Radiation Nation

by Natasha Zaretsky

  22. Deposition of Edward Frederick, RG 220, Central Files, Box 11, Folder: Deposition of Edward Frederick, Papers of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, NA II, 271, 276.

  23. See Del Tredici, The People of Three Mile Island, 10–11. On emergency procedures and the protocol for contacting different agencies, see page 3A of Statement of Oran Henderson, Transcript, News Conference, March 28, 1979, 10:55 AM, Series XI: Governor of Pennsylvania, 1979–1987, Subseries 7: Three Mile Island, Box 194, Folder 1, DT Papers, UPSC.

  24. Transcript, News Conference, March 28, 1979, 10:55 AM, Series XI: Governor of Pennsylvania, 1979–1987, Subseries 7: Three Mile Island, Box 194, Folder 1, DT Papers, UPSC.

  25. Ibid., 4–5.

  26. Walker, Three Mile Island, 80–84.

  27. Statement by William Scranton in transcript of press conference, March 28, 1979, 4:30 PM, Series XI: Governor of Pennsylvania, 1979–1987, Subseries 7: Three Mile Island, Box 194, Folder 1, DT Papers, UPSC.

  28. Press conference transcript, March 28, 1979, 10:30 PM, 8, Series XI: Governor of Pennsylvania, 1979–1987, Subseries 7: Three Mile Island, Box 194, Folder 1, DT Papers, UPSC. Gallina’s statement refuted information already coming into the NRC. On the discrepancies between Gallina’s statements and those coming out of NRC headquarters, see Walker, Three Mile Island, 99. “Cold shutdown” refers to when the temperature of the core’s water goes below the boiling point.

  29. Walker, Three Mile Island, 105.

  30. Ibid., 106.

  31. In fact, the plant’s wastewater was routinely discharged into the river, but Met-Ed had halted the discharge when the accident occurred. By Thursday, the water tanks on the island were close to overflowing with four hundred thousand gallons of water, now contaminated with the radioactive gas xenon.

  32. Ibid., 115–118.

  33. Ibid., 84: The reading was of twelve hundred millirems per hour. Walker writes: “The permissible dose for individual members of the general population was one tenth of the occupational level, or .5 rem per year. This was usually expressed as 500 millirems—a millirem is one-thousandth of a rem. The average allowable exposure for large population groups, such as the population around TMI, was one-thirtieth of the occupational level, or 170 millirems per year. The NRC further required that nuclear plants restrict their emissions during normal operation so that a person who stood on the boundary of a plant twenty four hours a day, 365 days a year, would not be exposed to more than about 5 millirems per year.”

  34. “Commissioners Deplored a Lack of Information,” New York Times, April 13, 1979. See also Walker, Three Mile Island, 119–150.

  35. US Congress, Joint Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Nuclear Regulation of the Senate Committee on Environmental and Public Works, and the Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment of the House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, Testimony of John Kemeny, Report of the President’ Commission on the Three Mile Island Accident, 96th Congress, 1st sess., October 31, 1979, 16.

  36. Walker, Three Mile Island, 150.

  37. Quoted in Eli Zaretsky, Why America Needs a Left: A Historical Argument (London: Polity, 2012), 128.

  38. Quoted in Christopher Hayes, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy (New York: Broadway, 2012), 119; Letters to the Editor, New York Times, October 4, 1973.

  39. Both of these quotations come from Public Information Task Force Interview of Reporters, Interviews with Roger Witherspoon and Curtis Wilkie, RG 220, Central Files, Box 472, unnamed folders, Papers of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, NA II.

  40. Letter from Carlton Walls to Health Resources Planning and Development, RG 220, Central Files, Box 307, unfiled, Papers of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, NA II.

  41. “Watergate cover-up feeling” comes from undated letter from Thomas Busch to health resource planning and development, RG 220, Central Files, Box 307, unfiled, Papers of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, NA II. Song comes from Gary Punch, “TMI Fallout: Trust in Officials Collapse,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, April 19, 1979.

  42. Deposition of Walter Creitz, 100–2, RG 220, Central Files, Box 6, Folder: Deposition of Walter Creitz, Papers of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, NA II.

  43. Interview with Walter Creitz, 21, RG 220, Central Files, Box 467, Folder: Interview with Walter Creitz, Papers of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, NA II.

