Speaker 1: Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, and welcome to the podcast, don Josh, And there's
Speaker 2: Chuck and Jerry's here too, And this is stuff you
Speaker 2: should know.
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Speaker 2: Very nice, Chuck, let's see, so you want to start
Speaker 2: talking about Three Mile Island.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the nuclear I guess it's still the worst nuclear
Speaker 1: disaster in American history, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I can't think of anything worse. I mean, as
Speaker 2: far as actual disasters go, it wasn't that bad. But
Speaker 2: how close it came to being like a true Nobyl
Speaker 2: level is kind of breath taking, actually.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. And this all went down when I
Speaker 1: had just turned eight years old, yep, on March twenty eighth,
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy nine.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And really interestingly, just twelve days before this accident
Speaker 2: happened at Three Mile Island, a movie called The China
Speaker 2: Syndrome came out, Yeah, starring Michael.
Speaker 1: Douglas, crazy timing, Yeah.
Speaker 2: And Jane Fonda, which makes it even weirder because The
Speaker 2: China Syndrome, if you've never seen it, it's pretty good movie.
Speaker 2: I would say go watch it it. It was basically this.
Speaker 2: It was essentially what happened, what happened to the movie
Speaker 2: China Syndrome happened at Three Mile Island twelve days later.
Speaker 2: It's really bizarre.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And the term China syndrome comes from I don't
Speaker 1: know if it's a term they still use, but I
Speaker 1: guess it was a term back then for a reactor
Speaker 1: melting down and melting all the way through to China.
Speaker 2: Yeah, pretty folksy term for something as horrific as that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because you know, when you grow up in the seventies,
Speaker 1: everyone knows if you dig deep enough, you will reach China.
Speaker 2: Sure, I tried a couple of times and gave up
Speaker 2: after a few hours.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was that was on the playground at least.
Speaker 1: But yeah, this happened March twenty eight, seventy nine. When
Speaker 1: you said it wasn't as bad as it could have been,
Speaker 1: you're dead right, because that means there were no casualties
Speaker 1: and they did avert completely that complete and total meltdown.
Speaker 1: But there's a lot of sort of I guess, skepticism
Speaker 1: still that like, hey, it was fine. There was the
Speaker 1: air spine, and that everything around there is just spine
Speaker 1: and nobody ever got sick because of this.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And one reason that it does pay to be
Speaker 2: skeptical of that, and you can't really blame people who are,
Speaker 2: especially people who live in the area like in Middletown
Speaker 2: or Pennsylvania, is that at the time, the atomic energy industry,
Speaker 2: including the businesses that ran the place, the businesses that
Speaker 2: built these places, the agencies that regulated it, all of
Speaker 2: them had nothing but pollyanna ish optimistic views of all
Speaker 2: of the amazing things that nuclear power could do and
Speaker 2: how safe it was. Like they were diluted as a
Speaker 2: group about the safety of nuclear power, and even throughout
Speaker 2: this whole accident as it was unfolding, they were just like, no,
Speaker 2: it's not that bad. Oh, it's a little worse than
Speaker 2: we thought, but it's still not that bad. And it
Speaker 2: just kept going and going like that. Every time something
Speaker 2: new came out, they were like, oh, it's a little
Speaker 2: worse than we thought. Finally, in the mid eighties they
Speaker 2: were like, Okay, this was really bad. It took that
Speaker 2: long for them to admit it because they were just
Speaker 2: that optimistic about it. They couldn't believe that this could happen.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. And as we'll see, it was a
Speaker 1: combination of human error and poor instrumentation and redundancies that
Speaker 1: didn't work and stuff that I mean, it's crazy, like
Speaker 1: some of the stuff I was almost ready to read, like, well,
Speaker 1: and this thing just wasn't labeled correctly, and that never happened,
Speaker 1: But it was getting a little absurd at some point
Speaker 1: when you were looking at all the sort of things
Speaker 1: that happened that led to.
Speaker 2: This Yeah, totally agreed. Yeah, I think that was a
Speaker 2: consequence of that over optimistic view too.
Speaker 1: So should we start as Night Ranger did at four
Speaker 1: in the morning without a warning?
Speaker 2: Is that, Sister Christian? That's the only Night Rangier song
Speaker 2: I know?
Speaker 1: No, it's the song they have a song called four
Speaker 1: in the morning. Oh, four in the morning came without
Speaker 1: a warning, That's all I remember. But that's what happened.
Speaker 1: There was a small mouth function in the secondary cool
Speaker 1: cooling system, and there was a mechanical that they still
Speaker 1: don't know if it was a mechanical or an electrical air.
Speaker 1: And the long and short of it was the water
Speaker 1: pump started sending water to the steam generators. And as
Speaker 1: you know from listening, I mean, we've done episodes on
Speaker 1: nuclear energy and on the one the meltdown in Japanshima,
Speaker 1: like water and keeping that reactor core cool is the
Speaker 1: whole key to keeping things safe.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, because once it starts heating, it's really tough
Speaker 2: to get it cooled down again, and all sorts of
Speaker 2: bad things happen when it overheats. And I think by
Speaker 2: the time they had shut the system down, by the
Speaker 2: time they finally intervened. It was at four thousand degrees
Speaker 2: farent height, so a thousand degrees short of a total meltdown.
Speaker 2: And just to kind of go into a little more
Speaker 2: detail of exactly what happened, because you basically kind of
Speaker 2: got the point across. There was a fault in I
Speaker 2: think a mechanical or electrical part that kept the water
Speaker 2: that you needed to cool all that stuff from flowing in.
Speaker 2: That was the thing that kicked it all off. But
Speaker 2: this nuclear reactor, the control panel was designed to sense
Speaker 2: like when it started to overheat, and it did overheat
Speaker 2: because there wasn't enough coolant, and it shut itself down
Speaker 2: and everything with that was working properly. The control ruds
Speaker 2: went in, nobody had to do anything. The system shut
Speaker 2: itself down because it was overheating.
