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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff You Should Know.
A whoops edition.
That's right.
You know it's not a whoops though.
Oh, I can guess where this is going. stuff at Sea Voyage.
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Right.
Yeah, there's going to be other stuff, too.
We're going to be meeting and greeting.
And I'm guessing there'll be other opportunities to hang out with us maybe, rather than just the one meet and greet.
Yeah, for sure.
This all goes down October 2nd through 7th of this year aboard the Valiant Lady.
And you can go check everything out at virginvoyages.com slash stuff.
Very nice, Chuck.
Let's see.
So you want to start talking about Three Mile Island?
Yeah, the nuclear, I guess it's still the worst nuclear disaster in American history, right?
Yeah, I can't think of anything worse.
I mean, as far as actual disasters go, it wasn't that bad.
But how close it came to being like Chernobyl level is kind of breathtaking, actually.
Yeah, for sure.
And this all went down when I had just turned eight years old on March 28th, 1979.
Yeah.
And, really interestingly, just 12 days before this accident happened at Three Mile Island, a movie called The China Syndrome came out.
Yeah.
Starring Michael Douglas.
Crazy timing.
Yeah, and Jane Fonda, which makes it even weirder.
Because The China Syndrome, if you've never seen it, it's a pretty good movie.
I would say go watch it.
It was basically this.
It was essentially what happened.
What happened in the movie China Syndrome happened at Three Mile Island 12 days later.
It's really bizarre.
Yeah.
And the term China syndrome comes from.
I don't know if it's a term they still use, but I guess it was a term back then for a reactor melting down and melting all the way through to China.
Yeah.
Pretty, pretty folksy term for something as horrific as that.
Yeah, because you know when you grew up in the 70s.
Everyone knows if you dig deep enough, you will reach China.
Sure.
I tried a couple of times and gave up after a few hours.
Yeah, that was on the playground at least.
But yeah, this happened March 28, 79.
When you said it wasn't as bad as it could have been, you're dead right, because that means there were no casualties and they did avert that complete and total meltdown.
But there's a lot of sort of...
I guess skepticism still that like, hey, it was fine.
There was the air spine and everything around there is just fine.
And nobody ever got sick because of this.
Yeah.
And one reason that it does pay to be skeptical of that and you can't really blame people who are especially people who live in the area, like in Middletown, Pennsylvania is that at the time, The atomic energy industry, including the businesses that ran the place, the businesses that built these places, the agencies that regulated it, all of them had nothing but Pollyanna-ish optimistic views.
Of all of the amazing things that nuclear power could do and how safe it was.
Like they were deluded as a group about the safety of of nuclear power and even throughout this whole accident as it was unfolding.
They were just like, that's not that bad.
Oh, it's a little worse than we thought, but it's still not that bad.
And it just kept going and going like that.
Every time something new came out, they were like, oh, it's a little worse than we thought.
Finally, in the mid 80s, they were like, OK, this was really bad.
It took that long for them to admit it because they were just that optimistic about it.
They couldn't believe that this could happen.
Yeah, for sure.
And, as we'll see, it was a combination of human error and poor instrumentation and redundancies that didn't work and stuff that I mean it's crazy.
Like some of the stuff I was almost ready to read like Well, and this thing just wasn't labeled correctly.
And that never happened, but it was getting a little absurd at some point when you were looking at all the sort of things that happened that led to this.
Yeah, totally.
Agreed.
Yeah.
I think that was a consequence of that over optimistic view, too.
So should we start as Night Ranger did at four in the morning without a warning?
Is that Sister Christian?
That's the only Night Ranger song I know.
No, they have a song called Four in the Morning.
Oh, that makes sense.
Four in the Morning came without a warning.
That's all I remember.
Okay.
But that's what happened.
There was a small malfunction in the secondary cooling system.
And there was a mechanical – they still don't know if it was a mechanical or an electrical error –
And the long and short of it was the water pump started sending water to the steam generators.
And, as you know from listening, I mean we've done episodes on nuclear energy and on the one the meltdown in Japan.
Fukushima.
Like water and keeping that reactor core cool is the whole key to keeping things safe.
Yeah, exactly.
Because once it starts heating, it's really tough to get it cooled down again, and all sorts of bad things happen when it overheats.
And I think by the time they had shut the system down, by the time they finally intervened it was at 4000 degrees Fahrenheit.
So 1,000 degrees short of a total meltdown.
