S1E7: The Spokesman That Killed

Monsters are supposed to be easy to spot. They hide in the dark, behind locked doors, in the parts of the story you already know to fear. A ghost in the hallway. A monster under the bed. The real danger never looks like that. At four o'clock in the morning, on March twenty-eighth, nineteen seventy-nine, on a small island in a river in Pennsylvania, the danger looked like nothing at all. It looked like a valve that would not close, a light on a panel that lied, and a man at a microphone who did not know what to say. Nobody died at Three Mile Island. And yet, what died there changed America for thirty years. Morgan Miller: This podcast was brought to you by flooftags, visit floof tags dot com for one of a kind laser engraved pet tags. Morgan Miller: This is the story of Three Mile Island. A story about the meltdown that was an engineering failure, and the communication failure that became the disaster. Morgan Miller: Three Mile Island sits in the Susquehanna River, near Harrisburg, in Pennsylvania. It held two pressurized water reactors, both of them new-clear reactors that used ordinary water under pressure to carry heat away from the core. Unit Two was barely three months old. It had been switched on at the end of December, nineteen seventy-eight, and by the spring of nineteen seventy-nine it was still, in every sense that mattered, a new machine being learned by the people who ran it. Morgan Miller: The accident did not begin in the new-clear part of the plant. It began in the ordinary part, the secondary cooling loop, where water that never touches the reactor carries heat away to make steam. At four o'clock in the morning, a feedwater pump in that secondary loop stopped. It should have been a routine upset. But backup pump valves had been left closed after maintenance, so the backup water could not get through. The turbine tripped. The reactor shut itself down automatically, exactly as it was designed to do. So far, everything was working. Morgan Miller: Then a valve on the primary system, a pilot operated relief valve, opened to bleed off pressure, exactly as designed. And then it stuck open. It never closed again. The control room had an indicator for that valve, but the indicator did not show the position of the valve itself. It showed only the command that had been sent to it. The command said close. The valve stayed open. Coolant was pouring out of the reactor, and the panel told the operators the opposite of the truth. Morgan Miller: The operators in that control room were not careless, and they were not reckless. They were looking at instruments that had been designed to mislead them, and they were working from training that had never prepared them for what they were seeing. The pressurizer, the tank that keeps pressure steady in the primary system, showed a water level that looked too high. What the operators could not see was that a bubble of steam had formed inside the reactor, pushing water up into the pressurizer and making the level look full. Believing there was too much water, they throttled back and then shut off the emergency pumps that were adding water to the core. It was the exact opposite of what the core needed. And that misdiagnosis held for more than two hours. Morgan Miller: By the third hour, parts of the core were melting from their own decay heat. The fuel rods and their cladding were being destroyed. Roughly half the core melted into a molten mass, a substance the industry calls corium. The hot zirconium cladding reacted with steam and produced hydrogen gas. The reactor was in a partial meltdown, the worst commercial new-clear accident in American history, and the people in charge of telling the public about it were about to make it worse. Morgan Miller: As the hydrogen collected, a bubble of gas formed in the reactor vessel, and officials began to fear it could explode and vent far more radiation. The fear was real, and it lasted for days. What nobody knew at the time was that the bubble could not explode, because there was not enough oxygen inside the vessel for combustion. That was a miscalculation by the federal new-clear regulator, acknowledged later. But the public never forgot the word bubble. It sounded like a bomb with a timer on it, and for days, that is how the whole country heard it. Morgan Miller: Radioactive gases and radioactive iodine did vent to the environment. It was the largest release of radioactivity in the United States up to that point. And here is the part of this story that has to be said plainly, because it is the part that gets lost in the panic. The highest estimated dose to any member of the public was about one millisievert, roughly the dose of a few medical scans. Most people near the plant received far less. About thirty-two thousand local residents were health monitored for thirteen years. No detectable health effects were found in plant workers or in the public. No one died. No one suffered a radiation injury. The accident was rated level five on the international new-clear event scale, an accident with wider consequences, and its consequences were not measured in bodies. They were measured in trust. Morgan Miller: The panic began the next day. On March twenty-ninth, Governor Dick Thornburgh advised residents to stay indoors, with their windows closed. The company that ran the plant, Metropolitan Edison, gave statements that were conflicting and downplaying, while the federal regulator sounded far more alarmed. One side said one thing. The other side said another. The public, trying to decide whether to stay or to run, was given two different realities and told to choose. Morgan Miller: And then came the spokesman. John Herbein, known as Jack Herbein, was a vice president at Metropolitan Edison, a man with no prior experience in public relations, who initially took sole responsibility for explaining the accident to the press and to the public. He is the spokesman of this episode's title, and it matters that you understand who he was. He was not a control room operator. He was management's institutional voice, the company speaking to the country. And the company, in those first days, spoke terribly. Morgan Miller: Herbein had earlier omitted the radiation releases from interviews because, as he put it, it did not come up. At a press conference, pressed by reporters, he snapped, and I quote him from the record: I do not know why we need to tell you each and every thing that we do specifically. The official post accident report judged that remark to be the one that eliminated whatever credibility Herbein and Metropolitan Edison had left with the press and with the public. On March twenty-eighth, Lieutenant Governor William Scranton told the press, on the record: Metropolitan Edison has given you and us conflicting information. That sentence, from the state's own second in command, was the moment the story stopped being about a valve and started being about whether anyone in authority could be believed. Morgan Miller: On March thirtieth, on the advice of the chairman of the federal new-clear regulator, Governor Thornburgh recommended the evacuation of about three thousand five hundred pregnant women and preschool children within five miles of the plant. That was the official recommendation. What actually happened was much larger. Well over one hundred thousand people fled anyway, some estimates approaching two hundred thousand, and some of them stayed away for weeks. They were not