Three Mile Island

Summary

Podcast Summary: Stuff You Should Know – "Three Mile Island"

Episode Date: June 4, 2026 — Hosts: Josh Clark & Chuck Bryant

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Episode Overview

Josh and Chuck tackle the story, significance, and aftermath of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident — the worst nuclear disaster in U.S. history — exploring exactly how it happened, what went wrong, the impact on local communities, and its far-reaching effects on nuclear energy policy. The hosts break down the dense technicalities and human factors with their usual mix of informed curiosity and conversational wit.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Setting the Stage

• Date & Context
  • The incident occurred on March 28, 1979, when Chuck was just 8 years old.
  • Twelve days before the disaster, the film The China Syndrome (about a fictional nuclear meltdown) was released, eerily mirroring events at Three Mile Island.
  • [03:28] "Really interestingly, just 12 days before this accident happened at Three Mile Island, a movie called the China Syndrome came out. ... It was essentially what happened. What happened in the movie China syndrome happened at Three Mile Island 12 days later. It's really bizarre." — Josh

2. What Happened — The Mechanical Error and Human Failures

• Initial Malfunction

  • The triggering event happened at 4am due to a malfunction in the secondary cooling system, possibly mechanical or electrical. The water pump failed, critically disrupting cooling to the reactor core.
  • Water is crucial in keeping a reactor core safe by absorbing heat.
  • [07:22] "Once it starts heating, it's really tough to get it cooled down again." — Josh

• Sequence of Errors

  • The control system did shut down the reactor automatically, but problems snowballed after this point due to operator misinterpretation and faulty instrumentation.
  • A key relief valve designed to release pressure became stuck open, but the control room indicators didn’t show this, misleading operators.
  • Operators shut off emergency cooling pumps, thinking the system was overfilled, but in truth, the core was being exposed — a catastrophic error.
  • [09:09] "The pressure's lower...water will boil at a lower temperature. ... They were like, oh, the temperature in the reactor is really going up. But they all generally agreed that it was just wrong." — Josh

3. Escalating Stakes & Communication Breakdown

• Recognition and Response Delays

  • It took two hours for operators to realize the relief valve was stuck. By then, 100,000 liters of radioactive water had leaked.
  • Notification of authorities was hampered by 1970s-era communication (missed calls, answering services).
  • [14:55] "It finally...takes nearly 40 minutes to even finally make contact with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. ... every second matters." — Chuck

• Public (and Official) Confusion

  • The power company initially downplayed the crisis, and authorities delayed evacuation orders, causing fear and rumors to spiral locally and nationally.
  • [15:31] "They were just lying their faces off. They just said whatever they thought, what people wanted to hear..." — Josh

4. Hydrogen Bubble: Secondary Disaster Risk

• An unexpected reaction in the superheated reactor created a hydrogen gas bubble — a potential explosion risk akin to the Hindenburg disaster.
• Teams managed to gradually vent and shrink the bubble, but in doing so released radioactive gases into the environment.
• President Jimmy Carter, a trained nuclear engineer, personally toured the site to calm the public, although the full risk was not known at the time.
• [23:20] "On April 1, Jimmy Carter...was like, you know what? I'm going to come there. ... That will reassure the public it's fine." — Josh

5. Investigation and Aftermath

• Regulatory & Training Failures
  • Both the NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) and energy company (Met Ed) were found drastically unprepared; operator training met requirements, but requirements were too basic.
  • [26:36] "Training requirements weren't good enough and...operating procedures were confusing during an emergency." — Chuck
  • The system's complexity, poor design, instrumentation failures, and unclear procedure indicators all played major roles.
  • [29:55] "The control room didn't have any direct measurements of the water." — Chuck

6. Radiation Release and Health Effects

• Conflicting Studies & Public Distrust
  • Official studies from EPA, NRC, and others have consistently concluded the radiation release was minor (comparable to a chest X-ray).
  • Some independent studies and local reports suggest possible health impacts, like increased infant deaths or cancer rates, but these have not been definitively linked to the accident.
  • [32:32] "Almost everybody agrees that there was not enough of a radioactive release to actually affect human health or the environment. ... I can barely get it out. But I think they might be right." — Josh
  • Emotional toll and distrust remain among many local residents.
  • [34:39] "If you believe that your mom or dad or kid died of cancer because of this nuclear accident...and everybody's telling you like, 'no, it's fine, you're hysterical,' I can't imagine not being deeply bitter about that." — Josh

7. Clean-Up and Long-Term Impacts

• Cleanup Lasted Decades

  • TMI2 never reopened; cleanup began immediately but continued into the 1990s and even today.
  • The containment vessel’s integrity was a matter of luck; had it failed, catastrophe could have ensued.
  • [37:23] "The nuclear fuel, the uranium...molten uranium had melted down into the bottom of what's called the vessel...just by sheer luck it, it did [not leak], but it definitely could have." — Josh

• Broader Consequences for Nuclear Energy

  • Public faith in nuclear power was devastated. Over 50 nuclear plant projects were canceled in the U.S. alone after the accident; global repercussions followed.
  • [46:13] "There were 51 planned nuclear reactors that were canceled in the United States alone. ... the reason...nuclear energy is not widespread...is because of Three Mile Island. Almost 100%." — Josh

8. Cultural Response and Notable Moments

• Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden protested at Three Mile Island; Bruce Springsteen’s legendary “No Nukes” concert was inspired by the disaster.
• [40:55] "Silver linings — it led to one of the great concerts of all time. The Bruce Springsteen no Nukes concert at Madison Square Garden in 1979..." — Chuck

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On regulatory optimism:

  • [04:59] "The atomic energy industry...all of them had nothing but Pollyanna-ish optimistic views of all of the amazing things that nuclear power could do and how safe it was. Like they were deluded as a group about the safety of nuclear power." — Josh

