This story originally appeared on PA Post. — In the early hours after the accident at Three Mile Island, officials urged residents to stay inside their homes – to keep windows closed. Everything was under control. The public was in no danger, they said. As officials gained a clearer understanding of the magnitude of the situation churning at the core of one of the reactors at Three Mile Island, a tide of panic swept the region. Expectant mothers and young children were ordered to evacuate, families fled, turning parts of the midstate into ghost towns as the Unit 2 reactor, which had been in operation a little more than a year, cast a specter of catastrophe over the region. The story of the March 28, 1979 Three Mile Island partial meltdown has undergone revisions over the years amid advancing scientific assessments. In time, nuclear engineers equipped with state-of-the-art robotics would learn that a substantial portion of the Unit 2 core – 50 percent in fact – had been destroyed during the partial meltdown. Ionized radiation had been released to the atmosphere and tons of radioactive uranium had been compromised. But in the 40 years since the nation’s worst nuclear disaster, the edict delivered by the federal government and the nuclear industry has remained unchanged. Officials say the amount of radiation released into the atmosphere as a result of the partial meltdown was well within accepted levels – far less than delivered by an x-ray. The official conclusions remain: No resident died or was harmed due to the TMI accident. No one was put in danger. That decree has stood in sharp contrast to the narratives that emerged among some of the residents who lived in the vicinity of the plant and experienced the accident unfold. Over the years, their initial reports about having experienced nausea, vomiting, hair loss, and skin rashes as a result of radiation exposure have led to more compelling stories of serious health issues, cancer rates and aberrations in the plant and animal world. Those stories have endured in defiance of the official conclusions. A 2017 study suggesting a correlation between radiation exposure at Three Mile Island and a type of thyroid cancer only heightened the debate. With each passing year, the stories have been woven into a seeming collective consciousness, lore of personal testimonies and anecdotes that bind the men and women who made their homes in the shadow of Three Mile Island. “Every family in this area has a cancer story,” said Patty Longnecker, who at the time of the accident lived in her family’s 300-year homestead in Elizabethtown, a few miles from the nuclear plant. “I feel we were a textbook with what goes wrong with radiation.” Longnecker, whose children were eight and 10 at the time of the accident (they evacuated), is among the legions of families who hold on to the conviction that exposure to Three Mile Island radiation had short and long-term adverse effects on the nearby population, as well as the plant and animal world. Over the years, she witnessed a number of relatives, friends, neighbors, and men who worked at the plant succumb to leukemia, cancers and other diseases. “You hear just enough stories that you know were real and it makes you concerned for what was happening,” Longnecker said. “These latencies with these many cancers….Every parent either for themselves or their children being diagnosed with cancer immediately wondered was it TMI? We are 40 years out and you still hear that comment.” Among the oldest surviving witnesses to the accident is Helen Hocker, who at 92, strolls up the hill behind her Fairview Township home from where she can see the iconic cooling towers. Hocker remembers the crisis in bits and pieces, so much of it now faded with time in her memory, but she has clear recollections of the friends, neighbors and family that she lost to cancer over the years. “So many people had cancer in this area,” Hocker said. “Why did so many people get cancer?” Among them were her daughter, Patty, the youngest of four, who died of thyroid cancer in her 20s; and Hocker’s son Chris, her oldest, who succumbed to throat cancer also as an adult. To this day, Hocker said she was never satisfied with the response from authorities. “Not at all,” she said. “None of us were.” Science and oral histories have not gelled with these narratives, though. Few, if any, studies have corroborated the claims from residents. Most of these studies have been assailed for their methods and conclusions. In fact, the general dearth of conclusive scientific studies has, at times, made the residents the target of skepticism and led to failed lawsuits against Three Mile Island owners. Some of the studies have had little impact. A 1982 study in the American Journal of Public Health, for instance, found a 43-percent increase in infant deaths in Dauphin County in a time frame corresponding to the accident. The deaths could not be linked to radiation, however, and researchers noted they could have been associated with maternal stress and the use of sedatives. Even