And just to kind of go into a little more detail of exactly what happened, because you basically kind of got the point across there was a fault in, I think, a mechanical or electrical part that kept the water that you needed to cool all that stuff flowing, from flowing in.
That was the thing that kicked it all off.
But this nuclear reactor, the control panel was designed to sense like when it started to overheat, and it did overheat because there wasn't enough coolant and it shut itself down.
And everything with that was working properly.
The control rods went in.
Nobody had to do anything.
The system shut itself down because it was overheating.
Right.
So, so far, so good in a certain sense.
Yeah.
But things really kind of went pear-shaped after this, as you used to say a lot.
You don't say that much anymore.
I miss pear-shaped.
I'll try to bring it back then.
I'm bringing it back.
So they had to lower the pressure in the system.
So a pilot-operated relief valve opened.
And that's great.
This thing should have stayed open for about 10 seconds or so, just to let a little pressure out.
Mm-hmm. and it was designed to close automatically when it returned to normal.
It did not close automatically.
It got stuck, but they didn't know that it got stuck.
That was the big problem up front.
Yeah, and that caused another problem.
So first of all, remember, it's overheated because there's not enough water.
Now the pressure is lower in the whole reactor.
And lower pressure means that water will boil at a lower temperature.
So the water is boiling more and more.
So you're losing more and more.
And it's creating more and more steam.
That's also raising the temperature.
That's another thing that the operators should have noticed, right?
Or they did notice.
They were like, oh, the temperature in the reactor is really going up.
But they all generally agreed that it was just wrong.
There had been problems with that pilot-operated relief valve for apparently weeks.
And rather than fix it, they were just falsifying the information and dealing with it like just living with the problem.
Yeah, and we should point out that there were two nuclear reactors there TMI, not too much information Three Mile Island One and Three Mile Island Two.
They built these things in 1968, and TMI One opened in 1974.
And TMI 2 in 78 and TMI 2, the one that had the issue here, had only been open for three months.
I think, yeah, just about three months when this accident occurred.
So it wasn't even online that long.
And so it must have had that leak kind of from the get go, it sounds like.
Yeah, I think you're right.
Because, yeah, it must not have ever worked properly.
And they just didn't really know it or care.
Well, they already cut the ribbon with those giant scissors.
Too late.
Yeah.
So the system again is like, guys, I'm going to run another security safety thing.
I've noticed that things are really starting to go pear-shaped in the reactor.
And I'm going to start sending in emergency coolant.
So the system opened up its own valves to let in emergency water flowing into the reactor.
Try to cool things down.
That actually helped make things worse to an extent where like water kept like bubbling and boiling and it was now spilling out of the open relief valve out of the reactor, which is not good.
But it still would have helped keep things cool sooner.
The problem is the operators, again, were like, that shouldn't be happening.
The pressure seems fine in here.
And now there's water flowing in.
We got to turn off these emergency pumps.
And they did.
They turned off the emergency pumps.
And that was the final straw.
The system was like, I'm not helping anymore.
You guys are on your own.
Yeah, so the water level is dropping, which is very key to keeping that thing stable and cool.
And it actually exposed the reactor's core, the top of that thing.
And once the core is exposed, that's very, very bad news.
So that happened.
I think everything started at 4 a.m.
Night Ranger time.
And then at 6 am this is two hours later an operator finally was like wait a minute, that release valve that was supposed to close automatically looks like that thing didn't close.
So he ordered it to be closed off, but 100000 liters of coolant had already leaked out of the system at this point.
Yeah, highly, highly radioactive water just spilling out.
And eventually it was pumped out of the reactor containment building into other buildings so that they were flooded with contaminated water.
It was quite a mess.
So these guys have now figured out the main issue.
They've closed the relief valve.
Now they can put more coolant in, and they started to do that.
But you said that the top of the reactor core was exposed.
That is never supposed to happen.
The core should never be exposed above water.
And because it had been, now pumping coolant in was not necessarily doing the trick.
It certainly wasn't doing it fast enough.
And they realized about 40 minutes after they figured out what the problem was, that the core was really screwed up.
Because remember all this time, for those two hours Chuck, they were just like ho-hum, everything's fine.
They thought their instruments were messed up or that everything was working correctly.
And finally, between 6 a.m. and 6.40, they're like, this is really, really, really bad.
And five minutes after they figured that out, radiation alarms started ringing around the plant which, if they didn't know it was bad before, those alarms certainly confirmed it.
Yeah, and then about 11 minutes later and this is almost 7 o'clock, this is almost three hours later they finally declared a site emergency.
