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Hey, and welcome to the podcast, don Josh, And there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, And this is stuff you should know.
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Very nice, Chuck, let's see, so you want to start talking about Three Mile Island.
Yeah, the nuclear I guess it's still the worst nuclear disaster in American history, right.
Yeah, I can't think of anything worse. I mean, as far as actual disasters go, it wasn't that bad. But how close it came to being like a true Nobyl level is kind of breath taking, actually.
Yeah, for sure. And this all went down when I had just turned eight years old, yep, on March twenty eighth, nineteen seventy nine.
Yeah, And really interestingly, just twelve days before this accident happened at Three Mile Island, a movie called The China Syndrome came out, Yeah, starring Michael.
Douglas, crazy timing, Yeah.
And Jane Fonda, which makes it even weirder because The China Syndrome, if you've never seen it, it's pretty good movie. I would say go watch it it. It was basically this. It was essentially what happened, what happened to the movie China Syndrome happened at Three Mile Island twelve days later. It's really bizarre.
Yeah, And the term China syndrome comes from I don't know if it's a term they still use, but I guess it was a term back then for a reactor melting down and melting all the way through to China.
Yeah, pretty folksy term for something as horrific as that.
Yeah, because you know, when you grow up in the seventies, everyone knows if you dig deep enough, you will reach China.
Sure, I tried a couple of times and gave up after a few hours.
Yeah, that was that was on the playground at least. But yeah, this happened March twenty eight, seventy nine. When you said it wasn't as bad as it could have been, you're dead right, because that means there were no casualties and they did avert completely that complete and total meltdown. But there's a lot of sort of I guess, skepticism still that like, hey, it was fine. There was the air spine, and that everything around there is just spine and nobody ever got sick because of this.
Yeah. And one reason that it does pay to be skeptical of that, and you can't really blame people who are, especially people who live in the area like in Middletown or Pennsylvania, is that at the time, the atomic energy industry, including the businesses that ran the place, the businesses that built these places, the agencies that regulated it, all of them had nothing but pollyanna ish optimistic views of all of the amazing things that nuclear power could do and
how safe it was. Like they were diluted as a group about the safety of nuclear power, and even throughout this whole accident as it was unfolding, they were just like, no, it's not that bad. Oh, it's a little worse than we thought, but it's still not that bad. And it just kept going and going like that. Every time something new came out, they were like, oh, it's a little worse than we thought. Finally, in the mid eighties they
were like, Okay, this was really bad. It took that long for them to admit it because they were just that optimistic about it. They couldn't believe that this could happen.
Yeah, for sure. And as we'll see, it was a combination of human error and poor instrumentation and redundancies that didn't work and stuff that I mean, it's crazy, like some of the stuff I was almost ready to read, like, well, and this thing just wasn't labeled correctly, and that never happened, But it was getting a little absurd at some point when you were looking at all the sort of things that happened that led to.
This Yeah, totally agreed. Yeah, I think that was a consequence of that over optimistic view too.
So should we start as Night Ranger did at four in the morning without a warning?
Is that, Sister Christian? That's the only Night Rangier song I know?
No, it's the song they have a song called four in the morning. Oh, four in the morning came without a warning, That's all I remember. But that's what happened. There was a small mouth function in the secondary cool cooling system, and there was a mechanical that they still don't know if it was a mechanical or an electrical air. And the long and short of it was the water
pump started sending water to the steam generators. And as you know from listening, I mean, we've done episodes on nuclear energy and on the one the meltdown in Japanshima, like water and keeping that reactor core cool is the whole key to keeping things safe.
Yeah, exactly, because once it starts heating, it's really tough to get it cooled down again, and all sorts of bad things happen when it overheats. And I think by the time they had shut the system down, by the time they finally intervened. It was at four thousand degrees farent height, so a thousand degrees short of a total meltdown. And just to kind of go into a little more detail of exactly what happened, because you basically kind of
got the point across. There was a fault in I think a mechanical or electrical part that kept the water that you needed to cool all that stuff from flowing in. That was the thing that kicked it all off. But this nuclear reactor, the control panel was designed to sense like when it started to overheat, and it did overheat because there wasn't enough coolant, and it shut itself down and everything with that was working properly. The control ruds
went in, nobody had to do anything. The system shut itself down because it was overheating.
