Three Mile Island American Cherynobl

Could Three Mile Island have gone much worse? To the point of being on the level of Chernobyl? Was there a chance it could've killed a lot more people? If so, what effects could it have had?

Warning: I ask this as an academic exercise. I'm glad this didn't become Cherynobl.
 
Could Three Mile Island have gone much worse? To the point of being on the level of Chernobyl? Was there a chance it could've killed a lot more people? If so, what effects could it have had?

Warning: I ask this as an academic exercise. I'm glad this didn't become Cherynobl.
No

Chernobyl had literally everything go wrong

  1. No Containment building
  2. Poor Reactor design (I am not a nuclear engineer and will not go into this)
  3. Poorly trained, inexperienced operators
  4. An experiment in progress
Three Mile Island could not have been as bad as Chernobyl unless someone was actually trying

Fukushima was not quite as bad and that had multiple reactor ruptures, an earthquake and a Tsunami

Three Mile Island just had a minor radioactive steam release and is not in the path of any natural disaters, in fact one of the reactors was still in use a while after and may still be running
 
Ah, yeah, expected. Just got done talking to someone about Chernobyl, and that was basically the worst nightmare imaginable for a reactor.
 
Ah, yeah, expected. Just got done talking to someone about Chernobyl, and that was basically the worst nightmare imaginable for a reactor.
It was and my Physics professor spent part of todays class talking about it

I shed tears for those brave volunteers who went into the reactor knowing they would die to get the thing under some sort of control, as well as the firefighters and others who died
 
Yeah, although they sadly didn't even know the full effects that would occur to them from that.

But okay, I was just making sure with this thread. As I've seen, basically no, unless something ludicrous happened on the same day.
 
Yes, Three Mile Island's design makes a Chernobyl-level disaster impossible. You could get a major disaster at an American facility, but people saying it couldn't get that bad are right.
 
Only if you hit it with a nuclear weapon.

Not true. Someone could slip and break their neck while working at the plant.

I am 100% sure this would be reported by the US media as a death due to the OMG HUGE MELTDOWN!

Now if you're asking (as I assume) could someone have been killed by radiation within days of the incident, then CalBear is right. You'd need some external agent (bomb, sabotage, etc.) to put out enough REMs to do more than raise someone's risk of cancer by 1%.

I haven't checked lately, but last I heard there hadn't been any deaths due to radiation at Fukushima, which (last I checked) was already several orders of magnitude worse than Three Mile Island.
 
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