Right after that happened, you know, they tried to – and, you know, partially –
Part of the problem here was due to the being in the 1970s and you can't get a hold of someone via cell phone like in a moment's notice.
That's where this kind of comes into play.
They tried to get in touch with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission kind of immediately.
They called.
The office wasn't open yet.
And so they had what these things still exist.
But what used to have a lot more back in the day is like an answering service, like humans that answer the phone and forward the call or call up the doctor or whoever they need to call and say hey, I got.
I think what's probably a concerning message that you probably need to get right away.
So they tried to do that.
They tried to call the regional duty officer at home, but they were like no, he already left for work.
And so this guy's in his car now.
Listen to the radio on his way to work.
He's listening to beautiful music on the AM dial.
He probably is.
And the long and short of it.
Is it finally like?
I think it takes nearly 40 minutes to even finally make contact with the nuclear regulatory commission?
And like time is is crucial at this point.
Like every every second matters.
Yeah, and the reason why they really needed to get in touch with the NRC is because they didn't know what to do.
They weren't really trained for a situation like this.
The NRC was the body that had this information they needed to figure out how to handle this.
So, very quickly, word starts to spread.
It hits D.C.
The local journalists start showing up.
Eventually, national journalists started showing up.
And by 9 a.m., everybody knows that there's a big, big problem at Three Mile Island.
The problem was...
No one knew how bad it was.
Because, on the one hand, the first people that started addressing things was Metropolitan Edison, the power company that ran and, I believe, owned Three Mile Island, both TM1 and 2.
And they were just lying their faces off.
They just said whatever they thought people wanted to hear.
And they would even do it in private.
Like the governor Dick Thornburg and the lieutenant governor William Scranton, they were just lying to them about how not a big deal this was from the outset.
So they proved that they were just untrustworthy from the outset and they got quickly pushed aside.
As far as the people who were really trying to handle this problem went, they just they were like you go stand over there, we'll deal with you later, For sure.
They on the 28th, they briefly considered evacuating the area.
This is FEMA.
They're on the scene now.
But they said no.
And then the governor.
Like you were saying, Governor Thornburg, he declined to evacuate again on March 29th because they're getting reports that there was no radiation that had escaped and everything was like completely contained.
Finally, on March 30th the governor got a report that said all right well, some radioactive gas has escaped the reactor.
So he said he makes an announcement like, all right, all pregnant women and preschool children need to evacuate and like get out of the area.
And that caused a pretty big panic.
It did.
I think 140,000 people left.
Did you see the American Experience, the PBS documentary on this?
Yeah.
It's called Meltdown at Three Mile Island.
So a lot of people were panicking and leaving, but there were also a lot of people around there like they can take my house out of my cold dead hands.
I'm not leaving.
Yeah, that always happens.
Right?
Yeah.
But so there were people that stayed, but a lot of people left because they were scared to death.
No one knew exactly how bad this was.
And so I think a lot of rumor and unsubstantiated stuff was really spreading very quickly.
Uh, at the same time, there was no one who really knew how bad it was.
That could say that's not true.
That's not true.
I can unequivocally say this is how bad it is.
So you really couldn't say like, don't worry.
It was, we don't think you should worry.
We hope you don't have to worry, but there was nothing that they could really reassure the public with at this point.
Yeah, for sure.
All right.
That feels like a great time for a break, if you agree.
I agree.
So they are trying to get this thing cooled down.
And then very quickly, another problem would pop up.
And we're going to address that right after this.
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Okay, Chuck.
So where we left off, Three Mile Island TMI-2 reactor had reached a different shape of a certain kind of fruit.
Things were going badly, in other words, right?
Not yes, it's bad, but I'm just glad you're saying it again.
So it went from bad to worse, actually.
They're like, they wouldn't call it a meltdown.
It took years before they officially started calling this a meltdown.
It was an accident.
It was a problem, an issue, that kind of thing.
But on top of that, the reactor having huge problems.
They now realized that there was a hydrogen gas bubble that during this two, three hours of the accident had developed because it got so hot that the zirconium tubes that held the fuel pellets.
It reacted with the steam that was being generated and it actually tore the water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen, and the hydrogen just started to build up.
Well obviously, if you listened to our Hindenburg episode, you know that a big bunch of hydrogen gas in one place is very, very dangerous, especially when it's in the middle of a nuclear reactor.
Yeah, so all of a sudden there's this more concerning problem.
They're like if this thing explodes?
You know, if this gas bubble explodes it might rupture the actual building This thing is housed in and we're in real trouble if that happens.
