Mad Science: The Nuclear Power Experiment

by Joseph Mangano

  Large amounts of cooling water poured out of the reactor core through the faulty valve, and Three Mile Island Unit 2 was in big trouble. The core overheated, and began melting. Alarms sounded, but even then, operators believed water levels in the core to be adequate, since levels in the pressurizer area were normal. They reduced the flow of coolant water, which only made the situation worse. Not until a full eighty minutes later was the mistake recognized.

  By then, a large-scale meltdown was well under way. Nearly all of the zirconium cladding surrounding the fuel rods ruptured, and fuel pellets inside the cladding that contained uranium melted. About half of the reactor core melted into a fiery-hot, highly radioactive mush. By 11 a.m., NRC personnel and the White House had been notified about the situation, and all non-essential workers were ordered to leave the plant – but not the people of the Harrisburg area.

  In addition to the lack of cooling water in the melting reactor core, another problem arose. An enormous bubble of hydrogen gas built up in the dome of the pressure vessel, the building that houses the reactor core, raising the possibility of a fire or explosion. Not until four days later did Metropolitan Edison relieve the pressure of the hydrogen bubble by deliberately releasing it into the air, in a sort of “burping” action. The meltdown was finally over. Because the containment around the reactor building was not breached, environmental radiation releases were believed to be lower than others like Santa Susana and Chernobyl.

  The story made national and international news. There were several images that stuck in the mind of the American people. There were government and industry spokespersons nervously trying to explain what had happened. There was a grim-faced President Jimmy Carter, himself a trained nuclear engineer, and his wife Rosalynn touring the site in hard hats. There were the inevitable references to and footage of the movie The China Syndrome that had opened in theaters less than three weeks before. And there were the thousands of local residents taking to their cars and evacuating the area on jam-packed highways, as soon as the word “meltdown” hit the airwaves, ignoring the pleas of leaders to remain calm.

  Regulators had grave concern for the safety of workers and local residents. But there was much confusion over whether an evacuation should be ordered. In a meeting on March 30, more than forty-eight hours after the meltdown began, NRC Chairman Joseph M. Hendrie stated:

  It seems to me that I have got to call the Governor… to do it (order an evacuation) immediately. We are operating almost totally in the blind, his information is ambiguous, mine is nonexistent, and – I don’t know, it’s like a couple of blind men staggering around making decisions.

  Later that day, Governor Richard Thornburgh advised that all pregnant women and pre-school children (but not their parents) evacuate the area within five miles of the stricken plant. In all, about 40% of residents within twenty miles evacuated, totaling 200,000 or more people, half of whom did not return until at least a week after the accident. Thornburgh frequently clashed with new state Health Commissioner Dr. Gordon McLeod during the crisis and in the months after. McLeod, who spoke out repeatedly about potential health risks and the lack of preparation to address the meltdown, was fired just seven months later.

  Almost immediately, President Carter ordered an investigation of the accident. The Kemeny Commission, named after its chair Dr. John Kemeny of Dartmouth College, returned a report six months later. It strongly criticized Babcock and Wilcox, who manufactured the reactor; Metropolitan Edison, who operated it; and the NRC, who regulated it. In cited eleven other instances in which similar valve problems had occurred in the past at American nuclear reactors. It recommended many changes, including improving plant design and equipment requirements, monitoring employee performance, and regulating plant operations by the NRC.

  The Kemeny Commission’s recommendations were strong in some ways, but could have reasonably gone further. It mentioned that thirteen to seventeen curies of radioactive iodine had escaped into the environment, along with 2.4 to 13 million curies of noble gases, mostly krypton and xenon – enormous amounts. But it casually termed these releases as “controlled and planned.” Subsequently, some contested these numbers, claiming they were underestimates. In another section, the report addressed health concerns, calling the potential effects as “not known.” But even before any health studies could be conducted, the Kemeny Commission arrived at a conclusion that was to permanently affect any efforts to understand the true damage from Three Mile Island.

