Three Mile Island is always referred to as "The worst nuclear accident in US history." And yet this 'worst accident' killed no one, injured no one, sickened no one, damaged no private property, and despite hundreds of studies hoping to prove the contrary, led to no long-term health problems. But is was SCARY!
AHC: Three Mile Island (1979) doesn’t lead to decline of U.S. nuclear power industry?
- Thread starter GeographyDude
- Start date
The nuclear industry in the U.S. was already on the ropes because of regulations that made nuclear power cost ineffective. I suspect the competition in terms of other energy lobbies may have had influence in that area, but regardless of why there wasn’t much power behind the pro-nuclear lobby by ‘79.
In terms of public opinion nuclear power became increasingly synonymous in the US with nuclear weapons and war while being against it became synonymous with being pro-peace. If this incident occurred 10 or 20 years earlier it would have been a one or two day story that certainly wouldn’t have been used to terrify the public about nuclear power.
I will say the reduction in Cold War fears I believe did have a lot to do with deep sixing nuclear power in the US. In the era when there was a much more significant fear by the political class the Middle East could be left in tatters in a limited WW3 exchange the political class believed the US and it’s allies like Japan, France and Germany needed nuclear power just to be safe even if the political class was much more economically tied into hydrocarbon extraction.
Would the Three Mile Island Incident not happening until after the occurred Soviet invasion of Afghanistan make the public more willing to except Nuclear Energy?
Back then it was a relatively small number of people who determined what they decided to play up to the public in terms of news. The press long could stampede public opinion ‘Remember the Maine’ and this was an era where the press was still very centralized. Today it’s not very centralized, but back then no cable news, no internet news and the big three nightly news channels were king.
If this was ‘79 post Iranian hostage crisis and post Soviet invasion of Afghanistan I doubt the press rooms would have pushed it a fraction as much as they did.
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...And the once-obscure accident in Santa Susanna California, where they didn't bother building a containment structure and, when the sodium coolant system unexpectedly clogged resulting in a core meltdown, dangerous isotopes escaped (not just noble gases, but stuff like Cs-137 and Sr-90 too). Rocketdyne - the operator - did a good job of covering the seriousness of incident up for many years and its extent is unclear but more recent revelations indicate that it released substantially more radioactive material than TMI did.
Funny that this older and more serious release of radioactive materials could be swept under the rug for 50 odd years while the comparatively harmless TMI (which arguably should have reinforced people's confidence in nuclear safety given that the worst case scenario could still be contained) became a frenzied media circus and rallying point for of unwarranted panic.
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Look at what happened with the Japanese 9.0 Earthquake and Tsunami. In Britain the press by in large just reported the facts and public support for nuclear power if anything was solidified some.
In Germany it was the inverse and their press hit the national panic button and had people stocking up on iodine and buying geiger counters. Soon thereafter it was announced nuclear power was being phased out. Major news organs have untold power and sometimes they let emotion or their agendas drive the story.
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GeographyDude
Gone Fishin'
Blue nuclear plants are pre-Three Mile Island. Red plants were in progress during Three Mile Island and completed afterwards.
And 1979, 1980, '81, etc. had high interest rates, so not sure why we're excluding these costs, which of cost are very real costs. Look, I usually think most regulation is pro forma. Maybe this is a rare exception of when it wasn't.
And I think we are all looking for the holy grail of regulation which is both affordable and which actually works. I tend to favor a good baseline with aggressive spot checking.
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GeographyDude
Gone Fishin'
This is a case in which I think we should change safety rules to reflect practice.
Or . . . if high-efficiency power lines came in earlier, we could site nuclear plants in very geologically stable areas and store the waste there. That is, Yucca Mountain might be known as the power plant of the American West — including California! — and not just as a high-tech waste repository.
GeographyDude
Gone Fishin'
But . . .
In his book Normal Accidents published in 1984 with Three Mile Island pretty much as his signature case, Charles Perrow uses the term for what would later be called a "system accident." And to point out the obvious, 100 alarms going off at once is not a functioning system. I would raise the question of whether the automated features of such a system reduce the workload during periods of normal operation, but increase workload during atypical operations.
That is, Three Mile Island brings a lot of searching questions.
* William Langewiesche is another very good writer on "system accident," maybe even better
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They’re excluding interest so they can examine the price rise properly outside of national economic conditions. So look at these costs and then figure the bad environment… no wonder 75+ were cancelled.
GeographyDude
Gone Fishin'
Plus, with the peaks and valleys in the price of oil, really hard to plan for the future.
But all the same, still waiting for power too cheap to meter!
Every year or so, we have a major fossil fuel disaster in the US, like the 2008 spill into the Clinch River in Tennessee. Or the 2014 spill in the Dan River in North Carolina. Coal ash is pretty awful stuff, and it's radioactive too (similar to the majority of nuclear waste projects and also similar to what's found in an average cigarette (smoke one, you're inhaling radioactive garbage like polonium).
