| Book Review | Environmental History, 10.2

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 10.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspectivee. By Samuel J. Walker. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. xi + 303 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, index. $24.95.
I first read a detailed account of the accident at the number 2 unit of the Three Mile Island nuclear power station (TMI-2) while a student at the Naval Nuclear Power School in Orlando, Florida, in 1984, where the case study was used to train future reactor operators. It was a chilling object lesson in how trained, experienced, and properly credentialed experts could misunderstand the technology they were operating and thus turn a minor incident into a near-catastrophe. In Walker's new account, the technical detail is reduced, but the lesson is no less chilling.	1
Walker begins his narrative with The China Syndrome, a 1979 movie that was released two weeks before the accident and that explained to millions of Americans the "worst case scenario" for nuclear engineers: a core meltdown. Then he briefly reviews the history of the industry, including the close alliance of government and industry that promoted it, the rapid growth of electrical consumption through the 1960s and into the early 1970s that seemed to make commercial nuclear power inevitable, the growth of the anti-nuclear movement, and finally the collapse of the "nuclear market" in 1975, undermined financially by suddenly slowing consumption and increasing interest rates.	. . .

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