  The major health effect of the accident appears to have been on the mental health of the people living in the region of Three Mile Island and of the workers at TMI. There was immediate, short-lived mental distress produced by the accident among certain groups of the general population living within twenty miles of TMI. The highest levels of distress were found among adults a) living within five miles of TMI, or b) with preschool children; and among teenagers a) living within five miles of TMI, b) with preschool siblings, or c) whose families left the area.

  This statement had no basis in scientific fact, broke the rules of scientific research that objectivity must be maintained prior to examination, and set the stage for future research articles. Over eleven years later, thirty-one articles in journals addressed stress and psychological problems due to Three Mile Island, while no articles – zero – examined actual rates of diseases such as cancer in the local area. Some local residents, distressed at the lack of research while anecdotal evidence of people, animals, and plants suffering built up, took matters into their own hands, conducting door-to-door surveys of local residents. Jane Lee, who was instrumental in conducting these surveys, observed: “You don’t have to be a great genius to see what’s going on here. Wherever the worst of the radiation blew, that’s where the health effects are. The people here are the human dosimeters.”

  The Three Mile Island meltdown strengthened public sentiments, which were already moving against atomic power. In May, a rally in Washington against nuclear reactors drew 65,000 people (featuring California Governor Jerry Brown as a speaker), while in September, a rally in New York City drew 200,000 people (including speakers Jane Fonda and Ralph Nader). Also in September, Musicians United for Safe Energy founded by rock stars Jackson Browne, John Hall, Graham Nash, and Bonnie Raitt held five “No Nukes” concerts in New York’s Madison Square Garden, featuring many other popular acts. An album and film of the concerts were released the following year. The media brought the protests and concerts to the attention of millions, firming up opposition against nuclear power.

  Legal actions were also a legacy of Three Mile Island. In 1981, a citizen group suing the utility agreed to a settlement of $25 million to create the Three Mile Island Public Health Fund. In 1983, Metropolitan Edison pleaded guilty to one count of falsifying pre-accident safety test results, and no contest to six other charges, and was fined $1 million to set up an emergency planning system. Anti-nuclear activist Harvey Wasserman estimates that $15 million has been paid to local parents with children born after the meltdown with one or more birth defects. Finally, a class-action suit brought by over 2,000 local residents with cancer and other health problems was dismissed in federal district court, and the appeal upheld the decision.

  Then there were the studies of health consequences of the meltdown. These attempts escalated into a war between researchers. One group was seemingly on a mission to dismiss any potential threats, or blame them on stress and psychological factors rather than radiation. The other side included those professionals who took a more open-minded viewpoint. This research battle has been discussed in Chapter 6 of this book.

  Life at Three Mile Island took a long time to return to any semblance of normality. Unit 1 at the site, which was closed for refueling during the March 1979 meltdown, stayed closed because of public protests, legal actions, and regulatory sluggishness. Finally, it restarted in October 1985, and is still operating. The thirty-seven-year-old reactor recently received permission from the NRC to operate past its original forty-year license,
to a maximum of sixty years (ending 2034).

  The cleanup of Three Mile Island 2 was a long and delicate process. The damaged core, along with large amounts of radioactive water, waste, and fuel was moved to the Idaho National Laboratory, operated by the US Energy Department (with, naturally, taxpayer dollars). Not until 1993, over fourteen years after the meltdown, was the decommissioning declared complete.

  There are those who believe that the Three Mile Island meltdown ruined the US nuclear power effort. This is not quite true; before March 28, 1979, concerns had grown about this technology, protests had begun, politicians had voiced opposition, Wall Street financial backers had cut down on loans for new plants, and utilities had cancelled dozens of planned reactors. A more accurate way to term Three Mile Island’s impact is that it put the lid on an already-built coffin of any hopes that the field would expand, a legacy that lives on today. It is no coincidence that the last order to the NRC to build a new reactor in the US took place in October 1978, just five months before Three Mile Island.

