3 mile Island accident case studies

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Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station sits on an island of area of 3.29 km² (814 acres) in the Susquehanna River in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, near Harrisburg. On March 28, 1979, the Unit 2 nuclear power plant (a pressurized water reactor manufactured by Babcock & Wilcox) on Three Mile Island suffered a partial core meltdown. This was the worst accident in US commercial nuclear power generating history. The accident unfolded over the course of five tense days, as a number of agencies at local, state and federal level tried to diagnose the problem and decide whether or not the on-going accident required a full emergency evacuation of the population. The full details of the accident were not discovered until much later. In the end, the reactor was brought under control. Although approximately 25,000 people lived within five miles of the island at the time of the accident, no identifiable injuries due to radiation occurred, and a government report concluded that "the projected number of excess fatal cancers due to the accident... is approximately one". But the accident had serious economic and public relations consequences, and the cleanup process was slow and costly. It also furthered a major decline in the public popularity of nuclear power, exemplifying for many the worst fears about nuclear technology and, until the Chernobyl accident seven years later, it was considered the world's worst civilian nuclear accident. also use this link for more details: http://www.threemileisland.org/ http://www.tmia.com/tmisab.html J. Samuel Walker, Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), p. 231. a b ANS Public Information, available at http://www.ans.org/pi/matters/tmi/whathappened.html http://www.radiation.org/press/tmi1105.ht Three Mile Island shows US nuclear risks, rewards Jon Hurdle/Matthew Robinson http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060420/lf_nm/energy_nuclear_usa_dc_4