Radiation Nation Read online

  The community’s confidence in the plant was a product of the nuclear industry’s promotional efforts, but it also took shape against the backdrop of the political economy of south central Pennsylvania in the 1970s. With an economy that combined agriculture with manufacturing, tourism, medicine, and government, the Susquehanna Valley was made up of rural landscapes dotted with small towns. In contrast to other parts of the state, devastated by the precipitous decline of the steel industry, the area largely weathered the deindustrialization of the 1960s and 1970s.14 Some people worked at Bethlehem Steel in Steelton (located ten miles north of the island), but there were other sources of employment. The largest city, the state capital of Harrisburg, provided government jobs. Penn State University’s Hershey Medical Center, a medical hub, was just over ten miles from the island. Tourists flocked to the chocolate factory in Hershey and to the Pennsylvania Dutch Country. Lancaster County, located south of the reactor, had some of the richest farmland in the nation. Because of the diversity of the economy, the region had a stable population and lower unemployment rates than the state as a whole.

  Still, just as in many parts of the industrial northeast, people worried about whether the region could sustain itself as the country’s economic center of gravity shifted toward the Sunbelt. In November 1964, the Department of Defense announced that it was closing Olmstead Air Force Base, a major employer in the area. When Met-Ed went public with its plans for Three Mile Island two years later, residents predicted that the plant would help fill the void. Once in operation, the plant would be a modest employer, providing only about five hundred jobs. But in the short term, the plant required an army of builders and construction workers. The plant was also seen as a cleaner, healthier alternative to an old coal-fired plant in Middletown that dumped soot and dust over the town’s cars and front porches. In addition, Met-Ed promoted the plant as an antidote to rising energy costs. Although the electricity produced by the plant would be outsourced to other parts of the state, it would benefit local residents by keeping utility costs down. Thus as employer, source of tax revenue, nonpolluter, and provider of low-cost electricity, the plant appeared to be a boon for the local community.

  The community’s faith in the plant also reflected the extent to which the area had remained largely—although not entirely—insulated from the social, political, and cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. Dauphin County, where TMI was located, had a predominantly white, rural population.15 Many of the families who lived in the towns and farms near the plant could trace their ancestry back to the German and Scotch-Irish immigrants who had settled the region in the mid-eighteenth century. Susquehanna Valley was a Republican Party bastion in the state, and the people who lived there were politically and socially conservative, possessing a paradoxical worldview that combined patriotism and respect for authority with an indigenous folk culture of suspicion. Harrisburg journalist Paul Beers described the culture this way: “For two centuries the Harrisburg area had an old-world Dutch hypersensitivity to fear and rumor.”16 Yet this culture of suspicion coexisted alongside a collective deference to authority. One syndicated columnist went so far as to declare the region around TMI “the confidence in authority capital of the country.”17 Many local residents were also religious Christians. Dauphin County alone was home to 130 Catholic, Evangelical Lutheran, and United Methodist congregations.18

  FIGURE 2.1.  Map of Three Mile Island. Reprinted with Permission from The People of Three Mile Island. Copyright Held by Robert Del Tredici. Courtesy of Robert Del Tredici.

  Of course like any place dominated by conservatism, there were pockets of dissent. There had been some antiwar mobilization in the cities of Lancaster and Harrisburg, as well as on the college campuses that dotted the region. And the antinuclear movement had established a foothold in the area by the early 1970s. Local residents would also have been familiar with the Catholic radical pacifist tradition. In 1972, priest and antiwar activist Philip Berrigan, along with six others, was charged with twenty-three counts of conspiracy, including plans to raid federal offices, bomb government property, and kidnap national security advisor Henry Kissinger. Their trial was held in the Pennsylvania capital, where the accused—who came to be called the Harrisburg Seven—were acquitted of all charges. Thus the region had not been wholly sequestered from the upheavals of the era. But before the accident, the patriotic men and women who lived near the plant were loath to question either the veracity of the utility company or the effectiveness of government safeguards regarding nuclear power. As one Middletown resident ruefully observed of his neighbors, “They think everything the government says is the gospel, Middletown people. Wave a flag in front of them and they’ll march off with you anywhere.”19 Confidence in the nuclear industry, the hope that the plant would secure the region’s economic viability, and a homegrown conservatism were all knitted into the Cold War culture of dissociation, which began to unravel as the coolant flowed out of the reactor core.

