Meltdown (2020)

[0] A warning, this episode contains a graphic description of the effects of the dropping of a nuclear weapon on people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, during World War II.

[1] On March 16, 1979, a new movie debuted in theaters across the country.

[2] The China Syndrome.

[3] It's about people, people who lie, and people faced with the agony of telling the truth.

[4] The phrase China syndrome describes a totally impossible yet terrible, yet terrible.

[5] terrifying doomsday scenario, where a reactor at a nuclear power plant melts down, and with nothing to stop it, burns through the earth all the way from the U .S. to China.

[6] Okay, back to the movie.

[7] So the China syndrome portrays a serious nuclear accident at a reactor in Ventana, California.

[8] This is Jack Goodell.

[9] We have a serious condition.

[10] You get everybody into safety areas.

[11] Which nearly leads to a meltdown at the plant.

[12] And then the efforts of investigative journalists to uncover what actually happened.

[13] Please, please, let me ask the question.

[14] Who's his Mr. Gibson?

[15] If there's nothing to hide, let him speak.

[16] Going kind of up against the owners of the reactor who are portrayed as villainous and as willing to cover up the accident sort of in order to protect their own bottom line.

[17] The owners of the nuclear power plant refused to acknowledge any wrongdoing, claiming the plant poses no danger.

[18] But the reporters are there to slowly unravel their lies.

[19] And at one point in the movie, a physics professor tells a reporter that, in fact, an explosion at the plant could render an area the size of Pennsylvania permanently uninhabitable.

[20] The China syndrome was a hit.

[21] It made millions at the box office was nominated for four Oscars, and some would later say it predicted the future.

[22] This film, in a kind of uncanny coincidence, came out 12 days before the accident at Three Mile Island.

[23] The government official said that a breakdown in an atomic power plant in Pennsylvania today is probably the worst nuclear reactor accident to date.

[24] It was such a kind of bizarre life -imitating art moment.

[25] The worst nuclear accident in U .S. history, sparking health concerns that linger 40 years later.

[26] 40 years after the nation held its breath over the near meltdown of this three -mile island nuclear power plant, many of the circumstances surrounding the accident remain cloaked in mystery.

[27] It was just panic.

[28] It was fear.

[29] It was all these emotions wrapped up into one.

[30] You're listening to ThruLine from NPR, where we go back in time to understand the present.

[31] In times of crisis, reliable information is especially important.

[32] It can serve as an antidote to fear, confusion, anger, emotions heightened by uncertainty.

[33] It can help people assess how much danger they are or aren't in.

[34] And it can help establish trust between the public and the authorities.

[35] That got us thinking about another time in U .S. history when the country was in crisis mode.

[36] In 1979, after an accident at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

[37] Would the plant explode?

[38] When was it safe to go out?

[39] How much radiation was released?

[40] Could you get sick from the water?

[41] Some of those questions remain to this day.

[42] Nuclear radiation is a threat that can linger for years and years, silently reeking, havoc.

[43] So the fear and the doubt also linger.

[44] Many people harbor strong fears about nuclear energy.

[45] Even as others argue that nuclear energy can and should help power our future in the face of climate change.

[46] But what this story is about is how nuclear technology morphed from a weapon of war to a thriving private industry.

[47] And the moment when disaster struck and the public's trust was broken.

[48] Hello, this is David Macommer calling from Seattle, Washington, and you're listening to ThruLine on NPR.

[49] Keep up the great work.

[50] I love it when you fill in the historical gaps.

[51] Thanks.

[52] Part 1.

[53] The Adam.

[54] On August 6th, 1945, the United States deployed the most powerful weapon the world had ever seen.

[55] A short time ago, an American airplane dropped one.

[56] bomb on Hiroshima and destroyed its usefulness to the enemy.

[57] That bomb has more power than 20 ,000 tons of TNT.

[58] The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor.

[59] They have been repaid many foes.

[60] The bomb was codenamed Little Boy, and according to the rationale of the United States High Command, it was a tool used to effectively end World War II.