the most comprehensive studies have fallen short of drawing conclusive verdicts on the ongoing debate. In the mid-1980s, the University of Pittsburgh released what seemed compelling findings linking cancer rates to exposure to Three Mile Island radiation. But in 2000, the university released findings from a more longitudinal 20-year study that concluded that exposure to radioactivity released in the accident did not appear to have caused an increase in cancer mortality among people living within a five-mile radius of the nuclear plant at the time of the accident. The university study found a higher than expected number of deaths among people who lived near the plant at the time, but many of the deaths were attributed to heart disease, not cancers associated with radiation exposure. And beginning in the late 1990s, a researcher out of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill found that cancer rates in the Harrisburg vicinity had spiked in the aftermath of the TMI meltdown. Dr. Steven Wing, an epidemiologist, believed that people who lived downwind of Three Mile Island had higher cancer rates and showed signs of genetic damage associated with high doses of radiation. Wing’s study, first published in 1997 in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, came under scrutiny, with experts noting that smoking may have contributed to the increased lung cancer risk cited in the study. Wing died in 2017. To date, one of the most compelling studies looking at Three Mile Island radiation exposure to cancer rates was conducted by researchers at Penn State College of Medicine. In 2017, Dr. David Goldenberg, the lead researcher, found that a certain type of thyroid cancer was common to people who had been near the nuclear plant in the aftermath of the 1979 partial meltdown. The findings seemed to contradict the long-held conclusions by officials, but Goldberg gave caution to the study’s limitations. The study didn’t prove whether the region had seen more thyroid cancer cases than would have occurred naturally, nor whether the cases had been more lethal. Goldenberg, armed with developments in the medical field and knowledge gained from extensive studies of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, followed up. He recently found a possible link. Goldenberg found that thyroid cancer caused by low-level radiation has a different “mutational signal” than most thyroid cancer. To ensure the study was “clean” Goldenberg had to limit the study to a relatively small sample population – 44 people who were born near Three Mile Island and who were being treated at Penn State Hershey Medical Center for cancer. Goldenberg’s study found a shift that can be attributed to exposure to radiation, in particular within the time frame of the Three Mile Island accident, but the findings do not prove that exposure to radiation from the plant caused cancer. They show correlation. “I face these patients every day of the week and they seem to think that this is what’s causing it. I tell them in no uncertain terms, no it’s not,” Goldenberg said. “You weren’t alive then. The lag time …it’s not like it was an ongoing nuclear disaster for 40 years. This was an event that happened and then stopped. But it’s human nature to try and attribute illness to something. There has to be a reason this happened to me is the thought process.” Arguably no more vocal an opponent to nuclear energy and the transparency of the 1979 disaster has emerged than Eric Epstein, chairman of Three Mile Island Alert, as much a watchdog to the nuclear industry as an advocacy group for renewable energy. For four decades, Epstein and his group have held the owners of Three Mile Island (currently Exelon) under public scrutiny, excoriating plant owners for being disingenuous and unprincipled to the community about the accident dating from the early days of the plant to the present. “The industry is never going to acknowledge the reality that they exposed people to radiation, produced a lot of harm, a lot of negative health effects and caused some people to die,” Epstein said. “That’s a reality.” He counts plant workers among the people, he said, who have died over the years as a result of being exposed to radiation from the accident. “To this day, just like every other nuclear power plant, Three Mile Island does not have a health or cancer registry,” Epstein said. “That’s on purpose so they can’t track workers.” Forty years out, the long-term studies have ended as well as any tracking of Three Mile Island-related health data by health officials. Factors such as the aging of the population, shifts in population by residents who have moved away and those who have settled in the region in the years since the accident, diet, smoking, lifestyle, all figure in as variables to the challenge of tracking meaningful data linking exposure to illness. The official conclusion remains intact. “There’s no question that there are people who believe they were exposed to harmful levels of radiation..they believe the plume blew in a special