  44. Union of Concerned Scientists, Press Backgrounder: The TMI Accident Fifth Anniversary: Industry Hasn’t Learned from Its Mistakes, March 2, 1984, 12, Series XI: Governor of Pennsylvania, 1979–1987, Subseries 13: Office of General Counsel, Box 352, Folder 12, DT Papers, UPSC.

  45. See Walker, Three Mile Island.

  46. Transcript, press conference, March 30, 1979, 10 PM, Part 2, 1A, Series XI: Governor of Pennsylvania, 1979–1987, Subseries 7: Three Mile Island, Box 194, Folder 3, DT Papers, UPSC.

  47. “Report by the Democratic Members of the TMI Committee,” Pennsylvania House of Representatives, 48, Series XI: Governor of Pennsylvania, 1979–1987, Subseries 12: Press Secretary, Box 334, Folder 11, DT Papers, UPSC.

  48. Kemeny, Accident at Three Mile Island, 53.

  49. US Congress, Joint Hearings, Subcommittee on Nuclear Regulation of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works and the Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment of the House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, Report of the Presidential Commission on the Three Mile Island Accident, Congress, 96th Cong., 1st sess., October 31, 1979, 20.

  50. Transcript of Proceedings, Commission, 47, Series XI: Governor of Pennsylvania, 1979–1987, Subseries 7: Three Mile Island, Box 198, Folder 3, DT Papers, UPSC.

  51. US Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on Science and Technology, Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Natural Resources and the Environment, Prepared Statement by Richard Thornburgh, 96th Cong., 1st sess., June 2, 1979, 49–50 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1980).

  52. Deposition of Richard Thornburgh, 25, RG 220, Central Files, Box 30, Folder: Deposition of Richard Thornburgh, Papers of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, NA II.

  53. Transcript of statement by William Scranton, “Incident at TMI,” press conference held on March 28, 1979, 4:30 PM, Part 1, 3, Series XI: Governor of Pennsylvania, 1979–1987, Subseries 7: Three Mile Island, Box 194, Folder 1, DT Papers, UPSC.

  54. Press Conference, March 31, 1979, 11 PM, Part 1, 8, Series XI: Governor of Pennsylvania, 1979–1987, Subseries 7: Three Mile Island, Box 194, Folder 7, DT Papers, UPSC.

  55. “TMI and the Politics of Public Health,” Gordon MacLeod, Lecture Prepared for Physicians for Social Responsibility, November 22, 1980, Beverly Hess Papers, Box 5, Folder 6, TMIC, DCASC. See also Gordon MacLeod, “Some Public Health Lessons from Three Mile Island: A Case Study in Chaos,” Ambio 10, no. 1 (1981): 18–23.

  56. See Walker, Three Mile Island, 228.

  57. Quotation is from interview with Bryce Nelson, reporter from the Los Angeles Times, Public Information Task Force, Interview with Reporters, RG 220, Central Files, Box 472, unnamed folder, Papers of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, NA II.

  58. Transcript of Kemeny Commission Interview with Karl Abraham, 73, RG 220, Central Files, Box 466, unnamed folder, Papers of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, NA II.

  59. Interview with Roger Witherspoon, reporter for Atlanta Constitution, Public Information Task Force Interview of Reporters, 3, RG 220, Central Files, Box 472, unnamed folder, Papers of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, NA II.

  60. “Townfolks Shrug Off Radioactivity,” Los Angeles Times, March 30, 1979.

  61. See, for example, Interview with Business Employee and Spouse, August 20, 1979, and Interview with College Administrator #4, June 7, 1979, Lonna Malmsheimer
Oral History Interviews (hereafter referred to as LMOHI), TMIC, DCASC. Resource Center of threemileisland.org, www.threemileisland.org/resource/index.php?aid=00024.

  62. “Establishing a Viable Public Information Center,” Series XI: Governor of Pennsylvania, 1979–1987, Subseries 7: Three Mile Island, Box 194, Folder 20, DT Papers, UPSC. On the difference between technological and natural disaster in this regard, see Susan Cutter, Living with Risk: the Geography of Technological Hazards (New York: Wiley, 1995).

  63. Interview with Curtus Wilkie, Public Information Task Force Interview of Reporters, RG 220, Central Files, Box 472, unnamed folder, Papers of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, NA II.

  64. On these measures, see Washington Post Special Report, Series XI: Governor of Pennsylvania, 1979–1987, Subseries 7: Three Mile Island, Box 200, Folder 1, DT Papers, UPSC; Box 194, Folder 1, DT Papers, UPSC; and Box 194, Folder 16, DT Papers, UPSC. See also “Population Dose and Health Impact of the Accident at the TMI Nuclear Station,” Series XI: Governor of Pennsylvania, 1979–1987, Subseries 7: Three Mile Island, Box 194, Folder 19, DT Papers, UPSC.

