to evacuate areas downwind of the plant. “Their plans weren’t set up for downwind areas,” he recalled. “They were set up to remove people from certain blocks of property.”84 The realization led Denton to question evacuation as a defense-in-depth measure,85 and it underscored a point that industry critics had long been making: whatever their claim to the contrary, the state could not protect citizens from a nuclear accident.86