Melt-down anniversary confirms nuke revival as a form of Three Mile Insanity

Today’s twenty-seventh anniversary of the disaster at Three Mile Island finds the nuclear industry pushing yet another lunatic attempt to revive atomic energy.

This periodic outbreak of industry-financed insanity usually precedes a major disaster, and always reflects a cynical denial of basic economic, public health and ecological reality. This year it also indicates a complete unwillingness to face the fact that renewable energy—especially wind power—has long ago left atomic energy in the radioactive dust.

At 4am on March 28, 1979, an “impossible” series of errors at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island Unit Two—which had opened exactly three months earlier—turned a $900 million investment into a $2 billion liability. The plant’s owners lied repeatedly about the seriousness of the accident and its emissions. Escaping radiation poured into the surrounding countryside, quickly killing thousands of birds and insects. A plague of death, disease, malformation, stillbirth and spontaneous abortion followed among a host of nearby farm animals.

In the ensuing months, infant death rates soared, followed by cancers and an epidemic of radiation-related diseases among the human population. In the ensuing years, more than 2,000 central Pennsylvania families filed suit for compensation. But to this day they have been refused the right to a public trial in federal court. The heavily financed myth that “no one died at Three Mile Island” is high among the most lethal lies ever told by American industry.

The Free Press