The Three Mile Island incident helped to galvanize the anti-nuclear movement in the United States. Radioactive fuel and water were removed, and workers eventually shipped 15 tons of radioactive waste to a nuclear waste storage facility in Idaho. The damaged reactor was permanently closed and entombed in concrete after the accident. The cleanup effort lasted 14 years and cost an estimated 1 billion dollars. No nuclear plants started after 1974 have been completed in the United States. As a result, construction of nuclear reactors steeply declined. Required design changes after the Three Mile Island accident resulted in higher costs and longer construction times for new nuclear plants. Federal requirements for safety controls and emergency response planning became more stringent, and officials imposed a temporary moratorium on the licensing of all new reactors. Several government agencies and independent groups conducted studies, but no adverse effects could be found to correlate to these exposures.Ĭareful analysis of the accident led to sweeping changes in the way nuclear plants are regulated in the United States. TMI ImpactĪfter the Three Mile Island (or TMI) accident, public support for nuclear energy fell from an all-time high of 69 percent in 1977 to 46 percent in 1979.Īn estimated two million people were exposed to small amounts of radiation as a result of the TMI accident. The crisis ended three days later when experts determined the hydrogen bubble could not burn or explode. Pennsylvania governor Dick Thornburgh advised pregnant women and pre-school-age children within a five-mile radius of the plant to evacuate the area.
The melting fuel created a large hydrogen bubble inside the unit that officials worried might cause an explosion, releasing even larger amounts of radioactive material. Trace amounts of radioactive gasses escaped into the surrounding community as a geyser of steam erupted from the top of the plant. The nuclear fuel began to melt through its metal container-about half the reactor core melted. These further starved the reactor core of water flow and caused it to overheat.
Nuclear reactor meltdown series#
Plant staff didn’t realize the reactor was experiencing a loss of coolant and took a series of actions that made the problem worse. Water pumps that helped to cool the radioactive fuel in the reactor core malfunctioned. In the early morning hours of March 28, 1979, a mechanical or electric failure set off an unlikely series of events that led to a partial meltdown at the Unit 2 reactor. Many experts said nuclear meltdowns-where a nuclear reactor overheats causing radioactive fuel to melt-were almost impossible, calling them “black swan” events. The nuclear industry, at the time, dismissed The China Syndrome plot as far-fetched. The film, starring Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon and Michael Douglas, dealt with the aftermath of a fictional nuclear meltdown at a reactor outside of Los Angeles. Construction ended in 1978 when the second of two nuclear reactors at the site came online to produce electricity.Ī thriller film, called The China Syndrome, hit theaters in March of 1979. Construction of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant began in 1968, in Londonderry Township, Pennsylvania, on a small island in the Susquehanna River just south of the state capital in Harrisburg.
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