Right, So, so far, so good in a certain sense. Yeah, but things really kind of went pear shaped after this. As you used to say a lot, you don't say that much anymore. I miss paar shaped.
I'll try to bring it back then.
I'm bringing it back. So they had to lower the pressure in the system, so a pilot operated relief valve opened. And that's great. This thing should have stayed open for about ten seconds or so just to let a little pressure out, and it was designed to close automatically when it returned to normal. It did not close automatically. It got stuck. But they didn't know it that it got stuck. That was the big problem up front.
Yeah, and that caused another problem. So first of all, remember it's overheated because there's not enough water. Now, the pressure's lower in the whole reactor, and lower pressure means that water will boil at a lower temperature. So the water's boiling more and more, so you're losing more and more and it's creating more and more steam. That's also raising the temperature. That's another thing that the operator should have noticed, right, or they did notice. They were like, oh,
I'm for sure, and the reactors really going up. But they all generally agreed that it was just wrong. There had been problems with that pilot operated relief valve for apparently weeks, and they rather than fix it, they were just falsifying the information and dealing with it like just living with the problem.
Yeah, and we should point out that there were two nuclear reactors there TMI not too much information, No, three Mile Island one and three Mile Island two. They built these things in nineteen sixty eight, and TMI one opened in seventy four, and tm I two and seventy eight, and TMI two, the one that had the issue here, had only been open for three months I think, yeah, just about three months when this accident occurred. So it wasn't even online that long, and so it must have
had that leak. Kind of from the get go.
It sounds like, yeah, I think you're right, because yeah, I must not have ever worked properly and they just didn't really know it or care.
They already cut the ribbon too late.
Yeah, So the system again is like, guys, I'm going to run another security safety thing. I'm going to I've noticed that things are really starting to go pear shaped in the reactor, and I'm going to start sending in emergency cooling. So the system opened up its own valves to let in emergency water flowing into the reactor try
to cool things down. That actually helped make things worse to an extent, where like water kept like bubbling and boiling and it was now spilling out of the open relief valve out of the reactor, which is not good. But it still would have helped keep things cool sooner. The problem is the operators again were like, that shouldn't be happening. The pressure seems fine in here, and now there's water flowing in. We got to turn off these emergency pumps. And they did. They turned off the emergency
pump and that was the final straw. The system was like, I'm not helping anymore. You guys are on your own.
Yeah. So the water, the water level was dropping, which is very key to keeping that thing you stable and cool, and it actually exposed the reactor's core, the top of that thing. Yeah, and once the core is exposed, that's very very bad news that happened. I think everything started at four a m. Night Ranger time, and then at six am, this is two hours later. An operator finally was like, wait a minute, that release valve that was supposed to close automatically, looks like that thing didn't close.
So he ordered it to be closed off. But one hundred thousand liters of coolant had already leaked out of the system at this point.
Yeah, highly highly radioactive water just spilling out, and eventually it was pumped out of the reactor containment of building into other buildings. So that they were flooded with contaminated water. It was quite a mess. So these guys have now figured out the main issue. They've closed the relief valve. Now they can put more coolant in, and they started to do that. But you said that the top of the reactor core is exposed. That is never supposed to happen.
That the core should never be exposed above water. And because it had been now pumping cooling and was not necessarily doing the trick, it certainly wasn't doing it fast enough. And they realized about forty minutes after they figured out that what the problem was that the core was really screwed up. Because remember all this time, for those two hours, Chuck, they were just like, oh, everything's fine. They thought their instruments were messed up or that everything was working correctly.
And finally between six am and six point forty they're like, this is really, really, really bad. And five minutes after they figured that out, radiation alarms started ringing around the plant, which if they didn't know it was bad before, those alarms certainly.
