We Need More Three Mile Islands

Originally published at Reason

Jane Fonda isn’t a nuclear expert, but she played one on TV. In the 1979 film The China Syndrome, Fonda portrayed Kimberly Wells, a vivacious news reporter who discovered a cover-up at a nuclear power plant. The conspiracy involved the possibility of a meltdown that could “render an area the size of Pennsylvania permanently uninhabitable.” 

The movie’s timing and location were both impeccable. Twelve days after Fonda’s film hit theaters, a reactor at Three Mile Island (TMI) in central Pennsylvania partially melted down. The accident resulted from “mechanical malfunctions…made much worse by a combination of human errors,” according to a federal post-mortem report.

There were no documented fatalities, illnesses, or injuries; TMI suffered more from poor emergency-procedure planning, haphazard public relations, and hyperbolic media meltdowns than from the actual meltdown itself. But the incident was cannon fodder for the anti-nuclear movement. Fonda, an avid anti-nuke activist well before the accident, knew that she and her comrades commanded the zeitgeist. “You know the expression ‘We had legs’?” she later said. “We became a caterpillar after Three Mile Island.”

Read more at Reason