Flawed and disingenuous communication continued as hundreds of reporters from around the globe descended on tiny Middletown to record the unprecedented accident. From the outset, the journalists found that messages from the authorities were frequently at odds with each other or so cryptic as to be indecipherable. If nervous Pennsylvanians were looking for guidance, it wasn’t coming from those in charge—at least in the first days. “The response to the emergency was dominated by an atmosphere of almost total confusion,” concluded the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, also known as the Kemeny Commission, in its report seven months later.
No one seemed to know what was happening or how to respond. That included state officials, who were charged with emergency preparedness; the NRC, which was assessing the accident from three different offices and eventually from the scene; and Met Ed, with officials issuing statements at the plant site, as well as in Reading, and from the New Jersey home of its parent company, General Public Utilities Corporation.
Very quickly, distrust colored nearly every exchange. At an 11:00 a.m. news conference the first morning, Lieutenant Governor William Scranton III told reporters Met Ed had assured him that “everything is under control.” Even as he was speaking, however, Met Ed was venting steam containing radioactivity from the plant. Later that afternoon Scranton would tell reporters: “The situation is more complex than the company first led us to believe.”
For the NRC, the telephone was the prime means of communication, but there was no dedicated line between regulators and the control room. Thus the commission had to deal in the first days with a frustratingly incomplete picture (something that might have felt familiar to the White Flint staffers hungry for information from Japanese officials three decades later). The NRC’s public affairs staff was swamped by media calls; staff members often had no updated information to provide. As for Met Ed, the utility’s public relations team had very little technical expertise, and the executives put forth to brief reporters soon lost credibility not only with the media but also with state and NRC officials.1
As the lack of reliable information stoked public fears, the NRC dispatched to the scene Harold Denton, director of the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation, who became the point man for the commission. Denton was handed the task of briefing President Jimmy Carter, the NRC commissioners and staff, and the hordes of media who assembled late each afternoon for a news briefing on the accident.
For many of Three Mile Island’s neighbors—as for the frightened residents living around Fukushima Daiichi thirty-two years later—the uppermost concern was the threat of a radiation release, large or small. If Three Mile Island was venting radioactivity, how safe were they? It was all too apparent that the reason answers were difficult to come by was that the experts were asking the same questions themselves.
By Thursday morning, March 29, the information trickling out of Three Mile Island prompted officials in Harrisburg to raise the possibility of an evacuation, which would be the state’s call. Less than twenty-four hours later, Governor Thornburgh recommended that children and pregnant women living within a five-mile radius of Three Mile Island evacuate and that schools be closed. Federal and state experts were divided on the need for such drastic action, but Thornburgh wasn’t willing to take chances, fearing further radiation releases.
News of the Three Mile Island accident spread around the globe, and hundreds of reporters gathered to cover the story. Afternoon media briefings were conducted by the NRC’s Harold Denton (lower left at microphones), who had been dispatched to the scene to provide updates to the media, the NRC, and President Jimmy Carter. U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission
It was the first unequivocal directive delivered to a population craving guidance. All told, nearly 150,000 people, regardless of age or gender, piled into cars and fled, eager to put distance between themselves and the troubled reactor.
Some have called Three Mile Island the most studied accident in U.S. history, at least up to that time. Two weeks after the accident, President Carter appointed the Kemeny Commission to investigate the accident’s causes and recommend ways to prevent recurrence. The U.S. Senate conducted its own investigation. The NRC conducted several investigations. The U.S. nuclear industry held its own Three Mile Island postmortem. The various examiners generally agreed that the accident largely resulted from safety studies and reviews that focused too narrowly on nuclear plant designs and hardware and not sufficiently on the human part of the safety equation.
Some of the most damning language came from the twelve-member commission chaired by Dartmouth College president John G. Kemeny. The Kemeny Commission issued a blunt report in October 1979 after an intensive six-month investigation.
“[T]he fundamental problems are people-related problems and not equipment problems,” the commission wrote. “[W]herever we looked, we found problems with the human beings who operate the plant, with the management that runs the key organization, and with the agency that is charged with assuring the safety of nuclear power plants.” The commission also pointed a finger at “the failure of organizations to learn the proper lessons from previous incidents.” As a result, “we are convinced,” the commission wrote, “that an accident like Three Mile Island was eventually inevitable.”
At the heart of the problem, the report said, was a pervasive attitude that nuclear power was already so safe that there was no need to consider extra precautions. The Kemeny Commission urged that “this attitude . . . be changed to one that says nuclear power is by its very nature potentially dangerous, and, therefore, one must continually question whether the safeguards already in place are sufficient to prevent major accidents.”
The nuclear industry was uncowed by these conclusions. Instead, it trumpeted another finding from the report: “[I]n spite of serious damage to the plant, most of the radiation was contained and the actual release will have a negligible effect on the physical health of individuals.” In the decades to follow, nuclear power supporters would rally behind this statement and repeat the shibboleth “Nobody died at Three Mile Island.” This would become a huge stumbling block to comprehensive safety reform.