Speaker 1: Right, So, so far, so good in a certain sense. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but things really kind of went pear shaped after this.
Speaker 1: As you used to say a lot, you don't say
Speaker 1: that much anymore. I miss paar shaped.
Speaker 2: I'll try to bring it back then.
Speaker 1: I'm bringing it back. So they had to lower the
Speaker 1: pressure in the system, so a pilot operated relief valve opened.
Speaker 1: And that's great. This thing should have stayed open for
Speaker 1: about ten seconds or so just to let a little
Speaker 1: pressure out, and it was designed to close automatically when
Speaker 1: it returned to normal. It did not close automatically. It
Speaker 1: got stuck. But they didn't know it that it got stuck.
Speaker 1: That was the big problem up front.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that caused another problem. So first of all,
Speaker 2: remember it's overheated because there's not enough water. Now, the
Speaker 2: pressure's lower in the whole reactor, and lower pressure means
Speaker 2: that water will boil at a lower temperature. So the
Speaker 2: water's boiling more and more, so you're losing more and
Speaker 2: more and it's creating more and more steam. That's also
Speaker 2: raising the temperature. That's another thing that the operator should
Speaker 2: have noticed, right, or they did notice. They were like, oh,
Speaker 2: I'm for sure, and the reactors really going up. But
Speaker 2: they all generally agreed that it was just wrong. There
Speaker 2: had been problems with that pilot operated relief valve for
Speaker 2: apparently weeks, and they rather than fix it, they were
Speaker 2: just falsifying the information and dealing with it like just
Speaker 2: living with the problem.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and we should point out that there were two
Speaker 1: nuclear reactors there TMI not too much information, No, three
Speaker 1: Mile Island one and three Mile Island two. They built
Speaker 1: these things in nineteen sixty eight, and TMI one opened
Speaker 1: in seventy four, and tm I two and seventy eight,
Speaker 1: and TMI two, the one that had the issue here,
Speaker 1: had only been open for three months I think, yeah,
Speaker 1: just about three months when this accident occurred. So it
Speaker 1: wasn't even online that long, and so it must have
Speaker 1: had that leak. Kind of from the get go.
Speaker 2: It sounds like, yeah, I think you're right, because yeah,
Speaker 2: I must not have ever worked properly and they just
Speaker 2: didn't really know it or care.
Speaker 1: They already cut the ribbon too late.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So the system again is like, guys, I'm going
Speaker 2: to run another security safety thing. I'm going to I've
Speaker 2: noticed that things are really starting to go pear shaped
Speaker 2: in the reactor, and I'm going to start sending in
Speaker 2: emergency cooling. So the system opened up its own valves
Speaker 2: to let in emergency water flowing into the reactor try
Speaker 2: to cool things down. That actually helped make things worse
Speaker 2: to an extent, where like water kept like bubbling and
Speaker 2: boiling and it was now spilling out of the open
Speaker 2: relief valve out of the reactor, which is not good.
Speaker 2: But it still would have helped keep things cool sooner.
Speaker 2: The problem is the operators again were like, that shouldn't
Speaker 2: be happening. The pressure seems fine in here, and now
Speaker 2: there's water flowing in. We got to turn off these
Speaker 2: emergency pumps. And they did. They turned off the emergency
Speaker 2: pump and that was the final straw. The system was like,
Speaker 2: I'm not helping anymore. You guys are on your own.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So the water, the water level was dropping, which
Speaker 1: is very key to keeping that thing you stable and cool,
Speaker 1: and it actually exposed the reactor's core, the top of
Speaker 1: that thing. Yeah, and once the core is exposed, that's
Speaker 1: very very bad news that happened. I think everything started
Speaker 1: at four a m. Night Ranger time, and then at
Speaker 1: six am, this is two hours later. An operator finally
Speaker 1: was like, wait a minute, that release valve that was
Speaker 1: supposed to close automatically, looks like that thing didn't close.
Speaker 1: So he ordered it to be closed off. But one
Speaker 1: hundred thousand liters of coolant had already leaked out of
Speaker 1: the system at this point.
Speaker 2: Yeah, highly highly radioactive water just spilling out, and eventually
Speaker 2: it was pumped out of the reactor containment of building
Speaker 2: into other buildings. So that they were flooded with contaminated water.
Speaker 2: It was quite a mess. So these guys have now
Speaker 2: figured out the main issue. They've closed the relief valve.
Speaker 2: Now they can put more coolant in, and they started
Speaker 2: to do that. But you said that the top of
Speaker 2: the reactor core is exposed. That is never supposed to happen.
Speaker 2: That the core should never be exposed above water. And
Speaker 2: because it had been now pumping cooling and was not
Speaker 2: necessarily doing the trick, it certainly wasn't doing it fast enough.
Speaker 2: And they realized about forty minutes after they figured out
Speaker 2: that what the problem was that the core was really
Speaker 2: screwed up. Because remember all this time, for those two hours, Chuck,
Speaker 2: they were just like, oh, everything's fine. They thought their
Speaker 2: instruments were messed up or that everything was working correctly.