• On the system's complexity & design flaws:

  • [28:06] "Charles Perrot...calls this a normal accident, which is basically an accident that is essentially inevitable because it's accidentally designed into the complex system." — Josh

• On the Homer Simpson effect:

  • [28:45] "There was an operator there that had a large belly...blocking the view of some of the panel indicators. ... Because of Homer Simpson standing there in the way." — Chuck

• On President Carter’s personal risk:

  • [23:44] "[Carter] was like, you know what? I'm going to come there. I'm going to be shown touring the plant. ... But at the time, it was not a certainty that the hydrogen bubble wasn't going to blow up while the president was there." — Josh

• On the complexity and randomness of catastrophe:

  • [31:00] "That's just nuts...the sequence of events...just so intertwined with all these different weird things." — Josh

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Important Timestamps

• [03:03] — Is Three Mile Island the worst nuclear disaster in the U.S.?
• [04:24] — The “China Syndrome” and playground misunderstanding of digging to China
• [06:48] — The first technical malfunction; importance of water in reactor safety
• [09:09] — Misinterpretation of control panels and falsified data
• [11:41] — Operators mistakenly turn off emergency pumps, exposing the reactor core
• [14:55] — Delays in reaching the NRC due to outdated communications
• [16:18] — Evacuation decisions and public panic
• [21:27] — The hydrogen bubble threat and risk of explosion
• [23:20] — President Carter’s visit and symbolic reassurance
• [26:36] — Training failures and control room blindness
• [32:32] — Radiation exposure—official and independent assessments
• [35:27] — Cooldown achieved, but TMI2 is shut down forever
• [37:23] — The vessel’s integrity and lucky avoidance of even greater disaster
• [46:13] — Impact on nuclear power: 51 projects canceled post-TMI

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Conclusion

In this detailed, engaging episode, Josh and Chuck unpack the Three Mile Island incident as a tangle of mechanical failures, regulatory shortcomings, and human error — a disaster that could have been much, much worse but still profoundly shaped America’s relationship with nuclear energy. They highlight the lingering issues of public trust, the ambiguity in assessing long-term health impacts, and the immense downstream societal, political, and cultural effects of those few tense days in March 1979.

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“Could have been really bad, but it's not as bad as people fear.” — Josh Clark [44:54]

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For listeners, this episode offers an accessible yet comprehensive account of an event that continues to resonate in debates about technology, safety, and policy. The hosts’ tone stays respectful, curious, and wry throughout — classic Stuff You Should Know.

Transcript

[Chuck Bryant]

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Hey, guys, it's us, the Jonas Brothers.

[Josh Clark]

I'm Joe.

[Chuck Bryant]

I'm Kevin. And I'm Nick. And guess what? We created our own podcast called hey Jonas. We invented a podcast. Well, we didn't invent it. We. We just contributed to it. The first people to do podcasts, we get to ask other people questions because we're sick and tired of being asked questions. Well, sick and tired is a strong way to put it, but, you know, tired and sick. Tired and sick. Listen to hey Jonas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Just listen. We don't care where you hear it.

[Josh Clark]

Hey, everyone.

[Chuck Bryant]

This is Teddi Mellencamp and Tamara Judge from Two T's and a Pod.

[Josh Clark]

There's been one scandal that's consumed our lives these last couple of months. We're recapping the three part summer house

[Chuck Bryant]

reunion, and as always, we're being brutally honest.

[Josh Clark]

We're dissecting timelines, receipts, lined items and previous episodes.

[Chuck Bryant]

Amanda and Wes, watch out. We're not gonna be easy on you. Listen to two T's in a pod on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your pod. This week at safeway.

[Josh Clark]

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[Josh Clark]

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. And there's Chuck. And Jerry's here too. And this is stuff you should know. The Whoops edition.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. You know, it's not a whoops though.

[Josh Clark]

I can guess where this is going.

[Chuck Bryant]

Stuff at Sea voyage.

[Josh Clark]

That's right. It's the most deliberate voyage ever created.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's completely unaccidental.

[Josh Clark]

That's right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Five night adults only sailing trip, it says. And we're going to be doing our live podcast from New York City to Bermuda. Not the whole way, just like one time, Right?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. There's going to be other stuff too. We're going to be meeting and greeting. And I'm guessing there'll be other opportunities to hang out with us maybe, rather than just the one meet and greet.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, for sure. This all goes down October 2nd through 7th of this year aboard the Valiant Lady. And you can go check everything [e-mail] stuff.

[Josh Clark]

Very nice, Chuck. Let's see. So you want to start talking about Three Mile Island?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. The nuclear. I guess it's still the worst nuclear disaster in American history, right?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. I can't think of anything worse. I mean, as far as actual disasters go, it wasn't that bad. But how close it came to being, like, Chernobyl level is kind of breathtaking, actually.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, for sure. And this all went down when I had just turned 8 years old on March 28, 1979.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And really interestingly, just 12 days before this accident happened at Three Mile Island, a movie called the China Syndrome came out.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Starring Michael Douglas.

[Chuck Bryant]

Crazy timing.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And Jane Fonda, which makes it even weirder, because the China Syndrome, if you've never seen it, it's a pretty good movie, I would say. Go watch. Was basically this. It was essentially what happened. What happened in the movie China syndrome happened at Three Mile Island 12 days later. It's really bizarre.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And the term China Syndrome comes from. I don't know if it's a term they still use, but I guess it was a term back then for reactor melting down and melting all the way through to China.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Pretty folksy term for something as horrific as that.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Because, you know, when you grew up in the 70s, everyone knows if you dig deep enough, you'll reach China.

