Three Mile Island Accident - 6 April 1979

Who would want to be a politician, a president or a prime minister? No sooner does Mr Carter get a very much-needed boost in the opinion polls by his triumph in the Middle East, than the nuclear reactor in Pennsylvania develops a hydrogen bubble, the temperature inside the container goes out of sight and the federal government begins to think of evacuating a million people, including the population of Harrisburg, which is the capital of Pennsylvania.

I hasten to say two things. First, that, as I talk the situation seems to be safe, if not yet, under absolute control. By the time some listeners hear this the reactor may have cooled and threaten no harm to anybody ever again. But, as I talk, the chief of the government's Nuclear Regulatory Commission says all is going well but he cannot say the emergency is over till the high temperatures have fallen off.

The second thing is that I know no more than any of you about the significance of hydrogen bubbles in nuclear reactors. This weekend all of us have become instant experts in the field in which there are no instant experts – so I don’t want anybody to feel that I am more qualified than the next man to assess the dangers of radiation or the efficiency or inefficiency of this particular nuclear reactor design.

What I can do, is to feel and report the pulse of popular prejudice one way and the other, and to pass on some well-grounded facts about what is likely to happen to the standing of nuclear energy in the United States. I notice that, whether qualified or not, simply everybody has an opinion about the accident at Three Mile Island. The very name, which none of us had ever heard before, will pass into the public memory along with such other names as Little Rock, Dallas and Chappaquiddick.

There have been some very good programmes on television of two sorts. First, NBC put on an hour show last Saturday about the structure of nuclear reactors, how they worked, and how this particular one appeared to have gone wrong. Then there have been many televised discussions between experts who disagree, mainly on one side the government, nuclear people in the company, managers, on the other, groups like the association of, so-called, concerned scientists.

Unfortunately for you and me, these debates or discussions are better and better the more complicated they become. It is, in a word, an immensely complex subject and the ordinary doctor, or physicist for that matter, is no better equipped to give a judgement than the ordinary grocer or farmer. But, as I say, this fact doesn’t stop farmers and doctors and journalists, actresses and jockeys from airing strong and dogmatic opinions. And I have noticed from my peering and reading, that practically nobody switches sides – in other words, the people who are against nuclear reactors on principle or, I suppose, I should say, on instinct, feel that their fears have been justified.

The scientists who are for it go on saying that nuclear power has to be... but we have to go back to square one, learn more about the behaviour of nuclear reactors and then devise stricter safety standards. The government is shaken – I mean the government nuclear experts. They admit that they had never anticipated this sort of accident that it was, for a time, out of control and extremely dangerous if the container walls had given way and spewed radioactivity into the atmosphere. And the last word we had before this broadcast was that the power plant, would have to be decontaminated and overhauled before it would be put to work again, and that this process will take at least two years, and maybe four. Our two senators on the Senate’s nuclear energy committee think it will never open again.

When the first scare was reported, many nuclear demonstrators, especially people who lived near other nuclear plants in other parts of the country, began parades urging the closing down of the neighbouring plant. Protestors in northern California kept it up for a couple of days and nights till Mr Brown, the governor of California, ordered one plant of the same design as that at Three Mile Island, to be closed. The governors have the power to do that.

What is not arguable is that the whole nuclear power industry in the United States, has suffered a shattering setback. The government simply arrested all plans for new construction – if only the government recognises the enormous force of public opinion, and of course, the architects, the corporation presidents, the nuclear researchers, everybody who is in the business of building nuclear power plants, and operating them.

The company that designed the plant at Three Mile Island has several more of them around the country and in those places, as you can imagine, the public pressure to close them down now is very great, whether or not there has ever been the faintest breath of a suspicion that they weren’t thoroughly safe.

