March 28: Three Mile Island

Victor Gilinsky, a senior commissioner with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), was informed about the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant accident as it began on this date in 1979 and found it “difficult to process the uncertain and often contradictory information,” according to a 2009 retrospective article he wrote for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. “I got lots of useless advice from all sides. . . . Outsiders expected me to know technical details I had no idea about . . . The commission was a paper-pushing operation that reviewed license applications.” The accident resulted in a partial meltdown of the reactor’s nuclear core. It shut down Unit 2 of the plant permanently, and provoked a demonstration of more than 200,000 people in New York and nationwide opposition to nuclear power. No new plants were constructed in the U.S. for more than thirty years. Today, as nuclear power makes a “comeback” as a “clean energy” (despite its creation of of highly radioactive, long-lived nuclear wastes for which there is no plausibly safe, long-term storage solution, among many, many other problems), Gilinsky is urging the NRC to stop serving “as the nuclear industry’s facilitators and protectors” and to emphasize its public safety mission.

“In international affairs, nuclear energy trumps just about everything. Even so-called arms controllers fall over themselves trying to establish their bona fides by supporting nuclear energy development and devising painless proposals that grandfather everything that’s already in place. . . . It’s time to take a more serious view. Security should come first — not as an afterthought.” —Victor Gilinsky