|
If it did nothing else, the accident at Three Mile Island injected new urgency into the national debate on nuclear power.
Demonstrations, sit-ins, plant shutdowns, occasional radiation leaks - none evoked the unthinkable aspects of living with nuclear power as starkly as the accident that Wednesday morning. What often had been dismissed as impossible now seemed to be unfolding on the banks of the Susquehanna.
Ironically, the accident at Three Mile Island raised the issue of nuclear safety all over just as it had become the least urgent of the three basic parts of the debate on nuclear power. The last three years had seen the spread of nuclear weapons and the disposal of radioactive waste become more central to the debate than the issue of safety.
In more than 20 years of operations in the United States, there had never been a nuclear accident as threatening to property and human life as Three Mile Island.
Thousands of reactor operating plant-years in the civilian power program have gone by without the loss of a single life. Not a single accident involving the nuclear propulsion system has ever befallen the world's nuclear navies. Only once before, in 1961, when Army technicians mistakenly started a chain reaction while working on a test reactor, had there been a fatality from a nuclear accident.
Nuclear advocates had hammered home this safety record. One famous assessment on which they relied was the so-called Rasmussen report of 1975, a probability study which said the likelihood of nuclear catastrophe is very low.
But the Rasmussen report also identifies certain sequences of events which it says are not as unlikely as others. One is called "TMLQ" in the code of the study. It means loss of feedwater plus failure of a safety valve. It is exactly what happened at Three Mile Island.
If ever a meltdown were to occur, according to the controversial study, this is one of the likely ways it might happen.
In the latter half of the last decade, the nuclear debate has inflamed sections of more than 40 states, dividing communities and even households. Sit-ins, walk-ins, pray-ins and shout-ins have been held for and against nuclear power. There are dozens of different bumper stickers damning and praising nuclear power.
The most debated issue in the nuclear controversy had not been the safety of plants like Three Mile Island. It has been whether it is safe to bury the wastes that can remain radioactive for thousands of years.
Second to that is the issue of nuclear weapons proliferation. When India exploded an atomic bomb almost five years ago with the plutonium it extracted from the spent fuel in a nuclear reactor, that issue grew dramatically in importance. On April 6, the United States suspended economic aid to Pakistan over evidence Pakistan was headed in the same direction.
With antinuclear ranks certain to grow because of Three Mile Island, the debate may once again shift back to safety. At the very least, the nuclear electricity industry faces new and stiffer regulations that could raise costs, shut down some plants and delay others.
It could be worse. The hearings the nuclear industry faces in the House and Senate for the next year over Three Mile Island may bring the types of stiff controls and demands that grind the industry to a halt. It has already slowed to a walk. Last year, only two new nuclear plants were ordered by U.S. electric companies, down from a peak of 41 ordered in the wake of the 1973 Arab oil embargo. In the last three years, 31 nuclear projects were canceled or deferred.
Real opposition to nuclear power surfaced in 1968 and has been growing since. That was the year Sports Illustrated published an article titled: "The Nukes Are in Hot Water." It raised questions about the impact of nuclear hot water discharge on sportsmen's fishing reels.
As alternatives to nuclear power, its critics advocate hydro, coal, wind and geothermal energy as the answers to the nation's energy needs. They regard as the most promising energy source the sun, which could provide limitless heat and electricity without polluting or endangering the air and water.
Solar technology has already made definable inroads in hot-water heating for individual homes, an appealing alternative to diminishing and increasingly costly oil and gas. But the time and expense involved in a harnessing of the sun's power as a major energy source is enormous.
At this point there seems little prospect from either political or technological stand-points that the nation will reverse its commitment to nuclear energy.
The consequence of the Three Mile Island accident is that it will undoubtedly shake the unquestioning acquiescence with which many Americans have accepted nuclear power as the chief ingredient in the nation's long-term energy base.
That may also be its only blessing.