American Experience: Three Mile Island

Three perspectives on the near-disaster at Three Mile Island
Edited for Applause Online by Anna Christopher

Pennsylvania Governor Dick Thornburgh had been in office a mere 68 days when he came face-to-face with the biggest crisis of his professional life. Retired Colonel Oran Henderson, the head of Pennsylvania's Emergency Management Agency, informed Thornburgh of the incident at Three Mile Island on the morning of March 28, 1979.

Thornburgh knew next to nothing about nuclear power, radiation, or evacuation management. Still, he found himself in a position of having to assure the citizens of his state that everything was, or soon would be, under control. Working against him was the fact that he was being given information by officials at Three Mile Island, Metropolitan Edison Company, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that was often incomplete, contradictory, and confusing. Here, Thornburgh, writer Mike Gray, and Middletown, Pennsylvania resident Robyn Stuart share their perspectives on the accident at Three Mile Island.

Interviewee: Dick Thornburgh

Do you remember how you first heard about the incident and where your initial reaction was?
DT: Well, March 28, 1979, I was a brand-new governor and I had a full agenda of items that had to be dealt with. Our economy was in a tailspin. Pennsylvania was a classic rust belt state and our smoke stack industries were really in a state of decline. Unemployment was creeping up. We had a tax base that was inadequate. We had a record debt. I mean these were things governors roll up their sleeves and tackle, and that's precisely what I was doing on the morning of March 28, 1979. I'd just delivered my first budget address, which kind of set the outline for where we wanted to go, and I had brought a group of freshman Democratic legislators to the governor's home for breakfast to do some sales pitching. I was a Republican, am a Republican, and I felt some missionary work among opposition might be fruitful in getting this task advanced.

We had this group assembled in the dining room, ready to feed them and to inform them, we hoped, when, at 7:50 a.m. -- and I'll never forget that time -- I received a phone call from our director of emergency management and he told me that there had been an accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear facility. For just a moment, I tried to think where that was and then recognized or recalled from a briefing I'd had that it was about ten miles down the Susquehanna River from the capitol. While I didn't know any of the particulars, I knew immediately that any kind of an accident at a facility like that was something that really was gonna be a serious consideration for us. I notified other people in our government, on my staff, and people with the responsibility for emergency management, and just kind of went back to the breakfast with this on my mind.

I remember I was walking down the hall and my wife was coming the other direction. I just stopped for a minute and told her that I'd gotten this call about an accident at the nuclear facility at Three Mile Island. We kind of looked at each other in a puzzled way. And that kind of set the stage. I think we were puzzled for a long time thereafter. Obviously, that was simply, if you will, a news bulletin. I had no detail on what had happened. I went back to the breakfast and made no mention to the assembled legislators because I knew we'd have to have more facts before we began to talk about it in public.

Interviewee: Mike Gray

What was your impression the first time you walked into a power plant?
MG: The first time I walked into the power plant at Zion, Unit One was finished and Unit Two was under construction. So it was the perfect moment to see the finished product and how it was put together. When [my guide] took me into the control room, I could see here is a room -- it's 90 feet around -- dials and buttons and gauges and alarms -- and here are these operators at this console. And a lot of the instruments aren't even visible. This was a primitive layout in an ergonomic sense. And then we went next door to the plant that was under construction, and I'm looking at this place and the pipes are big enough to walk through. The pumps are four stories tall. There is nothing in this whole operation that is anywhere on a human scale. And all of this stuff is right off the drawing boards. And there's 90,000 miles of wire in this thing. And all of it's got to work pretty close to perfectly. And I looked around there, as an engineer, and I said to myself, "These boys are in trouble," because, as I say, it's all right off the drawing board.

Was it unusual for something to go wrong in these monster plants?
MG: The one thing that the incident at Three Mile Island proved is that Murphy's Law is as immutable as the laws of Einstein. If anything can go wrong, it will. And in designing these enormous plants without any sort of slow progression of working their way up through smaller versions of this thing, they had created the potential for disaster without realizing it, because there were many things at work inside this plant that it turns out they had little understanding of.

Was Three Mile Island an accident that was expected to happen?
MG: Absolutely not. All of the people at the top of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission were stupefied by this accident. This was exactly what they had thought that they had prevented. They had designed these safety procedures and the plants had been designed to save themselves. And that's true. And it would have worked. If the operators had not intervened in that accident at Three Mile Island and shut off the pumps, the plant would have saved itself. They had thought of absolutely everything except what would happen if the operators intervened in anyway. That was the one thing they hadn't taken into consideration, that what would happen to a human being sitting at that console at four o'clock in the morning if all of a sudden 90 alarms went off around the room and the gauges were behaving in exactly the opposite direction of everything they'd ever been taught. Are the operators now supposed to sit on their hands and wait and see what's gonna happen? Of course they're not gonna do this. We know this is not human nature. But engineers think in terms of making the machine perfect, and they had perfected the machine's safety mechanisms so that if something like this happened, the machine would take care of itself. But, they had not figured on taking care of the operators and their sanity in such a moment.