direction at one time and exposed one particular part of the area more than others,” said Neil Sheehan, a spokesman for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. “The reality is that in the case of Three Mile Island the containment building did what it was supposed to and contained the vast majority of radioactive release that was caused by partial meltdown of the reactor. That’s not to say that there wasn’t a release of radioactive gas. There was.” Scientist calculated that the largest amount of release that anybody would have been exposed to was in the order of 100 millirems of radiation. The average American is exposed to 620 millirems of radiation annually from natural and man-made sources, including flying in commercial airplanes, and getting x-rays and medical treatments, Sheehan explained. The NRC, he said, remains “open to new information,” noting that it takes decades for latency periods to manifest. Forty years out, Sheehan said, and no comprehensive medical study has drawn a conclusive link. Matt Wald, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, a Washington-based trade group, acknowledges that the personal narratives are compelling, but not based on science. There is just no solid reliable survey data of people who lived in the vicinity of the plant at the time of the accident and any subsequent health impact. In the absence of such data, Wald said, scientific evidence must prevail. “I don’t mean to dispute them and their feelings, but they are feelings. People die from all kinds of causes….I don’t mean to make light of their fears and feelings, but it’s not something that science has been able to back up.” That scientific quandary continues to vex some of the men and women who experienced the 1979 Three Mile Island accident. On that Friday morning, Frank Goldstein, then a young and intrepid photojournalist with the Philadelphia CBS affiliate WCAU-TV, circled the plant in a helicopter, his assignment, perhaps one of the biggest of his career, blinding him to the potential dangers. “We really did not know what the dangers were, what the ash that falling from the sky was,” Goldstein said. “We just knew we were at the center of the universe.<doc-sep>Washington (AFP) - The 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island power plant, the worst in US history, claimed no lives but provoked an outcry over the country's nuclear electricity program. Caused by mechanical, design and human errors, the partial meltdown registered a five on the International Nuclear Event Scale that peaks at seven, the rate given to the Chernobyl (1989) and Fukushima (2011) disasters. Here is a rundown of what happened on March 28, 1979 at one of the two reactors at the Three Mile Island Generating Station in eastern Pennsylvania. - Early morning alert - An alert was declared at 4:00 am after a fairly minor malfunction in the water reactor's cooling system that was linked to a filter. Authorities quickly emphasized there had been no radioactive leaks. The reactor in question, TMI-2, automatically shut down. However engineers did not know that a pilot-operated relief valve remained open, allowing coolant to escape. A high pressure back-up system immediately pumped water back into the reactor. However technicians feared that too much pressure would build up and reduced the flow of water. - Partial meltdown - As sufficient cooling was prevented, the reactor core heated up; water evaporation exposed the fuel core and temperatures climbed even higher. The reactor remained intact, though a subsequent investigation determined that about 45 percent of its core had suffered a meltdown. Radioactive material called corium flowed to the bottom of the reactor core, where it was contained, which averted disaster. Engineers finally realized they had to restore the high pressure flow of water. They were able to gradually vent built-up radioactive gases to waste tanks. Some radioactivity, however, escaped into the atmosphere through a system of filters that officials insisted retained the most dangerous elements. - Five days of fear - Uncertainty and fear reigned for five days before the situation was declared under control. Story continues During that time residents were told to stay indoors with windows closed. More than 100 pregnant women and young children who lived close to the power plant were evacuated to a covered skating rink. President Jimmy Carter, who had studied nuclear engineering, visited the site on April 1 to reassure the public. It was not until April 27 that a natural convection circulation of coolant was reestablished, according to a World Nuclear Association account of the accident. - Panic, thousands flee - The accident caused major panic, fed by confusion and poor communication between state authorities, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the media. More than 140,000 people fled during a two-day exodus that rendered any official evacuation plans useless. With the exception of four plant employees, the NRC determined that millions of locals had only been exposed to about the same amount of radioactivity they would absorb during a routine chest X-ray. - Costly aftermath - The clean-up operation lasted until 1993 and cost an estimated $973 million. The 900 megawatt reactor, designed to provide 900,000 homes with electricity, was scrapped. Although no one died and no immediate injuries were linked to the incident, no new nuclear power plants have been built in the United States since then.<doc-sep>