[Josh Clark]

Sure, I tried a couple of times and gave up after a few hours.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, that was on the playground at least. But, yeah, this happened 3-28-79. When you said it wasn't as bad as it could have been. You're dead right. Because that means there were no casualties and they did avert that complete and total meltdown. But there's a lot of sort of, I guess, skepticism still, that, like, hey, it was fine. There was the air spine, and everything around there is just fine, and nobody ever got sick because of this.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And one reason that it does pay to be skeptical of that, and you can't really blame people who are, especially people who live in the area, like in Middletown, Pennsylvania, is that at the time, the atomic energy industry, including the businesses that ran the place, the businesses that built these places, the agencies that regulated it, all of them had nothing but Pollyanna ish optimistic views. Of all of the amazing things that nuclear power could do and how safe it was. Like they were deluded as a group about the safety of. Of nuclear power. And even throughout this whole accident as it was unfolding, they were just like, that's not that bad. Oh, it's a little worse than we thought, but it's still not that bad. And it just kept going and going like that. Every time something new came out, they were like, oh, it's a little worse than we thought. Finally, in the mid-80s, they were like, okay, this was really bad. It took that long for them to admit it because they were just that optimistic about it. They couldn't believe that this could happen.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, for sure. And as we'll see, it was a combination of human error and poor instrumentation and redundancies that didn't work and stuff that. I mean, it's crazy. Like some of the stuff I was almost ready to read, like, well, this thing just wasn't labeled correctly and that never happened. But it was getting a little absurd at some point when you were looking at all the sort of things that happened that led to this.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, totally agreed. Yeah, I think that was a consequence of that over optimistic view too.

[Chuck Bryant]

So should we start as Night Ranger did at 4 in the morning without a warning?

[Josh Clark]

Is that Sister Christian? That's the only Night Ranger song I know.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, it's the song. They have a song called Four in the Morning.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, that makes sense.

[Chuck Bryant]

Four in the morning came without a warning. That's all I remember.

[Josh Clark]

Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

But that's what happened. There was a small malfunction in the secondary cooling system and there was a mechanical. They still don't know if it was a mechanical or an electrical error. And the long and short of it was the water pump started sending water to the steam generators. And as you know from listening, I mean, we've done episodes on nuclear energy and on the one, the meltdown in Japan, Fukushima, like water and keeping that reactor core cool is the whole key to keeping things safe.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, exactly. Because once it starts heating, it's really tough to get it cooled down again. And all sorts of bad things happen when it overheats. And I think by the time they had shut the system down, by the time they finally intervened, it was at 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit. It's a thousand degrees short of a total meltdown. And just to kind of go into a little more detail of exactly what happened, because you basically kind of got the point across, there was a fault in, I think a mechanical or electrical part that kept the water that you needed to cool all that stuff from flowing in. That was the thing that kicked it all off. But this nuclear reactor, the control panel was designed to sense like when it started to overheat and it did overheat because there wasn't enough coolant and it shut itself down and everything from with that was working properly, the control rods went in, nobody had to do anything. The system shut itself down because it was overheating.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right. So so far so good in a certain sense. But things really kind of went pear shaped after this. As you used to say a lot. You don't say that much anymore. I miss pear shaped.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, I'll try to bring it back then.

[Chuck Bryant]

I'm bringing it back. So they had to lower the pressure in the system. So a pilot operated relief valve opened and that's great. This thing should have stayed open for about 10 seconds or so just to let a little pressure out. And it was designed to close automatically when it returned to normal. It did not close automatically. It got stuck. But they didn't know that it got stuck. That was the big problem up front.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And that caused another problem. So first of all, remember, it's overheated because there's not enough water. Now the pressure's lower in the whole reactor and lower pressure means that water will boil at a lower temperature. So the water is boiling more and more. So you're losing more and more and it's creating more and more steam that's also raising the temperature. That's another thing that the operators should have noticed. Right. Or they did notice. They were like, oh, the temperature in the reactor is really going up. But they all generally agreed that it was just wrong. There had been problems with that pilot operated relief valve for apparently weeks. And rather than fix it, they were just falsifying the information and dealing with it, like just living with the problem.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And we should point out that there were two nuclear reactors there. TMI. Not too much information.

[Josh Clark]

Nope.

[Chuck Bryant]

Three Mile Island 1 and Three Mile Island 2, they built these things in 1968 and TMI 1 opened in 74 and TMI 2 in 78. And TMI 2, the one that had the issue here, had only been open for three months, I think. Yeah, just about three months when this accident occurred. So it wasn't even online that long. And so it must have had that leak kind of from the get go, it sounds like.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I think you're right because yeah, it must not have ever worked properly and they just didn't really know it or Care.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, they already cut the ribbon with those giant scissors.

[Josh Clark]