So from I think well, we should say that the World Nuclear Association, they say that that never would have been possible.
But of course, they don't know this at the time.
And who knows if it was possible or not.
But for March 30th.
Just a couple of days later, through April 1st, they managed to decrease the size of that bubble by venting that thing out and, you know, basically kind of slowly just reducing the size of the bubble.
But this is also, if you're venting, you know... melting down, I guess I don't, what'd you say?
They didn't call it a meltdown.
It's having a tantrum, I guess.
You're releasing that stuff in like more radiation into the environment by doing so.
Right.
But they really had no choice, essentially.
It was either that or let the thing blow up.
So they did.
They managed to get the bubble under control.
And on April 1st, Jimmy Carter, who was president at the time, I didn't know this.
He was a trained nuclear engineer.
So he was essentially the president to be in charge for this to happen.
You knew that?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I knew from my visits to the Carter Center and I read a book and I've seen a documentary.
He's one of my guys.
One of the smartest dudes we've ever had in the White House.
Oh, I know.
He was a fantastic president.
It's a shame.
So he was president at the time, and he was like, you know what, I'm going to come there.
I'm going to be shown touring the plant.
Rosalind's going to come with me.
That will reassure the public that it's fine.
It's under control.
The problem was, according to that PBS documentary, at the time it was not certainty that the hydrogen bubble wasn't going to blow up while the president was there.
There are two dueling mathematicians who had conflicting results about whether the bubble was going to blow up.
And so Jimmy Carter, like, took a real risk.
So did Rosalind Carter.
By going there to tour the plant, they had to wear yellow rubber boots because again, there's really highly contaminated radioactive water that had spilled out of the coolant on the floor.
It was a big deal, but apparently it had the impact he was looking for and the public started to calm down.
Yeah, I don't know if you could get if they would let a president do that these days.
Yeah, it was the 70s, man.
What can happen?
It was, yeah, just put on these booties.
So he obviously orders a committee to convene and investigate this thing.
It ended up being called the Kemeny Report because it was led by Dartmouth College President John Kemeny.
Mm-hmm.
And they the NRC ended up coming out of this not looking so great.
We'll get to why as we go.
But they really took it on the chin.
The training program like met Ed was like, hey, we trained up our guys.
As well as we were able to and to meet your standards like we did everything you told us to do.
All your requirements were met.
It was the NRC apparently who like had lax requirements.
And you know, when it comes to like emergency training and stuff like that, they were really ill prepared.
Yeah, these guys were fully trained, but their training hadn't prepared them for that and it was the NRC's fault.
The NRC showed that they weren't prepared to handle this either.
Like it was just really poor planning, again based on over-optimistic ideas about the safety of nuclear energy right.
So the NRC also conducted its own examination.
They're like, yeah, we should probably do a little better.
There's a lot of confusing stuff in training.
I think there was this one passage that said insert key into the control panel, turn key to the left, break off the key in the control panel and eat what remains of the key.
That was part of the safety training process.
Anyway, they were like, we also have to say, though, it wasn't just us.
It wasn't just the operators.
But the design of this stuff is pretty nuts, if you ask us.
So one of the big problems was why it took so long to realize there was a problem.
Like, all that time was going by when things were leaking out.
And, you know, the NRC, again, took it on the chin.
They found that their training requirements weren't good enough and that – the operating procedures were confusing during an emergency.
Like from what I gathered from the documentary and by reading up on this, was that like they were trained to run the place.
And like turn the keys and push the buttons right, but if something went wrong?
That's where they really really failed to know like, what to do.
So they were at, you know, while this emergency was unfolding.
They're misinterpreting data that's coming through and they're making bad decisions based on that.
Uh they, you know.
You mentioned earlier that the water started boiling really violently.
That caused the coolant pumps to shake really hard.
And they thought they didn't know that's what that was.
They thought they were overfilling and the things were shaking because it had too much coolant in there and that the pumps you know were going to be damaged because of that.
So.
You know, just to not even know that like hey, by the way, if this thing really starts boiling hard, the pipes might shake.
Like, they didn't even know that could happen.
Right, exactly.
Like you said, they were trained to operate it, basically.
One other thing to say about the system too is in that documentary, I think, the guy who wrote The China Syndrome.
He was interviewed a lot in it.
He was saying that if they had done nothing, the system would have taken care of itself from the outset.
It was when they intervene those two times that that threw that safety sequence off.
And that's that.
So it really, truly was a combination of all sorts of different stuff.
