When I thought about nuclear energy, I thought of radiation and mutations. Visions of three legged creatures emerging from a frothy neon green river appeared before my eyes. I saw the Horrors of Hiroshima and Homer Simpson's bubbling cartoon stream all wrapped into one. Frankly, nuclear energy scared me. But here we were, at the site of America's worst nuclear disaster yet, assigned to find out what happened.

Were my images fact or fiction, or a little of both?

The truth is no one knows. The problem with nuclear radiation is that scientists, politicians and the affected public simply can't agree on just how dangerous differing amounts of radiation are, which makes the disaster at Three Mile Island still a hot topic of contention more than twenty years later.

Here's what all the discussion is about:

In 1979 a series of mishaps occurred at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant to create the worst nuclear accident in U.S. History. In brief, a stuck relief valve in the plant's Unit 2 reactor released radioactive water into the atmosphere as steam. When the technicians tried to fix the problem, they actually made it worse. By shutting off the cooling water to the reactor core, they caused a partial 'meltdown'. Because of the fear of radiation leakage, around 140,000 people had to be evacuated from the surrounding area.

We talked to Cherry Brendel, a local resident who lived through the accident, to find out how she was affected.

I asked her what information the authorities told her at that time.

After a week, Cheryl and her family came back, and they have lived in the area ever since. I wondered aloud if she'd seen anything unusual around TMI after the accident. "You hear things," she tells me, but she's not ready to link them directly to excess radiation. She's chosen to live by the reactor, and doesn't want to live in fear. But the stories she tells makes me wonder.

Although Cheryl quickly assures me there's no connection between these phenomenon and TMI, she does wonder if there's more to come. "I still worry about [what might happen to] them," she tells me, referring to her three daughters, who are now adults.

"What else has changed around here since the accident?" I ask.

So why did Cheryl choose to stay?

What bothers me is that even though there are newspapers and radiation sensors now, the actual effects of the partial meltdown in the last days of March, 1979 are still unknown... or perhaps hidden. Although 2,000 lawsuits have been filed by area residents claiming to have been effected by the radiation, none of them have actually been heard in court yet. While the politicians and energy officials claim that no one has died because of the accident, abnormally high infant mortality rates in the area tell a different story. There are also people who have just become sick within the past few years.

The Washington Post posed the essential question that no one seems able to answer: What are the long-term health risks to individuals exposed to low levels of radiation?

We don't have to just look at TMI for clues, since there are people at high risk for radiation exposure around the world. For evidence, we can look at any number of sources. There are the effects of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to consider, and the people living around the Russian Chernobyl disaster. There are the military men and women who are involved in the testing of those weapons. There are the people involved in any stage of the nuclear creation process: those working at mining and waste storage sites, uranium processing plants, and nuclear power reactors. And there are the people who eat, work, and sleep near nuclear weapons testing sites today. (Although only two have ever been used in warfare, our government alone has detonated over 700 nuclear bombs as "tests" since 1945. Can anyone tell me why?)

That's a lot of people with potential exposure to harmful radiation! So where are the scientific studies? Child development specialist Dr. Benjamin Spock writes that "the government's own record of health studies has been stained with serious scandal and obvious cover-up." It seems that no matter how many cases of cancer, deformities, animal abnormalities, and infant deaths are reported, "the government response has... been a condescending and blanket denial" that radiation is responsible.

With possible accidents like Three Mile Island, why do we have nuclear power plants at all? We were told by George Darling at the TMI training center that although it's expensive to start up a nuclear energy plant, it is really cheap to maintain. That means lower, more consistent energy prices for the public. But nuclear energy is dangerously destructive and risky to use. There are no good ways to dispose of the extremely radioactive spent fuel, yet we continue to create more and more. Dr. Spock promotes the end to nuclear energy all together. He advises that there are many other options, and that our government needs to "provide leadership for energy conservation and the development of nonpolluting, renewable resources such as the sun, the wind, the tides, [and] the burning of wood" instead.

Were we to take Dr. Spock's advice and demand a nationwide change, mothers like Cheryl could stop worrying that the long-term effects of radiation are poisoning their daughters. And there would be no cause for the poor-taste t-shirts that were printed after the accident in Pennsylvania: "I survived Three Mile Island... I Think."

Rebecca

Please email me at: rebecca@ustrek.org