[61] Three days later, the U .S. military dropped another bomb on another Japanese city, Nagasaki.

[62] It is an atomic bomb.

[63] It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe.

[64] The force from which the sun draws his power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.

[65] We have spent more than $2 billion on the greatest scientific gamble in history.

[66] and we have won.

[67] Together, both bombs killed over 100 ,000 people, most of them within seconds.

[68] In some cases, the only evidence that remained were their shadows on the concrete.

[69] It would not be the same, but we're silent.

[70] That was J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the secret research effort to create the atomic bomb called the Manhattan Project.

[71] He was describing the reactions of his colleagues after their first test of the atomic bomb.

[72] He was tortured by the fact that he had helped use the peak of human scientific knowledge to create a godlike destructive power.

[73] In reality, most Americans knew nothing of the Manhattan Project or anything really about nuclear fission.

[74] All they knew was that two massive bombs had brought victory.

[75] At least at first, There wasn't a huge visual lexicon that the average person had about what atomic destruction looked like.

[76] This is Sarah Robbie.

[77] I am an assistant professor in the history of energy at Idaho State University, and I am a nuclear historian.

[78] Evidence of what happened began to trickle out of Japan.

[79] Over the next few weeks and months, Photographs did come out of Hiroshima and the Nagasaki.

[80] Can we forget that flash?

[81] Suddenly, 30 ,000 in the streets disappeared.

[82] But they were mediated by the American government pretty heavily.

[83] In the crushed depths of darkness, the shrieks of 50 ,000 died out.

[84] You would see destroyed buildings and perhaps some aerial shots of, you know, complete decimation within a certain, certain perimeter.

[85] When the swirling yellow smoke thinned, building split, bridges collapsed, packed trains rested singed, and a shoreless accumulation of rubble numbers.

[86] Hiroshima.

[87] But for a long time, there was a conscious effort to keep images away from the press that led to the direct association with the human cost of those bombings.

[88] With skin hanging down like rags, hands -on chests, stamping on crumbled brain matter, burnt clothing covering hips.

[89] Toge Sankichi Ultimately, the government didn't succeed in cutting that association completely.

[90] The average public understood that the nature of war had changed, and they developed a very tight correlation between anything nuclear, except they were mostly saying atomic at the time, but atomic weapons and atomic science or atomic energy.

[91] There was always this overtone of like, hmm, okay, the war is over, but what have we gotten ourselves into in the long run?

[92] So it's hard to pinpoint, you know, a universal or monolithic public reaction to the dawn of the atomic age.

[93] But, you know, I think the best we can say is that it was profoundly mixed.

[94] The discovery of nuclear fission in the early 20th century was revolutionary.

[95] Scientists had figured out how to manipulate an atom, one of the most elemental things in nature.

[96] And with that, the atomic age was born.

[97] There is no denying that since that moment, the shadow of the atom bomb has been across all our lives.

[98] This is from a promotional film about the benefits of nuclear energy produced by General Electric.

[99] It reflected the attempt to reframe atomic science in the minds of the American public.

[100] GE, along with a host of other experts, were preparing people for a future where nuclear reactors could power the country.

[101] Because here, in fact, is the answer to a dream as old as man himself, a giant of limitless power at man's command.

[102] And where was it, science found that giant?

[103] In the atom.

[104] Meanwhile, good sense...

[105] You know, the bombings of Hiroshima Nagasaki gave an overwhelmingly negative slant to this whole kind of scientific category.

[106] But you see efforts on the part of federal officials, educators, other public intellectuals in the late 40s and 50s saying, hey, you know, this is a force that could be the end of us, but if we're responsible, we can turn this into something that will benefit society or benefit the world.

[107] An atomic energy power plant has already proved feasible.

[108] The future supplying of electric power to entire cities is far from impossible.

[109] Electricity produced by nuclear energy would be, quote unquote, too cheap to meter, right, which became a catchphrase in the 1915.

[110] as a way to promote the almost utopian vision of the benefits of nuclear energy.

[111] But it wasn't just companies and experts pushing this new narrative.