  If there were a single word to describe the first forty-eight hours of the accident, it would be “confusion.” The confusion began in the control room during the first minutes when over one hundred alarms went off simultaneously. Without a mechanism for turning off less important alarms in order to concentrate on the crucial ones, operators quickly became overwhelmed by the control panel. Multiple, redundant safeguards were built into the reactor, but these safeguards had the unintended consequence of bombarding operators with too many signals, increasing the likelihood of human error. This made Three Mile Island a paradigmatic case of what Charles Perrow calls “normal accidents”—accidents that emerge out of the failures and vulnerabilities inherent in any complex technological system.20 As one operator later told the Kemeny Commission (appointed by President Carter to investigate the accident): “I would have liked to have thrown away the alarm panel. It wasn’t giving us any useful information.”21 Plant operators had received extensive emergency training, but they found themselves blindsided. “We did not have a procedure to cover these conditions,” recalled Edward Frederick, who was there that morning. “We had no guidelines by which to operate.”22

  The confusion inside the control room soon migrated beyond the plant. Met-Ed first contacted the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency (PEMA) at 7:02 on Wednesday morning, three hours after the problems began, but immediately after the crew declared an emergency. Within twenty minutes, PEMA officials had contacted the state’s Department of Environmental Resources (DER), as well as the Civil Defense coordinators for Dauphin, Lancaster, and York counties. Between 7:45 and 9:00, PEMA director Oran Henderson called the governor and the lieutenant governor, the NRC was notified, and it relayed the news to the White House. At 9:02, the first AP bulletin reported a general emergency at Three Mile Island, and at 10:55, the governor’s office held its first press conference about what was then being called an incident.23 “Everything is under control. There is and was no danger to public health and safety,” William Scranton, the state’s lieutenant governor, told reporters.24 Scranton then explained that Met-Ed had been monitoring the air in the plant’s vicinity, and while there had been a small radiation release, there had been no increase in normal radiation levels in the area. While reassuring, his statement provoked a troubling question: Where was the Department of Environmental Resources, the state agency responsible for radiation monitoring? When this question was posed to William Dornsife, a nuclear engineer who worked with the DER’s Bureau of Radiation Protection, he answered that the DER lacked mobile monitoring equipment and was relying on Met-Ed’s readings. Indeed, the DER did not even have the legal authority to enter the plant.25 However calm in tone, this first press conference revealed the disturbing extent to which officials were reliant on the utility for information about a crisis that had potentially serious implications for public health.

  Over the next two days, the state’s dependence on Met-Ed emerged as a problem, as the utility issued statements that were contradictory, vague, and overly optimis
tic. As fragmentary information traveled from the utility to the state to the NRC and back again, local residents were subjected to an unnerving game of telephone. Met-Ed first reported that there had been “no recordings of significant levels of radiation” outside the plant, but clarified a few hours later that in fact there had been a “low level release of radioactive gas beyond the site boundary.” When Met-Ed vice president Jack Herbein arrived at the island on Wednesday morning, he minimized the situation, describing it as a “minor fuel failure.” Later that day, he clashed with state officials over the utility’s decision to vent radioactive steam to relieve pressure on the damaged reactor. Officials expressed anger that they had not been consulted, and the exchange left them convinced that Met-Ed could not be trusted.26 On Wednesday afternoon, Scranton expressed his growing frustration with the utility, telling reporters: “This situation is more complex than the company first led us to believe.… The company has given you and us conflicting information.” While he still believed that there was no immediate danger, Scranton now acknowledged that detectable amounts of radiation had been released.27

