corememories WRITTEN BY Maria VV. SSnyder

Three Mile Island.

TMI.THE NNAME EEVOKES AAN AAUTOMATIC

association with the most seriousnuclear power plant accident in theUnited States. Even 30 years later,memories of those living in CentralPennsylvania during the accidentare still vivid.

The accident began in TMI-2’s plant

on Wednesday, March 28, 1979, at about

4 a.m. The main feedwater pumps stopped

running and prevented the steam

generators from cooling down. Both the

reactor and steam turbines automatically

shut off, which increased the pressure in

the system. In order to fix the problem, a

relief valve opened to decrease the water

pressure, but once the pressure decreased,

the valve failed to close. Cooling water

therefore poured from the open valve

instead of going into the reactor core.

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Although

alarms rang and

warning lights flashed,

the operators mis-

diagnosed the problem and

made it worse by reducing the

flow of water to the core. This

caused the nuclear fuel to overheat

to a point where the fuel pellets began

to melt. It was discovered later that

TMI-2 suffered a severe core meltdown

that melted 52 percent of the core. This

could have resulted in the worst-case

scenario where melting nuclear fuel would

breach the walls of the building and

release major amounts of radiation to the

atmosphere.

Luckily, experts later determined

only a negligible amount of radiation

had been released into the

atmosphere. The accident caused

no deaths or injuries to plant

workers or local residents. But

to those who lived in the

area, the incident was

an unnerving and

terrifying

experience. The lack of official

information was one of the worse aspects

of the accident. Information that was

relayed via radio and the three broadcast

networks had been confusing and

contradictory.

“It was a scary time,” remembers Dick

Morgan. He was working in Elizabethtown

when the news reached him. “It was total

panic … the rumor mill started rapidly.”

Workers wanted to leave.

Becky Greenly can remember being in

social studies class when a person entered

her middle-school classroom and

whispered to her teacher. No one said

anything to the students, but they closed

the vents and windows of the building.

“Kids were being picked up by their

parents,” Greenly said. “It was chaos for a

while. They kept calling names over the

loudspeakers.”

When she arrived home on her

family’s

egg farm in

Elizabethtown, it

was “business as usual.

We couldn’t leave the

chickens.” When Greenly

returned to school, she

remembers, “The school was empty.

It was really weird.”

Many people fled. Overall,

approximately 140,000 people vol-

untarily evacuated the area.

Over the course of the next two days,

reports from the Nuclear Regulatory

Commission varied. At one point, an NRC

spokesman reassured the public that “the

danger was over,” even though they had

failed to stabilize the plant.

On Friday, March 30, NRC went

from underestimating the damage to

overestimating the danger. The

growing uncertainty about the

condition of the plant prompted

Governor Thornburgh to

advise pregnant women

and pre-school aged

children living

within a

Left: Protesters,shown in March 1985, statingtheir opposition to the restarting ofTMI-1 reactor, whichwas to take placein October 1985.

Right: TMIpersonnel

cleaning up thecontaminated

auxiliary building.

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President JimmyCarter touring theTMI-2 controlroom with (left toright) HaroldDenton, GovernorThornburgh, andJames Floyd,supervisor of TMI-2operations, onApril 1, 1979.

5-mile radius to leave the area. Later on

the 30th, the discovery of a large hydrogen

bubble triggered more panic.

Barb Read was attending Millersville

University during that time. She lived on

campus and had, at first, brushed off the

news. “We went out to dinner Friday

night and came back to mass hysteria,”

Read remembers. “Girls were screaming

and crying, ‘It’s gonna blow!’ The line for

the phones went down the stairs, across

the lobby, and out the front door. By

Friday night, the campus was dead

[empty].”

That night, Walter Cronkite reported,

“We are faced with the remote but very

real possibility of a nuclear meltdown at

Three Mile Island atomic power plant.”

The coincidental release of the movie

The China Syndrome, 12 days before the

accident, also helped fuel residents’ fear.

In the movie, an energy official informs

Jane Fonda’s character that an explosion

“could render an area the size of the state

of Pennsylvania permanently

uninhabitable.”

Throughout the day on Saturday,

March 31, the authorities and experts

studied the hydrogen bubble. If the bubble

burned or exploded, it could have caused

a breach of containment and released

massive amounts of radiation to the

atmosphere.

Unaware of the possible danger, Barb

Read and her roommate, Sue Ellerbrake,

stayed at school. Ellerbrake went on a

date Saturday night and Read worked on

a paper, listening to the radio. “The news

reported the bubble was growing, and I

started to get concerned.”

When Millersville issued a mandatory

campus-wide evacuation on Sunday,

April 1, Read panicked. “We called our

parents. The rumors speculated the area

could be radioactive for 500 years!” Read

now laughs at the memory. “We took

home all the important stuff—pictures,

clothes, and plants. No books!”

Dr. Werner Fetter of Elizabethtown

remembers being concerned but not afraid

about the accident. “Not until we went to

church,” he says. “There was a buzz in

the church. The rumors were wild;

everything was being blamed on TMI.

Someone said all the flies had died within

a 5-mile radius.”

The lack of trust in the media and

rumors of a cover-up all added to the

confusion. Even sensible Dr. Fetter sent

his wife and three daughters to

Shafferstown to stay with relatives. “I

stayed. I didn’t want my house looted.”

On Sunday, the experts determined the

hydrogen bubble would not burn due to

lack of oxygen. Panic finally eased after

two major events: President Jimmy Carter

and Governor Thornburgh toured the

plant, and Harold Denton, the director of

reactor regulation for the NRC, had

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arrived to coordinate the efforts to control

the plant and coordinated communications

with the public.

“He [Denton] was the kind of person we

needed,” Dr. Fetter says. “They put him in

charge, and he was calm and didn’t flower-

coat anything.”

The accident had caught everyone off-

guard. Since then, the NRC and other

government organizations have made major

changes to policy and procedures. Yet public

fear and distrust remain, and the incident

has halted and slowed nuclear plant

construction throughout the United States,

thereby “killing the nuclear industry for 30

years,” Andrew Kadak, MIT professor of

nuclear engineering, said. Only 35 new

commercial reactors have been put online

since 1979.

Cleanup of TMI-2 lasted 12 years and

cost $973 million. Currently, the reactor is

in long-term monitored storage. TMI-1

reactor was restarted in October 1985, and

has a license to operate until 2014. In

January 2008, a license renewal application,

which would allow TMI-1 to operate until

2034, was submitted to the NRC.

Memories of fear and panic will remain

with those who lived through those five days

in 1979. Everyone would likely agree with

Dick Morgan, who says, “It’s an experience

I don’t want to go through again.” ) )) )

Three Mile Island today, withreactor TMI-1 restarted in 1985and still running on the left, andTMI-2, the location of themeltdown of 1979, currently inlong-term monitored storage.

Links for more information:

• www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/3mile-isle.html (NCR: fact

sheet on the Three Mile Island accident)

• http://americanhistory.si.edu/tmi/ (Smithsonian: National Museum of American

History – Three Mile Island: The Inside Story)

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Neill Funeral HomeStephen Wilsbach, Supervisor

3501 Derry Street • Harrisburg, PA 17111(717) 564-2633

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(717) 737-8726

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Camp Hill, PA 17011(717) 761-4055

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