Author: Meta Bowman (Page 10 of 31)

Newspaper: The Evening Sentinel
Date: April 5, 1979
Title: Dickinson Students Probe Personal Effects of Nuclear Crisis
Author: Deb Cline, Associate Editor

Perhaps the most obvious reactions to Three Mile Islands were the jokes, stories and slogans about radiation and nuclear destruction.

They are ranging from harmless wit to sick jokes or black humor.

One such slogan, “Hell no, we won’t glow,” a nuclear variation on the anti-Vietnam slogan of the 1960’s, is now being silk screened onto t-shirts at Dickinson College by students who view it as a way to relieve tension.

Lonna Malmsheimer, American Studies professor at the college, views it as part of the folklore building up around the nuclear accident. And she says such slogans and jokes are a normal reaction for people trying to cope with a crisis.

ACCORDING TO Malmsheimer, there are numerous other reactions-fantasies, dreams, religious experiences, recollections of past crises, and, of course, jokes-that she, three other professors and 18 to 20 Dickinson students are attempting to record for a study on how people react to a crisis situation.

The students are now conducting in-depth interviews with both college students and people in the community and Monday will send out a detailed questionnaire on the subject. They are also asking that anyone with interesting stories, jokes, religious experiences or any other interesting reactions to the accident write them to Reaction to Reactor Project, Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pa. 17013.

“Folklore is one of the quickest responses to a crisis,” Malmsheimer said. “New terms, wit, jokes tend to reveal the way people feel and the things they fear.

“Many of the jokes are forms of denial. It’s kind of like saying it couldn’t happen or it couldn’t happen here.”

She said the mental images people have, their fantasies, dreams, perceptions, jokes-call can be very revealing about the way they are reacting.

“A LOT of people connect it with bomb images which is expectable,” Malmsheimer said. “People alive during World War II connected it with Pearl Harbor.”

“People who became adults in the 1960’s are more likely to connect it with the Kennedy death and other events of the 60’s.”

“It’s not a rational process. It has to do with confusion, wondering if anybody’s in charge. There are also images from different kinds of disaster films.”

“We’re trying to find out what sorts of cultural inventories people draw on in a situation that is unprecedented for them.”

She said often people will use their imaginations to place themselves in a prior crisis situation which will then help them to better understand the new crisis and how they wish to react to it.
Although definitive, conclusions on the study may not be reached for some time; Malmsheimer said members of the group conducting the interviews will give a presentation Friday at 1:30 p.m. in the college’s Holland Union Building.

In the meantime, Malmsheimer believes the area may soon be crawling with social scientists eager to study the reactions of people to the accident.

“We’re at the beginning, and we’re lucky,” she said.

Newspaper: The Evening Sentinel
Date: April 5, 1979
Title: They Stalked Story of Hour
Author: Jim Kershner, The Evening Sentinel

There they were in Middleton Borough Hall: the press.

There was Don Allegerella, a young reporter for the Capital Times.

Not many small newspapers sent reporters from as far as Madison, Wisc., but “The Times has been warning people about nuclear power for years,” he said.

This was the biggest story he’d ever covered. He said he’s never seen so many reporters.
There were a couple hundred reporters and technicians with notebooks, briefcases, typewriters, tape recorders, cameras, lights and deadlines, all suddenly crowded into an old basketball court and meeting room.

THE TELEPHONE company scrambled to spin a web of telephone lines around the long rows of press tables.

Joyce Barnell, a production coordinator for NBC News, had to find not only telephones, but cars, planes, helicopters, and even binoculars at the drop of a story.

“Where do you find binoculars at 10 a.m. Sunday morning?” she asked. (At a Camp Hill department store, it turns out.)

Tony Sargent, ABC radio correspondent from Washington, said he didn’t have any particular problems except the unavoidable pitfalls of a story this size happening in a place the size of Harrisburg.

The location was a little too close for comfort for Ed Perrone. But the Harrisburg Magazine writer felt good about one thing. His magazine was inundated with requests for the article they did shortly before the real accident describing the possibility of an accident at Three Mile Island.

Metropolitan Edison Co., part owner and operator of the nuclear power generating plant, had tried to get the magazine’s CETA funding withdrawn because of the article, he said.