  The name Three Mile Island became synonymous with nuclear power threats and related fears. But it didn’t take too long – just seven years – until a new name that embodied nuclear power’s ability to cause massive harm entered the mindset of Americans, and people around the world: Chernobyl.

  The Soviet Union had embarked on an ambitious plan of nuclear power beginning in the 1960s. The nation’s advanced atomic weapons program had endowed it with a core of well trained nuclear scientists. These highly skilled workers, along with the country’s need for electrical power, spurred the Communist government’s decision to move forward and build nuclear power reactors.

  One of the nuclear plants that gave the leadership high hopes was Chernobyl, a complex situated in the Ukraine near the border of Belarus, about eighty miles from the large city of Kiev. Four reactors were built at the site. In 1986, operators of the newest Chernobyl reactor #4, just three years old at the time, were conducting an experiment. The reactor’s backup generators took over a minute to start up if power was lost, a time considered unacceptably long if cooling water to the core was lost. Several earlier tests had been conducted to correct this situation, but all failed.

  On Friday, April 25, 1986, the latest experiment to reduce the lag time in generator startup was conducted, while Chernobyl Unit 4 was otherwise shut down for maintenance. The reactor was readied for the test, but the level of power fell well below the minimum needed for the test. Almost all the reactor’s control rods had been removed, which was a move that would severely limit the ability to cope with any problems. By now it was after midnight; night workers had replaced those on the day shift who had begun the experiment.

  At 1:23 a.m. local time on April 26, an emergency shutdown was followed by an extremely rapid increase in the power level, and then by two massive explosions. The blast blew the concrete lid completely off the reactor; radioactive debris spewed from the damaged reactor; and fires began throughout the plant.

  The fires blazed for hours, and were visible for miles around. G. N. Petrov, an eyewitness driving his car near the town of Pripyat which adjoined Chernobyl, recalled the sight:

  I approached Pripyat around 2:30 a.m. from the northwest … I could already see the fire above No. 4 unit. The ventilation stack, with its horizontal red stripes, was clearly lit up by the flames. I remember how the flames were higher than the shaft, so that they must have been nearly 600 feet in the air… by the light of the fire, I could see that the building was half destroyed.

  Brave firefighters took more than five hours to bring the blazes under control – all except the fire in Reactor 4, a huge and devastating event which would not be extinguished for another two weeks. These heroic workers were exposed to high levels of radiation, and would all perish from acute radiation poisoning not long after. Subsequently, the large amount of radioactive debris scattered around the plant was shoveled into the reactor by liquidators. During the next few days, the reactor was covered with sand, lead, and boric acid dropped from helicopters – again by liquidators who would meet untimely deaths from exposure. Finally, other workers buried the reactor under a concrete sarcophagus by late 1986, where it remains today.

  The impossible task of clearing the local area wasn’t confined to the Chernobyl plant, but to a broader area heavily hit by radiation. Entire villages and towns were visited by the liquidators, who now numbered in the thousands. Liquidator Arkady Filin recalls the confusion, fear, and anger of local residents they visited:

  We buried trash heaps and gardens. The women in the villages watched us and crossed themselves. We had gloves, respirators, and surgical robes. The sun beat down on us. We showed up in their yards like demons. They didn’t understand why we had to bury their gardens, rip up their garlic and cabbage when it looked like ordinary garlic and ordinary cabbage.

  A staggering amount of radioactivity was released during the meltdown. There have been varying estimates of the total, all between fifty million and 100 billion curies. Never before in history had this amount of radiation entered into the environment at one time; even the largest aboveground nuclear weapons tests fell far short of Chernobyl.

  To compound matters, the radiation plume was thrust thousands of feet into the air, and proceeded to encircle the globe, mostly in the Northern Hemisphere. Precipitation brought the radiation back to earth, where it entered the food chain. The hardest hit areas, naturally, were the Ukraine, Belarus, and European Russia. But land in distant nations like Finland, Sweden, and Yugoslavia were hard hit; they received from 10% to 40% of the contamination measured in the former Soviet Union.