Yeah. And then about eleven minutes later, and this is almost seven o'clock, it was almost three hours later, they finally declared a site emergency right after that happened. You know, they tried to and you know, partially part part of the problem here was due to the being in the nineteen seventies and you can't get a hold of someone via cell phone like in a moment's notice. That's where
this kind of comes into play. They tried to get in touch with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission kind of immediately they called. The office wasn't open yet, and so they had what you know, these things still exist, but what they used to have a lot more back in the day is like an answering service. Like humans had answered the phone and forward the call or call up the doctor or whoever they need to call and say, hey, I got I think what's probably a concerning message that
you probably need to get right away. So they tried to do that. They tried to call the regional duty officer at home, but they're like, no, he already left for work. So this guy's in his car now, don't didn't listen to the radio on his way to work.
He's listening to beautiful music on the AM dial.
He probably is. And the long and short of it is it finally like I think it takes nearly forty minutes to even finally make contact with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and like time is crucial at this point, like every second matters.
Yeah, And the reason why they really needed to get in touch with the NRC is because they didn't know what to do. They weren't really trained for a situation like this. The NRC was the body that had this information. They needed to figure out how to handle this. So very quickly word starts to spread hits DC, the local journalists start showing up. Eventually national journalists started showing up, and by nine am, everybody knows that there's a big,
big problem at Three Mile Island. The problem was no one knew how bad it was. Yeah, because on the one hand, the first people that started dress saying things was Metropolitan at Edison, the power company that ran and I believe owned Three Mile Island, both TM one and two, and they were just lying their faces off. They just said whatever they thought what people wanted to hear, and they would even do it in private, like the Governor
Dick Thornburg and the Lieutenant Governor William Scranton. They were just lying to them about how like how not a big deal. This was from the outset. So they proved that they were just untrustworthy from the outset, and they got quickly pushed aside as far as the people who were really trying to handle this problem, when yeah, they just they were like, you go stand over there, we'll deal with you later.
For sure. They on the twenty eight they briefly considered evacuating the area. This is SPEMA there on the scene now, but they said no, and then the governor, like you were saying, Governor Thornburg, he declined to evacuate again on March twenty ninth because they're getting reports that there was
no radiation that had escaped and everything was like completely contained. Finally, on March thirtieth, the governor got a report that said, all right, well some radioactive gas has escaped the reactor. So he said he makes an announcement like all right, all pregnant women and preschool children need to evacuate and like get out of the area. And that caused a pretty big panic.
It did. I think one hundred and forty thousand people left. Did you see the American experience of the PBS documentary on this yeah, melt, It's called meltdown at three Mile Island. So a lot of people were panicking and leaving, But there were also a lot of people around there like they can take my house out of my cold dead hands. I'm not leaving.
Yeah, that always happens, right, Yeah.
But so there were people that stayed, but a lot of people left because they were scared to death. No one knew exactly how bad this was, and so I think a lot of rumor and unsubstantiated stuff was really spreading very quickly. At at the same time, there was no one who really knew how bad it was that could say that's not true. That's not true. I can unequivocally say this is how bad it is. So you really couldn't say, like, don't worry. It was you don't
think you should worry. We hope you don't have to worry. But there was nothing that they could really reassure the public with at this point.
Yeah for sure, all right, that feels like a great time for a break, if you agree, I agree.
Uh.
So they are trying to get the thing cool down, and then very quickly another problem would pop up, and we're going to address that right after this.
Stop you know, stop, stop, stop you shouldn't you know? No, stop you know stop stuff shouldn't know stuff you should know?
Okay, Chuck. So where we last left off, three Mile Island TMI two reactor had reached a different shape of a certain kind of fruit. Things were going badly in other words.
Right not yes, it's bad, but I'm just glad you're saying it again.
So it went, it went from bad to worse. Actually, they're like, they wouldn't call it a meltdown. It took years before they officially started calling this a meltdown. It was an accident, it was a problem in issue, that kind of thing. But on top of that the reactor
having huge problems. They now realized that there was a hydrogen gas bubble that during this two three hours of the accident had developed because it got so hot that the zirconium tubes that held the fuel pellets it reacted with the steam that was being generated and it actually tore the water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen, and the
hydrogen just started to build up. Well, obviously, if you listen to our Hindenberg episode, you know that a big bunch of hydrogen gas in one place is very, very dangerous, especially when it's in the middle of a nuclear reactor.
