Nowhere to Run after TMI

In January 2012 I was interviewed on Corbett Report Radio by independent radio journalist James Corbett (see also his blog Fukushima Update). After the interview, I thought of dozens of ways I could have answered the questions better, and one such question that stuck with me, before this interview and afterward, is: Why do you stay in Japan? I have never felt that I have a satisfactory answer for myself or for others.

President Carter touring the TMI-2 control room, April Fools Day, 1979

This week I came across a series of radio documentaries on nuclear issues aired by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in the 1990s. In part 3 of this series (Counting the Costs – Chalk River to Chernobyl), there was an interview with Jane Lee, a farmer from Etters, Pennsylvania, who became active in various public-awareness groups following the accident at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Station on March 28, 1979. In this short interview (transcribed below), she gives the best answer I can think of to the “why I stay” question:

70% of the core has been compromised, and they are in a process now of grinding up the core to remove it from the reactor [a process which lasted until 1990], and as they do that, of course, they are constantly having emissions coming from the plant.The infant mortality rate in this area doubled. But what is even more alarming than that is the enormous increase in cancer deaths in children in the four counties surrounding Three Mile Island. Compared to the numbers previous to the accident that the health department listed even just on leukemia.

We have done an in-depth report on plant life where we are seeing many mutations… All the birds on the farm disappeared. It looked like winter. And not only did we see complete defoliation, we saw trees that were defoliated at different levels.

Interviewer: Why do you stay here?

I think that most people can understand when you talk about roots. You set down roots in a community. And you are part of that community. That’s one reason, but the main reason that we will not move is because we went to a map and we looked and there’s no place to run. There is no place to run. The United States right now is operating 101 nuclear power plants – that’s commercial plants. We’re also operating university reactors, we’re also operating military reactors, and then you have the processing plants, and the processing plants are the worst violators of all because they are dumping tons, and I say tons, of uranium dust into the atmosphere. So if you move from here – here you know what you’ve got – even if you’re living in danger – you know what’s here. We know what came out of the plant now, and so, why do we want to run some place and start the process all over?

50% of the people in this area left. They sold their properties and they went. And you know what happened? They’re just as close, or almost as close to a reactor as where they left here. So it’s futile to think that you’re going to escape this. You have to stand your ground. You have to do your research and you have to challenge your government and say you cannot continue to do this because you’re going to kill this planet.

This population [in the Three Mile Island area] is very passive and very conservative. Most of the people in this area don’t want to talk about it. They don’t want to read about it. They simply know, and they have a feeling of helplessness about their own government. Now, we’re not talking about Russia. We’re talking about the good old USA.

Whether Jane Lee's answer is sensible depends on the level of contamination one is living with. In heavily contaminated areas it would make no sense to stay, but for people who are in areas of lighter contamination, and for whom the initial blast of iodine 131 and xenon 135 (now decayed away) can't be undone, the decision is not so clear cut. Sometimes it makes more sense to take precautions with food, monitor the health of people around you, and, like she says, "stand your ground."

Further information about the work of Jane Lee appears in various reports about the Three Mile Island accident–-a word which the CBC report suggests should be replaced with something that means "an unfortunate event foreseeable because of previously known hazards."

In the article People Died at Three Mile Island, Harvey Wasserman describes how the TMI operator, and the Pennsylvania and US government downplayed the consequences of the accident and reneged on promises to carry out thorough health studies. He states, "… the most reliable studies were conducted by local residents like Jane Lee and Mary Osborne, who went door-to-door in neighborhoods where the fallout was thought to be worst. Their surveys showed very substantial plagues of cancer, leukemia, birth defects, respiratory problems, hair loss, rashes, lesions and much more."

Such research has been routinely dismissed with pejorative connotations by the word “anecdotal.” If hundreds of people in an area report the sudden onset of health problems after a nuclear accident, but the researcher is deemed to be just an unqualified farmer-activist (not participating in officially sanctioned research), the findings are treated contemptuously with such zingers as "the plural of anecdote is not data." Actually, the plural of anecdote in much academic research is data. If you describe your symptoms to a citizen mobilizing her own research project, you are telling anecdotes. If you describe your symptoms to an approved researcher, you’re giving data.