  65. Public Information Task Force Interviews of Reporters, 2, RG 220, Central Files, Box 472, unnamed folder, Papers of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, NA II.

  66. Interview with John Baer, Public Information Task Force Interviews of Reporters, RG 220, Central Files, Box 472, unnamed folder, Papers of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, NA II.

  67. On safety protocols at the plant, see Deposition of Joseph Deman, RG 220, Central Files, Box 6, Folder: Deposition of Joseph Deman, Papers of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, NA II.

  68. “Radiation Overdose: All in a Day’s Work,” New York Times, April 4, 1979.

  69. Ibid.

  70. “Townfolks Shrug Off Radioactivity.”

  71. Adriana Petryna, Life Exposed: Biological Citizens After Chernobyl (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). In this book, Petryna looks at how biological health became a realm of entitlement within Ukrainian state formation after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Here, I am using the category of biological citizenship more broadly.

  72. I use the formulation atomic-cum-ecological age to suggest that the ecological age emerged out of the atomic one, but also that there are significant continuities between the two epochs.

  73. US Congress, Senate, Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Energy, Nuclear Proliferation, and Federal Services of the Committee on Governmental Affairs, 96th Cong., 1st sess., 1979.

  74. Interview with Tate, Public Information Task Force Interviews of Reporters, 2, RG 220, Central Files, Box 472, unnamed folder, Papers of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, NA II.

  75. Letter from Thomas Busch to health resource planning and development, RG 220, Central Files, Box 307, unfiled, Papers of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, NA II.

  76. Interview with Business Employee and Spouse, August 20, 1979, LMOHI, TMIC, DCASC. Accessed at Resource Center of threemileisland.org, www.threemileisland.org/resource/item_detail.php? item_id=00000220.

  77. Scranton quoted in Walker, Three Mile Island, 81. See also Richard Thornburgh Deposition, RG 220, Central Files, Box 30, Folder: Richard Thornburgh Deposition, Papers of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, NA II.

  78. There were six counties that fell within the ten-mile radius alone. They were York County, Lancaster County, Lebanon County, Dauphin County, Perry County, and Cumberland County.

  79. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission recommended a 2.2-mile evacuation plan. The state had a plan for a five-mile evacuation. On Middletown, see interview with Robert Reid in Del Tredici, The People of Three Mile Island, 17. Those plans in place were often short on detail. The emergency-planning document for Dauphin County, where TMI was located, offers an example. The document included lists of possible suppliers (such as bus companies and ambulance services) that could be utilized in the event of an emergency. It also included phone listings for people and agencies to be contacted if an accident occurred at the plant. But missing from the document was any recommended evacuation routes or provision for mass care centers beyond the five-mile ring. “The Social and Economic Effects of the Accident at TMI,” Series XI: Governor of Pennsylvania, 1979–1987, Subseries 7: Three Mile Island, Box 197, Folder 1, DT Papers, UPSC.

  80. Kemeny, Accident at Three Mile Island, 15.

  81. Interview with Brian McKay in Del Tredici, The People of Three Mile Island, 112.

  82. “TMI and the Politics of Public Health,” Gordon MacLeod, Lecture Prepared for Physicians for Social Responsibility, November 22, 1980, Beverly Hess Papers, Box 5, Folder 6, TMIC, DCASC.

  83. Interview with College Administrator #8, LMOHI, TMIC, DCASC. Resource Center of threemileisland.org, www.threemileisland.org/resource/item_detail.php?item_id=00000222.

  84. Deposition of Harold Denton, 133, RG 220, Central Files, Box 6, Folder: Deposition of Harold Denton, Papers of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, NA II.

  85. On the concept of defense-in-depth, see Walker, Three Mile Island, 52–54.

  86. See, for example, Letter from John and Patricia Longnecker to the Kemeny Commission, RG 220, Central Files, Box 8, unnamed folder, Papers of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, NA II; Letter from Judith Johnsrud and Chauncey Kepford, The Environmental Coalition, September 20, 1979, Select Committee’s Report of the Hearings Concerning TMI, Series XI: Governor of Pennsylvania, 1979–1987, Subseries 7: Three Mile Island, Box 199, Folder 13, DT Papers, UPSC. The difficulties in coordinating an evacuation in response to a nuclear accident reflected the roots of emergency planning in the Cold War. The Civil Defense Act had emphasized nuclear attack rather than reactor events, and evacuations were not considered a realistic response.