Yeah, so all of a sudden, there's this more concerning problem. They're like, if this thing explodes, you know, if this gas bubble explodes, it might rupture the actual building that this thing is housed in. And we're in real trouble if that happened. So from I think, well we should say that the World Nuclear Association they say that that never would have been possible. But of course they don't know this at the time, and who knows if it
was possible or not. But from March thirtieth, this couple of days later through April first, they managed to decrease the size of that bubble by venting that thing out and you know, basically kind of slowly just reducing the size of the bubble. But this is also if you're venting, you know, melting down. I guess I don't what you said. It didn't called to meltdown, it's having a tantrum. I guess you're releasing that stuff in like more radiation into the environment by doing.
So, right, But they really had no choice essentially or let the thing blow up, so they did. They managed to get the bubble under control. And on April first, Jimmy Carter, who was president at the time, I didn't know this. He was a trained nuclear engineer, so he was essentially the president to be in charge for this to happen.
You knew that, Yeah, yeah, I knew from my visits to the Carter Center and I read a book and I've seen a documentary. He's one of my guys, one of the smartest dudes we've ever had in the way.
Oh, I know. He was a fantastic president. It's a shame. So he was president at the time, and he was like, you know what, I'm going to come there. I'm going to be shown touring the plant. Ros One's going to come with me. That will reassure the public that it's fine, it's under control. The problem was, according to that PBS documentary, at the time, it was not a certainty that the hydrogen bubble wasn't going to blow up while the president
was there. There are two dueling mathematicians who had conflicting results about whether the bubble was going to blow up, and so Jimmy Carter took a real risk. So did Rosalind Carter by going there to tour the plant. They had to wear yellow rubber boots because again there's really highly contaminated radioactive water that had spilled out of the coolant on the floor. It was a big deal, but apparently it had the impact he was looking for and the public started to calm down.
Yeah, I don't know if you could get if they would let a president do that these days.
Yeah, it was the seventies. Man, what can happen?
It was, Yeah, just put on these booties. So he obviously orders a committee to convene and investigate this thing. It was ended up being called the Kimmeny Report because it was led by Dartmouth College president John Kemeny, and they the NRC ended up coming out of this not looking so great. And we'll get to why as we go,
but they really took it on the chin. The training program, like met ed was like, hey, we trained up our guys as well as we were able to and to meet your standards, Like, we did everything you told us to do. All your requirements were met. It was the NRC apparently, who like had lax requirements and you know when it comes to like emergency training and stuff like that, they were really ill prepared.
Yeah, these guys were fully trained, but their training hadn't prepared them for that, and it was the NRC's fault. The NRC showed that they weren't prepared to handle this either, Like it was just really poor planning, again based on over optimistic ideas about the safety of nuclear energy. Right, So the NRC also conducted its own examination. They're like, yeah, we should probably do a little better. There's a lot
of confusing stuff in training. I think there was this one passage that said insert key into the control panel, turn key to the left, break off the key in the control panel, and eat what remains of the key. That was part of the safety training. Anyway, they were like, we also have to say though, it wasn't just us, it wasn't just the operators, but the design of this stuff is pretty nuts if you ask us.
So one of the big problems was why it took so long to realize there was a problem, Like all that time was going by when things were leaking out, and you know, the NRC again took it on the chin.
They found that their training requirements weren't weren't good enough, and that the operating procedures were confusing during an emergency Like from what I gathered from the documentary and by reading up on this, was that like they were trained to run the place and like turn the keys and push the buttons right, but if something went wrong, that's where they really really failed to know what to do.
So they were at you know, while this emergency was unfolding, they're misinterpreting data that's coming through, and they're making bad decisions based on that. They you know, you mentioned earlier that the water started boiling really violently that caused the coolant pumps to shake really hard, and they thought they didn't know that's what that was. They thought they were overfilling and the things were shaking because it had too much coolant in there, and that the pumps you know,
were going to be damaged because of that. So you know, just to not even know that, like, hey, by the way, if this thing really starts boiling hard, the pipes might shake, Like they didn't even know that could happen.