It wasn't only human failure. It was the valve.
MG: Yes. Well, that valve was improperly designed. The valve on top of the pressurizer, which was the chief element that failed in this accident, is like a drawer that's too wide. That was a mistake, an engineering error. So that instead of sliding freely, it had a tendency to twist. So it failed, and it failed in the open position and they didn't know it. They didn't realize that it had failed in the open position because the instruments on the control panel told them that it was closed. It turns out that instrument was improperly designed because it didn't tell you whether the valve was closed. All it told you was that the valve switch had been closed. So the valve was supposed to be closed, but there was no way for those operators down there in the control room to know that it wasn't.

That was not the first time that had happened.
MG: No. The accident at Three Mile Island had occurred some months earlier at a plant outside Toledo. Davis Bessie was the plant. And they had a real heart thumper that was an exact precursor of what happened at Three Mile Island. There was an inspector in Chicago who, in going over the records, realized that these operators in Toledo had taken exactly the wrong action in response to what was called a "loss of coolant" accident. It turns out how they lost it was from this little valve there which had jammed just like it would jam a few months later in Three Mile Island. But, they managed in Toledo -- somebody there happened to notice something on one of the gauges that told him that that valve might be open. And just on a hunch, he closed the block valve, which is in the line below that valve, sealed it off and saved the plant. Now that warning from Toledo, if it had gone out to all the rest of the similar nuclear power plants, the accident at Three Mile Island would not have happened and that plant would have remained an anonymous sand bar in the middle of the Susquehanah.

Unfortunately, in the nuclear power industry at that time, there was a tremendous amount of fear that public hostility to nuclear power was gaining the upper hand. There were a lot of protests about nuclear power. People were beginning to question the fundamental concept and so forth. As a consequence, the nuclear power industry evolved, over the years, a siege mentality. So instead of describing this accident at Toledo as an accident, they described it as an "unplanned event," which it certainly was. But, they described it in such obscure language that even the other operators of identical plants, for example, the one at Three Mile Island, were not able to read this report and get anything out of it. So it not only effectively concealed from the public and the press that this very dangerous accident had occurred in Toledo, it concealed this knowledge from the other operators of identical plants around the country.

And as a consequence, that night in March of 1979, when the valve stuck on top of the pressurizer again, the operators at Three Mile Island had no knowledge of the situation in Toledo, and they went through exactly the same sequence of mistakes. Unfortunately, there was nobody there to notice the essential instrument that was caught in Toledo. As a consequence, we had the closest brush with nuclear disaster we have ever had in the continental United States.

Interviewee: Robyn Stuart

What finally makes you decide to leave?
RS: It was probably when they were saying to evacuate pregnant women and children. How can you say one life is more valuable than another? The women and children, why do they come first? I felt sorry, I recall, for the people who couldn't leave and who wouldn't leave. My father wouldn't leave. My mother was out of town at the time. She was up in the Poconos and they stayed there. My siblings all left and were leaving. And my father wouldn't leave and he was almost, to me, like one of the people who couldn't leave, like the policeman and the fireman and the people who were in charge of security. Dad was thinking of his neighbors and his neighborhood and thinking about the possibility of looting and he was going to stand guard. He was one of the heroes to me because he felt that sense of duty.

Were you worried that you would never be able to come back?
RS: Well, the amazing thing, at least for me, was that when I got to my destination, when our good cousins took us in on Plum Island, where was I? I was within view of another nuclear power plant. That was where we landed. And my thoughts were full of, "You're not leaving it behind. It doesn't matter where you go." You know, we were not -- perhaps we were singled out for what happened that day, but it wasn't necessarily Middletown. It could have been anywhere and it could have been the next day, the next week to the refuge I had gone to. I could have been faced with the same thing. And then what do you do? Then where do you run to, the next one? How far away can you go? I don't think you can anymore. And I think I knew that then. I mean, I was faced with another one in my exodus.

What did you encounter on your exodus from Middletown?
RS: I do recall going to Dad's house, stopping at a red light, and there was a gas station that was closed, as many of them were at that point. Whether they were out of gas or whether the owners had left, of course, there was no way to know. I got out of my car to take a photograph of the cardboard makeshift signs on the gas tanks that read "Out of Gas." And as I did, a car was driving by behind the gas tanks with a crib roped to the top. And it just seemed to be finality or reality of what was looming over our heads. That it truly was a mass exodus. Shortly farther down the road, the restaurants were closed because they didn't have enough employees to stay open because everyone was leaving