Too late.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

So the system again is like, guys, I'm going to run another security safety thing. I'm going to. I've noticed that things are really starting to go pear shaped in the reactor and I'm going to start sending in emergency coolant. So the system opened up its own valves to let in emergency water flowing into the reactor, try to cool things down. That actually helped make things worse to an extent where like water kept like bubbling and boiling and it was now spilling out of the open relief valve out of the reactor, which is not good, but it still would have helped keep things cool sooner. The problem is the operators again were like, that shouldn't be happening. The pressure seems fine in here and now there's water flowing in. We got to turn off these emergency pumps. And they did. They turned off the emergency pumps. And that was the final straw. The system was like, I'm not helping anymore. You guys are on your own.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. So the water level is dropping, which is very key to keeping that thing stable and cool. And it actually exposed the reactor's core, the top of that thing. And once the core is exposed, that's very, very bad news. That happened. I think everything started at 4am, night ranger time. And then at 6am, this is two hours later, an operator finally was like, wait a minute. That release valve that was supposed to close automatically looks like that thing didn't close. So he ordered it to be closed off, but 100,000 liters of coolant had already leaked out of the system at this point.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, highly, highly radioactive water just spilling out. And eventually it was pumped out of the reactor containment building into other buildings so that they were flooded with contaminated water. It was quite a mess. So these guys have now figured out the main issue. They've closed the relief valve. Now they can put more coolant in. And they started to do that. But you said that the top of the reactor core is exposed. That is never supposed to happen. The core should never be exposed above water. And because it had been now pumping coolant in was not necessarily doing the trick. It certainly wasn't doing it fast enough. And they realized about 40 minutes after they figured out that what the problem was that the core was really screwed up. Because remember all this time for those two hours, Chuck, they were just like, ho hum, everything's fine. They thought their instruments were messed up or that everything was working correctly. And finally between 6:00am and 6:40 they're like, this is really, really, really bad. And five minutes after they figured that out, radiation alarms started ringing around the plant, which if they didn't know it was bad before, those alarms certainly confirmed it.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And then about 11 minutes later, and this is almost 7 o', clock, this is almost three hours later, they finally declared a site emergency. Right after that happened, you know, they tried to. And you know, partially part of the problem here was due to it being in the 1970s and you can't get ahold of someone via cell phone like in a moment's notice. That's where this kind of comes into play. They tried to get in touch with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission kind of immediately they called. The office wasn't open yet. And so they had what, you know, these things still exist. But what used to have a lot more back in the day is like an answering service. Like humans had answered the phone and forward the call or call up the doctor or whoever they need to call and say, hey, I got, I think what's probably a concerning message that you probably need to get right away. So they tried to do that. They tried to call the regional duty officer at home, but they were like, no, he already left for work. And so this guy's in his car now. Dun da dum da dum. Listen to the radio on his way to work.

[Josh Clark]

He's listening to beautiful music on the AM dial.

[Chuck Bryant]

He probably is. And the long and short of it is it finally, like, I think it takes nearly 40 minutes to even finally make contact with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And like time is, is crucial at this point. Like every, every second matters.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And the reason why they really needed to get in touch with the NRC is because they didn't know what to do. They weren't really trained for a situation like this. The NRC was the body that had this, this information they needed to figure out how to handle this. So very quickly, word starts to spread, hits D.C. the local journalists start showing up. Eventually national journalists started showing up. And by 9am everybody knows that there's a big, big problem at Three Mile Island. The problem was no one knew how bad it was.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Because on the one hand, the first people to start addressing things was Metropolitan Ed Edison, the power company that ran and I believe owned Three Mile island, both TM1 and 2. And they were just lying their faces off. They just said whatever they thought, what people wanted to hear, and they would even do it in private, like the, the Governor, Dick Thornberg, and the Lieutenant Governor, William Scranton. They were just lying to them about how, like not. How not a big Deal this was for from the outset. So they proved that they were just untrustworthy from the outset, and they got quickly pushed aside as far as the people who were really trying to handle this problem went. They were like, you go stand over there. We'll deal with you later, for sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

On the 28th, they briefly considered evacuating the area. This is FEMA. They're on the scene now, but they said no. And then the governor, like you were saying, Governor Thornburg, he declined to evacuate again on March 29th because they're getting reports that there was no radiation that had escaped and everything was, like, completely contained. Finally, on March 30, the governor got a report that said, all right, well, some radioactive gas has escaped the reactor. So he said, he makes an announcement like, all right, all pregnant women and preschool children need to evacuate and, like, get out of the area. And that caused a pretty big panic.

[Josh Clark]

It did. I think 140,000 people left. Did you see the American Experience, the PBS documentary on this? It's called Meltdown at Three Mile Island. So a lot of people were panicking and leaving, but there were also a lot of people around there, like, they can take my house out of my cold, dead hands. I'm not leaving.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, that always happens, right? Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

So there were people that stayed, but a lot of people left because they were scared to death. No one knew exactly how bad this was. And so I think a lot of rumor and unsubstantiated stuff was really spreading very quickly. At the same time, there was no one who really knew how bad it was that could say, that's not true. That's not true. I can unequivocally say this is how bad it is. So you really couldn't say, like, don't worry. It was. We don't think you should worry. We hope you don't have to worry. But there was nothing that they could really reassure the public with at this point.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, for sure. All right, that feels like a great time for a break, if you agree.

[Josh Clark]

I agree.

[Chuck Bryant]

So they are trying to get this thing cooled down, and then very quickly, another problem would pop up. And we're going to address that right after this. Number one hits, millions of records sold, awards, sold out tours. You think the Jonas Brothers are satisfied? Nope. It's podcast time. We get to ask other people questions because we're sick and tired of being asked questions. Hey, Jonas is available now, and their first guest is a big one, Paul Rudd. You know, Steve Carell is a great singer. Let me tell you, not to audition at the office or something.

[Josh Clark]

I told him, whoa, we were filming Anchorman. Clearly I was the idiot. Thank God he didn't listen to me right?

[Chuck Bryant]

Listen to hey Jonas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Happy Pride from the Outspoken Podcast Network. All month long and all year round, we're celebrating being loud, proud, and always original. It's me, Brandon Kyle Goodman, host of the podcast Tell Me Something Messy. Check out my show for unfiltered takes on dating, relationships and and adulting. The more you get comfortable with someone,

[Josh Clark]

the more their real self comes out. They're gonna be gross.

[Chuck Bryant]

What's the grossest thing about a man burping?

[Josh Clark]

Shut it down.

[Chuck Bryant]

Listen to High Key for the best pop culture takes. And there are no girls on the Internet. For all your tech news. For your favorite celebrity, Kiki's, check out outlaws with T.S. madison. Wait, so Luke was the star of and Bader was turned by RuPaul?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, well, somebody turned him some old, old, old witch.