Speaker 2: And finally between six am and six point forty they're like,
Speaker 2: this is really, really, really bad. And five minutes after
Speaker 2: they figured that out, radiation alarms started ringing around the plant,
Speaker 2: which if they didn't know it was bad before, those
Speaker 2: alarms certainly.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And then about eleven minutes later, and this is
Speaker 1: almost seven o'clock, it was almost three hours later, they
Speaker 1: finally declared a site emergency right after that happened. You know,
Speaker 1: they tried to and you know, partially part part of
Speaker 1: the problem here was due to the being in the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies and you can't get a hold of someone
Speaker 1: via cell phone like in a moment's notice. That's where
Speaker 1: this kind of comes into play. They tried to get
Speaker 1: in touch with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission kind of immediately
Speaker 1: they called. The office wasn't open yet, and so they
Speaker 1: had what you know, these things still exist, but what
Speaker 1: they used to have a lot more back in the
Speaker 1: day is like an answering service. Like humans had answered
Speaker 1: the phone and forward the call or call up the
Speaker 1: doctor or whoever they need to call and say, hey,
Speaker 1: I got I think what's probably a concerning message that
Speaker 1: you probably need to get right away. So they tried
Speaker 1: to do that. They tried to call the regional duty
Speaker 1: officer at home, but they're like, no, he already left
Speaker 1: for work. So this guy's in his car now, don't
Speaker 1: didn't listen to the radio on his way to work.
Speaker 2: He's listening to beautiful music on the AM dial.
Speaker 1: He probably is. And the long and short of it
Speaker 1: is it finally like I think it takes nearly forty
Speaker 1: minutes to even finally make contact with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,
Speaker 1: and like time is crucial at this point, like every
Speaker 1: second matters.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And the reason why they really needed to get
Speaker 2: in touch with the NRC is because they didn't know
Speaker 2: what to do. They weren't really trained for a situation
Speaker 2: like this. The NRC was the body that had this information.
Speaker 2: They needed to figure out how to handle this. So
Speaker 2: very quickly word starts to spread hits DC, the local
Speaker 2: journalists start showing up. Eventually national journalists started showing up,
Speaker 2: and by nine am, everybody knows that there's a big,
Speaker 2: big problem at Three Mile Island. The problem was no
Speaker 2: one knew how bad it was. Yeah, because on the
Speaker 2: one hand, the first people that started dress saying things
Speaker 2: was Metropolitan at Edison, the power company that ran and
Speaker 2: I believe owned Three Mile Island, both TM one and two,
Speaker 2: and they were just lying their faces off. They just
Speaker 2: said whatever they thought what people wanted to hear, and
Speaker 2: they would even do it in private, like the Governor
Speaker 2: Dick Thornburg and the Lieutenant Governor William Scranton. They were
Speaker 2: just lying to them about how like how not a
Speaker 2: big deal. This was from the outset. So they proved
Speaker 2: that they were just untrustworthy from the outset, and they
Speaker 2: got quickly pushed aside as far as the people who
Speaker 2: were really trying to handle this problem, when yeah, they
Speaker 2: just they were like, you go stand over there, we'll
Speaker 2: deal with you later.
Speaker 1: For sure. They on the twenty eight they briefly considered
Speaker 1: evacuating the area. This is SPEMA there on the scene now,
Speaker 1: but they said no, and then the governor, like you
Speaker 1: were saying, Governor Thornburg, he declined to evacuate again on
Speaker 1: March twenty ninth because they're getting reports that there was
Speaker 1: no radiation that had escaped and everything was like completely contained. Finally,
Speaker 1: on March thirtieth, the governor got a report that said,
Speaker 1: all right, well some radioactive gas has escaped the reactor.
Speaker 1: So he said he makes an announcement like all right,
Speaker 1: all pregnant women and preschool children need to evacuate and
Speaker 1: like get out of the area. And that caused a
Speaker 1: pretty big panic.
Speaker 2: It did. I think one hundred and forty thousand people left.
Speaker 2: Did you see the American experience of the PBS documentary
Speaker 2: on this yeah, melt, It's called meltdown at three Mile Island.
Speaker 2: So a lot of people were panicking and leaving, But
Speaker 2: there were also a lot of people around there like
Speaker 2: they can take my house out of my cold dead hands.
Speaker 2: I'm not leaving.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that always happens, right, Yeah.
Speaker 2: But so there were people that stayed, but a lot
Speaker 2: of people left because they were scared to death. No
Speaker 2: one knew exactly how bad this was, and so I
Speaker 2: think a lot of rumor and unsubstantiated stuff was really
Speaker 2: spreading very quickly. At at the same time, there was
Speaker 2: no one who really knew how bad it was that
Speaker 2: could say that's not true. That's not true. I can
Speaker 2: unequivocally say this is how bad it is. So you
Speaker 2: really couldn't say, like, don't worry. It was you don't
Speaker 2: think you should worry. We hope you don't have to worry.
Speaker 2: But there was nothing that they could really reassure the
Speaker 2: public with at this point.
Speaker 1: Yeah for sure, all right, that feels like a great
Speaker 1: time for a break, if you agree, I agree.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 1: So they are trying to get the thing cool down,
Speaker 1: and then very quickly another problem would pop up, and
Speaker 1: we're going to address that right after this.
Speaker 3: Stop you know, stop, stop, stop you shouldn't you know? No,
Speaker 3: stop you know stop stuff shouldn't know stuff you should know?
Speaker 2: Okay, Chuck. So where we last left off, three Mile
Speaker 2: Island TMI two reactor had reached a different shape of
Speaker 2: a certain kind of fruit. Things were going badly in
Speaker 2: other words.
Speaker 1: Right not yes, it's bad, but I'm just glad you're
Speaker 1: saying it again.
Speaker 2: So it went, it went from bad to worse. Actually,
Speaker 2: they're like, they wouldn't call it a meltdown. It took
Speaker 2: years before they officially started calling this a meltdown. It
Speaker 2: was an accident, it was a problem in issue, that
Speaker 2: kind of thing. But on top of that the reactor
Speaker 2: having huge problems. They now realized that there was a
Speaker 2: hydrogen gas bubble that during this two three hours of
Speaker 2: the accident had developed because it got so hot that
Speaker 2: the zirconium tubes that held the fuel pellets it reacted
Speaker 2: with the steam that was being generated and it actually
Speaker 2: tore the water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen, and the
Speaker 2: hydrogen just started to build up. Well, obviously, if you
Speaker 2: listen to our Hindenberg episode, you know that a big
Speaker 2: bunch of hydrogen gas in one place is very, very dangerous,
Speaker 2: especially when it's in the middle of a nuclear reactor.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so all of a sudden, there's this more concerning problem.
