Three Mile Island Interviews
angry guy
The anger on his face is real. Mr. Smith truly believes that nuclear power is shit. He says so explicitly. He grew up in the backyard of Three Mile Island, and he hasn’t appreciated the teasing and mocking he got from his Californian college friends about the film Deer Hunter, let alone this. It is likely that this is a factor in his passionate anger at the corruption and incompetence that he believes surrounded the accident, and may in fact still be in play. He believes that the days of TMI are numbered, that when their backyard radioactive waste ponds are filled up, they’ll be forced to halt production. The new reactors planned to open are just symbols, they wont ever actually be built. Nuclear is not Eco-friendly if you consider that the waste will exist forever. Yet, he doesn’t believe the reactor is unsafe.
Perhaps it is because for all the media attention at the time, there were no known lasting effects. Perhaps it is because it is the worst known nuclear incident in American history, and when was all said and done, not much really happened. Or maybe, like Grandma Nazareth, he knows that of all the reactors, in all the world, TMI is the one “they” (the power company, the NRC, the government) won’t let meltdown again.
This is quite strange, because Mr. Smith seems to have dedicated his life to a NGO focused on watching over nuclear power plants. Perhaps all his confidence in nuclear is a show of his arrogance for what a great watchdog he is. Or maybe it’s a sinister attempt to bring about the end of nuclear power by any means necessary, because he does hate it. Or maybe for all his confidence that nothing ever could, would go wrong, he wouldn’t be able to live with himself knowing that he didn’t do everything he could to stop it. It’s a shame, this is a question I should’ve asked, but he was so bent on lecturing ideology to our young impressionable minds that we barely got a word in edgewise.
Grandma Nazareth
The passion with which Grandma Nazareth recalls her experience is haunting. She clutches her hand to her chest, she looks pleadingly into our eyes, this larger than life woman towers over us extolling the fear she felt upon hearing the news that an evacuation was recommended for young children. She was babysitting several children, and she called their parents to tell them that if they didn’t pick up their child in 2 hours, she was taking them with her to her mothers house in the country. Fortunately it didn’t come to that, as they were all picked up. She recalls the fear she felt when her son threw up bright green, and the certainty with which a Japanese doctor confirmed it to be radiation sickness. Yet she feels safe.
Grandma Nazareth virtually lives in the shadow of the two towering, iconic cooling towers of Three Mile Island. Any radiation that was expelled during the 1979 accident surely affected her and her flock, especially since the recommended evacuation came two days after the fact, much to her upset. Much like the residents of Tomioka, she expresses serious mistrust of the government, of the power companies, and even the doctors who find nothing wrong with her son. Nearly forty years later, temperatures have cooled. She is certain that nothing will ever happen again at TMI, after what has already happened. She concedes that the company made a small one time payout as compensation for evacuation. Though she blames everyone involved at the time, she certainly doesn’t believe that they are still corrupt and incompetent. After all, TMI was a long time ago. She even goes so far as to say that the NRC has learned a lot.
Go on to read about how people were affected by the Fukushima disaster here, or click here to see a timeline of events in the TMI accident.