[Chuck Bryant]

Learn to love yourself unapologetically with BFF Black Fat Femme and start your day with intention with Waking up with Ryan Coming in July. Celebrate Pride with the Outspoken Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Open your free iHeartRadio app. Search Pride and listen now. Every story has a point where it's balanced on a knife's edge. That's where we begin. For some, it's a confrontation no parent ever expects. They finally admit, we're here to take your children. The department has taken custody and we're here to take your kids. It was just shock and horror and desperation. For others, it's surviving the unthinkable as

[Josh Clark]

they're having this gun battle thousands of

[Chuck Bryant]

feet up in the air, many of

[Josh Clark]

the bullets start to puncture the aircraft.

[Chuck Bryant]

I thought we were going to die then. The Knife is a podcast about real people whose lives were upended in an instant. We talked to the people who lived it, unpacking what happened, how they got through it, and what came next. And on our off record episodes, we go even deeper into the reporting and answer the questions you can't stop thinking about. New episodes drop every Thursday on the Exactly Right Network and the iHeart Podcast Network. Listen to the Knife on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Stop.

[Josh Clark]

You, you, you know. Stop, stop. You should know. Know. Stop. You, you, you know. Stop, stop. You should know. Stuff you should know. Okay, Chuck, so where we Last left off Three Mile Island. TMI2 reactor had reached a different shape of a certain kind of fruit. Things were going badly, in other words. Right?

[Chuck Bryant]

Not, yes, it's bad, but I'm just glad you're saying it again.

[Josh Clark]

So it went. It went from bad to worse, actually. They're like. They wouldn't call it a meltdown. It took years before they officially started calling this a meltdown. It was an accident. It was a problem, an issue, that kind of thing. But on top of that, the reactor having huge problems. They now realized that there was a hydrogen gas bubble that during this 2, 3 hours of the accident, had developed because it got so hot that the zirconium tubes that held the fuel pellets, it reacted with the steam that was being generated, and it actually tore the water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen, and the hydrogen just started to build up. Well, obviously, if you listen to our Hindenburg episode, you know that a big bunch of hydrogen gas in one place is very, very dangerous, especially when it's in the middle of a nuclear reactor.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. So all of a sudden, there's this more concerning problem. They're like, if this thing explodes, you know, if this gas bubble explodes, it might rupture the actual building that this thing is housed in, and we're in real trouble if that happens. So from. I think, well, we should say that the World Nuclear association, they say that that never would have been possible. But of course, they don't know this at the time, and who knows if it was possible or not. But from March 30, just a couple of days later, through April 1, they managed to decrease the size of that bubble by venting that thing out and basically kind of slowly just reducing the size of the bubble. But this is also. If you're venting a melting down, I guess they don't. What'd you say? They didn't call it a meltdown. It's having a tantrum, I guess. You're releasing that stuff in, like, more radiation into the environment by doing so.

[Josh Clark]

Right. But they really had no choice. Essentially, it was either that or let the thing blow up. So they did. They managed to get the bubble under. Under control. And on April 1, Jimmy Carter, who was president at the time, I didn't know this. He was a trained nuclear engineer, so he was essentially the president to be in charge for this to happen. You knew that?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, he. Yeah, I knew from my visits to the Carter center, and I read a book and I've seen a documentary. He's. He's one of my guys, one of the smartest dudes we've ever had in the White House.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, I know. He was a fantastic president. It's a shame. So he was president at the time, and he was like, you know what? I'm going to come there. I'm going to be shown touring the plant. Rosalind's going to come with me. That will reassure the public that it's fine, it's under control. The problem was, according to that PBS documentary at the time, it was not a certainty that the hydrogen bubble wasn't going to blow up while the president was there. There are two dueling mathematicians who had conflicting results about whether the bubble was going to blow up. And so Jimmy Carter, like, took a real risk. So did Rosalynn Carter. By going there to tour the plant, they had to wear yellow rubber boots because again, there's really highly contaminated radioactive water that had spilled out of the coolant on the floor. It was a big deal, but apparently it had the. The impact he was looking for. And the public started to calm down.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I don't know if you could get. If they would let a president do that these days.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, it was the 70s, man. What can happen?

[Chuck Bryant]

It was, yeah, just put on these booties. So he obviously orders a committee to convene and investigate this thing. It was ended up being called the Kemeny Report because it was led by Dartmouth College president John Kemeny. And the NRC ended up coming out of this not looking so great. And we'll get to why as we go, but they really took it on the chin. The training program like Met Ed was like, hey, we trained up our guys as well as we were able to meet your standards. Like we did everything you told us to do. All your requirements were met. It was the NRC apparently, who had lax requirements. And when it comes to emergency training and stuff like that, they were really ill prepared.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, these guys were fully trained, but their training hadn't prepared them for that. And it was the NRC's fault. The NRC showed that they weren't prepared to handle this either. Like, it was just really poor planning, again, based on over optimistic ideas about the safety of nuclear energy. Right. So the NRC also conducted its own examination. They're like, yeah, we should probably do a little better. There's a lot of confusing stuff in training. I think there was this one passage that said, insert key into the control panel, turn key to the left, break off the key in the control panel, and eat what remains of the key. That was part of the safety training, anyway, they were like. We also have to say, though, it wasn't just us, it wasn't just the operators, but the design of this stuff is pretty nuts, if you ask us.