For all its problems, if "Big Nuclear"--I've read books which seem like pure propaganda from the nuclear industry--was as strong as "Big Oil" or even "Big Coal" and "Big Natural Gas" (when I was in college a few years ago, some company was sponsering advertising about how natural gas was the future and all the benefits of it all over my school's campus), then we'd be in a far, far better place. I'll take potential radioactive contamination (but see Ramsar in Iran for background radiation and what it does) over destroying rivers.
Ultimately it's a matter of human stupidity. Nuclear power has high costs associated with it and requires subsidies. So does solar power but we're told that's the future (and we ignore how China, the main manufacturer of solar panels, has made insane amounts of toxic waste in making solar panels). Yet with nuclear power--anyone in the wake of 3MI is supporting modern reactor designs--all you have is the damage uranium mining causes. Or at worst, Fukushima.
Deregulation would have done well decades ago, but to this day, the cost of building a new plant is still insanely expensive, at least in the US (ideally we should fix that). And nuclear plants are by design baseload plants. The best way is thorium power, I think. We could mine our own rare earths (see Lemhi Pass) at no greater cost than any other major mine, and also mine a ton of thorium which we'd use to fuel our nuclear plants. Thorium could also make our nuclear weapons (this is the Cold War after all), since thorium plants can "breed" certain isotopes used in nuclear weapons.
Ideal situation is a fission future--energy surplus--with reactors transmuting some of the nuclear waste into precious metals (ruthenium, rhodium, etc.) and the rest into fuel for RTGs.
Pretty much the environmentalists shot themselves in the foot and left the future of energy to fossil fuels and expensive solar/wind/renewables. It isn't surprising "yellow environmentalism" became a thing, but yellow environmentalism was never strong enough to be a good advocate for nuclear power. Like how instead of damming a river, they should build a nuclear plant instead--that's what "yellow environmentalism" could have done.
In Tennessee, coal mining still exists as it has for over a century. Except now, all Tennessee coal is exported to China (and IIRC the rest of Asia), since it's too dirty to be used in the US. This is true with some other coal mines in Kentucky and West Virginia too. Not sure of rare earths in Appalachia. Lemhi Pass on the Idaho-Montana border has a huge amount of rare earths. And it's known that Iran and India have a lot of rare earths too. US sponsered rare earth/thorium projects there would be vital in the Cold War and ideally prevent the Iranian Revolution.
For all its problems, if "Big Nuclear"--I've read books which seem like pure propaganda from the nuclear industry--was as strong as "Big Oil" or even "Big Coal" and "Big Natural Gas" (when I was in college a few years ago, some company was sponsering advertising about how natural gas was the future and all the benefits of it all over my school's campus), then we'd be in a far, far better place. I'll take potential radioactive contamination (but see Ramsar in Iran for background radiation and what it does) over destroying rivers.
Ultimately it's a matter of human stupidity. Nuclear power has high costs associated with it and requires subsidies. So does solar power but we're told that's the future (and we ignore how China, the main manufacturer of solar panels, has made insane amounts of toxic waste in making solar panels). Yet with nuclear power--anyone in the wake of 3MI is supporting modern reactor designs--all you have is the damage uranium mining causes. Or at worst, Fukushima.
Deregulation would have done well decades ago, but to this day, the cost of building a new plant is still insanely expensive, at least in the US (ideally we should fix that). And nuclear plants are by design baseload plants. The best way is thorium power, I think. We could mine our own rare earths (see Lemhi Pass) at no greater cost than any other major mine, and also mine a ton of thorium which we'd use to fuel our nuclear plants. Thorium could also make our nuclear weapons (this is the Cold War after all), since thorium plants can "breed" certain isotopes used in nuclear weapons.
Ideal situation is a fission future--energy surplus--with reactors transmuting some of the nuclear waste into precious metals (ruthenium, rhodium, etc.) and the rest into fuel for RTGs.
Pretty much the environmentalists shot themselves in the foot and left the future of energy to fossil fuels and expensive solar/wind/renewables. It isn't surprising "yellow environmentalism" became a thing, but yellow environmentalism was never strong enough to be a good advocate for nuclear power. Like how instead of damming a river, they should build a nuclear plant instead--that's what "yellow environmentalism" could have done.
In Tennessee, coal mining still exists as it has for over a century. Except now, all Tennessee coal is exported to China (and IIRC the rest of Asia), since it's too dirty to be used in the US. This is true with some other coal mines in Kentucky and West Virginia too. Not sure of rare earths in Appalachia. Lemhi Pass on the Idaho-Montana border has a huge amount of rare earths. And it's known that Iran and India have a lot of rare earths too. US sponsered rare earth/thorium projects there would be vital in the Cold War and ideally prevent the Iranian Revolution.
GeographyDude
Gone Fishin'
No, not stupidity. We humans are very good at improv and very good at the here and now. Usually, this plays to strength. Maybe ? 1/5 of the time with long-range planning, or realistically even less often, it comes back to bite us in the butt.
And can’t we do regulation right?
Say 60% announced inspections in which we’re trying to coach up the company and 40% unannounced inspections. If the company does well, fewer scheduled inspections, but we’re never going to compromise that much on the unannounced. Yes, we want openness, and these are the things the company ought to be doing anyway.
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