fleeing a dose anyone had measured. They were fleeing the feeling, earned hour by hour from conflicting statements, that nobody in charge knew what was happening, or would say so if they did. Morgan Miller: And the country was primed to believe the worst. Twelve days earlier, on March sixteenth, a film had premiered in American cinemas. The China Syndrome, starring Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon, and Michael Douglas, told the story of a fictional new-clear cover up, of engineers who saw danger and executives who buried it. It was fiction. But when the real news began to sound like the plot of the film, the public did what any audience would do. They assumed the film had been a preview. The timing was eerie, and it shaped everything that followed, because from that week on, every reassurance from the company sounded like a line from the movie. Morgan Miller: On April first, President Jimmy Carter visited the plant. Carter was not a politician pretending to understand reactors. He was a trained Navy new-clear engineer who had once helped dismantle a damaged reactor in Canada. He walked the site, he spoke plainly, and his visit calmed the nation in a way no company statement had managed. On April ninth, the regulator declared the crisis over. By May, the damaged reactor was in cold shutdown. The immediate danger had passed. The damage to public trust had not even begun to be counted. Morgan Miller: The reckoning came in a report. The Kemeny Commission, which reported on October thirtieth, nineteen seventy-nine, found that poor training was a key factor, and it handed down a damning indictment of the regulator itself, saying it did not possess the organizational and management capabilities necessary for the effective pursuit of safety goals. The commission also indicted the control room design: banks of identical alarms, no indication of how much coolant was actually in the reactor, and no indication of the relief valve's true position. The panel had lied to the operators. The operators had trusted the panel. And the industry had built both. Dozens of regulatory changes followed, and on October twenty-fifth, nineteen seventy-nine, the regulator fined Metropolitan Edison one hundred fifty-five thousand dollars. Morgan Miller: Imagine that control room in the small hours of the morning. Banks of identical alarms, lights and buzzers competing for attention, and no single instrument that could answer the one question that mattered: how much water was actually left in the reactor. The operators were trained men doing a job they took seriously, and the room around them was built as if the people inside it would never need to know the truth quickly. When the commission later examined that room, it found exactly that failure written into the design. The tragedy of Three Mile Island is not that the operators failed to read the panel. It is that the panel, in the moment it mattered most, failed to tell them anything they could use. Morgan Miller: That is why the operators in this story are never the villains. The commission blamed training, control room design, and the regulator. The men in the control room were failed by every system that was supposed to support them, by instruments that showed commands instead of facts, by training that never covered the accident they were living through, and by a company whose public voice then made the public's fear worse. Blame the management. The people at the panels were doing their jobs inside a machine that had been designed to hide its own failure from them. Morgan Miller: Unit Two was too damaged to ever run again. Its defueling and cleanup ran through the nineteen eighties and nineties, and about ninety-nine percent of the fuel and damaged core was removed and shipped to a federal laboratory in Idaho. Roughly two thousand four hundred eighty pounds of fuel debris, about one percent of the original core, remains fused to pipes and tanks inside the plant. Decommissioning is targeted for the late twenty thirties, by one estimate, or the early twenty fifties, by another. The melted reactor is still, nearly half a century later, giving up its last percent. Morgan Miller: Unit One, the twin that was never damaged, was shut during the crisis, restarted in nineteen eighty-five, and ran productively until September of two thousand nineteen, when it was retired for economics, for the price of cheap natural gas, not for safety. And between those two facts sits the longest shadow of Three Mile Island. No new commercial new-clear reactors were ordered in the United States for roughly three decades afterward. The next orders did not come until the twenty tens. The accident froze the American build out, and the world answered by founding the World Association of New-clear Operators, an industry body built on the idea that operators everywhere should learn from one another's accidents before they repeat them. Morgan Miller: Which brings us to the strangest part of the ending, the part that belongs to our own time. One island, two stories. The melted reactor still has not given up the last one percent of its nineteen seventy-nine core. And the healthy twin next door is being scrubbed back to life. In September of two thousand twenty-four, the company now called Constellation Energy signed a twenty year agreement with Microsoft, under which the entire output of the restarted Unit One, more than eight hundred megawatts, would go to Microsoft's data centers. The plant has been renamed the Crane Clean Energy Center. The restart, a project costing about one point six billion dollars, is targeted for two thousand twenty-seven or two thousand twenty-eight. And in September of two thousand twenty-six, the federal environmental review cleared its final hurdle. The twin that survived is coming back, this time to power the machines that think. Morgan Miller: Thirty years is a long time for an industry to stand still. It is long enough for a whole generation to grow up hearing that new-clear power means Three Mile Island, and nothing else. It is long enough for the engineers who built the plants to retire, and for the public conversation to harden into a single image: a cooling tower in fog, a bubble that might explode, a spokesman who could not explain himself. That is what a communication failure buys you. Not a better reactor, not a safer plant, but three decades in which the country simply stopped ordering, because the people who would have had to say yes no longer believed the people who were asking. Morgan Miller: So what did the spokesman kill? Not a person. No one died at Three Mile Island, and this show will never pretend otherwise. What died was the public's willingness to believe the people who run new-clear power when they say everything is under control. A valve stuck open. A light lied. A company contradicted itself on television. And for thirty years, America stopped building. The meltdown was the engineering failure. The communication failure was the disaster. The panel lied to the operators, the operators trusted the panel, and the industry paid for thirty years. Morgan Miller: I am Morgan Miller, and this has been New-clear Shadows. Morgan Miller: A big thank-you to floof tags dot com for sponsoring the show. Morgan Miller: If you are enjoying New-clear Shadows, please follow or subscribe wherever you are listening. It helps others find the show. Morgan Miller: Visit our website, new-clear shadows pod dot com, for more information.