Takemoto Iinuma, from Japan’s nationally-circulated daily, Yomiuri Shimbum, said in some ways this was the biggest story he’d ever covered. But then, he’s covered the fall of Saigon.
“This event itself is not so dramatic as a war,” he said, “but in a philosophical sense, this has a great impact on the people.”

It had a big impact in Japan too. “The Japanese people are very sensitive to radioactives. The people there say the amount of radioactives is not the issue. The issue is the presence of radioactives.”

The Japanese government has ordered safety checks on all 19 of the country’s nuclear power plants.

Iinuma found it quite interesting that there was no panic here.

“IF THIS had happened in Japan it would have been very different,” he said. “The people would have rushed out but there is no place to go on an island.”

Washington bureau chief for his paper, Iinuma noted a difference in Japanese and American reporting of the event. “In the U.S. you pay much more attention to the process-every little step is reported.”

Reporting for the Voice of America was Gill Butler. He said the accident had been the lead story in 37 languages for most of the week.

For Butler, the biggest problem at first was that none of the reporters knew what questions to ask. And then Met-Ed said one thing and the NRC said another.

Max Robinson of ABC World News Tonight said he had the same nagging feeling every reporter there had-that in this story, “I might also be a victim.”

But he thought it was important to be on the scene to bring the story to the ABC viewers.

“That’s one of the things we try to do on World News Tonight,” he said with a television smile.
Another reporter asked if he felt the press had gone overboard.

“We were on the brink of a very serious disaster. In view of that how could we have overreacted?” he replied.

BUT IN THE end it was Jimmy Breslin, the New York Daily News columnist who got the story.

He had arrived on Friday but didn’t stay with the pack of reporters fighting for scraps of news in borough hall. His column Sunday told the real story of Three Mile Island.

“At first yesterday, I wasn’t all that afraid,” it begins.

Breslin had stood at the gate to the plant and watched the steam drift out of the tops of the cooling towers. He talked to one of the workers who wasn’t afraid. And to a man who works for the plant in health physics. Then he summed it all up in one exchange.

“Where’s the wife and kids, out shopping?” I asked.

“No, I sent them away to the mountains,” he said.

“Oh,” I said.

How does he do it?

Legwork.

“I only made it with legs,” he said.

Newspaper: The Evening Sentinel
Date: April 5, 1979
Title: Recovery Emergency Declared
Author: Unknown

Cumberland County commissioners today declared a county state of emergency “for the purpose of planning, readiness and the recovery of costs” relating to the Three Mile Island nuclear accident.

Commissioners also requested local taxing bodies submit itemization of nuclear accident-related expenses for possible Met-Ed reimbursement.

Commissioners issued State of Disaster Emergency for possible collection of federal and state funds to aid in normalization, Commissioner Nelson Punt said.

Commissioners also asked local government officials and school districts to “assemble all the bills and records of overtime payments by police departments, school bus drivers and other people that…you have asked to participate in the readiness preparations attendant to this emergency.”

Newspaper: Sentinel
Date: April 6, 1979
Article: S. Middleton reviews plan for evacuees
Author: Unknown

SOUTH MIDDLETON TOWNSHIP –

Supervisors Thursday night reviewed plans for hosting evacuees from eastern Cumberland County, if an evacuation is ordered.

Ann Neimer, township secretary-treasurer, outlined activities planned for evacuees who would be housed in South Middleton Schools in the event of an emergency.

It includes provision for registration, security, first aid, recreation, and even provisions for evacuated household pets.

Neimer and the supervisors worked through the last week with county emergency prepardness officials on the possibility of the township serving as a host area, she said.

In other business, the supervisors awarded a contract to Frank Slyder, Mount Holly Springs, for the installation of two fire hydrants in Pine Road Heights.

One would be at McLand Drive and Sunset Drive, the other at McLand Drive and Sycamore Drive.

The board also reappointed Richard Ingle to the Municipal Authority and accepted the appointment of Roger Morgenthal as solicitor to the Planning Commission.

Newspaper: The Sentinel
Date: April 6, 1979
Article: Engineers aim to reduce radiation leaks
Author: United Press International

HARRISBURG, Pa. (UPI) – Engineers worked around a troublesome valve and began operations today aimed at reducing the small leak of radioactive gases from the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant.

