|
|
|
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. |
2
|
|
After establishing the context for the accident, Walker describes the regulatory system and its evolution and explains the central concept of nuclear safety, "Defense in Depth." Then Walker turns to the accident itself, devoting a chapter to each of the five days of the "crisis phase," which began 28 March 1979 with a loss-of-cooling accident that "uncovered" the reactor core. He traces the events of each day, including actions by the operators, regulatory officials, state emergency personnel, and media reports. Because it was never clear what was going on within the core, the responses of all these actors were confused. Experts argued with each other over whether the fuel was melting, for example, and over whether an evacuation should be ordered. Lines of authority between the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the State of Pennsylvania were unclear, leading to additional sources of uncertainty and to conflicting public statements. Inadequate communications facilities exacerbated tensions. Reporters translated the welter of conflicting claims into confusing stories, some alarming, some not. Walker's decision to recount the accident chronologically brings this confusion to the forefront, at the cost of making the narrative occasionally difficult to follow. |
3
|
|
He then addresses the investigations of the accident, splitting them into short-term and long-term impact studies, and examines them in two separate chapters. The NRC's certification process, the operators' level of training, and the inadequacy of emergency core-cooling systems all drew criticism and were reformed in the accident's wake. The cleanup process, essentially completed by 1991, revealed that core damage was far more extensive than either plant operators or industry and government engineers had believed at the end of the crisis phase. But health studies through 2000 found no conclusive evidence that the radiation released during the accident had any health impact. He casts this conclusion into stark relief with a brief synopsis of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, which killed thirty-one people directly, forced the resettlement of 130,000 people, and to date has caused several thousand excess cancer cases. |
4
|
|
Walker's study is well-balanced, well-sourced, and highly readable. It is appropriate at the advanced undergraduate level for courses in environmental history, in history of technology, and certainly in the history of the nuclear industry. It should also be read by anyone with an interest in the uncertainty of engineering knowledge. |
5
|
|
Dr. Erik Conway is the historian at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. |
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|