Bob CollinsThe terrible situation with Japan’s nuclear installations affords old-timers the opportunity to remember when it was a U.S. nuclear plant that was melting down.
It was 1979, when the Three Mile Island plant, on the Susquehanna River south of Harrisburg Pennsylvania, melted down partially. The U.S. wasn’t really sure how to react; we’d never heard of a nuke plant melting down before.
But it was a movie — The China Syndrome — that helped push us in an anti-nuke direction. It was released 12 days before TMI melted down:
In the middle of the film, a reference is made to the size of the area that would be affected if the fictional plant in the film melted down. “It would be the size of Pennsylvania,” it said. Whoops.
The movie — and TMI — helped kill the notion of new nuclear power plants in the U.S., even though the actual damage was relatively small.
History, it appears, is repeating itself. Germany today shut down all of its pre-1980 nuke plants while it reconsiders its nuclear strategy.
The design of Japan’s Fukushima Dachaii plant is the same one used by 16 power plants in the U.S., including the plant in Monticello, Minnesota.
Is the fear overblown? It doesn’t matter, a UK professor tells the BBC. “In a crisis the emotional takes hold and no matter how logical and compelling the rational arguments are, the emotional wins out,” he said.