[Chuck Bryant]

So one of the big problems was why it took so long to realize there was a problem. Like, all that time was going by when things were leaking out. And, um, you know, the NRC again, took it on the chin. They found that their training requirements weren't. Weren't good enough and that the operating procedures were confusing during an emergency. Like, from what I gathered from the documentary and by reading up on this, was that, like, they. They were trained to run the place and, like, turn the keys and push the buttons, but if something went wrong, that's where they really, really failed to know, like, what to do. So they were, you know, while this emergency was unfolding, they're misinterpreting data that's coming through and they're making bad decisions based on that. They. You know, you mentioned earlier that the water started boiling really violently. That caused the coolant pumps to shake really hard. And they thought they didn't know that's what that was. They thought they were overfilling and the things were shaking because it had too much coolant in there and that the pumps were going to be damaged because of that. So just to not even know that, like, hey, by the way, if this thing really starts boiling hard, the pipes might shake. Like, they didn't even know that could happen.

[Josh Clark]

Right, exactly. Like you said, they were trained to operate it, basically. One other thing to say about the system, too, is in that documentary, I think the guy who wrote the China Syndrome, he was interviewed a lot in it. He was saying that if they had done nothing, the system would have taken care of itself from the outset.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, interesting.

[Josh Clark]

It was when they intervened those two times that threw that safety sequence off, and that's that. So it really, truly was a combination of all sorts of different stuff. The complexity of the system, human error, malfunctions, poor planning. And there's a sociologist named Charles Perrot who calls this a normal accident, which is basically an accident that is essentially inevitable because it's accidentally designed into the complex system. Somehow, somewhere, all these things are going to come together and cause an accident. That's what happened at Three Mile Island.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. If you're waiting for your Homer Simpson moment, wait no further. Because one of the things they found when they did the big investigation was that there was an operator there that had a large belly, sounded like he had a big beer gut. And his beer gut was blocking the view of some of the panel indicators. And they literally didn't see these things because of Homer Simpson standing there in the way. There was a printer, a computer printer that malfunctioned that was recording real time data that got jammed for 90 minutes. Just the communication with wearing face respirators and masks and all that stuff. They just weren't able to talk, you know, in an effective manner while this is all going down.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And that computer printer that was giving them that real time information being jammed for 90 minutes meant that the data they were working from was 90 minutes old in the middle of a meltdown. So, like, these guys really just had no genuine clue what was actually going on. They didn't even seem to suspect anything was going on, in part because of that 90 minute old data they were working from.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. So if it wasn't bad enough already, there are two more big factors here and just how sort of janky this thing seemed to be laid out. The control room didn't have any direct measurements of the water. Like we kept talking, you know, earlier in Act 1 about, you know, the water levels. And they didn't, you know, they thought it was filling up too much, so they shut the water off. But they, this was all happening because it didn't have just direct measurements of the water level. So they didn't even know they were guessing at how much water was in the system. And then the second one, big one was that automatic release valve has an indicator light in the control room. It shows, you know, it was supposed to close automatically, but I think you can also order it to close. And eventually they, they tried to order it to close, but it doesn't actually show whether it's closed or not. The indicator lit up when it was ordered to close. Not confirming that it was closed.

[Josh Clark]

Right. But they took it like that. They took it to mean, like, oh, well, the light's on, the thing's closed.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, ask the guy with a big belly blocking the screen.

[Josh Clark]

Exactly. So, I mean, like, that's just nuts that like all of this was happening, just the sequence of events. I mean, if you went back and did it all again, surely it couldn't possibly follow the same steps because it was just so intertwined with all these different weird things.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, for sure.

[Josh Clark]

So there's a lot of. You want to talk about the radiation that may or may not have been released?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, because I mean, that's one of the biggest, obviously issues at hand is like how much of this stuff is getting out to the local community in Pennsylvania, Right?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And like you said, to get rid of the hydrogen bubble, they definitely vented radioactive gas into the air. That's just. There's just no two ways around it. They also had to do that a couple more times during the cleanup, as we'll see. But the epa, the nrc, Pennsylvania itself, the Union of Concerned Scientists, just countless different organizations, including non governmental organizations, have conducted all sorts of studies. People have done meta analyses of these studies. Three Mile island is a very, very, very heavily studied area to find out exactly what happened. And essentially almost everybody agrees that there was not enough of a radioactive release to actually affect human health or the environment. And it seems to be one of those times where it actually is true. I can barely get it out. But I think they might be right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. I mean, they claim that there was like the radiation was about the estimated levels of a, like a chest X ray. The Department of Energy said it had negligible effects on public health and the environment. I guess we'll end up talking about the lawsuits later. Cause there obviously would be some. But you know, there were some interesting things like I think the 43% increase in infant deaths in the area around the time of the accident. There was a study in 97 that found increased cancer rates in the area. There was a 2017 study that found a correlation between thyroid cancer and living in that region. But in each of these studies and in each of these cases, they're like, well, you can't absolutely prove that was the absolute cause.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And these studies are few and far between. Most of the other studies are like, I didn't turn up any statistically significant correlation even.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

I saw that the highest exposure during cleanup with a peak in 1989 was 0.98 rems. And that is a tenth of a chest X ray. And that on site. The EPA found on site. So at the Three Mile island reactor, the radiation in the environment was what you would get from flying on an airplane per hour.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

So it really does seem like there was just not that much of an exposure. Again, I'm quite sure if you go to Three Mile island and talk to some of the older residents, they will tell you otherwise because the. A lot of people reported, especially right afterward, that they were suffering from vomiting, nausea, hair loss, rashes. And I'm sure that people just have dismissed them over the years as like, that's placebo effect or nocebo effect or something like that. So, yeah, I mean, if you believe that you're, you know, wife or husband or mom or dad or kid died of cancer because of this nuclear accident. And everybody's telling you like, no, it's, it's fine. You're, you're hysterical. Overreacting. I can't imagine.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Not being deeply bitter about that, you know.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, of course. Speaking of deeply bitter, I think that triggered another ad break.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

And we'll be back to finish up on three Ma island right after this.