Still, the many investigations did result in some chipping around the edges. Among the reforms resulting from the Three Mile Island accident were enhanced training requirements for plant workers, changes in emergency response procedures, and improvements in control room instrumentation. Control room operators now spend about 10 percent of their time reviewing changes to plant procedures and refreshing their skills on full-scale simulators. Prior to Three Mile Island, plant operators typically were required to diagnose what had happened and why before they could invoke the proper response procedure. After Three Mile Island, the operators were allowed to take certain steps to counter a developing problem before ascertaining its cause. Control panels were reconfigured and on/off switches were placed near relevant gauges so an operator could quickly verify the effect of using them.
In addition, the NRC took new steps to collect and share information about problems occurring at nuclear plants. Over the years since Three Mile Island, the commission has issued thousands of notices to plant owners about design, maintenance, and operating problems encountered at reactors. Early on the NRC went further, creating the Office for the Analysis and Evaluation of Operational Data (AEOD) to formally review reports and spotlight emerging adverse trends. (The NRC disbanded the AEOD in the mid-1990s as a budget-cutting measure.)
Three Mile Island’s lessons also led to changes in the nuclear industry’s safety philosophy. In the 1970s, plant owners often applied Band-Aid fixes to equipment problems so reactors could quickly restart—even if it meant the problems would soon recur. But nuclear reactors aren’t yo-yos, and cycling them on and off is neither wise nor cost-effective. Once companies acknowledged that, they paid more attention to finding and fixing problems that triggered reactor shutdowns, such as the recurring issues at Three Mile Island that had preceded the accident.
T
oday, U.S. nuclear plants operate on average at about a 90 percent capacity factor, meaning that they are almost always producing electricity, except when they are shut down for refueling, which occurs every eighteen to twenty-four months.
One direct response to Three Mile Island by the U.S. nuclear industry was the creation of the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations. Among other things, INPO functions as an information clearinghouse for the industry—and to some degree as a shadow regulator.
The déjà vu sequence of events that led to the Three Mile Island accident eighteen months after a similar occurrence at Davis-Besse was not unique. In the 1970s, nuclear utilities shared little information with each other. Companies were needlessly vulnerable to common problems because of a lack of real-time communication about operating glitches and equipment malfunctions. Now, INPO requires plant owners to share good and bad practices. The goal is to enable everyone to learn from a mistake or malfunction without necessarily having to experience it firsthand.
INPO also established standards of excellence and periodically evaluates each nuclear plant against those standards. But the sharing only goes so far. The INPO assessment reports are among the most closely guarded nuclear industry secrets in the United States. Not even the NRC gets a copy. The nuclear industry defends this secrecy on the grounds that the assessments can be brutally frank—benefits apparently missing from publicly available (and often unjustifiably tame) NRC assessment reports.
In 1993, the public interest group Public Citizen obtained confidential INPO safety reports for all U.S. nuclear plants and compared them with the assessments prepared by the NRC over the same period. Of 463 problems cited by INPO at fifty-six plants, only about a third showed up as matters of concern in the NRC’s reports. INPO identified 185 specific plant problems the NRC reviews did not address, and in 115 cases the NRC praised plant performance that INPO had red flagged. A spokesman for the nuclear industry explained the differences: “The NRC’s mission is to regulate the industry. INPO’s mission is to be painfully candid . . . come into a plant and lay it bare.”
Another downside of the secrecy—beyond hiding a useful yardstick for the NRC’s own inspection performance—is that the public never knows to what extent nuclear utilities implement INPO’s recommendations to fix problems.
The Three Mile Island accident also prompted the NRC to upgrade its requirements for preparing the public for nuclear plant emergencies. There had never before been a radiation release significant enough to warrant advising nearby residents to evacuate. Now, government officials—and people living near nuclear plants—were alerted to the issue.
In 1980, the NRC required that plant owners draw up evacuation plans for the public within ten miles of each plant. (Compare that with the NRC’s recommendation that U.S. citizens within fifty miles of Fukushima be advised to leave.) It also mandated that biennial emergency exercises be conducted at each nuclear plant site. During the exercise, a plant accident is simulated and the Federal Emergency Management Agency evaluates the steps local, state, and federal officials take to protect the public from radiation. In parallel, the NRC evaluates how well plant workers respond to the simulated accident and work with off-site officials.
The biennial exercises are better than nothing, but not by much. In the simulation, winds are assumed to blow in only one direction, conveniently but unrealistically limiting the number of people in harm’s way. The evacuations are only simulated, so there is no way to tell if the complicated logistics of evacuating all homes, businesses, schools, hospitals, and prisons could be successfully carried out. Instead, the exercises merely verify that officials have the right phone numbers and contractual agreements for the buses to carry evacuees and the hospitals to treat the injured and contaminated.
These exercises only provide an illusion of adequate preparation. As the Fukushima experience painfully demonstrated, rapidly moving people out of harm’s way in the midst of a nuclear crisis is exceedingly difficult, yet critical.