The process was pumping gases from an auxiliary building into the radiation-proof dome around the crippled reactor. Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials said it should make a significant reduction of all gases leaving the plant.

The degassing operation was stalled for a while early today by a valve that would not open. Engineers worked around that by switching to a second gas source and planned to deal with the valve later.

BECAUSE OF THE continuing release of very low levels of radiation from the plant, officials continued to advise pregnant women and young children to stay out of a five mile radius around the site.

Engineers, meanwhile, proceeded slowly in their efforts to bring the reactor to a safe cold shutdown condition. The final shutdown was expected late next week.

Robert Bernaro, an NRC technical specialist, said it took plant operators 18 hours to stabilize the reactor March 28 when the accident occurred, but he said the situation was never out of control.

“That implies people had no means with coping with the deterioration,” Bernaro told UPI. “I don’t think that was the case at all. They had a number of things they could do.”
President Carter, referring to the Pennsylvania nuclear crisis, told the American people in a nationally broadcast speech on energy Thursday night: “You deserve a full accounting and will get it.”

Carter said he would appoint an independent presidential commission to investigate what the Nuclear Regulatory Commission calls the worst accident at a commercial nuclear power generator in American history.

TENS OF THOUSANDS of the estimated 200,000 people who fled to other parts of Pennsylvania and even to other states have returned home, but some still stayed away, waiting for clearer signs the danger had passed.

At a hearing in Washington Thursday, a Congressman and a power company lawyer disagreed over whether the consumers served by the Metropolitan Edison Co., operator and 50 percent owner of the plant, should bear the costs of the accident – estimated to range into the millions of dollars.

Rep. Eugene Atkinson, D-Pa., said rather than the consumer, the power companies – and possibly the federal government, too – should pay for repairs and the replacement of power lost to the accident.

But Gerald Charnoff, a power industry lawyer, said large costs could bankrupt even an electric utility.

That was when officials declared there was a chance of a reactor core meltdown, a nuclear catastrophe that would have threatened the very lives of area residents and ravaged the rolling central Pennsylvania dairy farm countryside.

Gov. Dick Thornburgh said late Thursday he would not lift his recommendation that pregnant women and pre-school children stay outside of a five-mile radius of Three Mile Island because they are particularly vulnerable to its dangers.

“THE NEWS remains encouraging, “Thornburgh said in a statement. “It appears that we may not be close to the time when the women and children who left their homes a week ago can return.”

The governor also said schools in the area would remain closed until further notice. Classroom doors were shut last Friday.

Federal and state health officials said radiation levels still were not high enough to cause harm to public safety. Tests indicated milk produced on numerous farms around the plant has not been adversely affected.

Carter cautioned Americans against overreacting to the Three Mile Island crisis.

Earlier, Carter administration officials said the country could not afford to drop nuclear power as a source of energy. Thirteen percent of U.S. energy comes from nuclear generators.

At the plant, meanwhile, engineers took the first steps Thursday leading to a shutdown of the reactor that went haywire last week.

Harold Denton, the NRC’s operations chief at the Susquehanna River site, said the 10-day cool-down process began with the gradual removal of gases from the water around the uranium fuel core. This action was to avoid the reformation of a dangerous gas bubble when pressure is lowered.

The high pressure in the reactor kept gases dissolved in the water, like the gas in a bottle of champagne before it is uncorked.

DENTON SAID approval was given to a plan to pump radioactive gases from an auxiliary building into the radiation-filled dome around the reactor. This, he said, should reduce by at least 30 percent the slight level of radiation escaping from the island plant.

The cooling plan now being followed will use in a few days the same natural circulation process Henry Ford used to cool the Model T engine half a century ago.

Hot water from the reactor will flow into a steam generator filled with cooled water. The hot water will become cooler and thus sink and push already cooled water ahead of it back into the reactor to take away more heat from the core. The process will continue without the need for pumps, which might fail.

Newspaper: The Sentinel
Date: April 6, 1979
Article: Met-Ed: Consumers should foot bill…
Author: United Press International

Washington (UPI) – Consumers and not utility company stockholders should pick up the tab for repairs and power losses resulting from the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant accident, according to a lawyer for owners of the Pennsylvania facility.

Washington attorney Gerald Charnoff, testifying at congressional hearings, said Thursday forcing utilities to pay the costs could “impoverish or bankrupt” them.