[Josh Clark]

Foreign. Stuff, you know, Stuff. Stuff you should know. Stuff you should know.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right. So they had resolved this bubble issue and they got to cool this thing down. And that's really the main thing. That reactor core that had been exposed, like everything is super hot. So they. First things first. They really just need to get it cooled down. So they worked on that for, for a while. Finally, on April 27, I guess this is almost a month later, they said that it was in cold shutdown. They had reached that point where water was less than 100 degrees Celsius at atmospheric pressure. And so they could start cleanup. And that was it for TMI2. That thing shut down and did not reopen.

[Josh Clark]

No, it didn't. Three months of energy production and that's it. It's crazy. And it is still actually technically under cleanup today. The cleanup effort started pretty much right out of the gate. I think it was in 1979 that they first started. But I'm sure the first couple years were like, okay, what are we going to do? Part of the problem was is they couldn't see into the reactor. They couldn't tell with what kind of a problem they were dealing with. And it wasn't until the 80s that they started getting actual video confirmation. They put like video cameras in to the reactor and saw that the core had partially melted down. And that not only that, Chuck, the, the, the nuclear fuel, the uranium had. Molten uranium had melted down into the bottom of what's called the vessel, the container vessel. The. Basically the last thing between the, the, the uranium, molten uranium in China is this vessel. And it actually had not been expected to be able to stand up to something like that. And just by sheer luck it, it did. It did not leak, but it definitely could have. And had that happened, it would have been catastrophic had it gotten out. So three cheers to the containment vessel.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, for sure. The cleanup, I think they, yeah, they started in 79 and 11 years later by 90 was when that whole first phase was done. They had like most of the nuclear fuel had been removed by that point and about 150 tons of radioactive materials. I feel like we've talked about this kind of disposal before in other episodes. Yeah, it may have been the disaster in Japan or maybe it was just one on nuclear. Like bearing nuclear waste.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, it was within, I think it was 2025. It was a good one. But we talked about that. That place in Washington, the Hanford nuclear site.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Well, this stuff, or at the time at least they went to. It went to the National Engineering Laboratory in Idaho for storage. But then you still had all that water. You had about two and a quarter million gallons of bad water that took another few years. So that wasn't fully cleaned up until 1993. You had to evaporate that stuff.

[Josh Clark]

Right. Which means you got gas on your hands, radioactive gas again. And that's where those further exposures happened throughout the 80s. Yeah, I think 1982 and 1989 were the worst, but even then they were less than a millirem of exposure, which again is about a tenth of a chest X ray. Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

So finally the, the cleanup of TMI2 is completed in 1993. But even that is still, like I said, it's still ongoing because they were just like we got 99% of the nuclear fuel out there out of the reactor and isn't that amazing? We're just going to call it done now. And so there's still 1% left. And there's a company called TMI 2 Solutions that is currently cleaning up that remaining 1% of fuel from the reactor.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, they're solutions based. That's what they do, Josh.

[Josh Clark]

They are. And I was like, wait a minute, they own tmi to why would somebody buy a reactor so that you can pay to clean it up? And it turns out there was a bunch of not even taxpayer ratepayer money that Metropolitan Ed had basically added to people's bills as like a tax to set aside to pay for cleanup. And I think there was something like a billion dollars of that left. And I guess that TMI2 Solutions was going. Has been receiving that for cleaning it up.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I mean that when they were protesting Met Ed, they had signs that said, first you try to kill us, then you want to bill us. Yeah, this kicked off a lot of, I mean this nuclear energy was at a probably all time public low. Obviously after Three Mile island, like things were kind of humming along and then people really, really turned against it. There were a lot of protests when Jane Fonda shows up that you're in big trouble. And she and her husband at the time, Tom Hayden, did just that. It did lead to I mean, silver linings. It led to one of the great concerts of all time. The Bruce Springsteen no Nukes concert at Madison Square Garden in 1979 brought musicians banded together and formed the Musicians United for Safe Energy Muse. And they just released that in 2021. And I just want to say, I know you're probably not a big Springsteen guy, but if you're a fan of the Boss, watch. Don't just listen to it. Watch the concert film of the no Nuke show. And it is peak, peak, Bruce Springsteen,

[Josh Clark]

unbelievable show from 1979.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, it's incredible. Cause it's before Born in the USA and all that. So before he was in Stadium. Well, I guess this is msg. But before, he was at, like, that level of huge. But right after Born to Run in Darkness on the Edge of Town, he was still young and hungry. And it's just like. It's an incredible, incredible show.

[Josh Clark]

That's awesome.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

I have a Bruce Springsteen anecdote if you want to hear it. Sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

Let's hear it.

[Josh Clark]

Backstage at one of our Bell House shows, I was meeting the boyfriend of one of my friends, and he was from Jersey, and he was telling me this story about how he and his friends were at a pool once, and he looked over and he's like. And there was Bruce. And I went, willis. And this guy looked. I was serious, too. The look of just, like, contempt that fell over this guy's face for a second before he could regain himself. He was like, no, Springsteen. I was like, oh, okay. I feel equally about both, you know?

[Chuck Bryant]

At least you didn't say box Lightner.

[Josh Clark]

That would have been really weird. That would have been much better. Oh, boy.

[Chuck Bryant]

Keep that one in your hip pocket. If anyone ever just throws out a Bruce story again, say box Lightner.

[Josh Clark]

Okay, you got it, buddy. He was on V, wasn't he?

[Chuck Bryant]

Sure. I don't know. I don't remember.

[Josh Clark]

He wasn't Scarecrow and Mrs. King.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay, Scarecrow. Or was he in Tron? No, he wasn't in Tron. That was. That was a different guy.

[Josh Clark]

That was Jeff Bridges.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, but the other guy, the main

[Josh Clark]

guy, that was Bruce Springsteen.

[Chuck Bryant]

No. Who am I thinking of? Never mind. We got to finish this one. People are going to be so mad at us.