  87. Richard Thornburgh statement before the US Senate Subcommittee on Nuclear Regulation, April 23, 1979, Series XI: Governor of Pennsylvania, 1979–1987, Subseries 7: Three Mile Island, Box 195, Folder 6, DT Papers, UPSC. My italics.

  88. See Richard Thornburgh Deposition, RG 220, Central Files, Box 30, Folder: Richard Thornburgh Deposition, Papers of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, NA II; and Kemeny, Accident at Three Mile Island, 120.

  89. “The Social and Economic Effects of the Accident At TMI: Findings to Date,” Prepared by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 59–60, Series XI: Governor of Pennsylvania, 1979–1987, Subseries 7: Three Mile Island, Box 197, Folder 1, DT Papers, UPSC.

  90. Transcript of Proceedings, Commission, 25–6, Box 198, Folder 3, DT Papers, UPSC.

  91. See Jackie Orr, Panic Diaries: A Genealogy of Panic Disorders (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); and Philip Wylie, “Panic, Psychology, and the Bomb,” Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 10, no. 2 (February 1954): 37–40.

  92. See Joanna Bourke, Fear: A Cultural History (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2007), 269.

  93. Colonel Oran Henderson testimony to House Armed Services Committee, 6, Series XI: Governor of Pennsylvania, 1979–1987, Subseries 7: Three Mile Island, Box 195, Folder 1, DT Papers, UPSC.

  94. On the panic myth, see Enrico Quarantelli, “Conventional Beliefs and Counterintuitive Realities,” Social Research 75, no. 3 (Fall 2008): 873–904. See also Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell; and Clarke, Worst Cases.

  95. Lee Clarke quoted in Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell, 131. See also Clarke, Worst Cases. In this way, the TMI story provides an illustrative example of the ways that panic myths, in Clarke’s words, work to “reinforce particular institutional interests.”

  96. Quoted in Walker, Three Mile Island, 137.

  97. Ibid., 107.

  98. Washington Post Special Report, Series XI: Governor of Pennsylvania, 1979–1987, Subseries 7: Three Mile Island, Box 200, Folder 1, DT Papers, UPSC. News stories detailing the evacuat
ion often mobilized a gendered logic by implying that local women were more fearful and local men more stoic in the face of the accident. Indeed, even a new term—nuclear macho—was coined to describe male residents who were staying put. On nuclear macho, see Peter M. Sandman and Mary Paden, “At Three Mile Island,” Columbia Journalism Review (July/August 1979): 43–58. See also “Three Years Later, Middletown Remembers,” Harrisburg Evening News, April 2, 1982.

  99. “A Young Mother’s Story: Three Mile Island Happened to Us,” Redbook, April 1980, and “The Social and Economic Effects of the Accident at TMI: Findings to Date,” prepared for the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Series XI: Governor of Pennsylvania, 1979–1987, Subseries 7: Three Mile Island, Box 197, Folder 1, DT Papers, UPSC.

  100. See Dunaway, “Gas Masks, Pogo, and the Ecological Indian.”

  101. See Cowie, Stayin’ Alive.

  102. Borstellman, The 1970s: A New Global History, 15.

  103. Quoted in Greg Adamson, We All Live on Three Mile Island Now: The Case Against Nuclear Power (Sydney: Pathfinder, 1981), 107.

  104. Ibid., 108.

  105. These included the United Mine Workers, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, International Chemical Workers Union, Graphic Arts International Union, United Auto Workers, International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union, United Furniture Workers of America, International Woodworkers of America, and the National Education Association.

  106. For several illustrative examples, see Washington Post Special Report, Series XI: Governor of Pennsylvania, 1979–1987, Subseries 7: Three Mile Island, Box 200, Folder 1, DT Papers, UPSC.

  107. Quoted in Walker, Three Mile Island, 156.

  108. The data on evacuation is varied. According to both the NRC and the Pennsylvania Department of Health, 60 percent of people living within the five-mile ring left (approximately twenty-one thousand people), 44 percent of people within the five- to ten-mile ring (approximately fifty-six thousand people), and 32 percent of people within the ten- to fifteen-mile ring (approximately sixty-seven thousand people). See “The Social and Economic Effects of the Accident at TMI.”