Charnoff’s contention that electric ratepayers should foot the bill was challenged by consumer spokesmen and several members of Congress, including subcommittee Chairman Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass.

Consumers should not be made to pay for bad business decisions, Kennedy told the utility spokesman.

“CONSUMERS ARGUE that the management made the decision, so it should pay the costs of its mistakes,” he said.

“It seems to me inescapable that considerations of fairness and ultimate economic impact require that the cost of replacement power be flowed through to consumers,” Charnoff told the energy subcommittee of the Joint Economic Committee.

He said the company had invested $780 million in the damaged unit and that it was insured for up to $300 million.

“It is not yet known whether the total (accident) costs will exceed $300 million,” he said.
Pennsylvania Rep. Eugene Atkinson, a Democrat, said he was opposed to automatically passing on costs to consumers “who played no role” in causing the plant shutdown. He suggested that the government share in the costs if the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was “responsible for licensing a deficient plant.”

MARK WIDOFF, official Consumer Advocate for Pennsylvania, said the Three Mile Island plant was merely the “the most dramatic and most serious example” of a growing problem for utility customers faced with picking up the tab for shutdowns.

And Alden Meyer, testifying for the Environmental Action Foundation, urged that, “Consumers must no longer be forced to bear all risks of poor design, operator error, or other shortcomings for which utility management is primarily responsible.”

Hazel Rollins, deputy administrator of the Energy Department’s Economic Regulatory Administration, said that passing the accident costs on to customers would add about $7.50 to the average monthly electric bill.

Newspaper: The Sentinel
Date: April 6, 1979
Article: … but here’s one who’s had enough
Author: Deb Cline

Joyce Trinneer was mad enough at Met-Ed before Three Mile Island ever happened.
Now she’s steaming.

“I’m outraged,” she kept saying, as she relayed her feelings about reports that Met-Ed consumers would likely bear at least some of the costs of last week’s Three Mile Island nuclear power plant accident.

A resident of White Rock Acres, Trinneer believes she and her neighbors and customers of the utility have been paying far too much already.

ALTHOUGH HER reaction is one of the most emotional expressed so far, it is consistent with the opinions being expressed by customers and legislators over the possible economic ramifications of the Three Mile Island.

But Trinneer’s gripe isn’t new. She’s been upset with Met-Ed ever since she arrived here from New Jersey.

“I have to close off my bedrooms every day. I don’t heat my bathroom and I’m paying 200 and some odd dollars a month and I’m getting sick to my stomach,” Trinneer said.

“How can they hope for us to pay more?”

She was already upset over the fact that Met-Ed charges lower rates for people who use electric only for cooking that they do for all-electric customers. Calling that a discriminatory practice, she said, “They were not allowed to do that in New Jersey.”

Trinneer says she isn’t the only one who feels this way.

She said she and her neighbors have been planning to buy some woodburning stoves to help reduce their use of electric heat.

“NOW INSTEAD of getting one, I may decide to get two. They’re not going to make it on me.”

That isn’t the only thing Trinneer is going to do. Although she’s not quite sure where to begin, she says she’s been going to try to start up at petition protesting the present and possible future rates of the utility and present it to the governor.

“I’m willing to freeze before I give them more money. That’s how mad I am,” she said.

“I’ll do whatever I can not to give them more money. God help anybody who tries to stop us.”

Newspaper: The Sentinel
Date: April 6, 1979
Article: Med – Ed: Cold, hard, uncaring
Author: Unknown

In total disbelief, Metropolitan Edison officials continue with their arrogance and self-serving attitudes they blatantly exhibited during this country’s worst nuclear power plant crisis at Three Mile Island.

In short, they just don’t seem to give a damn about the people they’re serving.

In astonishingly self-interested testimony at a Congressional hearing Thursday, company of officials said the consumers should bear the brunt of the costs for the Three Mile Island accident, certainly not the company stockholders.

On Wednesday, Met-Ed coldly told company employees who are pregnant that they wouldn’t be paid for staying off the job at the nuclear plant, despite the dangers of the fear of personal safety.

Perhaps we shouldn’t expect anything less from a company which lied to the public about the potential disaster at Three Mile Island, or one which fed us so much confusing and conflicting information as to fan the flames of potential panic and chaos in and around the nuclear facility.