[112] It was also the President of the United States, former general and war hero, Dwight D. Eisenhower.

[113] Members of the General Assembly, when Secretary General Hammer Scholl's invitation, So very early in Eisenhower's presidency, he went before the United Nations in New York and gave what became known as the Adams for Peace speech, where he outlined a vision of the nuclear future for the world.

[114] This greatest of destructive forces can be developed into a great boom for the benefit of all mankind.

[115] Eisenhower is framing nuclear science and the peaceful uses of nuclear science as something that can heal the world.

[116] The United States knows that peaceful power from atomic energy is no dream of the future.

[117] That capability already proved is here.

[118] Now, today.

[119] It's very much about public sentiment and it's about signaling to both Cold War allies and Cold War enemies that the United States is not just invested in nuclear weapons proliferation.

[120] The United States pledges before you and therefore before the world its determination to help solve the fearful atomic dilemma to devote its entire heart and mind to find the way by which the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death but consecrated to his life.

[121] But this is still with a backdrop of massive arms build -up throughout the course of the 1950s on both sides of the iron curtain.

[122] And while Eisenhower was out giving speeches about the peaceful potential of nuclear power, the U .S. was building bigger and scarier nuclear weapons.

[123] So what he's saying at the U .N. and what's going on, you know, in the American military and the American Atomic Energy Commission, not always totally in line there.

[124] Even so, his speech seemed to work from a public relations perspective.

[125] On the whole, Eisenhower's speech was received pretty well, or at least as far as I can tell, you know, when you look at newspaper accounts and editorials and, you know, there are public opinion polls from this era.

[126] People were willing and kind of, I would say, sometimes almost eager to consider the peaceful and, you know, maybe.

[127] utopian vision of the atomic age.

[128] And within a year of the Adams for Peace speech, Congress passed a bill that gave private industry more access to nuclear technology.

[129] And what that did is it paved the way for private companies and utilities to have access to the expertise and, you know, even just the fuel needed to put a nuclear reactor on the grid, more or less.

[130] And the federal government didn't just open up the pathway to linking nuclear power to the electric grid.

[131] They actually kind of got into the nuclear power game.

[132] One of the things that they did was they basically fast -forwarded a reactor development site, set up this reactor on the grid to demonstrate that it could be done, but at great expense and effort on the part of the federal government.

[133] That first commercial reactor became operational in 1957.

[134] It was happening.

[135] Electricity from nuclear power was about to be a reality in the United States.

[136] And by the 1960s, new power plants are being licensed at a pretty steady clip.

[137] This is Natasha Zaretsky.

[138] I'm a professor of history at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

[139] According to Natasha, Unlike other industrial sites, like toxic waste dumps, for example, which were often placed near poor communities and communities of color, nuclear power plants didn't follow that pattern.

[140] They were just as likely to be placed near white middle -class communities.

[141] And if members of those communities had questions about their own safety living near a nuclear reactor, they were pretty much told, meh, nothing to worry about.

[142] There was just a great deal of confidence.

[143] that you could create these technologies that were essentially accident -proof and designed so well that it wasn't that they could remove the possibility of human error, but that they could safeguard against any one human error creating the conditions for a really serious accident.

[144] The Atomic Energy Commission really downplayed the potential health effects of nuclear fallout.

[145] But concerns about the safety of these facilities were increasing.

[146] You had growing worries that the nuclear regulatory commission, which is the regulatory body that oversaw the licensing of new plants, was overstating the safety of nuclear reactors.

[147] And by the 1970s, you have anti -reactor activists asking about radiation emission from plants.

[148] The kinds of arguments that they would use against new reactors would often operate in this gray area between nuclear weapons and nuclear power.

[149] You'll see protesters that say no nukes.

[150] They're very intentionally calling upon the destructive side of nuclear energy.

[151] The earliest associations between atomic reactors and atomic weapons never completely disappears.

[152] There was tension and mistrust between these two sides, the burgeoning nuclear industry who thought they were turning a technology associated with destruction into something positive, and the anti -reactor movement who raised questions about the actual safety of the technology.