  Even the United States, whose closest point to Chernobyl is over 6,000 miles away, was subjected to radioactivity from the catastrophe. Radioactive chemicals from Chernobyl detected in various parts of the nation by the Environmental Protection Agency included barium, cerium, cesium, iodine, lanthanum, ruthenium, and zirconium. They first appeared in the air above the US just nine days after the disaster. From mid-May to late June 1986, the weekly EPA levels of iodine-131 in pasteurized milk at sixty sites around the country were about 5.6 times greater than normal, before returning to typical levels (I-131 has a half life of eight days).

  The Pacific Northwest was hardest hit, because of heavy rainfall in May. The table below shows that Boise, Idaho and Spokane, Washington had levels twenty-eight and twenty-two times above normal. Some individual readings were extremely high. The highest EPA measurement occurred in Spokane on May 16 (136 picocuries I-131 per liter of milk, compared to the usual 2.5), while the Washington Department of Health and Social Services reported a staggering 560 in the town of Redland on May 5.

  Source: Office of Radiation Programs, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Environmental Radiation Data, Volumes 42 and 46, 1985–1986.

  Longer-lasting radioactivity did not disappear as quickly. cesium-137 levels in US milk were nearly four times above normal during May and June 1986, just after Chernobyl. But levels did not return to normal until 1989, nearly three years later (Cs-137 has a half life of thirty years).

  Measuring radioactivity was a difficult task, but there was relative agreement among scientists as to where the plume went and how much entered the environment and diet. But calculating casualties was another story. Literally from the moment the Chernobyl reactor exploded, the fight over the number of casualties was on. Some clung to the extremely low number of thirty or thirty-one deaths. Even today, this risibly low number is used, as on the March 2011 web site of the World Nuclear Association, which declared:

  Two Chernobyl plant workers died on the night of the accident, and a further thirty-eight people died within a few weeks as a result of acute radiation poisoning.

  Even highly prestigious organizations maintained that only a small number of people had been harmed, all of them in the former Soviet Union. In 2005, just prior to the twentieth anniversary of the disaster, a conference was held in Vienna. Among the presenters were officials from the International Atomic E
nergy Agency (IAEA), World Health Organization (WHO), and United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR). The conclusion of panelists was that Chernobyl caused just 9,000 cancers, along with cataracts in workers and local children.

  But the minimalists were opposed, as three billion people around the world had been exposed to radioactive fallout from Chernobyl (and with residual fallout in the biosphere, are still being exposed through the food chain). The Soviet Union and its successor nations were slow about conducting and releasing studies, and even suppressed studies. But many anecdotes of horrible suffering, especially among children, made their way across the world, making it clear that the carnage was massive. Nikolai Kalugin, a local resident whose daughter died, recounts time spent in hospitals overflowing with people suffering from radiation-related disease:

  My daughter was six years old. I’m putting her to bed and she whispers in my ear. “Daddy, I want to live. I’m still little.” … Can you picture seven little girls shaved bald in one room? There were seven of them in the hospital room… My wife came home from the hospital. She couldn’t take it. “It’d be better for her to die than to suffer like this. Or for me to die, so that I don’t have to watch anymore…” I want to bear witness: my daughter died from Chernobyl. And they want us to forget it.

  In late 2009, a 327-page book by three Russian scientists was published by the New York Academy of Sciences. The book was replete with facts, tables, graphs, and maps – based on over 5,000 articles and reports (both printed and on the internet), many never acknowledged before since they were written in the Slavic languages. The evidence in this report was disturbing. The proportion of children in Belarus, the Ukraine, and European Russia considered healthy had shrunk from 80% to 20% since 1985. The biggest number of all was the estimated worldwide number of deaths from the catastrophe: “The overall mortality for the period from April 1986 to the end of 2004 from the Chernobyl catastrophe was estimated at 985,000 additional deaths. The estimate of the number of additional deaths is similar to those of 1994 and 2006. A projection for a much longer period – for many future generations – is very difficult.”