Speaker 1: They're like, if this thing explodes, you know, if this
Speaker 1: gas bubble explodes, it might rupture the actual building that
Speaker 1: this thing is housed in. And we're in real trouble
Speaker 1: if that happened. So from I think, well we should
Speaker 1: say that the World Nuclear Association they say that that
Speaker 1: never would have been possible. But of course they don't
Speaker 1: know this at the time, and who knows if it
Speaker 1: was possible or not. But from March thirtieth, this couple
Speaker 1: of days later through April first, they managed to decrease
Speaker 1: the size of that bubble by venting that thing out
Speaker 1: and you know, basically kind of slowly just reducing the
Speaker 1: size of the bubble. But this is also if you're venting,
Speaker 1: you know, melting down. I guess I don't what you said.
Speaker 1: It didn't called to meltdown, it's having a tantrum. I
Speaker 1: guess you're releasing that stuff in like more radiation into
Speaker 1: the environment by doing.
Speaker 2: So, right, But they really had no choice essentially or
Speaker 2: let the thing blow up, so they did. They managed
Speaker 2: to get the bubble under control. And on April first,
Speaker 2: Jimmy Carter, who was president at the time, I didn't
Speaker 2: know this. He was a trained nuclear engineer, so he
Speaker 2: was essentially the president to be in charge for this
Speaker 2: to happen.
Speaker 1: You knew that, Yeah, yeah, I knew from my visits
Speaker 1: to the Carter Center and I read a book and
Speaker 1: I've seen a documentary. He's one of my guys, one
Speaker 1: of the smartest dudes we've ever had in the way.
Speaker 2: Oh, I know. He was a fantastic president. It's a shame.
Speaker 2: So he was president at the time, and he was like,
Speaker 2: you know what, I'm going to come there. I'm going
Speaker 2: to be shown touring the plant. Ros One's going to
Speaker 2: come with me. That will reassure the public that it's fine,
Speaker 2: it's under control. The problem was, according to that PBS documentary,
Speaker 2: at the time, it was not a certainty that the
Speaker 2: hydrogen bubble wasn't going to blow up while the president
Speaker 2: was there. There are two dueling mathematicians who had conflicting
Speaker 2: results about whether the bubble was going to blow up,
Speaker 2: and so Jimmy Carter took a real risk. So did
Speaker 2: Rosalind Carter by going there to tour the plant. They
Speaker 2: had to wear yellow rubber boots because again there's really
Speaker 2: highly contaminated radioactive water that had spilled out of the
Speaker 2: coolant on the floor. It was a big deal, but
Speaker 2: apparently it had the impact he was looking for and
Speaker 2: the public started to calm down.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know if you could get if they
Speaker 1: would let a president do that these days.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was the seventies. Man, what can happen?
Speaker 1: It was, Yeah, just put on these booties. So he
Speaker 1: obviously orders a committee to convene and investigate this thing.
Speaker 1: It was ended up being called the Kimmeny Report because
Speaker 1: it was led by Dartmouth College president John Kemeny, and
Speaker 1: they the NRC ended up coming out of this not
Speaker 1: looking so great. And we'll get to why as we go,
Speaker 1: but they really took it on the chin. The training program,
Speaker 1: like met ed was like, hey, we trained up our
Speaker 1: guys as well as we were able to and to
Speaker 1: meet your standards, Like, we did everything you told us
Speaker 1: to do. All your requirements were met. It was the
Speaker 1: NRC apparently, who like had lax requirements and you know
Speaker 1: when it comes to like emergency training and stuff like that,
Speaker 1: they were really ill prepared.
Speaker 2: Yeah, these guys were fully trained, but their training hadn't
Speaker 2: prepared them for that, and it was the NRC's fault.
Speaker 2: The NRC showed that they weren't prepared to handle this either,
Speaker 2: Like it was just really poor planning, again based on
Speaker 2: over optimistic ideas about the safety of nuclear energy. Right,
Speaker 2: So the NRC also conducted its own examination. They're like, yeah,
Speaker 2: we should probably do a little better. There's a lot
Speaker 2: of confusing stuff in training. I think there was this
Speaker 2: one passage that said insert key into the control panel,
Speaker 2: turn key to the left, break off the key in
Speaker 2: the control panel, and eat what remains of the key.
Speaker 2: That was part of the safety training. Anyway, they were like,
Speaker 2: we also have to say though, it wasn't just us,
Speaker 2: it wasn't just the operators, but the design of this
Speaker 2: stuff is pretty nuts if you ask us.
Speaker 1: So one of the big problems was why it took
Speaker 1: so long to realize there was a problem, Like all
Speaker 1: that time was going by when things were leaking out,
Speaker 1: and you know, the NRC again took it on the chin.
Speaker 1: They found that their training requirements weren't weren't good enough,
Speaker 1: and that the operating procedures were confusing during an emergency
Speaker 1: Like from what I gathered from the documentary and by
Speaker 1: reading up on this, was that like they were trained
Speaker 1: to run the place and like turn the keys and
Speaker 1: push the buttons right, but if something went wrong, that's
Speaker 1: where they really really failed to know what to do.
Speaker 1: So they were at you know, while this emergency was unfolding,
Speaker 1: they're misinterpreting data that's coming through, and they're making bad
Speaker 1: decisions based on that. They you know, you mentioned earlier
Speaker 1: that the water started boiling really violently that caused the
Speaker 1: coolant pumps to shake really hard, and they thought they
Speaker 1: didn't know that's what that was. They thought they were
Speaker 1: overfilling and the things were shaking because it had too
Speaker 1: much coolant in there, and that the pumps you know,
Speaker 1: were going to be damaged because of that. So you know,
Speaker 1: just to not even know that, like, hey, by the way,
Speaker 1: if this thing really starts boiling hard, the pipes might shake,
Speaker 1: Like they didn't even know that could happen.