When all the technical instruction which television and the newspapers have been feeding us has been forgotten, the public will remember that at Three Mile Island the radioactivity behind the four-foot thick walls of the concrete container was measured at a hundred times the lethal dose. The reflex attitude of Americans – and maybe non-Americans in other countries – the reflex attitude of people who live close by a nuclear power plant is if it didn’t happen at Three Mile Island, it could happen to us. And we now know, of course, they are right. The chances maybe a hundred to one against it happening, a thousand to one. They were such in Pennsylvania, but as long as there is a remote possibility, the power industry will be regarded not as an aid, but as a threat to life.

Of course the industry goes on. There are lots of people who say it shouldn’t. Suppose though, just suppose, that all the nuclear generating facilities in this country were to be shut down – what then? Well, there’d be a lot of unpleasant surprises in store for us all. I don’t think think that many people knew before last weekend that 13% of all the electricity in America is produced by nuclear plants. Thirteen percent is a statistical average: in three big regions of the country, New England (which is twice the size of old England) in the south east (about the same), and in the city of Chicago about a half of all the electricity comes from nuclear plants.

The companies involved don’t dare imagine what would happen, they can only say limp things like we'd have to replace this generating power or... it wouldn’t help our customers in any way. What they mean is that large sections of the country would have to institute blackouts and brownouts, there would be drasticreductions of power throughout the nights. And nobody cares to predict what would happen in midsummer when about two-thirds of the country lives through a continuous searing heatwave, and the air conditioners are buzzing away in half the homes of America.

What many of the "anti-nuke" protestors, as they are called, don’t figure is alternative sources of power. Nuclear energy is still, to many people not merely sinister but an unnecessary new-fangled luxury. They assume that we can get along very well with the old sources, and if you ask what they are, they answer is coal and oil. Well, America sits on a bed of coal but I don't think America is about to start a massive new exploration of coal, or be able to recruit legions of new miners. We have come in fact to rely on oil, and as one nuclear manufacturer says, "Where are you going to get that oil – from Iran maybe?"

So the accident came at an embarrassing bad time, when the United States can no longer expect to import all the oil it needs, not since the organisation of OPEC. In other and blunter words, the black eye that nuclear power has just received, throws the United States more than ever on the mercy of the Arabs. I think the other thing to notice is the effect of the Pennsylvania accident abroad. All of western Europe, except the poorest countries, is committed to nuclear power, and producing it.

On the same day that the Long Island Lighting Company's request to build two nuclear generating plants was suspended indefinitely by a New York State Commission, the Swedish Atomic Energy Inspection Board shut down two plants to repair leaking cooling system that I believe nobody on the outside had known about. In West Germany, which has 13 nuclear power plants, there were organised protests by environmentalists to close all atomic plants.

And the effect in poor countries, or what we now call "developing countries", whether they are developing or not, can be imagined. As an editorial in an Argentine newspaper put it, "the lesson from Harrisburg is that even in a country with highly developed scientific and technical skills like the United States, nuclear accidents of tremendous danger are possible". Or as a simple soul, a lady in a small town in Pennsylvania put it, "I don’t know about that stuff, that nuclear seems to me so powerful man can’t tame it right". I think that puts in a nutshell the attitude of the anti-nuke people and the fear of the experts, and I should think it’s a universal attitude.

Well, maybe, not quite universal. The one calm, complacent voice is heard from – wouldn’t you guess it, Moscow. I don’t know how thoroughly the Pennsylvania accident has been reported in the Soviet Union. I would be surprised to hear that it had been extensive, for the Soviets are always the first to guess the likely effects of frightening publicity on an a national audience. They have not made a point of reporting to their own people several known accidents to their astronauts and a few years ago they had an earthquake which was about two points higher on the Richter scale than the one that destroyed San Francisco. We heard about this only from Western astrophysicists.

Well, they have spoken out about Three Mile Island. The deputy minister of electricity was interviewed by the national paper, called Truth. "The truth is," he said, "that such accidents were likely to happen because of the slipshod attitude that exists where, as in this case, private interests are of paramount importance."

All the same, I’ll bet the nuclear inspectors are off on their secret rounds with new orders in their hands and a sinking feeling in their stomachs.

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