‘Dodged a bullet’: how whistleblowers averted a second US nuclear disaster
Shortly after 4am on 28 March 1979, a pressure valve failed to close in the Unit 2 reactor at Three Mile Island, a nuclear power plant on a strip of land in central Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna River. The technical malfunction, compounded by human error – control room workers misread confusing signals and halted the emergency water cooling system – heated the nuclear core to dangerously high levels. The film The China Syndrome was still in theaters, starring Jane Fonda as a television reporter investigating cover-ups at a nuclear power plant whose meltdown could release radioactive material deep into the earth, “all the way to China”.
Three Mile Island – still the worst commercial nuclear accident in US history – was no China Syndrome, but it got terrifyingly close to catastrophic, Chernobyl-level damage.
