Meltdown: A Race Against Disaster at Three Mile Island

Meltdown
A Race Against Nuclear Disaster at Three Mile Island
by Wilborn Hampton
Candlewick Press, 2001

It's been 40 years since the accident - some may call it a near-disaster -  at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Middletown, Pennsylvania, which began in the early hours of March 28, 1979.

My reminiscences of the accident were posted back in March of 2009, where I also posted reviews of fiction, such as Michael Swanwick's In the Drift, dealing with nuke plant disasters.

For the 40th anniversary, I decided to read an account of the accident by Wilborn Hampton (b. 1940), who was a UPI reporter in 1979. Although Hampton was a foreign affairs reporter, and did not normally cover domestic events or science and technology, he was dispatched to Three Mile Island on March 30 to assist another UPI reporter with what was turning out to be a major story.

Metropolitan Edison's Three Mile Island nuclear power plant at the time of the accident. Literally located on an island in the middle of the Susquehanna River, the plant's reactor containment buildings are the two cylindrical structures in the middle of the photo. The cooling towers are the large white structures located on the left- and right- hand sides of the photo.

'Meltdown' is not a technical history of the accident, but a personal reminiscence of reporting on the event 'as it happened'. The book is an illustrated narrative, providing black and white photographs and diagrams in accompaniment to the author's spare, declarative text. 

A couple of worthwhile observations emerge from the pages of 'Meltdown'. One is that the plant operators could not 'see' what was taking place in reactor No. 2 in the sense of walking into the building and peering through a reinforced glass panel at the reactor core. In reality the core was a featureless stainless steel container lodged inside the containment building. 

The only thing the TMI plant personnel 'knew' about the condition of the reactor was what they saw on the gauges and multicolored light panels inside their control room. In fact, when an instrument in the containment building showed that the temperature within the core had reached 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit (as Michael Swanwick noted, hotter than the surface of Venus) the Metropolitan Edison staff refused to believe it - they thought the reading was due to a malfunction of the instrument. It's an indication of the confusion that governed the the handling of the accident.

Another observation is that there was continual uncertainty about how bad things would get. Some experts warned that it would be only hours before the hydrogen bubble (estimated to be 1,000 cubic feet in size) within the core would trigger an explosion that would render much of Pennsylvania uninhabitable for centuries. 

Others insisted there were days within which to try and eliminate the bubble by running water into the core and venting built-up gas into the atmosphere. Pennsylvania Governor Dick Thornburgh was forced to consider both points of view before declining to order an evacuation of the 200,000 people living in the vicinity of TMI.

Another observation deals with how the press covered major stories back in '79. Hampton writes about lugging his portable typewriter around with him; back in those days there were no laptops. There was also no internet, so people were reliant on the press and government statements to learn what was going on. 

And of course, while coverage of disasters such as hurricanes and tornadoes and terror bombings can include photographs and video of the carnage and its aftermath, there was no real 'visual' sense of what was taking place at TMI. The best the media could do was present rather bland footage of the exterior of the plant, and press conferences held by various state and federal officials (including President Jimmy Carter). 

Hampton's final chapter covers the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 and discusses the issues associated with nuclear power, all of which remain relevant today: Exelon, the current operators of TMI, plans to shut down reactor No. 1 this year, but there are calls from some Pennsylvania officials to continue operating the reactor as a preferred source of clean energy in an era of global warming. 

Summing up, 'Meltdown' stands the test of time as a readable overview of the accident, an overview designed to be informative to a nontechnical audience. I can't say that Baby Boomers will find the book nostalgic in the regular sense of the word, but it will bring you back to a specific time and place, particularly if you lived in the Northeast back in the Spring of '79.