Speaker 2: Right, Exactly like you said, they were trained to operate
Speaker 2: it basically. One other thing to say about the system, too,
Speaker 2: is in that documentary, I think the guy who wrote
Speaker 2: the China Syndrome, he was interviewed a lot in it.
Speaker 2: He was saying that, like, if they had done nothing,
Speaker 2: the system would have taken care of itself from the outset. Interesting,
Speaker 2: it was when they intervened those two times that threw
Speaker 2: that safety sequence off. And so it really truly was
Speaker 2: a combination of all sorts of different stuff, the complexity
Speaker 2: of the system, human error, malfunctions, poor planning. And there's
Speaker 2: a sociologist named Charles Perrow who calls this a normal accident,
Speaker 2: which is basically an accident that is essentially inevitable because
Speaker 2: it's accidentally designed into the complex system. Somehow, somewhere, all
Speaker 2: these things are going to come together and cause an accident.
Speaker 2: That's what happened at Three Mile Island.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if you're waiting for your Homer Simpson moment, wait
Speaker 1: no further. Because one of the things they found when
Speaker 1: they did, you know, the big investigation, was that there
Speaker 1: was an operator there that had a large belly sounded
Speaker 1: like I had a big beer gut, Yeah, and his
Speaker 1: beer gut was blocking the view of some of the
Speaker 1: panel indicators and like they literally didn't see these things
Speaker 1: because of Homer Simpsons standing there in the way. There
Speaker 1: was a printer, a computer printer that malfunctioned that was
Speaker 1: recording like real time data that got jammed for ninety minutes.
Speaker 1: Just the communication with like wearing face respirators and masks
Speaker 1: and all that stuff. Like they just weren't able to talk,
Speaker 1: you know, in an effective manner while this is all
Speaker 1: going down.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that computer printer that was giving them that
Speaker 2: real time information being jammed for ninety minutes meant that
Speaker 2: the data they were working from was ninety minutes old
Speaker 2: in the middle of a meltdown. So like these guys
Speaker 2: really just had no genuine clue what was actually going on.
Speaker 2: They didn't even seem to suspect anything was going on,
Speaker 2: in part because of that ninety minute old data they
Speaker 2: were working from.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So if it wasn't bad enough already, there are
Speaker 1: two more big factors. Yeah, And just how sort of
Speaker 1: janky this thing seemed to be laid out. The control
Speaker 1: room didn't have any direct measurements of the water, like
Speaker 1: we kept talking, you know earlier in Act one about
Speaker 1: you know, the water levels, and they didn't you know,
Speaker 1: they thought it was filling up too much, so they
Speaker 1: shut the water off. But they this was all happening
Speaker 1: because it didn't have just direct measurements of the water level,
Speaker 1: so they didn't even know they were guessing at how
Speaker 1: much water was in the system. And then the second one,
Speaker 1: big one was that automatic release valve has an indicator
Speaker 1: light in the control room. It shows, you know, it
Speaker 1: was supposed to close automatically, but I think you can
Speaker 1: also order it to close, and eventually they they tried
Speaker 1: to order it to close, but it doesn't actually show
Speaker 1: whether it's closed or not. The indicator lit up when
Speaker 1: it was ordered to close, not confirming that it was.
Speaker 2: Closed, right, But they took it like that. They took
Speaker 2: it to mean like, oh, well the lights on the
Speaker 2: things closed, Yeah.
Speaker 1: Asked the guy with the big belly blocking the screen exactly.
Speaker 2: So I mean, like that's a just nuts that, like
Speaker 2: all of this was happening, just the sequence of events.
Speaker 2: I mean, if you if you went back and did
Speaker 2: it all again, surely it couldn't possibly follow the same
Speaker 2: steps because it was just so intertwined with all these
Speaker 2: different weird things.
Speaker 1: Oh for sure.
Speaker 2: So there's a lot of you want to talk about
Speaker 2: the radiation that may or may not have been.
Speaker 1: Released, yeah, because I mean that's one of the biggest
Speaker 1: obviously issues at hand is like how much of this
Speaker 1: stuff is getting out to the local community in Pennsylvania.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, And like you said, to get rid of
Speaker 2: the hydrogen bubble, they definitely vented radioactive gas into the air.
Speaker 2: That's just there's just no two ways around it. They
Speaker 2: also had to do that a couple more times during
Speaker 2: the cleanup, as we'll see. But the EPA, the NRC,
Speaker 2: Pennsylvania itself, the Union of Concerned Scientists, just countless different organizations,
Speaker 2: including non governmental organizations, have conducted all sorts of studies.
Speaker 2: People have done meta now all seas of these studies.
Speaker 2: Three Mile Island is a very very heavily studied area
Speaker 2: to find out exactly what happened. And essentially almost everybody
Speaker 2: agrees that there was not enough of a radioactive or
Speaker 2: release to actually affect human health or the environment. And
Speaker 2: it seems to be one of those times where it
Speaker 2: actually is true. I can barely get it out, but
Speaker 2: I think they might be right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean they claimed that there was like the
Speaker 1: radiation was about the estimated levels of a like a
Speaker 1: chest X ray. The Department of Energy said it had
Speaker 1: negligible effects on public health and the environment. I guess
Speaker 1: we'll end up talking about the lawsuits later, but because
Speaker 1: there obviously would be some But you know, there were
Speaker 1: some interesting things, like I think the forty three percent
Speaker 1: increase in infant deaths in the area around the time
Speaker 1: of the accident. There was a study in ninety seven
Speaker 1: that found increased cancer rates in area. There was a
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen study that found a correlation between thyroid cancer
Speaker 1: and living in that region. But in each of these studies,
Speaker 1: and in each of these cases, they're like, well, you
Speaker 1: can't absolutely prove that was the absolute cause.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and these were these studies are few and far between.