The complexity of the system, human error, malfunctions.
Poor planning.
And there's a sociologist named Charles Perrault who calls this a normal accident, which is basically an accident that is essentially inevitable because it's it's accidentally designed into the complex system.
Somehow, somewhere, all these things are going to come together and cause an accident.
That's what happened at Three Mile Island.
Yeah.
If you're waiting for your Homer Simpson moment, wait no further, because one of the things they found when they did, you know, the big investigation was that there was an operator there that had a large belly.
Sound like he had a big beer gut.
Yeah.
And his beer gut was blocking the view of some of the panel indicators.
And like they literally didn't see these things because of Homer Simpson standing there in the way, there was a printer, a computer printer that malfunctioned, that was recording like real-time data, that got jammed for 90 minutes.
Just the communication with like wearing face respirators and masks and all that stuff.
Like, They just weren't able to talk in an effective manner while this is all going down.
Yeah, and that computer printer that was giving them that real-time information.
Being jammed for 90 minutes meant that the data they were working from was 90 minutes old.
In the middle of a meltdown.
Yeah.
So like these guys really just had no genuine clue what was actually going on.
They didn't even seem to suspect anything was going on, in part because of that 90 minute old data they were working from.
Yeah, so if it wasn't bad enough already, there are two more big factors here.
And just how sort of janky this thing seemed to be laid out.
The control room didn't have any direct measurements of the water.
Like we kept talking, you know, earlier in Act 1 about... you know, the water levels and they didn't, you know, they thought it was filling up too much.
So they shut the water off, but they this was all happening because it didn't have just direct measurements of the water level.
So they didn't even know they were guessing at how much water was in the system.
And then the second big one was that automatic release valve has an indicator light in the control room.
It was supposed to close automatically, but I think you can also order it to close.
And eventually they tried to order it to close, but...
Um, it doesn't actually show whether it's closed or not.
The indicator lit up when it was ordered to close, not confirming that it was closed.
Right.
But they took it like that.
They took it to mean like, oh, well, the lights on the things closed.
Yeah.
Ask the guy with the big belly blocking the screen.
Exactly.
So, I mean, like that's just nuts that like all of this was happening.
Just the sequence of events.
I mean, if you, if you went back and did it all again, surely it couldn't possibly follow the same steps, because it was just so intertwined with all these different weird things.
Oh, for sure.
So there's a lot of you want to talk about the radiation that may or may not have been released.
Yeah, because I mean that's one of the biggest.
Obviously, issues at hand is like how much of this stuff is getting out to the local community in Pennsylvania?
Right.
Yeah.
And, like you said, to get rid of the hydrogen bubble, they definitely vented radioactive gas into the air.
There's just no two ways around it.
They also had to do that a couple more times during the cleanup, as we'll see.
But the EPA, the NRC, Pennsylvania itself, the Union of Concerned Scientists, just countless people.
Different organizations, including nongovernmental organizations, have conducted all sorts of studies.
People have done meta-analyses of these studies.
Three Mile Island is a very, very heavily studied area to find out exactly what happened.
And essentially...
Almost everybody agrees that there was not enough of a radioactive release to actually affect human health or the environment.
And it seems to be one of those times where it actually is true.
I can barely get it out, but I think they might be right.
Yeah.
I mean, they claim that there was like the radiation was about the estimated levels of a like a chest X-ray.
The Department of Energy said it had negligible effects on public health and the environment.
I guess we'll.
We'll end up talking about the lawsuits later, but because there obviously would be some
But you know, there were some interesting things like, I think, the 43 percent increase in infant deaths in the area around the time of the accident.
There was a study in 97 that found increased cancer rates in the area.
There was a 2017 study that found a correlation between thyroid cancer and living in that region.
But in each of these studies and in each of these cases they're like well, you can't absolutely prove that was the absolute cause.
Yeah.
And these studies are few and far between.
Most of the other studies are like, I didn't turn up any statistically significant correlation even.
Right.
I saw that the highest exposure during cleanup with a peak in 1989 was 0.98 rems.
And that is a tenth of a chest X-ray.
And that on site, the EPA found on site.
So at the Three Mile Island reactor, the radiation in the environment was what you would get from flying on an airplane per hour.
Yeah.
So it really does seem like there was just not that much of an exposure.
Again, I'm quite sure if you go to Three Mile Island and talk to some of the older residents, they will tell you otherwise.
Because a lot of people reported, especially right afterward, that they were suffering from vomiting nausea, hair loss, rashes.