Panic set in after the partial nuclear meltdown 40 years ago as the public tried to decide which story to trust—and whether to evacuate. For tellers at a Shrewsbury, Pennsylvania bank, the final days of March 1979 should have felt like business as usual. Instead, they were sheer chaos: customers piled up, trying to withdraw money in the days before ATMs. “Customers were stopping by with their cars packed up to flee, withdrawing their cash,” recalled bank teller Bailey Brown in 2014. “One even showed me the diamond necklace she bought; she figured we were all going to die and she wouldn’t have to pay for it!” Shrewsbury wasn’t under evacuation orders during the nuclear disaster at Three Mile Island. But people were evacuating from the town 40 miles away from the power station anyway. The response by local, state and national officials had been so alarming—and confusing—that the public didn’t know what to think. Journalist and TV news broadcaster Walter Cronkite, anchor for the 'CBS Evening News,' reporting on the meltdown of a reactor at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in 1979. CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images The disaster itself was made worse by human error. And the botched public response was no different. During the tense days following the accident, conflicting reports and recommendations made it hard to know what to believe. Was the area on the verge of a China Syndrome-style catastrophe, or was it just fine to stay at home? Today, the response to the Three Mile Island nuclear crisis is considered a textbook example of what not to do during an emergency. But before 4:00 a.m. on the morning of March 28, 1979, nobody had made adequate plans as to how to respond to an accident at the nuclear power plant. That morning, a chain reaction began inside one of Three Mile Island’s nuclear reactors. Due to a constellation of mechanical and human errors, the reactor’s automatic cooling system didn’t cool down the reactor as expected, and a partial meltdown occurred. For hours, the radioactive core of the reactor was left uncovered, causing radiation levels to spike throughout the facility. It took until nearly 7:00 a.m. for reactor staff to notify local and state authorities about the situation, and at 7:24 a.m., an emergency was declared. But though officials had begun responding to what they considered to be an emergency, the outward-facing message downplayed the danger. The day after the partial meltdown occurred, an official from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) told the public the danger had passed. Top portion of the reactor on the day of the meltdown accident. Bettmann Archive/Getty Images But that wasn’t what officials were told. By the night of March 29, they’d been briefed on the radiation and told that the reactor had suffered more damage than previously thought. And on March 30, there was a radiation release that provoked even more confusion. Different agencies relayed conflicting information as to whether an evacuation should happen. After waffling, the NRC advised everyone within 10 miles of the power plant to stay inside. A few hours later, the NRC said pregnant women and small children should leave the area. Other residents were told to remain inside. Meanwhile, all hell was breaking loose at the facility as a hydrogen bubble in the reactor threatened to trigger an explosion. That evening, officials faced facts: They might need to evacuate everyone within a 20-mile radius, an order that would affect over 600,000 people in six surrounding counties. “What to do?” wrote the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “Lock up and leave? Wait and hope for the best? Wait to be told to evacuate? On a broader level, the incident on Three Mile Island, once a recreation area, has disrupted every aspect of civil and private life in a five-county area around the state capital.” But what residents may not have realized was that there were no evacuation plans. “Plans to evacuate [nearby residents] were made during the TMI accident,” noted the Federal Emergency Management Agency in a 1980 report on the disaster. As conflicting reports continued to circulate, local agencies made reactive plans they had no idea if they would have to carry out. Some local residents weren’t going to risk it. About 40 percent of people who lived within 15 miles of Three Mile Island evacuated themselves, order or no order. And officials sparred on the evacuation orders that had been issued. Governor Dick Thornburgh came under fire for supposedly hesitating to evacuate women and children.