What was the reaction like among the townspeople? We figured three-quarters of the people left the borough. The governor called for an evacuation of pregnant women and preschool-age children. On Friday there was a hydrogen bubble that they thought was going to explode.
Then everything seemed to go back to normal.
#NUCLEAR REACTOR MELTDOWN HOW TO#
I thought they had been lying to us, but now I think that this was a new type of energy and things were developing so fast they didn’t know how to react. Then they told me there was a small release of radiation. He said, “Something’s going on down at the island.” They told us there was a problem, but no release of radiation. I was teaching at the local high school, and I was on hall duty when the emergency preparedness coordinator called. How did you learn about the partial meltdown in one of the reactors? On the occasion of the anniversary of the accident, Smithsonian spoke with Reid, who finished his last term as mayor in 2013, about what it was like on the ground when the reactor partially melted down. Unless Pennsylvania state legislators vote to save the power plant, it will shut in September.Įlected in 1978, Robert Reid was the mayor of Middletown Borough, which is just three miles from the plant. Now, more than 40 years after the accident, Three Mile Island might be closing down for good. Many local residents became dedicated anti-nuclear advocates, while others continued working at the non-damaged reactor (Unit 1), which resumed operation in 1985. In the aftermath, a presidential commission investigated the accident and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission intensified its oversight of nuclear reactors, implementing new industry-wide safety standards. history.Ī sign announces the closing of the observation center for the Three Mile Island nuclear plant following an accident on March 28, 1979. The site took 14 years and $1 billion to clean up and, to date, Three Mile Island remains the worst nuclear accident in U.S. On March 28, 1979, at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, a combination of technical malfunction and human error caused one of the reactors (Unit 2) to partially melt down and release a small amount of radiation into the atmosphere. One nuclear power executive said the film was “an overall character assassination of an entire industry.” He reassured readers of the New York Times, “The systems are designed and built in such a way that a reactor will operate safely even if there is a significant equipment failure or human error.”īut just 12 days after the film’s release, proponents of nuclear power were having to answer for a drastic real-life situation. Whatever the critics said, The China Syndrome immediately spurred debate about the dangers of relying on nuclear power and the real-world plausibility of such a disaster. Variety called it “moderately compelling” while the New York Times was a bit more generous, deeming it a “smashingly effective, very stylish suspense melodrama.”
Starring Jane Fonda, Michael Douglas and Jack Lemmon, the disaster thriller follows a broadcast journalist who discovers safety coverups at a nuclear power plant and the plant supervisor who tries to avert a nuclear disaster. In mid-March 1979, Americans headed to the theaters to see The China Syndrome.
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