And I'm sure that people just have dismissed them over the years as like, it's placebo effect or nocebo effect or something like that.
So I mean if you believe that you're, you know, wife or husband or mom or dad or kid died of cancer because of this nuclear accident.
And everybody's telling you like, no, it's fine.
You're hysterical, overreacting.
I can't imagine not being deeply bitter about that.
Yeah, of course.
Speaking of deeply bitter, I think that triggered another ad break.
Oh, okay.
And we'll be back to finish up on Three Mile Island right after this.
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I told him.
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June is Black Music Month and on the Drink Champs podcast we're speaking with the hottest names in the culture, like Swae Lee.
Do you realize how legendary you are?
I appreciate that.
I be seeing it, but I'm like, man, I still got like so much more to do.
Like Prince, he dropped like 30 albums.
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You should know.
All right.
So they had resolved this bubble issue and they got to cool this thing down.
And that's really the main thing, that reactor core that had been exposed, like everything, is super hot.
So they first things first, they really just need to get it cooled down.
So they worked on that for for a while.
Finally, on April 27th, I guess this is almost a month later.
They said that it was in cold shutdown.
They had reached that point where water was less than 100 degrees Celsius at atmospheric pressure.
And so they could start cleanup.
And that was it for TMI2.
That thing shut down and did not reopen.
No, it didn't.
Three months of energy production and that's it.
It's crazy.
And it is still actually technically under cleanup today.
The cleanup efforts started pretty much right out of the gate.
I think it was in 1979 that they first started.
But I'm sure the first couple of years were like, OK, what are we going to do?
Part of the problem was is they couldn't see into the reactor.
They couldn't tell with what kind of a problem they were dealing with.
And it wasn't until the 80s. that they started getting actual video confirmation.
They put video cameras into the reactor and saw that the core had partially melted down and that not only that, Chuck the, The nuclear fuel, the uranium, molten uranium, had melted down into the bottom of what's called the vessel, the container vessel.
Basically, the last thing between the...
The uranium, molten uranium in China is this vessel.
And it actually had not been expected to be able to stand up to something like that.
And just by sheer luck, it did.
It did not leak.
But it definitely could have.
And had that happened, it would have been catastrophic had it gotten out.
So three cheers to the containment vessel.
Yeah, for sure.
The cleanup.
I think they yeah, they started in 79, and 11 years later, by 90, was when that whole first phase was done.
They had like.
Most of the nuclear fuel had been removed by that point and about 150 tons of radioactive materials.
I feel like we talked about this kind of disposal before in other episodes.
Yeah, we did.
It may have been the disaster in Japan, or maybe it was just one on nuclear, like burying nuclear waste.
Yeah, it was.
I think it was 2025.
It was a good one.
But we talked about that place in Washington, the Hanford nuclear site.
Yeah well, this stuff, or at the time at least, they went to the National Engineering Laboratory in Idaho for storage.
But then you still had all that water.
You had about two and a quarter million gallons of bad water.
That took another few years.
So that wasn't fully cleaned up until 1993.
You had to evaporate that stuff.
Right, which means you got gas on your hands radioactive gas again, and that's where those further exposures happened throughout the 80s.
I think 1982 and 1989 were the worst, but even then they were less than a millirem of exposure, which again is about a tenth of a chest X-ray right.
So finally, the cleanup of TMI-2 is completed in 1993.
But even that is still like I said, it's still ongoing because they were just like we got 99 of the nuclear fuel out of the reactor.
Isn't that amazing?
We're just going to call it done now.
Yeah.
And so there's still 1 left, and there's a company called TMI2 Solutions that is currently cleaning up that remaining 1 of fuel from the reactor.
Yeah, they're solutions-based.
That's what they do, Josh.
They are.
And I was like, wait a minute.
They own TMI, too.
Why would somebody buy a reactor so that you can pay to clean it up?
And it turns out there is a bunch of not even taxpayer, ratepayer money that Metropolitan Ed had basically added to people's bills is like a tax set aside to pay for cleanup.
And I think there was something like a billion dollars of that left.
And I guess that TMI2 Solutions has been receiving that for cleaning it up.
Yeah.
I mean that when they were protesting Met Ed, they had signs that said first you try to kill us, then you want to bill us.
Yeah.
This this kicked off a lot of I mean, this nuclear energy was at a probably all time public low.
Obviously after Three Mile Island, like things were kind of humming along and then people really really turned against it.
Yeah, there were a lot of protests.