Wasserman also cites the work of Arnie Gundersen, a nuclear engineer who left the industry in order to pursue anti-nuclear work. He quotes Gundersen as saying, "When I correctly interpreted the containment pressure spike and the doses measured in the environment after the TMI accident, I proved that TMI's releases were about one hundred times higher than the industry and the NRC claim, in part because the containment leaked. This new data supports the epidemiology of Dr. Steve Wing and proves that there really were injuries from the accident.” Dr. Wing’s findings have been rejected by many because they were inconsistent with what was believed to be the possible effects of the known releases from TMI. This inconsistency disappears if Gundersen is correct that the releases were a hundred times higher than previously thought.

Self-Important Swine Ass

Saturday Night Live, May 14, 1979 (season 4, episode 19)

Dan Akroyd and Jane Curtin debate the merits of nuclear energy in their famous satirical news program, Point/Counter-Point

The photo is from an episode of Saturday Night Live that aired in 1979. Jane Curtin and Dan Aykroyd did one of their famous Point/Counterpoint debates, which were a parody of the three-minute debates between James Kilpatrick and Shana Alexander that appeared on CBS' 60 Minutes program in the 1970s.

In this installment they debate the pros and cons of nuclear energy, at a time when the Three Mile Island accident and the plutonium poisoning of Karen Silkwood were in the headlines. As horrible as those events were, it now seems like a more innocent time, before the world knew of places called Chernobyl and Fukushima.

Plus ca change.... 34 years have passed and still no one has figured out what to do with nuclear waste--what Jane Curtin referred to as "... one pile you just can't flush down the toilet, Dan." It is remarkable to see how little the issues and the nature of the debate have changed. Both debaters hit on the same issues that have not been resolved to this day, and each paints the opposing side in the familiar demonizing strokes.

This video appears on YouTube occasionally, but NBC is very efficient about getting it pulled off. Readers who are familiar with the 70s version of SNL can recall the actors delivery as they read the transcript below.

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Hello, I’m Dan Akroyd, station manager for Weekend Update. Yesterday a federal jury awarded 10.5 million dollars to the estate of Karen Silkwood, a 28-year-old laboratory technician contaminated by radiation in 1974 while employed at a Kerr-McGee Corporation plutonium plant. The verdict could have an impact on the future of the nuclear power industry, already clouded by the Three Mile Island incident. This will be the subject of tonight’s Point/Counter-Point. Jane will take the anti-nuclear point. I will take the pro-nuclear counter-point.

CON

Dan, you self-important swine ass. There’s no future for nuclear energy because Three Mile Island taught everybody what some of us already knew: that nuclear power plants are time bombs ready to melt down, and even if nuclear power plants were safe, which they aren’t, there’s still the potentially more dangerous nuclear waste problem. But you don’t care about waste, Dan, you’re content to wallow in the short-term profits the corporate pigs reap for themselves. But unlike real pigs, the corporate animals haven’t learned that you don’t excrete where you eat. Their radioactive excrement will be with us for 250,000 years. That’s one pile you just can’t flush down the toilet, Dan.

PRO

Jane, you magnificently ignorant slut. Aren’t the gas lines in California proof enough that the energy crisis is for real? Nuclear energy provides 12% of our nation’s electricity, and who’d be the first to complain when the electricity goes out, Jane? You and your horde of promiscuous anti-nuclear harpies. I can just see you now sitting alone in your darkened apartment staring forlornly at your now useless vibrator. You’ll be humming a different tune then, Jane. But let’s talk about risks for a minute, Jane. Sure, nuclear power has risks, even though there has yet to be an industry-related fatality. But even so, this is not a risk-free society. Where is your liberal compassion when coal-miners die in the mines? And how about the 50,000 a year killed on our nation’s highways. You undergo a bigger risk of cancer taking one of your birth control pills, Jane, than you would living next door to an atomic plant, and all for the convenience of hopping indiscriminately from bed to bed with your fellow no nuke-niks. As for the waste problem, Jane, I, for one, have confidence in good old American technology. You just don’t understand the scientific mind. Let us thank God almighty that this country has dedicated sober scientists solving our problems through the long nights, while ignorant sluts like yourself writhe in coitus at anti-nuclear toga parties.