Almost 32 years after America's worst nuclear crisis at Three Mile Island, people who live in the shadow of the reactor's cooling towers can instantly distinguish among sirens designating three different levels of alert.Many residents
The crisis here on March 28, 1979, led to "changes throughout the world's nuclear power industry," as a state historical plaque on Route 441 notes.
Over the decades, Three Mile Island has become a touchstone for attitudes toward nuclear power: a symbol of fear for anti-nuclear activists and of the success of emergency safeguards for nuclear supporters.
Comparisons between what happened at Three Mile Island and what is unfolding at the earthquake-damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant are inevitable. On Friday, Japan's nuclear agency raised the severity of the crisis on the International Nuclear Events Scale from Level 4 to Level 5, the same number the United States used to classify the far less serious accident at Three Mile Island.
Making judgements, are we? Let's wait until the dust has settled before we decide which was more serious, shall we?
The Three Mile Island experience also suggests that the cleanup in Japan will be a mammoth undertaking. Luke Barrett, a nuclear consultant, was involved in the crisis response and cleanup effort, which cost $1 billion. "For the first year, no human went into the containment building," Barrett said, because of the high radiation levels.
The NRC gave money to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh to develop robots that could work inside the reactor. Later, the technology was put to work in auto plants and in the cleanup of nuclear waste at Hanford, Wash.
The silver lining, so to speak.
Japan contributed $18 million to the effort, and sent 20 nuclear engineers who spent the better part of a decade living around Middletown. Before they all went home in 1989, they donated about a dozen cherry trees as a symbol of friendship. Those trees are expected to bloom right around the March 28th anniversary of the accident.
Today, Middletown has 10,000 residents, about the same as in 1979.