Right, Exactly like you said, they were trained to operate it basically. One other thing to say about the system, too, is in that documentary, I think the guy who wrote the China Syndrome, he was interviewed a lot in it. He was saying that, like, if they had done nothing, the system would have taken care of itself from the outset. Interesting, it was when they intervened those two times that threw
that safety sequence off. And so it really truly was a combination of all sorts of different stuff, the complexity of the system, human error, malfunctions, poor planning. And there's a sociologist named Charles Perrow who calls this a normal accident, which is basically an accident that is essentially inevitable because it's accidentally designed into the complex system. Somehow, somewhere, all these things are going to come together and cause an accident.
That's what happened at Three Mile Island.
Yeah, if you're waiting for your Homer Simpson moment, wait no further. Because one of the things they found when they did, you know, the big investigation, was that there was an operator there that had a large belly sounded like I had a big beer gut, Yeah, and his beer gut was blocking the view of some of the panel indicators and like they literally didn't see these things
because of Homer Simpsons standing there in the way. There was a printer, a computer printer that malfunctioned that was recording like real time data that got jammed for ninety minutes. Just the communication with like wearing face respirators and masks and all that stuff. Like they just weren't able to talk, you know, in an effective manner while this is all going down.
Yeah, and that computer printer that was giving them that real time information being jammed for ninety minutes meant that the data they were working from was ninety minutes old in the middle of a meltdown. So like these guys really just had no genuine clue what was actually going on. They didn't even seem to suspect anything was going on, in part because of that ninety minute old data they were working from.
Yeah. So if it wasn't bad enough already, there are two more big factors. Yeah, And just how sort of janky this thing seemed to be laid out. The control room didn't have any direct measurements of the water, like we kept talking, you know earlier in Act one about you know, the water levels, and they didn't you know, they thought it was filling up too much, so they
shut the water off. But they this was all happening because it didn't have just direct measurements of the water level, so they didn't even know they were guessing at how much water was in the system. And then the second one, big one was that automatic release valve has an indicator light in the control room. It shows, you know, it was supposed to close automatically, but I think you can also order it to close, and eventually they they tried to order it to close, but it doesn't actually show
whether it's closed or not. The indicator lit up when it was ordered to close, not confirming that it was.
Closed, right, But they took it like that. They took it to mean like, oh, well the lights on the things closed, Yeah.
Asked the guy with the big belly blocking the screen exactly.
So I mean, like that's a just nuts that, like all of this was happening, just the sequence of events. I mean, if you if you went back and did it all again, surely it couldn't possibly follow the same steps because it was just so intertwined with all these different weird things.
Oh for sure.
So there's a lot of you want to talk about the radiation that may or may not have been.
Released, yeah, because I mean that's one of the biggest obviously issues at hand is like how much of this stuff is getting out to the local community in Pennsylvania.
Right, Yeah, And like you said, to get rid of the hydrogen bubble, they definitely vented radioactive gas into the air. That's just there's just no two ways around it. They also had to do that a couple more times during the cleanup, as we'll see. But the EPA, the NRC, Pennsylvania itself, the Union of Concerned Scientists, just countless different organizations, including non governmental organizations, have conducted all sorts of studies. People have done meta now all seas of these studies.
Three Mile Island is a very very heavily studied area to find out exactly what happened. And essentially almost everybody agrees that there was not enough of a radioactive or release to actually affect human health or the environment. And it seems to be one of those times where it actually is true. I can barely get it out, but I think they might be right.
Yeah, I mean they claimed that there was like the radiation was about the estimated levels of a like a chest X ray. The Department of Energy said it had negligible effects on public health and the environment. I guess we'll end up talking about the lawsuits later, but because there obviously would be some But you know, there were some interesting things, like I think the forty three percent increase in infant deaths in the area around the time of the accident. There was a study in ninety seven
that found increased cancer rates in area. There was a twenty seventeen study that found a correlation between thyroid cancer and living in that region. But in each of these studies, and in each of these cases, they're like, well, you can't absolutely prove that was the absolute cause.