  Worries intensified over the next forty-eight hours. As of Wednesday night, conditions seemed to be improving as operators worked to cool the core. At a press conference, NRC representative Charles Gallina announced that there was no significant core damage (a groundless claim) and predicted that the reactor would be in a cold shutdown within a day.28 On Thursday morning, Jack Herbein and Met-Ed president Walter Creitz exuded confidence, telling television viewers that the radiation releases were too small to pose a danger. As Herbein snapped to an ever-growing press corps, “I can tell you that we didn’t injure anybody through this accident, we didn’t overexpose anybody, and we certainly didn’t kill a single sole [sic].” The levels of off-site radiation were “absolutely minuscule.”29 But later that day, industry critic Ernest Sternglass flew into the area and announced that his portable monitor showed radiation levels fifteen times the norm. He urged pregnant women and young children to leave immediately.30 That afternoon, Governor Richard Thornburgh spoke publicly for the first time about the accident, assuring residents, and explicitly pregnant women and children, that there was no cause for alarm.

  But by Thursday night there were two more worrisome developments. First, as operators struggled to bring down temperatures, they realized that the damage was far more extensive than anyone had first grasped. Bringing the reactor to a state of cold shutdown was not going to be as simple as the utility had predicted. Second, officials learned that Met-Ed had discharged slightly radioactive water into the Susquehanna River earlier in the day.31 The utility had asked NRC regional officials for permission to dump the wastewater, which was granted on the grounds that the water’s radiation levels remained within regulatory limits. But both Thornburgh and upper NRC officials were angry when they learned of the decision. They feared that there would be an impression that the company had endangered public health. Indeed, neither the press nor those living downstream from the plant had been informed that the utility was releasing contaminated liquid into a river that provided drinking water and fish to local communities.32

  By Friday both plant conditions and communications were deteriorating. Early that morning, operators vented radioactive gas out of the reactor’s auxiliary building as a way to relieve pressure, and a helicopter showed a very high radiation reading.33 The emission had been planned, but both PEMA and the NRC erroneously thought that the crippled reactor was now leaking dangerous amounts of radiation into the air. Because of this faulty information, the NRC headquarters in Bethesda advised Governor Thornburgh to issue an evacuation order. For the first time, civil defense authorities in Dauphin, Lancaster, and York counties were informed that an evacuation was likely, and Dauphin County’s civil defense director announced on local radio that an evacuation might be necessary. But both Thornburgh and officials at the plant were confused by the evacuation recommendation, which seemed unwarranted based on the reactor’s relatively stable condition. To Thornburgh, who was ultimately responsible for the evacuation decision, the recommendation seemed rash, even reckless. The confusion captured the difficulties involved in gathering consistent information, sustaining clear lines of communication between those who were working on- and off-site, and coordinating a coherent response to the accident. As NRC chairman Joseph Hendrie complained, “We are operating almost totally in the blind: his [the governor’s] information is ambiguous, mine is nonexistent and—I don’t know—it’s like a couple of blind men staggering around making decisions.”34

  On Friday came another dire concern: a large hydrogen gas bubble had developed in the container that housed the core. If workers could not reduce the bubble, they would not be able to cool the reactor. On Friday afternoon, officials began speaking publicly for the first time of a possible core meltdown. At the same time, if oxygen levels rose inside the vessel, the mixing of hydrogen and oxygen could cause an explosion. Central Pennsylvania now appeared to be at risk for the two catastrophes that the nuclear industry had said could never happen: a meltdown and a detonation. Indeed, the NRC had been so unprepared for this second contingency that, during the crisis, commission members had called “all around the country to find out whether a hydrogen bubble could or could not blow up in the reactor.”35 And while a hydrogen explosion was not the same as a weapon detonation, the distinction mattered little to a public that still associated plants with bombs. “The world has never known a day quite like today,” Walter Cronkite announced on the CBS evening news that Friday night. “It faced the considerable uncertainties and dangers of the worst nuclear power plant accident of the atomic age. And the horror tonight is that it could get much worse.”36 The fear of an explosion persisted until Sunday night, when Met-Ed and the NRC learned that the size of the bubble had diminished. At that point, five days after the accident, the worst of the crisis appeared to be over.

