For seven days, and seven nights, those within 20 miles of Three Mile Island lived with the specter of unknown power out of control. Was it?Ī “meltdown” - synonym for nuclear catastrophe - was indeed a possibility. “It was not that close to a catastrophe,” an official said. The leak was totally controlled, it was not. Nobody was overdosed, though four workers were. There was no radiation, they said, though there was.

“An awful bash had been given the plant.”īut a confusion of voices, contradicting, reassuring, frightening, made it difficult at first to learn just how bad things were. “Everybody knew there was danger,” recalls one federal nuclear official. And the chain of human error and mechanical breakdown grew, multiplied, and turned a routine glitch into the worst nuclear accident in the 22 years since the nation began using nuclear power. Three valves on auxiliary pumps that should have been open weren’t. The other, Unit 2, was humming along quietly until, at 3:53 a.m., terrible events began with a whoosh. One of the Three Mile Island reactors was shut down for routine refueling on March 28. There are 223 nuclear reactors at power plants around the globe two of them at Three Mile Island. There is a nuclear plant in Hiroshima, witness to atomic energy at its worst and near Leningrad, Frankfurt, Buenos Aires. Indeed, the whole world had a stake in Three Mile Island. “We all live in Pennsylvania,” chanted protesters in Germany. In the small neighboring towns like Yocumtown and York Haven, Goldsboro and Pleasant Grove, there was confusion, then fear. (AP) - In the darkness before dawn, in the chill mists that rise from the Susquehanna River, the atomic powerhouse on Three Mile Island defied its human keepers and threatened catastrophe.

Meltdown synonym