Media meltdown

Editorial
Copyright 1999 Washington Times
March 26, 1999



Twenty years ago this Sunday, U.S. residents came home from work to the news that doom was waiting for them. There had been an accident, some kind of "meltdown" at a little-known power plant outside of Harrisburg, Pa., known as Three Mile Island. It threatened to loose lethal doses of radiation on area residents.

The avuncular CBS broadcaster Walter Cronkite promptly went nuclear. "The danger faced by man for tampering with natural forces, a theme familiar from the myths of Prometheus to the story of Frankenstein," he said, "moved closer to fact from fancy through the day." Then-Pennsylvania Gov. Richard Thornburgh soon advised all pregnant women and preschool children within 5 miles of the plant to evacuate. Activists and media descended on the area. A movie about a nuclear-plant accident, entitled "The China Syndrome" and coincidentally released about the same time, raised fears of a meltdown. The panic was on.

It all made for great drama but lousy science and government policy. Since the accident, researchers have searched continually for serious health effects from the accident, only to find that they couldn't find any. No one died at Three Mile Island. No one even got seriously ill. Health experts said they could find no more cancer deaths, fetal or infant mortality, developmental abnormalities or genetic ill health than they would have expected to find without the accident. Indeed, in 1985 researchers found that a 5-year survey of residents living within 20 miles of the plant showed they actually suffered fewer cancer deaths than would have been normally expected.

A federal judge in Harrisburg threw out a case in 1996 brought by persons claiming ill effects from the accident. The plaintiffs, she said, "have had nearly two decades to muster evidence in support of their respective cases. . . . The paucity of proof alleged in support of the Plaintiffs' case is manifest. The court has searched the record for any and all evidence which construed in a light most favorable to Plaintiffs creates a genuine issue of material fact warranting submission of their claims to a jury. This effort as been in vain."

That's not surprising. Although radiation did escape the plant that day, residents' exposure was so small as to be negligible. The average dose for someone living within 5 miles of the plant was about what an airline passenger receives during two round-trip transcontinental flights. (And that assumes the hypothetical resident was standing outside continuously from March 28 to April 7, 1979.) But no one on a plane trip expects to find Frankenstein watching the in-flight movie in the seat next to him.

Not that there weren't any health effects. Researchers examining area residents found that the biggest health problem had to do with stress. There was a "pronounced demoralizing effect" on residents in the general area. Part of the problem was that they couldn't decide how seriously to take the risk of remaining in the area. Almost 20 percent of the homes surveyed in the area said there was disagreement about whether to leave.

Some of that ambivalence continues to this day, in part because the media, activists and similarly credentialed experts continue to play up nuclear's alleged risks. Such fearmongering makes it harder for utilities to renew plant licenses for existing plants, much less order new ones. Losing a clean, safe, relatively inexpensive source of electricity like nuclear power would be a far greater disaster than Three Mile Island.


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