  THE BREAKDOWN OF TRUST

  The confusion during the early days of the accident created a serious credibility crisis for Met-Ed. The fact that the company had waited several hours to contact government officials, combined with its early overconfidence about the state of the reactor, left some convinced that the utility was whitewashing what had happened. That theory resonated with the Vietnam War, which had exposed patterns of dissemblance characterized not simply by the deliberate withholding of information, but also by the careful titration of information with the aim of emotionally containing the population. Secretary of State Dean Rusk later recalled of the Vietnam era: “We made a deliberate decision not to stir up war fever among the American people.… We felt that in a nuclear world it’s just too dangerous for an entire people to become too angry. That might push the situation beyond the point of no return.”37 Thus when reporters asked him what Met-Ed was doing in response to the accident, Jack Herbein could retort with impunity: “We have more important things to do than to tell you every little step we take.” Such comments fed into a growing suspicion that the utility was engaging in a cover-up.

  This cover-up theory resonated not only with the Vietnam War debacle but also with the Watergate scandal, another crisis of authority that had exploded five years earlier. A man from New Jersey described his experience of watching the Watergate hearings in 1973 in a letter to the New York Times: “One of the frightening effects … is the feeling that we can no longer trust in the reality of our experience. We have witnessed so much façade, contrivance, and deception in our political and economic processes … that one has the sensation of living in a kind of movie-set society where the people and the buildings look real but are actually hollow.” The most fatal damage inflicted by Watergate, he continued, was that it had undermined the concept of “face value—that reality is what we perceive it to be.”38 The accident was suffused with the same air of unreality, fueled by speculation that those in positions of authority were lying. As Curtis Wilkie, the Washington bureau reporter for the Boston Globe recalled: “The guys from Met-Ed looked connivin
g, looked like people with something to hide. They had the look of Richard Nixon in ’74.”39 For the first time, too, local residents had realized how dependent they were on the utility for leveling with them about their own safety. As one man put it, “I believe that we as citizens have been lied to about many things that have happened.”40 Another resident described what he called “a Watergate cover-up feeling,” and a twenty-year-old folk singer poked fun at Met-Ed’s efforts to downplay what had happened, penning a song with the line: “We’re top of the news for the entire week, because of what they call a minor leak.”41

  At a moment when national opposition to nuclear power was growing, then, Met-Ed executives grasped that the accident constituted a public relations crisis of considerable proportions. And if Watergate was on the minds of local residents and reporters, Met-Ed executives were also thinking about the political thriller The China Syndrome, released only twelve days before the accident. The film told the story of a reporter and cameraman (played by Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas) who join forces with a plant operator (played by Jack Lemmon) to expose safety problems at a nuclear power plant in Ventana, California. In the film, the owners are unambiguous villains: deceptive, reckless, profit-driven, and willing to resort to violence to hide safety problems. Met-Ed president Walter Creitz later told the Kemeny Commission that he had seen the film before the accident and that it loomed over him as he prepared to talk with reporters: “Because of the credibility gap that developed in The China Syndrome, I wanted to be able to tell the news media, the people, exactly what happened.” But because “exactly what happened” inside the reactor remained elusive, Creitz could not do this. He instead found himself preoccupied with striking the appropriate tone. “I must admit I was nervous,” he told the commission. “I didn’t want to make a statement accredited to the company that might have been over-pessimistic as well as over-optimistic. I was concerned about creating panic. At the same time, I didn’t want to indicate that everything was in good shape or good hands, and yet looking back at it I guess there were times when we were more optimistic than we should have been.”42 More than anything, Creitz had wanted to distance himself from the film’s depiction of the shady company executive who had “tried to hide the facts.”43 But in his eagerness to appear unlike a villain, Creitz ended up resembling one. Met-Ed’s vice president Jack Herbein noted the irony. During a congressional tour of the plant soon after the accident, a congressman asked Herbein if he had seen the film. Herbein answered that he had. When the representative asked him what he had thought of the film’s portrayal of the company’s deceitful public relations man, Herbein answered, “I didn’t like him at all.… But you know, a week later, I was doing the same damn thing.”44