Speaker 2: Most of the other studies are like, I didn't turn
Speaker 2: up any statistically significant correlation even right. I saw that
Speaker 2: the highest exposure during cleanup, with a peak in nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty nine was point nine to eight rims and that
Speaker 2: is a tenth of a chest X ray, and that
Speaker 2: on site, the EPA found on site, So at the
Speaker 2: Three Mile Island reactor, the radiation that in the environment
Speaker 2: was what you would get from flying on an airplane
Speaker 2: per hour. Yeah, so it really does seem like there
Speaker 2: was just not that much of an exposure. Again, I'm
Speaker 2: quite sure if you go to Three Mile Island and
Speaker 2: talk to some of the older resid evidence. They will
Speaker 2: tell you otherwise, because a lot of people reported, especially
Speaker 2: right afterward, that they were suffering from vomiting, nausea, hair loss, rashes,
Speaker 2: and I'm sure that people just have dismissed them over
Speaker 2: the years as like that's placebo effect or no cebo
Speaker 2: effect or something like that. So I mean, if you
Speaker 2: believe that your you know, wife or husband or mom
Speaker 2: or dad or kid died of cancer because of this
Speaker 2: nuclear accident, and everybody's telling you like, no, it's it's fine,
Speaker 2: You're you're hysterical overreacting, I can't imagine not being deeply
Speaker 2: bitter about that. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Of course, speaking of deeply bitter, I think that triggered
Speaker 1: another ad break. Oh okay, and we'll be back to
Speaker 1: finish up on three Mile Island right after this.
Speaker 3: Stop you know, stop stoop stock shouldn't know. No, stop
Speaker 3: you know, stop stop Stock shouldn't know stop you should know.
Speaker 1: All right, So they had resolved this bubble issue and
Speaker 1: they got to cool this thing down, and that's really
Speaker 1: the main thing that reactor cored that had been exposed.
Speaker 1: Like everything is super hot. So they first things first,
Speaker 1: they really just need to get it cooled down. So
Speaker 1: they worked on that for a while. Finally, on April
Speaker 1: twenty seventh, I guess this is almost a month later,
Speaker 1: they said that it was in cold shutdown. They had
Speaker 1: reached that point where water was less than one hundred
Speaker 1: degrees celsius at atmospheric pressure, and so they could start
Speaker 1: clean up. And that was it for tm I two.
Speaker 1: That thing shut down and did not reopen.
Speaker 2: No, it didn't. Three months of energy production and that's it.
Speaker 2: It's crazy, and it is still actually technically under cleanup today.
Speaker 2: The cleanup efforts started pretty much right out of the gate.
Speaker 2: I think it was in nineteen seventy nine that they
Speaker 2: first started, but I'm sure the first couple of years
Speaker 2: were like, Okay, what are we going to do. Part
Speaker 2: of the problem was is they couldn't see into the reactor.
Speaker 2: They couldn't tell with what kind of a problem they
Speaker 2: were dealing with. And it wasn't until the eighties that
Speaker 2: they started getting actual video confirmation. They put like video
Speaker 2: cameras in to the reactor and saw that the core
Speaker 2: had partially melted down, and that not only that chuck
Speaker 2: the nuclear fuel, the uranium had molten uranium had melted
Speaker 2: down into the bottom of what's called the vessel, the
Speaker 2: container vessel. The basically the last thing between the the
Speaker 2: uranium molten uranium in China is this vessel, and it
Speaker 2: actually had not been expected to be able to stand
Speaker 2: up to something like that, and just by pure luck
Speaker 2: it did. It did not leak, but it definitely could
Speaker 2: have and had that happened, it would have been catastrophic
Speaker 2: had it gotten out. So three cheers to the containment vessel.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. The cleanup I think they Yeah, they
Speaker 1: started in seventy nine and eleven years later. By ninety
Speaker 1: was when that whole first phase was done. They had
Speaker 1: like most of the nuclear fuel had been removed by
Speaker 1: that point and about one hundred and fifty tons of
Speaker 1: radioactive materials. I feel like we talked about this kind
Speaker 1: of disposal before in other episodees. Yeah, it may have
Speaker 1: been the disaster in Japan, or maybe it was just
Speaker 1: one on nuclear like bearing nuclear waste.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was within I think it was twenty twenty five.
Speaker 2: It was a good one. But we talked about that
Speaker 2: place in Washington, the Handford Nuclear Site.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, this stuff or at the time at least
Speaker 1: they went to the National Engineering Laboratory in Idaho for storage.
Speaker 1: But then you still had all that water. You had
Speaker 1: about two and a quarter million gallons of bad water.
Speaker 1: That took another few years, so that wasn't fully cleaned
Speaker 1: up until nineteen ninety three. You had to evaporate that stuff.
Speaker 2: Right, which means you got gas on your hands, radioactive
Speaker 2: gas again, And that's where those further exposures happened throughout
Speaker 2: the eighties. I think nineteen eighty two and nineteen eighty
Speaker 2: nine were the worst, but even then they were less
Speaker 2: than a millirem of exposure, which again is about a
Speaker 2: tenth of a chest X ray. Right. Yeah, So finally
Speaker 2: the cleanup of TMI two is completed in nineteen ninety three,
Speaker 2: but even that is still, like I said, it's still
Speaker 2: ongoing because they were just like, we got ninety nine
Speaker 2: percent of the nuclear fuel out out of the reactor,
Speaker 2: isn't that amazing. We're just gonna call it done now.