You know, when Jane Fonda shows up that you're in big trouble, and she and her husband at the time, Tom Hayden, did just that.
It did lead to, I mean, silver linings.
It led to one of the great concerts of all time.
The Bruce Springsteen No Nukes concert at Madison Square Garden in 1979 brought musicians banded together and formed the Musicians United for Safe Energy MUSE.
And they just released that in 2021.
And I just want to say I know you're probably not a big Springsteen guy, but if you're a fan of The Boss, watch.
Don't just listen to it.
Watch the concert film of the No Nuke show.
And it is peak, peak Bruce Springsteen.
Unbelievable show.
1979?
Yeah, it's incredible because it's before Born in the USA and all that.
So before he was in state, well, I guess this is MSG, but before he was at like that level of huge.
But right after Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town, he was still young and hungry.
And it's just like, it's an incredible, incredible show.
That's awesome.
Yeah.
I have a Bruce Springsteen anecdote if you want to hear it.
Sure, let's hear it.
Backstage at one of our Bell House shows I was meeting the boyfriend of one of my friends and he was from Jersey and he was telling me this story about how he and his friends were at a pool once and he looked over and he's like and there was Bruce.
And I went, Willis?
And this guy looked—I was serious, too.
The look of just like contempt that fell over this guy's face for a second before he could regain himself.
Bruce Willis.
He was like, no, Springsteen.
I was like, oh, okay.
I was like, I feel equally about both, you know?
At least you didn't say Boxleitner.
Yeah.
That would have been so much better.
Oh boy.
Keep that one in your hip pocket if anyone ever just throws out a Bruce story again.
Say Box Lightner?
Okay.
You got it, buddy.
He was on V, wasn't he?
Oh, sure.
I don't know.
I don't remember.
He was in Scarecrow and Mrs. King.
Okay, Scarecrow.
Or was he in Tron?
No, he wasn't in Tron.
That was a different guy.
That was Jeff Bridges.
Yeah, but the other guy.
The main guy.
That was Bruce Springsteen.
Now, who am I thinking of?
Never mind.
We got to finish this one.
People are going to be so mad at us.
All right.
Sorry.
Sorry, everybody.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is going to send us a letter.
I know.
So not because of a lawsuit that we're filing, but people certainly did.
There was the fact that they falsified those leaked test results that you talked about, without fixing stuff.
And they issued a report to the Department of Justice in November of 1983 saying They indicted MetEd for that falsification of the leaks.
They had to pay a huge fine of $45,000.
And you're like, OK, well, this is 1984 dollars.
How much is it today?
Still just one hundred and forty thousand dollars today.
For falsifying leaks of nuclear material.
Yeah, for sure.
And just being general jerks during the whole, you know, crisis.
But they were like OK well, we're also going to help set up a fund for the Pennsylvania EPA to take care of this area for years to come.
We're going to give it $1 million.
Again, you're like, okay, it's $1984.
Nope, just $3.1 million.
So all told, I think MetEd officially paid out something like less than $3.5 million.
There's a group called Three Mile Island Alert.
They're a nonprofit that is...
Essentially watchdogs about Three Mile Island and I don't think that they feel very good about Metropolitan Ed.
But they say that Ed has paid out lots more than that in civil and personal injury lawsuits to settle those.
Yeah.
Settling them because there was in 1996 there were, I think, a couple of thousand active cases for, like you know, exposure obviously to the radiation.
And the judge said all right, let me pick 10 of these and try them as a group, as a test case, to see if we, you know, if there's merit to the whole thing.
And the judge ruled against the plaintiffs.
You know, citing what I talked about earlier, like you can't.
There's not enough evidence to cite a direct link between the cancer that you have and the radiation that you may or may not have endured.
Right.
So this is one of those, I think, instances where I that I'm convinced, because there's just so many different people and groups of people from all different sectors of our society who have looked at this and said it actually wasn't as bad.
Right.
Could have been really bad, but it's not as bad as people fear.
That's why I buy into the idea that it wasn't that bad.
That's not to say that there weren't people who acted as whistleblowers.
And in particular, if you saw a Netflix documentary called Meltdown going on.
Three Mile Island there was a whistleblower named Rick Parks who was a supervisor in the cleanup crew during the 80s.
And he blew the whistle because he was saying they were using this crane that was in the reactor To basically dismantle the reactor afterward, even though it had gone through the meltdown seemed very unsafe to me.
I didn't like how they were testing it.
So if, like throughout the 80s cleanup of Three Mile Island, that's the most scandalous thing a whistleblower comes up with.
