Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective

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University of California Press, 10 janv. 2006 - 314 pages
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Twenty-five years ago, Hollywood released The China Syndrome, featuring Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas as a TVnews crew who witness what appears to be a serious accident at a nuclear power plant. In a spectacular coincidence, on March 28, 1979, less than two weeks after the movie came out, the worst accident in the history of commercial nuclear power in the United States occurred at Three Mile Island. For five days, the citizens of central Pennsylvania and the entire world, amid growing alarm, followed the efforts of authorities to prevent the crippled plant from spewing dangerous quantities of radiation into the environment. This book is the first comprehensive account of the causes, context, and consequences of the Three Mile Island crisis. In gripping prose, J. Samuel Walker captures the high human drama surrounding the accident, sets it in the context of the heated debate over nuclear power in the seventies, and analyzes the social, technical, and political issues it raised. His superb account of those frightening and confusing days will clear up misconceptions held to this day about Three Mile Island.

The heart of Walker's suspenseful narrative is a moment-by-moment account of the accident itself, in which he brings to life the players who dealt with the emergency: the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the state of Pennsylvania, the White House, and a cast of scientists and reporters. He also looks at the aftermath of the accident on the surrounding area, including studies of its long-term health effects on the population, providing a fascinating window onto the politics of nuclear power and an authoritative account of a critical event in recent American history.
 

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Table des matières

The Nuclear Power Debate
1
The Regulation of Nuclear Power
29
Defense in Depth
51
Wednesday March 28 This Is the Biggie
71
Thursday March 29 The Danger Is Over for People Off Site
102
Friday March 30 Going to Hell in a Handbasket
119
Saturday March 31 Youre Causing a Panic
151
Sunday April 1 Look What We Have Done to These Fine People
173
The Immediate Aftermath of the Accident
190
The LongTerm Effects of Three Mile Island
209
Notes
245
Essay on Sources
287
Index
291
Droits d'auteur

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Fréquemment cités

Page 7 - Project Independence.* Let us set as our national goal, in the spirit of Apollo, with the determination of the Manhattan Project, that by the end of this decade we will have developed the potential to meet our own energy needs without depending on any foreign energy sources.
Page 265 - Planning Basis for the Development of State and Local Government Radiological Emergency Response Plans in Support of Light Water Nuclear Power Plants, US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, December 1978.
Page 243 - States have been relatively uncommon since the mid1980s, but when dramatic and devastating ones occur, as with the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City in 1993 and the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, they can be traumatic, shattering Americans' sense of invulnerability and security.
Page 27 - In the excitement over the unfolding of his scientific and technical powers, modern man has built a system of production that ravishes nature and a type of society that mutilates man. If only there were more and more wealth, everything else, it is thought, would fall into place. Money is considered to be all-powerful; if it could not actually buy non-material values, such as justice, harmony, beauty or even health, it could circumvent the need for them or compensate for their loss.
Page 213 - Our calculations show that even if a meltdown occurred, there is a high probability that the containment building and the hard rock on which the TMI-2 containment building is built would have been able to prevent the escape of a large amount of radioactivity.
Page 210 - ... require the conclusion that nuclear power is inherently too dangerous to permit it to continue and expand as a form of power generation. Neither do they suggest that the nation should move forward aggressively to develop additional commercial nuclear power. They simply state that if the country wishes, for larger reasons, to confront the risks that are inherently associated with nuclear power, fundamental changes are necessary if those risks are to be kept within tolerable limits.
Page 213 - Based on our investigation of the health effects of the accident, we conclude that in spite of serious damage to the plant, most of the radiation was contained and the actual release will have a negligible effect on the physical health of individuals.
Page 202 - Under procedures approved by the Director of the National Institutes of Health, the Director of the National Cancer Institute...
Page 224 - The failure of the US nuclear power program ranks as the largest managerial disaster in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale.

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À propos de l'auteur (2006)

J. Samuel Walker is the historian of the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission. His previous books include Permissible Dose: A History of Radiation Protection in the Twentieth Century (California, 2000) and Containing the Atom: Nuclear Regulation in a Changing Environment, 1963-1971 (California, 1992).

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