TMI 35 years later
“I went to East Pennsboro High School and graduated in 1974. I went to college and my dream was to be a high school Social Studies teacher and coach basketball. I got my degree in Secondary Education and I student-taught my last year in college and realized I didn’t like teaching."
"I was offered a couple of teaching jobs – one in Dubois and one in South Carolina – and I didn’t take either of them, I was just working doing odd jobs and living at home. My dad said 'You’ve got to get a real job.'”
"I was on shift at four o’clock in the morning when the accident happened. I was in the security command center, which was a very important place to be; it's always very busy. I was supposed to go off at seven o’clock that morning- I got off around mid-day. I was doing a lot of communications with the state police and off-site agencies."
“Well, I had only been there for 5 weeks. I’d just gotten the job [and] moved here. No one was ordering me to cover [TMI]. For the first night I went down, I went down to see it— I had a friend and I asked him to drive me down. There were people in moon suits taking radiation readings the first night.”
"That changed my career. One of the biggest lessons of the accident was the company lost all of its credibility with the community – for many reasons – but one of the most important reasons was there were no relationships between TMI and the community at that time. There was no public information crisis plan, there was no community outreach plan. There was a bit of arrogance that 'Well, people aren’t going to understand nuclear power anyway.'”
“Well, I had only been there for 5 weeks. I’d just gotten the job [and] moved here. No one was ordering me to cover [TMI]. For the first night I went down, I went down to see it— I had a friend and I asked him to drive me down. There were people in moon suits taking radiation readings the first night.”
But guess what? That same valve stuck open six months earlier at another plant and the operators responded in the wrong way to that valve being stuck open, but that information was never shared within the industry."
"President Carter came here on Sunday, and after the accident he had a commission called the President’s Commission on Three Mile Island and investigated the accident."
"They said this was the industry’s accident. The main causes were a mechanical problem that night, a stuck open valve, that simple.
“Well, I had only been there for 5 weeks. I’d just gotten the job [and] moved here. No one was ordering me to cover [TMI]. For the first night I went down, I went down to see it— I had a friend and I asked him to drive me down. There were people in moon suits taking radiation readings the first night.”
"So, the operators at TMI also responded incorrectly to that stuck open valve. You had a mechanical problem with a stuck open valve, you had a lack of training and procedures in the control room for the operators to appropriately respond, you had a control room that was not designed well for man-machine interface, and then you had a whole series of miscommunications. There weren’t emergency plans. People in the community around here had no idea what was going on at TMI. The company did not do their job of communicating what was happening during the accident, so we had to regain the trust of the people. They were starting to build this communications group up out of professionals from around the nation. I was picked because of my background in teaching. Isn’t it something? You just never know."
“Well, I had only been there for 5 weeks. I’d just gotten the job [and] moved here. No one was ordering me to cover [TMI]. For the first night I went down, I went down to see it— I had a friend and I asked him to drive me down. There were people in moon suits taking radiation readings the first night.”
"I was hired to do energy education programs, talk to people at the Visitor’s Center and educate them about nuclear power. I progressed from there to working with the community, building longer term relationships. It changed me forever, created my career for me, and I've been here 35 years now. I've been kind of the face of TMI, I mean, I've been recognized. And I love that big part of my persona. I’ve built relationships with a lot of local officials in the area, like Mayor Bob Reid from Middletown, people who have a history with TMI from the very beginning."
“Well, I had only been there for 5 weeks. I’d just gotten the job [and] moved here. No one was ordering me to cover [TMI]. For the first night I went down, I went down to see it— I had a friend and I asked him to drive me down. There were people in moon suits taking radiation readings the first night.”
"TMI’s had a profound impact in my life. I mean, in the years after the accident when I went out and talked to people, the meetings were very emotional. I used to take our president of the company out and do town meetings -- that was one of the first things I did when I got hired in communications. We would fill up meeting rooms and auditoriums with people— mainly people opposed to the restart. My job was to try to get people to feel comfortable with restarting the undamaged reactor. It took five and a half years to do that. In ’85 we got the approval to start up the undamaged reactor, and that was a big deal. We went to the Supreme Court."
"At the start, I never really thought about being pro or anti nuclear. After the accident, I took a real hard look at the energy field. I never thought about energy other than what I paid for gasoline at the pump. I started doing research and got educated on nuclear power. I came to the realization that the best way to look at energy [is]: don’t think about being pro or con on one source of power – think about the whole pie. The best thing for our country, for our environment [and] our security is to have a wide range of sources.So, even though I'm very pro-nuclear, I'm not a zealot: 'Oh, everything has to come from nuclear.'”
It's not at the expense of solar, wind, hydro, coal or new technology— it's in concert with that, so that’s how I look at it. I think when people look at it that way it kind of breaks down the barriers. There are pros and cons to every fuel source.