[153] Both continued to grow in the 1970s, but warnings weren't just coming from the outside.

[154] You do have nuclear engineers who see themselves as whistleblowers who are coming forward, and saying, you know, there are complexities built into these systems that can create the conditions for really serious accidents.

[155] Hi, my name is Carrie Merrill from Phoenix, Arizona.

[156] You're listening to ThruLine from NPR.

[157] Part 2.

[158] The Accident.

[159] From my perspective, we were just living our lives, you know, taking the kids to school, cooking, cleaning, taking them, you know.

[160] There was no sense.

[161] of danger at all.

[162] This is Karen Goldstein.

[163] She and her husband, Raymond Goldstein, moved to a small town near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in the mid -1970s, very close to Three Mile Island.

[164] Going back to Harrisburg was like going back in another time period, another time where things were socially, culturally, way different, or you might say, not as progressive.

[165] They'd ended up there after Raymond got a job, teaching at a local university.

[166] And he was starting to think about what he was going to do his dissertation on.

[167] He knew it would have something to do with public health.

[168] But beyond that, he was stumped.

[169] I was a stay -at -home mom at that point.

[170] I had two children, a 9 -year -old boy and a 4 -year -old boy, and I was pregnant at the time.

[171] Their memories of that time and place are pretty idyllic.

[172] Karen described rolling fields and lush farmland.

[173] It's very beautiful there in the spring when all the crops start to pop up.

[174] And it has a wonderful smell.

[175] And Susquehanna River flows through that area, which is really a beautiful river that heads down into the Chesapeake Bay.

[176] But there was one unavoidable eyesore right in the middle of, of all of that beauty.

[177] Our older son played baseball in a field and the towers loomed over it.

[178] Everybody just went to the field, drove up to the field and watched the games, you know, in the shadow of the cooling towers.

[179] Those are the kind of big concrete towers that have sort of the parabolic arc sides.

[180] It's the job of tomorrow.

[181] Today, let us choose an electrifying career in line.

[182] Perhaps made most famous by The Simpsons.

[183] Nuclear power.

[184] Nuclear power.

[185] I think at that time, the power plant was not on people's minds.

[186] Beneath the people worked at the plant.

[187] It was a well -paying job.

[188] We were promised this was safe.

[189] We believe them that this was safe.

[190] We will go about our lives.

[191] And we will even work in your plant.

[192] and we think it's a good opportunity and a good environment.

[193] That's how it was before.

[194] The accident started in the early morning hours of Wednesday, March 28th, 1979.

[195] It was what people in the industry call a loss of coolant accident.

[196] The biggest safety concern in any nuclear power plant is keeping the temperature at the level you want it to be at.

[197] The temperature is crucial because there's a danger of overheating.

[198] And on the first day of the Three Mile Island accident, a small mechanical failure caused the coolant to overheat.

[199] The reactor automatically shut down, which should have fixed the problem, because as the pressure was rising, the relief valve opened to release the coolant.

[200] But it got stuck and didn't close again.

[201] There was also a malfunction in terms of the alert system.

[202] It was a failure of design.

[203] There was no explicit instrument to alert operators that the valve failed to close, which meant the operators didn't realize the valve was stuck.

[204] They knew there was a problem, but not what it was.

[205] The control room, like the panels literally went crazy with different alerts and noises, and the operators found themselves completely overwhelmed.

[206] And so while the time, the control room, like the panels literally went crazy with different alerts and noises, The technicians initially reacted correctly, their equipment was giving them bad information.

[207] Bad information.

[208] They couldn't get a read on what was actually going on inside the reactor, which led to some unintended missteps.

[209] And what they ended up doing is exacerbating the coolant loss problem.

[210] So it created what became called a partial meltdown.

[211] Meltdown is when temperatures get out of control.

[212] Damaging the core and causing more.

[213] and more parts of the reactor to go haywire.

[214] And by around 11 a .m., there was a very volatile situation going on in the building that encloses the reactor.