Speaker 2: And so there's still one percent left and there's a
Speaker 2: company called tm MY two Solutions that is currently cleaning
Speaker 2: up that remaining one percent of fuel from the reactor.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they're solutions based, that's what they do, Josh.
Speaker 2: They are and I was like, wait a minute, they
Speaker 2: own TMI two. Why would somebody buy a reactor so
Speaker 2: that you can pay to clean it up? And it
Speaker 2: turns out there was a bunch of not even taxpayer
Speaker 2: ratepayer money that Metropolitan ED had basically added to people's bills,
Speaker 2: is like a tax set aside to pay for cleanup.
Speaker 2: And I think there was something like a billion dollars
Speaker 2: of that left. And I guess that TMI two Solutions
Speaker 2: was going has been receiving that for cleaning it up.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean that when they were protesting met ED,
Speaker 1: they had signs that said, first you try to kill us,
Speaker 1: then you want to bill us. Yeah. This kicked off
Speaker 1: a lot of I mean, this nuclear energy was at
Speaker 1: a probably all time public low. Obviously after Three Mile Island,
Speaker 1: like things were kind humming along, and then people really
Speaker 1: really turned against it. There were a lot of protests.
Speaker 1: You know, when Jane Fonda shows up that you're in
Speaker 1: big trouble, and she and her husband at the time,
Speaker 1: Tom Hayden, did just that. It did lead to I
Speaker 1: mean silver linings. It led to one of the great
Speaker 1: concerts of all time, the Bruce Springsteen No Nuke's Concert
Speaker 1: at Madison Square Garden in nineteen seventy nine brought you know,
Speaker 1: musicians banded together and for the Musicians United for Safe
Speaker 1: Energy MUSE and they just released that in twenty twenty one.
Speaker 1: And I just want to say, I know you're probably
Speaker 1: not a big Springsteen guy, but if you're a fan
Speaker 1: of the Boss, watch, don't just listen to it. Watch
Speaker 1: the concert film of the No Nuke Show, and it
Speaker 1: is peak, peak Bruce Springsteen Unbelievable.
Speaker 2: Show nineteen seventy nine.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's incredible because it's before Born in the USA
Speaker 1: and all that, so before he was in state Earl,
Speaker 1: I guess this is MSG, but before where he was
Speaker 1: at like that level of huge, but right after Born
Speaker 1: to Run in darkness on the edge of town, he
Speaker 1: was still young and hungry, and it's just like, it's
Speaker 1: an incredible, incredible show.
Speaker 2: That's awesome.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I have a Bruce Springsteen anecdote if you want.
Speaker 1: To hear it, sure, let's hear it.
Speaker 2: Backstage one of our Bell House shows, I was meeting
Speaker 2: the boyfriend of one of my friends, and he was
Speaker 2: from Jersey and he was telling me this story about
Speaker 2: how he and his friends were at a pool once
Speaker 2: and he looked over and he's like, and there was Bruce,
Speaker 2: And I went Willis and this guy look I was
Speaker 2: serious too, the look of just like contempt that fell
Speaker 2: over this guy's face for a second before he could
Speaker 2: regain himself. He was like, no Springsteen. I was like, oh, okay,
Speaker 2: it's like I feel equally about the both.
Speaker 1: You know, at least you didn't say box Lightner.
Speaker 2: That would have been really so much better. Oh boy, keep.
Speaker 1: That one in your hip pocket. If anyone ever just
Speaker 1: throws out a Bruce story again, a box lightner.
Speaker 2: Okay, you got it, buddy. He was on V, wasn't he?
Speaker 1: Uh sure, I don't know. I don't remember. He was scared,
Speaker 1: true as king, okay, scare them? Or was he in tron? No,
Speaker 1: he wasn't in tron. That was That was a different guy.
Speaker 2: That was Jeff Bridges.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: But the other guy, the main guy.
Speaker 2: That was Bruce Springsteen.
Speaker 1: No, who am I thinking of? Never mind, we got
Speaker 1: to finish this. When people are going to be so
Speaker 1: mad at.
Speaker 2: Us, they're all right, sorry, sorry everybody. The Nuclear Regulatory
Speaker 2: Commission's going to send us a letter.
Speaker 1: I know, uh so not because of a lawsuit that
Speaker 1: we're filing, but people certainly did. There was the fact
Speaker 1: that they falsified those leak test results that you talked
Speaker 1: about without fixing stuff, and they issued a report to
Speaker 1: the Department of Justice. In November of nineteen eighty three,
Speaker 1: they indicted met Ed for that falsification of the leaks,
Speaker 1: where they had to pay a huge fine of forty
Speaker 1: five thousand dollars.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you're like, okay, well, this was nineteen eighty
Speaker 2: four dollars. How much is it today? Still just one
Speaker 2: hundred and forty thousand dollars today.
Speaker 1: For falsifying leaks of nuclear material?
Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure and just being general jerks during the
Speaker 2: whole you know, crisis.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: But they were like, okay, well, we're also going to
Speaker 2: help set up a fund for the Pennsylvania EPA to
Speaker 2: take care of this area for years to come. We're
Speaker 2: going to give it one million dollars. Again, you're like, okay,
Speaker 2: it's nineteen eighty four dollars. No, just three point one
Speaker 2: million dollars. So all told, I think ED officially paid
Speaker 2: out something like three less than three and a half million.
Speaker 2: There's a group called Three Mile Island Alert. They're a
Speaker 2: nonprofit that is essentially watchdogs about three Mile Island, and
Speaker 2: I don't think that they feel very good about Metropolitan ED.
Speaker 2: But they say that the ED is paid out lots
Speaker 2: more than that in civil and personal injury lawsuits to settle.