[Josh Clark]

They're screwing us. Right? Sorry. Sorry, everybody. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is going to send us a letter.

[Chuck Bryant]

I know. So. Not because of a lawsuit that we're filing, but people certainly did. There was the fact that they falsified those leaked test results that you talked about without fixing Stuff. And they issued a report to the Department of Justice in November of 1983. They indicted met Ed for that falsification of the leaks. They had to pay a huge fine of $45,000.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And you're like, okay, well, this is $1984. How much is it today? Still just $140,000 today for falsifying leaks of nuclear material. Yeah, for sure. And just being general jerks during the whole, you know, crisis.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

But they were like, okay, well, we're also going to help set up a fund for the Pennsylvania EPA to take care of this area for years to come. We're going to give it $1 million. Again, you're like, okay, it's $1984. Nope, just $3.1 million. So, all told, I think Met Ed officially paid out something like three, less than three and a half million. There's a group called Three Mile Island Alert. They're a nonprofit that is essentially watchdogs about Three Mile Island. And I don't think that they feel very good about Metropolitan Ed, but they say that Met Ed has paid out lots more than that in civil and personal injury lawsuits to settle those.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, settling them because there was. In 1996, there were, I think, a couple of thousand active cases for, like, you know, exposure, obviously, to the radiation. And a judge said, all right, let me pick 10 of these and try them as a group, as a test case to see if we, you know, if there's merit to the whole thing. And the judge ruled against the plaintiffs. You know, citing what I would. I talked about earlier, like, you can't. There's not enough evidence to cite a direct link between the cancer that you have and the radiation that you may or may not have endured.

[Josh Clark]

Right. So this is one of those, I think, instances where I. That I'm convinced because there's just so many different people and groups of people from all different sectors of our society who have looked at this and said it actually wasn't as bad.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

Could have been really bad, but it's not as bad as people fear.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

That's why I buy into the idea that it wasn't that bad. That's not to say that there weren't people who acted as whistleblowers. And in particular, if you saw a Netflix documentary called Meltdown going Three Mile island, there was a whistleblower named Rick Parks who was a supervisor in the cleanup crew during the 80s, and he blew the whistle because he was saying they were using this crane that was in the reactor to basically Dismantle the reactor afterward, even though it had gone through the meltdown seemed very unsafe to me. I didn't like how they were testing it. So if, like throughout the 80s cleanup of Three Mile island, that's the most scandalous thing a whistleblower comes up with. It seems like it's about as on the up and up as something like this can be.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. He claimed in that documentary that they, like, retaliated against him and that someone planted drugs in his car during a random drug inspection. There are other people that have come out and said, hey, that documentary is a little misleading. He did raise concerns about that, Crane, but they didn't ignore them. He just didn't agree with how they handled it. And just take that documentary with a grain of salt, basically.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. So there were, I think, like you said, nuclear power was just humming along and then it just nosedived after. After Three Mile Island. And I think there were 51 planned nuclear reactors that were canceled in the United States alone. Like this had global repercussions between 1980 and 1984, 51 of them were canceled. I think I saw in the end of the documentary that was in 1999. They said zero new ones have been ordered since Three Mile Island. I saw a hundred had been, potentially. But regardless, the upshot is the reason why nuclear energy is not widespread, especially in the United States, is because of Three mile Island. Almost 100%.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. For sure. Kind of. Strangely, a couple of years ago, Microsoft signed a 20 year deal to purchase power from TMI One, starting a couple of years from now in 2028. And everyone's like, wow, that's weird. Why is Microsoft buying a bunch of power? And like, oh, they're using power generated from that to fuel the data centers for AI.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Which I think we talked about that in the data centers episode and the getting rid of nuclear waste episode.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. It feels kind of like a full circle moment, for sure.

[Josh Clark]

So let's leave it at that, huh?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, sure.

[Josh Clark]

All right. Well, we came full circle, which means we automatically triggered listener mail, even though we have no indicator light to tell us as much.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. Hey, guys. This is from Nathan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Guy, I'm a former academic who never lost a love of learning. Your shows, both old and new, brighten my daily content commutes with fresh knowledge and an open curiosity that genuinely warms my heart.

[Josh Clark]

Nice.

[Chuck Bryant]

But that's a very nice setup for a correction. Oh, very gentle correction on Thomas Hobbes. Guys. He didn't actually assume that all or, and this is from our humanism episode, by the way.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Hobbes didn't actually assume that all or even most people are inherently bad. Instead, he argued that some people will do bad things sometimes and that the rest of us cannot know who, when, or where. Hobbes would point out that we lock our houses at night and our cars and parking garages. And we do this even though we have laws, courts, and police officers. It's not about human evil. It's about rational caution in an uncertain world. And there's a little bonus here, guys. Hobbes lived an absolutely wild life. He was a scribe for Francis Bacon. He met Galileo in Italy. He tutored the future King Charles II in math, and spent years in heated disagreements with Descartes through the mail. In fact, a few years after Hobbs died, Oxford University held a public book burning that included his work. That spectacle prompted John Locke to leave Oxford, hide his manuscripts, and flee to Holland for five years.

[Josh Clark]

That'll do it.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, that's Nathan from Pittsburgh. Always love the extra info.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, I do, too. And thank you for setting us straight on Hobbes, too. We didn't mean to misrepresent him.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, for sure.

[Josh Clark]

Because he can stick the Leviathan on us.

[Chuck Bryant]

We don't want that.

[Josh Clark]

If you want to be like Nathan from Pittsburgh and send us a cool email like he did, maybe even butter us up first. We like that kind of thing. You can send it to stuff podcastheartradio.com

[Chuck Bryant]

Stuff youf Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. This is an I heart podcast. Guaranteed human.