Numbers

Three Mile Island

"Three Mile Island" is used to both refer to the nuclear power plant located near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and the accident that took place there on March 29, 1979. It is still the most serious accident in the history of nuclear power in the United States. As such, it is often used as shorthand for the dangers of nuclear power.

How It's Used

"A security meltdown the likes of Three Mile Island hit the ABC News morning tipsheet yesterday. The Note's 'Must Reads' e-mail was sent out at 5:30 a.m. to an elite group of what presumably are the touted 'Gang of 500' opinion shapers -- the people who count in the world of politics and media. No one, absolutely no one, is told who is on this famous bcc ('blind carbon copy') list. Well, that was the case until yesterday morning.

"Despite our constant admonitions to be very, very careful before hitting the 'send' button, a young ABC-er hit it -- accidentally, we're told. Not a minute later came the 'would-like-to-recall' message, trying to retrieve the five-page list of the e-mail's recipients. Too late."

"The availability cascade is a self-perpetuating process: the more attention a danger gets, the more worried people become, leading to more news coverage and more fear. Once the images of Sept. 11 made terrorism seem a major threat, the press and the police lavished attention on potential new attacks and supposed plots. After Three Mile Island and 'The China Syndrome,' minor malfunctions at nuclear power plants suddenly became newsworthy."

"Progress on the upgrades slowed in the mid-1990s when the Liberal government began a nationwide program of cuts. AECL [Atomic Energy of Canada Limited] became 'a skeleton of an organization that could barely function,' said one former middle manager.

"Ms. McLellan, the natural resources minister at the time, defended the approach. 'Back in the early 1990s, it wasn't clear what the future of nuclear was,' she said. 'There had been no new facilities built in many years. [The nuclear accidents at] Chernobyl and Three Mile Island were still fresh in people's minds. It was a time of great uncertainty.”

"When James Lovelock, founder of the Gaia theory (that planet Earth should be looked upon as a self-sustaining organism, to whom we are incidental) came out in favour of nuclear energy as the only serious alternative to fossil fuels in 2004, it shocked generations of post-60s, environmentally-conscious Britons. The Windscale fire of 1957, the partial meltdown of a US reactor core at Three Mile Island in 1979, the Chernobyl horror of 86 - these are what we remember first about nuclear energy, closely followed by Meryl Streep as Karen Silkwood, The China Syndrome, Mr Burns and Blinky the fish and Homer Simpson munching doughnuts with his feet on the control panel. More recently, that decommissioning the fleet of British-designed Magnox and Advanced Gas-Cooled (AGR) Reactors built between the 1950s and 1970s will cost not less than £73bn. And rising."

"In the United States, which already gets nearly 20 percent of its electricity from nuclear plants, utilities are thinking about new reactors for the first time since the Three Mile Island meltdown three decades ago—despite global concerns about nuclear proliferation, local concerns about accidents or terrorist attacks, and the lack of a disposal site for the radioactive waste."

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