Yeah, and these were these studies are few and far between. Most of the other studies are like, I didn't turn up any statistically significant correlation even right. I saw that the highest exposure during cleanup, with a peak in nineteen eighty nine was point nine to eight rims and that is a tenth of a chest X ray, and that on site, the EPA found on site, So at the Three Mile Island reactor, the radiation that in the environment was what you would get from flying on an airplane
per hour. Yeah, so it really does seem like there was just not that much of an exposure. Again, I'm quite sure if you go to Three Mile Island and talk to some of the older resid evidence. They will tell you otherwise, because a lot of people reported, especially right afterward, that they were suffering from vomiting, nausea, hair loss, rashes, and I'm sure that people just have dismissed them over the years as like that's placebo effect or no cebo
effect or something like that. So I mean, if you believe that your you know, wife or husband or mom or dad or kid died of cancer because of this nuclear accident, and everybody's telling you like, no, it's it's fine, You're you're hysterical overreacting, I can't imagine not being deeply bitter about that. Yeah.
Of course, speaking of deeply bitter, I think that triggered another ad break. Oh okay, and we'll be back to finish up on three Mile Island right after this.
Stop you know, stop stoop stock shouldn't know. No, stop you know, stop stop Stock shouldn't know stop you should know.
All right, So they had resolved this bubble issue and they got to cool this thing down, and that's really the main thing that reactor cored that had been exposed. Like everything is super hot. So they first things first, they really just need to get it cooled down. So they worked on that for a while. Finally, on April twenty seventh, I guess this is almost a month later,
they said that it was in cold shutdown. They had reached that point where water was less than one hundred degrees celsius at atmospheric pressure, and so they could start clean up. And that was it for tm I two. That thing shut down and did not reopen.
No, it didn't. Three months of energy production and that's it. It's crazy, and it is still actually technically under cleanup today. The cleanup efforts started pretty much right out of the gate. I think it was in nineteen seventy nine that they first started, but I'm sure the first couple of years were like, Okay, what are we going to do. Part of the problem was is they couldn't see into the reactor. They couldn't tell with what kind of a problem they
were dealing with. And it wasn't until the eighties that they started getting actual video confirmation. They put like video cameras in to the reactor and saw that the core had partially melted down, and that not only that chuck the nuclear fuel, the uranium had molten uranium had melted down into the bottom of what's called the vessel, the
container vessel. The basically the last thing between the the uranium molten uranium in China is this vessel, and it actually had not been expected to be able to stand up to something like that, and just by pure luck it did. It did not leak, but it definitely could have and had that happened, it would have been catastrophic had it gotten out. So three cheers to the containment vessel.
Yeah, for sure. The cleanup I think they Yeah, they started in seventy nine and eleven years later. By ninety was when that whole first phase was done. They had like most of the nuclear fuel had been removed by that point and about one hundred and fifty tons of radioactive materials. I feel like we talked about this kind of disposal before in other episodees. Yeah, it may have been the disaster in Japan, or maybe it was just one on nuclear like bearing nuclear waste.
Yeah, it was within I think it was twenty twenty five. It was a good one. But we talked about that place in Washington, the Handford Nuclear Site.
Yeah, well, this stuff or at the time at least they went to the National Engineering Laboratory in Idaho for storage. But then you still had all that water. You had about two and a quarter million gallons of bad water. That took another few years, so that wasn't fully cleaned up until nineteen ninety three. You had to evaporate that stuff.
Right, which means you got gas on your hands, radioactive gas again, And that's where those further exposures happened throughout the eighties. I think nineteen eighty two and nineteen eighty nine were the worst, but even then they were less than a millirem of exposure, which again is about a
tenth of a chest X ray. Right. Yeah, So finally the cleanup of TMI two is completed in nineteen ninety three, but even that is still, like I said, it's still ongoing because they were just like, we got ninety nine percent of the nuclear fuel out out of the reactor, isn't that amazing. We're just gonna call it done now. And so there's still one percent left and there's a company called tm MY two Solutions that is currently cleaning up that remaining one percent of fuel from the reactor.
Yeah, they're solutions based, that's what they do, Josh.
