So a story burning up Reuters’s Web site this morning reports that federal officials are investigating a radiation leak at Three Mile Island. Radiation! Ack! And you can’t mention any issue at Three Mile Island without noting that the plant was the scene of the “worst nuclear power accident” in the U.S. Nuclear accidents! Meltdowns! Jane Fonda running around with a microphone!
Of course, once you dig through all the scary-sounding terminology and images of neon nuclear waste inverting our eyeballs and turning our organs purple, you find that the “worst nuclear accident,” which occurred in 1979, still has not been conclusively linked to a single death or incidence of cancer (though the controversy rages on about its after-effects). Meanwhile, the current leak is described as follows:
One employee was found to have received 16 millirem of exposure and other workers were exposed to lower levels, Exelon said. The annual occupational dose limit for nuclear workers at Exelon nuclear plants is 2,000 millirem, the company said.
The containment building has been shut down since October 26 for refueling and maintenance, Exelon said in a statement.
All of which highlights the fact that since 1979, we’ve made pretty impressive strides in keeping nuclear plants safe, to the point where a leak as small as this one is quickly detected and dealt with. The fear of nuclear power, and the subsequent resistance to adopting it on a larger scale, has always been about public perception: Images of meltdowns and modern Chernobyls are far scarier than, say, the radiation that you’re exposed to every time you get an X-ray or mammogram. But the actual danger of a nuclear catastrophe is still incredibly small — though it still has that Jane Fonda sexiness.
Related Content:
November 23rd, 2009 at 12:38 pm
[...] a comment » * Three Mile Island may still be leaking. More at Infrastructurist, which gives the story a strong pro-nuclear slant not really supported by the [...]