It seems like it's about as on the up and up as something like this can be.
Yeah.
He claimed in that documentary that they like retaliated against him and that someone planted drugs in his car during a random drug inspection.
There are other people that have come out and said, hey, that documentary is a little misleading.
He did raise concerns about that crane, but they didn't ignore them.
He just didn't agree with how they handled it and just take that documentary with a grain of salt.
Basically,
Yeah.
So there were.
I think, like you said, nuclear power was just humming along and then it just nosedived after Three Mile Island.
And I think there were 51 planned nuclear reactors that were canceled in the United States alone.
Like this had global repercussions.
Between 1980 and 1984, 51 of them were canceled.
I think I saw on the end of the documentary that was in 1999, they said zero new ones have been ordered since Three Mile Island.
I saw 100 had been potentially, but...
Regardless, the upshot is, the reason why nuclear energy is not widespread, especially in the United States, is because of Three Mile Island, almost 100.
Yeah, for sure.
Kind of strangely, a couple of years ago, Microsoft signed a 20-year deal to purchase power from TMI1, starting a couple of years from now, in 2028.
And everyone's like, that's weird.
Why is Microsoft buying a bunch of power?
And like, oh, they're using power generated from that to fuel the data centers for AI.
Yeah, which I think we talked about that in the data centers episode and the getting rid of nuclear waste episode.
Yeah, it feels kind of like a full circle moment.
For sure.
So let's leave it at that, huh?
Yeah, sure.
All right.
Well, we came full circle, which means we automatically triggered listener mail, even though we have no indicator light to tell us as much.
That's right.
Hey, guys.
This is from Nathan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania guy.
I'm a former academic who never lost a love of learning.
Your shows, both old and new, brighten my daily commutes with fresh knowledge and an open curiosity that genuinely warms my heart.
Nice.
But that's a very nice setup for a correction.
Oh, sure.
Very gentle correction on Thomas Hobbes, guys.
He didn't actually assume that all, and this is from our humanism episode, by the way.
Hobbes didn't actually assume that all or even most people are inherently bad.
Instead, he argued that some people will do bad things sometimes and that the rest of us cannot know who, when or where.
Hobbes would point out that we lock our houses at night and our cars in parking garages, and we do this even though we have laws, courts and police officers.
It's not about human evil.
It's about rational caution in an uncertain world.
And there's a little bonus here, guys.
Hobbes lived an absolutely wild life He was a scribe for Francis Bacon.
He met Galileo in Italy.
He tutored the future King Charles II in math and spent years in heated disagreements with Descartes through the mail.
In fact, a few years after Hobbes died, Oxford University held a public book burning that included his work.
That spectacle prompted John Locke to leave Oxford, hide his manuscripts and flee to Holland for five years.
That'll do it.
Yeah, that's Nathan from Pittsburgh.
I always love the extra info.
Oh, I do too.
And thank you for setting us straight on Hobbes too.
We didn't mean to misrepresent him.
Yeah, for sure.
Because he can stick the Leviathan on us.
Yeah.
We don't want that.
If you want to be like Nathan from Pittsburgh and send us a cool email, like he did, and maybe even butter us up first.
We like that kind of thing.
You can send it to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
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Hey guys, it's us, the Jonas Brothers.
I'm Joe.
I'm Kevin.
And I'm Nick.
And guess what?
We created our own podcast called Hey Jonas.
We invented a podcast?
Well, we didn't invent it.
We just contributed to it.
We're the first people to do podcasts.
We get to ask other people questions because we're sick and tired of being asked questions.
Well, sick and tired is a strong way to put it, but, you know.
Tired and sick.
Tired and sick.
Listen to Hey Jonas on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Just listen.
We don't care where you hear it.
For years, The Unhoused has been presented as a monolith in mainstream media.
Weedian House is a podcast that's changing the narrative.
I'm Theo Henderson, and I created this show while I was unhoused on the streets of Los Angeles.
We've grown into a two-time Webby Award-winning podcast, the only podcast that shares unhoused stories and news from the unhoused perspective.
Listen to Weezy and Howes on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Here's something that should not be as complicated as it is, getting a racist statue removed.
And here's something that should be a whole lot easier than it is getting a new one put up in its place.
I'm Akilah Hughes, and Rebel Spirit season two is about both of those things.
As I was watching these statues come down, I was thinking about what it meant that I grew up in a majority Black city in which there were more homages to enslavers than there were to enslaved people.
Listen to Rebel Spirit Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Guaranteed human.
