4.7 • 21.6K Ratings
🗓️ 6 March 2023
⏱️ 183 minutes
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0:00.0 | Early in the morning, March 28, 1979, equipment failures and a stuck-open relief valve |
0:05.7 | prevented the removal of heat from the 3-mile island unit-2 nuclear reactors core, |
0:10.8 | an essential function that prevents reactor damage. And within hours, it seemed like things were |
0:15.6 | on the brink of a catastrophic nuclear crisis. Nobody, or almost nobody, there were people very |
0:21.5 | opposed to nuclear power in general before the meltdown, thought that 3-mile island would be |
0:25.8 | the site of a major nuclear disaster. The plant had been built in 1974 on a sand bar on |
0:30.8 | Pennsylvania's Susquehanna River, just 10 miles downstream from the state capital in Harrisburg. |
0:36.3 | In 1978, a second state-of-the-art reactor began operating on the 3-mile island, |
0:40.4 | which was flooded for generating affordable and reliable energy in a time of an American energy |
0:45.5 | crisis. But soon, unit-2 would become a crisis of its own. In the days following March 28, |
0:50.8 | panic ensued as people wondered whether or not to evacuate, trying to figure out what was going |
0:55.6 | on for the plant's limited press releases and the government's confusing messages. |
0:59.7 | Journalists stoked the fires of paranoia, implying that the conflicting information, given by |
1:04.1 | different sources, many of whom didn't know what was going on yet, amounted to some kind of |
1:09.6 | conspiracy. Dun, dun, duh! Though the crisis would quickly be over, on April 10, 1979, the effects |
1:17.1 | were long lasting. All in all, experts determined that the approximately 2 million people in the nearby |
1:22.4 | area during the accident were exposed to very small amounts of radiation. The estimated average |
1:28.5 | radiation dose was about 1 mRM above the area's natural background of about 100 to 125 mRM's per year. |
1:36.8 | To put this into further context, exposure from a chest x-ray is about 6 to 10 mRM's. |
1:42.0 | Doesn't sound as scary when you put it in perspective, right? The accident's exposure had no |
1:46.3 | detectable health effects on the plant workers or the surrounding public officially. But did it |
1:51.5 | really? And it totally, there have been numerous claims. Jean Trimmer, a 54-year-old farmer, |
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