Despite initial fears to the contrary, the accident at Three Mile Island did not result in any significant damage to local residents\u2019 health or property.\u00a0 The partial meltdown was successfully managed, and the unaffected reactor, TMI-1, continued in operation for years after the crisis.\u00a0 A major humanitarian crisis had been averted. \u00a0Where, then, is the nuclear disaster?<\/p>\n
Three Mile Island was a significant event not for the accident itself, but because of the way that humans responded to it.\u00a0The media\u2019s portrayal of the disaster, for example, stoked public fear toward nuclear energy, even as government actors took steps to reassure Americans by implementing sweeping policy changes.\u00a0 The effects of the accident remain baked into American culture today, as the debate over nuclear power\u2019s efficacy continues and government bureaucracy has assumed an increasingly active regulatory role in the industry.\u00a0 In short, the TMI crisis was disastrous in the sense that it was conceived that way by the human actors responding to it.\u00a0 And as with many historical disasters, the contours of crisis are as much drawn by the human response as the inciting event itself.<\/p>\n
Was TMI an Exception?<\/strong><\/p>\n In the wake of the TMI accident, sociologist Charles Perrow developed his Normal Accident Theory, which holds that in tightly coupled complex systems \u2013 that is, systems whose multiple components change rapidly \u2013 accidents become inevitable over a long enough period of time, despite their short-term implausibility (Scharre 2016, 25).<\/p>\n The nuclear reactor at TMI-2 typifies the sort of complex system that is prone to disaster, per Perrow\u2019s theory.\u00a0 Features of such systems include:<\/p>\n Many of the individual failures in the TMI-2 system were simple and might have been adequately managed in isolation. \u00a0The interaction of so many of these minor failures, however, all of which responded to each other in unpredictable and nonlinear ways, ultimately led to a serious disaster that was nearly impossible to avoid (Scharre 2016, 27).\u00a0 The TMI reactor reflects a larger truth about the systems humans build.\u00a0 Sometimes, the sheer complexity of these structures make accidents all too plausible, suggesting that man-made disasters may not always be the exceptional circumstance humans would like to believe they are.<\/p>\n Technological Determinism and Spoiled Expectations<\/strong><\/p>\n As with other industrial and man-made accidents, Three Mile Island was marked by a general attitude of hubris prior to the event. The NRC\u2019s Rasmussen Report, for example, promised that nuclear energy was perfectly safe and consequence-free; multiple energy companies in the industry likewise attempted to persuade the public of the unparalleled safety of nuclear energy.\u00a0 As the Kemeny Commission noted, a persistent assumption lingered in the years prior to the accident that nuclear power plants could be made sufficiently safe so as to be “people-proof” (Commission 20).<\/p>\n And Americans bought it. \u00a0As local grandmother Carol Pfeiffer explained after the crisis. \u201cI don\u2019t think hardly anybody in town realized the danger before the accident. We were just plain stupid about it. We didn\u2019t understand. We were so pleased about the prosperity it brought to the town\u201d (Zaretsky 2018, 61).\u00a0 Even the officials who were supposed to know better did not grasp the gravity of the risk, with the NRC\u2019s director of nuclear reactor regulation, Harold Denton, later recalling that \u201cwithin the NRC, no one really thought you could have a core meltdown. It was more a Titanic sort of mentality. This plant was so well designed that you couldn\u2019t possibly have serious core damage\u201d (Ibid.).<\/p>\n America\u2019s generally relaxed attitude toward nuclear power reflected an attitude that scholar Nicole Fleetwood would later call technological determinism.\u00a0 This philosophy is marked by a central belief that technology is the prevailing force \u201cbehind progress and social development,\u201d and Americans of all stripes exhibited their sympathy to this idea prior to TMI (Fleetwood 2006, 768).\u00a0 Middletown residents had faith that the nuclear reactor would forestall the region\u2019s economic decline, bringing new jobs and prosperity to the area (Zaretsky 2018, 61).\u00a0 Nuclear power industry executives believed that their technology was error-proof, and would prove a key component of American infrastructure in years to come.\u00a0 Even President Carter never strayed from his firm belief in the efficacy of nuclear power as a tool to wean the United States from its dependence on oil.<\/p>\n Writing about the Fukushima nuclear disaster years later, Harry Bernas might have a succinct way to describe the pervasive attitudes of Americans prior to TMI: System 1 thinking.\u00a0 In this pattern, Bernas writes, humans tend to overlook their own technological shortcomings in favor of the immediate benefits such developments promised.\u00a0 Bernas\u2019s stern warning in Fukushima\u2019s aftermath that humans need to shift to System 2 thinking, marked by \u201cnew, adaptive patterns\u201d to account for potential disaster, shows that the lessons of TMI continue to be relearned with each nuclear event (Bernas 2019, 1372).\u00a0 Indeed, as humanity prepares for some of its greatest challenges in the 21st<\/sup> century \u2013 COVID relief, rectifying slow violence around the world, and climate change mitigation among them \u2013 the disaster at Three Mile Island is as relevant as ever.\u00a0 Popular media threatens disinformation and sensationalism, and hubristic faith in human progress promises to face yet another reckoning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Despite initial fears to the contrary, the accident at Three Mile Island did not result in any significant damage to local residents\u2019 health or property.\u00a0 The partial meltdown was successfully managed, and the unaffected reactor, TMI-1, continued in operation for years after the crisis.\u00a0 A major humanitarian crisis had been averted. \u00a0Where, then, is the … Continue reading “A Disastrous Non-Event”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-42","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/history-2203-fall-2020-wbuschin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/42","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/history-2203-fall-2020-wbuschin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/history-2203-fall-2020-wbuschin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/history-2203-fall-2020-wbuschin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/history-2203-fall-2020-wbuschin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/history-2203-fall-2020-wbuschin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/42\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/history-2203-fall-2020-wbuschin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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