But Met-Ed’s attitudes and actions not only have caused a serious – some say fatal – blow to the nuclear power industry, but the company is driving another nail in the coffin of public opinion against big business.

Instead of coming out with the truth and having compassion for its employees and its customers, the company is wrapping itself and its stockholders in a mantle of protection. They’re showing us they’re out to save their own hides first.

Why should the consumers bear the brunt of the accident costs? They had nothing to do with it and those people who are served only by Met-Ed have no choice about buying their power. Certainly the stockholders take a risk when they buy stock and have built-in tax advantages the consumers do not.

In the end, the consumers may have to help defray the costs, to keep the company from going bankrupt, but every other alternative should come first: insurance, the federal government and Met-Ed itself.

Despite the outcome over who’ll pay for what, Met-Ed may never recover from it’s blackened image of the past few days – but it was one of the company’s own making.

Newspaper: The Sentinel
Date: April 6, 1979
Article: Nuclear plants safe, episode shows
Author: William Rusher

NEW YORK – Press and public reaction to the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania dramatically illustrates how difficult it is in a democracy to discuss nuclear power calmly, let alone reach national decisions regarding its use.

Public awareness of nuclear energy was born in that awesome mushroom cloud over Hiroshima, and has never really shaken free of that image. There are undoubtedly many millions of Americans who sincerely believe that, if the right combination of accidents occurred, a similar explosion could take place at Middletown, Pa. Now, as it happens, that one thing – in fact, very nearly the only thing – that could not possibly occur; the technology required to produce an atomic bomb is wildly different from that used to produce electrically by nuclear means. But how can the average housewife be expected to understand that?

A MORE POPULAR scenario, because it is at least technically conceivable, is the one forever being pushed by the foes of nuclear energy: Some mechanical accident occurs that ruptures or otherwise evades the containment systems surrounding a nuclear reactor, and nuclear energy in one form or another (usually wastes) spews out into the environment.

Given that hypothesis, all one has to do is 1) imagine that the quantity of contaminated material is large enough, 2) imagine that winds or other natural means capable of spreading it do in fact arise and do their job, and 3) imagine that the winds or whatever spread the contaminated material where it will do the maximum harm – and presto! There’s your nuclear disaster.

Since such an event is, as I have said, at least technically conceivable, all the supporters of nuclear energy can do is point out, rather lamely, that is extremely unlikely, and that no such disaster has ever occurred. As a matter of fact, it remains as true today as it was before the Three Mile Island accident that there has never yet been a single fatality as a result of a nuclear accident of any type in any American commercial reactor.

But doesn’t the Three Mile Island episode suggest that the disaster scenario is likelier than we had been led to believe? After all, a mechanical accident did occur; contaminated wastes did get out into the environment; and increased radiation levels were detected miles away.

ON THE CONTRARY, this episode illustrates vividly just how safe a nuclear power plant is. When the accident occurred, the safety control automatically began to close down the reactor. When, as a result of a separate but simultaneous accident, contaminated wastes did reach the outer environment, they were far below dangerous levels. The significant fact is not how much happened, but how little.

None of this however, will prevent the foes of nuclear power from opportunizing gaudily, or reassure average citizens who understandably fear dangers not disclosed by their five senses. “Detectable levels of increased radiation have spread over a four – country area,” the New York Times reported. The statement is quite true, but what danger, if any does the radiation pose to the public? A Harvard biology professor, long known for his support of leftist causes, dashes into the area and purports to answer the question: “Any dose is unsafe” – literally any at all. A hard man to please! Yet the same Times article quotes state officials as saying that the very highest levels of radiation detected anywhere outside the plant would expose, over a period of an hour to about as much radiation as one receives in less than a second from an ordinary dental X-ray.

The Clamshell Alliance and the leftist Harvard professor may yet get their way and stop nuclear energy in this country dead in its tracks. (It is being expanded briskly everywhere else.) In that case, we will clearly have to increase coal consumption sharply. In 1977 there were 139 fatal accidents in American coal mines. In the five preceding years, the average was 143 per year. What kind of mentality is it that can compare those figures with the brilliant 30-year record of the American nuclear power industry and call nuclear power unacceptably unsafe?