They are and I was like, wait a minute, they own TMI two. Why would somebody buy a reactor so that you can pay to clean it up? And it turns out there was a bunch of not even taxpayer ratepayer money that Metropolitan ED had basically added to people's bills, is like a tax set aside to pay for cleanup. And I think there was something like a billion dollars of that left. And I guess that TMI two Solutions was going has been receiving that for cleaning it up.
Yeah, I mean that when they were protesting met ED, they had signs that said, first you try to kill us, then you want to bill us. Yeah. This kicked off a lot of I mean, this nuclear energy was at a probably all time public low. Obviously after Three Mile Island, like things were kind humming along, and then people really really turned against it. There were a lot of protests. You know, when Jane Fonda shows up that you're in big trouble, and she and her husband at the time,
Tom Hayden, did just that. It did lead to I mean silver linings. It led to one of the great concerts of all time, the Bruce Springsteen No Nuke's Concert at Madison Square Garden in nineteen seventy nine brought you know, musicians banded together and for the Musicians United for Safe Energy MUSE and they just released that in twenty twenty one. And I just want to say, I know you're probably not a big Springsteen guy, but if you're a fan
of the Boss, watch, don't just listen to it. Watch the concert film of the No Nuke Show, and it is peak, peak Bruce Springsteen Unbelievable.
Show nineteen seventy nine.
Yeah, it's incredible because it's before Born in the USA and all that, so before he was in state Earl, I guess this is MSG, but before where he was at like that level of huge, but right after Born to Run in darkness on the edge of town, he was still young and hungry, and it's just like, it's an incredible, incredible show.
That's awesome.
Yeah.
I have a Bruce Springsteen anecdote if you want.
To hear it, sure, let's hear it.
Backstage one of our Bell House shows, I was meeting the boyfriend of one of my friends, and he was from Jersey and he was telling me this story about how he and his friends were at a pool once and he looked over and he's like, and there was Bruce, And I went Willis and this guy look I was serious too, the look of just like contempt that fell over this guy's face for a second before he could
regain himself. He was like, no Springsteen. I was like, oh, okay, it's like I feel equally about the both.
You know, at least you didn't say box Lightner.
That would have been really so much better. Oh boy, keep.
That one in your hip pocket. If anyone ever just throws out a Bruce story again, a box lightner.
Okay, you got it, buddy. He was on V, wasn't he?
Uh sure, I don't know. I don't remember. He was scared, true as king, okay, scare them? Or was he in tron? No, he wasn't in tron. That was That was a different guy.
That was Jeff Bridges.
Yeah.
But the other guy, the main guy.
That was Bruce Springsteen.
No, who am I thinking of? Never mind, we got to finish this. When people are going to be so mad at.
Us, they're all right, sorry, sorry everybody. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's going to send us a letter.
I know, uh so not because of a lawsuit that we're filing, but people certainly did. There was the fact that they falsified those leak test results that you talked about without fixing stuff, and they issued a report to the Department of Justice. In November of nineteen eighty three, they indicted met Ed for that falsification of the leaks, where they had to pay a huge fine of forty five thousand dollars.
Yeah, and you're like, okay, well, this was nineteen eighty four dollars. How much is it today? Still just one hundred and forty thousand dollars today.
For falsifying leaks of nuclear material?
Yeah, for sure and just being general jerks during the whole you know, crisis.
Yeah.
But they were like, okay, well, we're also going to help set up a fund for the Pennsylvania EPA to take care of this area for years to come. We're going to give it one million dollars. Again, you're like, okay, it's nineteen eighty four dollars. No, just three point one million dollars. So all told, I think ED officially paid out something like three less than three and a half million.
There's a group called Three Mile Island Alert. They're a nonprofit that is essentially watchdogs about three Mile Island, and I don't think that they feel very good about Metropolitan ED. But they say that the ED is paid out lots more than that in civil and personal injury lawsuits to settle.
Those, yeah, settling them. Because that was in nineteen ninety six, there were I think a couple of thousand active cases for like, you know, exposure obviously to the radiation, and a judge said, all right, let me pick ten of these and try them as a group as a test case to see if we, you know, if there's merit
to the whole thing. And the judge ruled against the planeiffs, you know, citing what I would I talked about earlier, like you can't there's not enough evidence to side a direct link between the cancer that you have and the radiation that you may or may not have endured.