"We know, environmentally, that makes sense. States cannot meet those new EPA limits on clean air without nuclear power plants—they just can't. Solar and wind are great sources of energy, but they're not reliable. We can tell the power grid, with 95-96% certainty, next Wednesday we’ll give you enough electricity for a million homes. Solar and wind can't do that. If it's cloudy or if there’s no wind blowing you're not going to have the power."
So Denton had a press conference at about 10 o’clock on a Friday night. They used to have an old media center— really small room up on top floor of the capitol. And I can remember waiting for that. The click of the cameras… in the old days, the cameras would make a clicking noise and it was almost intense the way he walked out there; no one had seen him [before]. He was able to start relaying information in a more folksy style. A calming style from the start. Denton was a real change in terms of just trying to understand it. I had no reason to doubt him.
The UPI, the United Press, was talking about a meltdown fear. It was later, I think, later on you were getting the [hydrogen] bubble story. [It] was developing later that day maybe even. So that might have been what Denton was addressing when he first got here, into that Saturday and Sunday.
"Today there’s how many reactors – nine in Pennsylvania. People don’t know this, but nuclear power generates about a third of our state’s electricity. Think of that: one out of every three homes gets their power from a nuclear power plant."
"We all like electricity, everyone wants it. Right now, 20% of our nation’s electricity comes from nuclear.
So Denton had a press conference at about 10 o’clock on a Friday night. They used to have an old media center— really small room up on top floor of the capitol. And I can remember waiting for that. The click of the cameras… in the old days, the cameras would make a clicking noise and it was almost intense the way he walked out there; no one had seen him [before]. He was able to start relaying information in a more folksy style. A calming style from the start. Denton was a real change in terms of just trying to understand it. I had no reason to doubt him.
The UPI, the United Press, was talking about a meltdown fear. It was later, I think, later on you were getting the [hydrogen] bubble story. [It] was developing later that day maybe even. So that might have been what Denton was addressing when he first got here, into that Saturday and Sunday.
"[Even if] we shut all the plants down now, there’s still this issue of where do you put the waste? Yucca Mountain, [in] which the Department of Energy built a multi-billion dollar monitored retrievable facility where there are cells deep inside the mountain, they put [waste] in there, they monitor it."
"Right now it's all stored at the nuclear plants because Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, shut down Yucca Mountain in Nevada. It was going to be a centralized repository for all of our nation’s waste. He won't allow the waste to go there. It's understandable, but a lot of people support it. We’re all getting the benefits of nuclear power, but we need to deal with the side effects. Too often, the anti-nuclear folks—their strategy is not to support a place to put the nuclear fill."
"Nuclear power is an unforgiving technology, and the consequences are pretty severe when things go wrong. Around Fukushima and Chernobyl, there are exclusion areas— people can't live there. We have to operate these plants at the highest level. In the United States, we've had an awesome track record with nuclear power. TMI, the plant design worked— very little radiation actually escaped from TMI; there was never any off-site contamination, and all the health studies showed that no one died as a result of TMI. Now, there are disputes about that but the official studies show ‘no.’"
"Right now, there are four brand new reactors being built in the United States – two in Georgia and two in South Carolina. The one in Georgia is 56% completed and that gives us a lot of the newer technology. In Georgia we’re having a big conference in August for the South Eastern United States of young engineers that are in the nuclear power industry are going to that area. I guess all of them wouldn’t have been born [then] but now they're in and what I'm going to tell them is almost everything they do on a daily basis came out as a result of the TMI 2 accident."
"Today we have emergency plans in place, we have good relationships built with the PA Emergency Management Agency and the counties around TMI. We have better radiation monitoring today than we did back then, and training wasn’t up to speed for the operators. For example, in 1979 there were one or two simulators in the whole country and they were generic. After the accident, we built site-specific simulators at all the nuclear plants in the United States. Nothing’s 100% guaranteed, but we feel as close as we can to be able to insure that we can never have an accident like that again."
"I saw in the newspaper that Metropolitan Edison was hiring security officers at Three Mile Island. I’d never heard of Three Mile Island at all, I'd never heard of Metropolitan Edison company. It paid pretty well-- actually it was paying a lot more than teaching. So, because my dad was getting impatient with me—I came down here and interviewed and they offered me a job. I never had interest in security or anything, but I took this job in late January of 1979."
Story of an Exelon Rep:
Ralph DeSantis
"I knew something extraordinary happened, but it really didn’t hit me until that afternoon. On CBS, they cut in to the regular programming and Walter Cronkite did a special bulletin. The most trusted man in America says 'We have this accident, a nuclear plant in Middletown, Pennsylvania.' I was like 'I was just there!' It really hit me, then, how significant it was."