Speaker 1: Those, yeah, settling them. Because that was in nineteen ninety six,
Speaker 1: there were I think a couple of thousand active cases
Speaker 1: for like, you know, exposure obviously to the radiation, and
Speaker 1: a judge said, all right, let me pick ten of
Speaker 1: these and try them as a group as a test
Speaker 1: case to see if we, you know, if there's merit
Speaker 1: to the whole thing. And the judge ruled against the planeiffs,
Speaker 1: you know, citing what I would I talked about earlier,
Speaker 1: like you can't there's not enough evidence to side a
Speaker 1: direct link between the cancer that you have and the
Speaker 1: radiation that you may or may not have endured.
Speaker 2: Right. So this is one of those I think instances
Speaker 2: why that I'm convinced because there's just so many different
Speaker 2: people and groups of people from all different sectors of
Speaker 2: our society who have looked at this and said, it
Speaker 2: actually wasn't as bad. Right, it could have been really bad,
Speaker 2: but it's not as bad as people fear, Right, That's
Speaker 2: why I buy into the idea that it wasn't that bad.
Speaker 2: That's not to say that there weren't people who acted
Speaker 2: as whistleblowers. And in particular, if you saw a Netflix
Speaker 2: documentary called Meltdown Golan three Mile Island, there was a
Speaker 2: whistleblower named Rick Parks who was a supervisor in the
Speaker 2: cleanup crew during the eighties, and he blew the whistle
Speaker 2: because he was saying they were using this crane that
Speaker 2: was in the reactor to basically dismantle the reactor afterward,
Speaker 2: even though it had gone through the meltdown. Seemed very
Speaker 2: unsafe to me. I didn't like how they were testing it.
Speaker 2: So if like throughout the eighties cleanup of Three Mile Island,
Speaker 2: that's the most scandalous thing a whistleblower comes up with,
Speaker 2: it seems like it's about as on the up and
Speaker 2: up as something like this can be.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he claimed in that documentary that they like retaliated
Speaker 1: against them and that someone planted drugs in his car
Speaker 1: during a random drug inspection. There are other people that
Speaker 1: have come out and said, hey, that documentary is little misleading.
Speaker 1: He did raise concerns about that crane, but they didn't
Speaker 1: ignore them. He just didn't agree with how they handled it,
Speaker 1: and just take that documentary with a grain of salt.
Speaker 2: Basically, Yeah, so there were I think, like you said,
Speaker 2: nuclear power was just humming along and then it just
Speaker 2: nosedived after Three Mile Island. And I think there were
Speaker 2: fifty one plan nuclear reactors that were canceled in the
Speaker 2: United States alone, like this had global repercussions between nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty and nineteen eighty four, fifty one of them were canceled.
Speaker 2: I think I saw in the end of the documentary
Speaker 2: that was in nineteen ninety nine they said zero new
Speaker 2: ones have been ordered since Three Mile Island. I saw
Speaker 2: ae hundred had been potentially, but regardless, the upshot is
Speaker 2: the reason why nuclear energy is not widespread, especially in
Speaker 2: the United States, is because of Three Mile Island almost
Speaker 2: one hundred percent.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. Kind of Strangely, a couple of years ago,
Speaker 1: Microsoft signed a twenty year deal to purchase power from
Speaker 1: TMI one, starting a couple of years from Mount twenty
Speaker 1: twenty eight, and it was like, that's weird. Why is
Speaker 1: Microsoft buying a bunch of power, Like, oh, they're using
Speaker 1: power generated from that to fuel the data centers for AI.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which I think we talked about that in the
Speaker 2: Data Centers episode and the Getting rid of nuclear waste episode.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it feels kind of like a full circle moment.
Speaker 2: For sure, so let's leave it at that. Huh yeah, sure,
Speaker 2: all right, Well we came full circle, which means we
Speaker 2: automatically triggered listener mail even though we have no indicator
Speaker 2: light to tell us as much.
Speaker 1: That's right. Hey, guys, this is from Nathan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Guy,
Speaker 1: I'm a former academic who never lost a love of learning.
Speaker 1: Your show's both old new brighton my daily commutes with
Speaker 1: fresh knowledge and open curiosity that genuinely warms my heart.
Speaker 2: Nice.
Speaker 1: But that's a very nice setup for a correction. Correction
Speaker 1: on Thomas Hobbs. Guys, he didn't actually assume that all
Speaker 1: or and this is from our Humanism episode, by the way,
Speaker 1: Hobbs didn't actually assume that all or even most people
Speaker 1: are inherently bad. Instead, he argued that some people will
Speaker 1: do bad things sometimes, and that the rest of us
Speaker 1: cannot know who win or where. Hobbs will point out
Speaker 1: that we lock our houses at night, and our cars
Speaker 1: and parking garages, and we do this, even though we
Speaker 1: have laws, courts and police officers. It's not about human evil.
Speaker 1: It's about rational caution in an uncertain world. And there's
Speaker 1: a little bonus here, guys. Hobbes lived an absolutely wild life.
Speaker 1: He was ascribed for Francis Bacon. He met Galileo in Italy.
Speaker 1: He tutored the future King Charles the Second in math,
Speaker 1: and spent years and heated its disagreements with Descartes through
Speaker 1: the mail. In fact, a few years after Hobbs died,
Speaker 1: Oxford University held a public book burning that included his work.
Speaker 1: That spectacle prompted John Locke to leave Oxford, hide his manuscripts,
Speaker 1: and flee to Holland for five years.
Speaker 2: That'll do.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's Nathan from Pitts. I always loved the extra info.
Speaker 2: Oh I do too, And thank you for sending us
Speaker 2: straight on Hobbs too. We didn't mean to misrepresent him, yeah,
Speaker 2: for sure, because he can sick the Leviathan on us.
Speaker 1: If we don't want that.
Speaker 2: If you want to be like Nathan from Pittsburgh and
Speaker 2: send us a cool email like he did, and maybe
Speaker 2: even butter us up first. We like that kind of thing.
Speaker 2: You can send it to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1: Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
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