Three Mile Island Accident

On March 28, 1979, the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station in Pennsylvania suffered from a partial meltdown. This was a powerful reactor that the United States was confident would help the country out. However, problems occurred when the station’s cooling system began to malfunction. At the time, the water used to keep the radioactive substances from melting was leaking out, but there wasn’t anything that indicated that from the technology. There were alarms going off, but people couldn’t figure out what was wrong.The instruments indicated that everything was working, so the workers tried to fix the alarms. Soon after, the nuclear fuel began to melt the reactor core, and the core erupted. The Three Mile Island meltdown was the largest meltdown in United States history. While the meltdown was quite a shock, the impacts of the Three Mile Island were quite important in shaping how we would treat nuclear facilities in the future.

After the accident, many government agencies set out to see if the surrounding area had been affected by radiation. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Health, and many others set out to see how this had affected the people and environment around the Three Mile Island. The most accurate estimate was that the people in the surrounding area had received an average radiation dose of only about 1 millirem. For context, an x-ray gives around 6 millirem of radiation, and on average, the people in the area were expected to receive around 100-125 millirems a year, which is totally safe. Even workers at the site were expected to have received less than 100 millirems, so they weren’t worried too much about health concerns. Then, researchers looked at the environment. Columbia University did some experiments and found that “the actual release had negligible effects on the physical health of individuals or the environment”. It’s quite miraculous that this accident didn’t truly harm the people or environment surrounding the plant.

Despite the fairly low impact on the lives of many, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission became much more strict with regulations. The public began to lose faith in nuclear power, and many people were now afraid that nuclear power was too dangerous. There were rules set in place to make sure that technology was up to date and running smoothly. They increased emergency preparedness plans, and created more check ups. Overall, the NRC used this event to help make sure that nuclear industry would be safer, so no more accidents would occur in the future.



Sources: https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/3mile-isle.html
https://www.history.com/topics/1970s/three-mile-island