Although the various Three Mile Island reviews converged on the need for major nuclear safety upgrades, there was no consensus on how wide-ranging the reforms should be. At the heart of the safety debate were these questions: Should the reforms address only the issues raised by the last accident? Or would that be tantamount to fighting the last war? If the next accident were triggered by a completely different event and proceeded along a different track, the failure of a too-narrow approach would be evident. Because of the NRC’s regulatory focus on design-basis accidents that followed a certain script, it had never taken a comprehensive look at the universe of beyond-design-basis accidents—that is, everything else that could go wrong—or the need to protect against them.
The aversion to considering beyond-design-basis accidents—then called “Class 9 accidents”—dated back to the NRC’s predecessor, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). One of the AEC’s concerns was laid out by none other than Harold Denton, then a member of the AEC’s licensing staff. During a January 5, 1973, AEC meeting on reactor siting criteria, he stated that “if Class 9 accidents are considered ‘credible,’ this may preclude the construction of reactors in the Northeast United States.” In other words, if protection from reactor accidents was deemed to require large distances between the reactors and the public, there might be no suitable sites in the northeast.
However, this sentiment was not shared by the NRC’s Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards. The panel of experts wrote in a letter to the NRC in December 1979: “The lessons learned from the TMI accident should be viewed in a broader perspective . . . there are other potentially important contributors to the probability of a reactor accident, and they should also receive priority attention.”
Had the NRC followed that advice, the regulation and operation of the nation’s reactors could have been transformed. But breaking out of its traditional focus into this new realm of oversight was not in the cards. Instead, in the face of Three Mile Island’s evidence to the contrary, the NRC ultimately returned to its belief that beyond-design-basis accidents were rare enough to largely ignore, and it limited the scope of the subsequent regulatory reform primarily to fighting the last war.
The NRC had blown its chance to develop a comprehensive approach to preventing meltdowns and thus had failed to learn one of the most significant lessons from Three Mile Island: that if one type of beyond-design-basis accident could occur, so could others. Instead, a series of ad hoc half measures and voluntary industry “initiatives” would fill the vacuum, creating a regulatory patchwork with plenty of holes. The NRC would refuse to recognize the defects of this system for decades, until it was compelled to convene yet another task force to conduct a postmortem on yet another catastrophe: Fukushima.
8
MARCH 21 THROUGH DECEMBER 2011: “THE SAFETY MEASURES . . . ARE INADEQUATE”
On the evening of March 21, Chuck Casto left the Kantei, the prime minister’s headquarters in Tokyo, feeling upbeat. The meeting had finally given the U.S. team what it had sought for days: access to “the middle layer”—the people within the government and TEPCO who knew what was going on and were willing to share information with the Americans.
Previous meetings with top-level officials of the utility and the government had not been fruitful. “You can’t sit and interrogate those people and say, give me exactly what’s going on, because they don’t know,” Casto explained. “You need that middle layer of people.”
That evening, senior cabinet ministers, utility officials, and their staff experts gathered with U.S. representatives from a variety of agencies to discuss the situation. “Once we did get access to the middle layer then we really got our feet on the ground,” Casto recalled of that evening. The first session went so well that the group agreed to meet the following night, and the evening conferences became fixtures, continuing for months.
The Japanese especially wanted U.S. help in devising a sustainable injection system to deliver water to the damaged reactors. The meeting provided an opp
ortunity to exchange information on that and other subjects, something the Americans welcomed. “It felt good and successful,” said Casto.
Earlier in the day, there had been a discovery that was also on the minds of the Japanese. It had nothing to do with getting water into the reactors. A monitoring survey had detected radioactive materials in the ocean about one thousand feet (330 meters) south of a discharge canal for Units 1 through 4. The canal carried heated water from the condensers to the ocean for cooling. Normally the water flowing from the canal was not radioactive, but it now contained radioactive cobalt, cesium, and iodine, a troubling sign that the plant had sprung a new leak.
On March 21, 2011, radionuclides, including long-lived cesium, were detected in water about one thousand feet (330 meters) south of a discharge canal (circled) at Fukushima Daiichi. The discovery threatened what had been a productive fishing area. It also heralded what would become a mounting problem for TEPCO: what to do with huge volumes of contaminated water. Air Photo Service Co. Ltd., Japan
Some of the thousands of tons of water pumped and dumped into the reactors to cool their damaged systems had picked up radionuclides and was now heading out into the sea. Further, the presence of iodine-131 and tellurium-132 indicated the water was leaking out of at least one core. Most of the radiation releases earlier in the accident had been airborne and reached the ocean surface as fallout from the prevailing winds. The detection of contaminants, including long-lived cesium, flowing directly into the sea posed a worrisome new problem.
Before the disaster, the waters off Fukushima Prefecture had supported a thriving commercial fishing industry. The tsunami had wreaked havoc on its fleets, ports, and processing facilities. The prospect that seafood taken from these waters might now be contaminated and unsafe to eat threatened to deliver another blow to the devastated region.
Fukushima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster Page 20