Right. So this is one of those I think instances why that I'm convinced because there's just so many different people and groups of people from all different sectors of our society who have looked at this and said, it actually wasn't as bad. Right, it could have been really bad, but it's not as bad as people fear, Right, That's why I buy into the idea that it wasn't that bad. That's not to say that there weren't people who acted
as whistleblowers. And in particular, if you saw a Netflix documentary called Meltdown Golan three Mile Island, there was a whistleblower named Rick Parks who was a supervisor in the cleanup crew during the eighties, and he blew the whistle because he was saying they were using this crane that was in the reactor to basically dismantle the reactor afterward, even though it had gone through the meltdown. Seemed very unsafe to me. I didn't like how they were testing it.
So if like throughout the eighties cleanup of Three Mile Island, that's the most scandalous thing a whistleblower comes up with, it seems like it's about as on the up and up as something like this can be.
Yeah, he claimed in that documentary that they like retaliated against them and that someone planted drugs in his car during a random drug inspection. There are other people that have come out and said, hey, that documentary is little misleading. He did raise concerns about that crane, but they didn't ignore them. He just didn't agree with how they handled it, and just take that documentary with a grain of salt.
Basically, Yeah, so there were I think, like you said, nuclear power was just humming along and then it just nosedived after Three Mile Island. And I think there were fifty one plan nuclear reactors that were canceled in the United States alone, like this had global repercussions between nineteen eighty and nineteen eighty four, fifty one of them were canceled. I think I saw in the end of the documentary that was in nineteen ninety nine they said zero new
ones have been ordered since Three Mile Island. I saw ae hundred had been potentially, but regardless, the upshot is the reason why nuclear energy is not widespread, especially in the United States, is because of Three Mile Island almost one hundred percent.
Yeah, for sure. Kind of Strangely, a couple of years ago, Microsoft signed a twenty year deal to purchase power from TMI one, starting a couple of years from Mount twenty twenty eight, and it was like, that's weird. Why is Microsoft buying a bunch of power, Like, oh, they're using power generated from that to fuel the data centers for AI.
Yeah, which I think we talked about that in the Data Centers episode and the Getting rid of nuclear waste episode.
Yeah, it feels kind of like a full circle moment.
For sure, so let's leave it at that. Huh yeah, sure, all right, Well we came full circle, which means we automatically triggered listener mail even though we have no indicator light to tell us as much.
That's right. Hey, guys, this is from Nathan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Guy, I'm a former academic who never lost a love of learning. Your show's both old new brighton my daily commutes with fresh knowledge and open curiosity that genuinely warms my heart.
Nice.
But that's a very nice setup for a correction. Correction on Thomas Hobbs. Guys, he didn't actually assume that all or and this is from our Humanism episode, by the way, Hobbs didn't actually assume that all or even most people are inherently bad. Instead, he argued that some people will do bad things sometimes, and that the rest of us cannot know who win or where. Hobbs will point out that we lock our houses at night, and our cars and parking garages, and we do this, even though we
have laws, courts and police officers. It's not about human evil. It's about rational caution in an uncertain world. And there's a little bonus here, guys. Hobbes lived an absolutely wild life. He was ascribed for Francis Bacon. He met Galileo in Italy. He tutored the future King Charles the Second in math, and spent years and heated its disagreements with Descartes through the mail. In fact, a few years after Hobbs died, Oxford University held a public book burning that included his work.
That spectacle prompted John Locke to leave Oxford, hide his manuscripts, and flee to Holland for five years.
That'll do.
Yeah, that's Nathan from Pitts. I always loved the extra info.
Oh I do too, And thank you for sending us straight on Hobbs too. We didn't mean to misrepresent him, yeah, for sure, because he can sick the Leviathan on us.
If we don't want that.
If you want to be like Nathan from Pittsburgh and send us a cool email like he did, and maybe even butter us up first. We like that kind of thing. You can send it to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
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