The 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown in central Pennsylvania was and remains the worst such accident in the United States, but, as a new documentary shows, it could have been much worse.
In Netflix’s four-part docuseries “Meltdown: Three Mile Island,” which premiered Wednesday, May 4, Rick Parks, a former lead engineer at the facility, reveals how the cover-ups, the falsifications of security tests, and the outright Dangerous corner cutting caused the terrifying nuclear event and could potentially have triggered a second, larger one that would have affected a large part of the East Coast.
What Parks found risked the United States being “on the brink of an apocalypse” capable of triggering “a collapse that could wipe out Philadelphia, New York City and Washington, DC,” says Tom Devine of the watchdog group Government Accountability Project, in the document. .
catastrophic cleanup
The partial collapse, caused by a valve malfunction, occurred on March 28, 1979 and was rated a level five out of seven on the International Nuclear Event Scale as an “accident with wider consequences.”
But from the start, plant operators and government officials tried to downplay the disaster, downplaying the severity of the accident and refusing to order an evacuation from the region.
For Parks, a former Marine and a longtime believer in nuclear power, the accident immediately put the future of the industry “in doubt,” he says in the documentary. But things got even more harrowing when he watched the cleanup effort unfold, which was being led by industry powerhouse Bechtel Corp.
“There was a push on the political side and on the industry side to push the cleanup faster…they would take every possible shortcut,” Parks says on screen.
Most troubling was that higher-ups wanted to use a pole crane, a device used to lift heavy and hazardous materials, to remove roughly 1,000 pounds of nuclear debris from the failed reactor core. To Parks, this idea sounded terrifying, as the crane had been present on Three Mile Island at the time of the collapse and was likely severely damaged.
Using it, Parks thought, could inadvertently cause a Chernobyl-like collapse.
“Yes [the crane] broke, we wouldn’t be able to keep the core covered. We would never get the entrance to that reactor building back in any of our lifetimes because the levels of radiation escaping would be horrendous. It would be evacuating eastern Pennsylvania to Washington, DC,” Parks says in the document, adding that 2 million people lived within a 50-mile radius of the facility at the time.
“We had the potential to kill them. Period.”
Although Parks and his colleague Larry King raised their concerns with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, pointing out all the dangers they found and pleading for a safety review, the government agency sided with Bechtel.
“I was pleased that that crane was safe enough,” says Lake Barrett, the NRC’s director of cleanup for the island, explaining that competition over cleanup plans sparked “drama and soap operas.”
King then became suspicious of the NRC and its loyalties to Bechtel, saying in the document that “having the NRC guard nuclear plants is like having a fox guard the chicken coop.” He refused to authorize the use of the crane and was fired soon after, according to Parks, who then “knew [his] the days were numbered” too.
Parks was right. Before leaving for work one morning, Parks says he noticed a bag of marijuana planted inside his car. After disposing of it at his home, he claimed he was first randomly searched upon arriving at work that day.
“That is the way organizations react to whistleblowers; they are a threat and must be destroyed,” says Devine.
harassed whistleblower
That inspired Parks to approach the Government Accountability Project in early 1983. Initially, he was too scared to identify himself, or even mention the facility by name, but gathered courage as the plan to use the crane drew closer. Parks and his closest colleagues drafted an affidavit of his findings.
In March of that year, just after writing the affidavit, Parks and her children came home to find their apartment had been broken into. He says that nothing was out of place, except that a cupboard seemed to be knocked over, which was where he normally kept all of his papers.
“It was clear that the only thing they were interested in was the documentation,” says Park, adding that the documents in question were not taken because they were stored elsewhere in his house. But, “That scared me beyond reason for the lives of my family after my apartment was broken into. I took it as a message that ‘Your children are vulnerable and we will help you overcome them.’”
He adds: “And that made me an enemy for life, because you don’t threaten my children… I knew they were thirsty for blood and they weren’t going to stop.”
Anger galvanized Parks, and later that month, he held a televised news conference detailing his knowledge of faulty practices at the plant. Meanwhile, a GAP member submitted his affidavit to the NRC, just hours before the tow truck was scheduled to be used.
“I had no choice [to go public]”, says Park on the screen. “If that crane were to fall over and cost someone their life or result in uncontrolled exposure to the general public, I would never be able to look at myself in the mirror again.”
This time, perhaps due to public pressure, the NRC sided with Parks and a congressional investigation into TMI was ordered. “The number of irregularities and misconduct that surfaced during the hearing process was extraordinary,” says Joanne Doroshow, senior attorney for the advocacy group TMI Alert, in the documentary.
It was discovered that prior to the opening of the facility, security data had been falsified and documents destroyed. Furthermore, system failures and cover-ups in the immediate aftermath of the 1979 crash had left TMI only minutes away from an even worse crisis.
That day, control room crews released hydrogen gas into the containment area, which “meant the core was melting and there could be a significant amount of radiation released,” the document says.
It made the decision not to evacuate the community even more devastating, he explains.
“The danger was potentially lethal amounts of radiation on the first day, while children were going to school, while people were tending their farms,” says Doroshow. “These people’s lives were in danger and no one told them… this was a serious crisis within minutes of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, the entire central Pennsylvania area was permanently contaminated by radiation.”
Eventually, in 1985, the crane was finally used for cleanup, with better controls thanks to Parks, but it still “froze” on multiple occasions, says Devine.
Parks’ actions soon after cost him his job at the facility, he says, but Barrett, who requested a reassignment out of TMI after the proceedings, says otherwise.
“I had never heard of this, that it was left without the industry or anything like that,” he says in the documentary.
That same year, TMI was authorized to reopen an unaffected plant under the same company. The island closed permanently in 2019.
“What the industry learned from this is that you can lie, cheat, falsify documents, intimidate and harass workers, be convicted of a crime, and you can get a license to operate a nuclear reactor,” says Doroshow.
Reference-nypost.com