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Guest Essay: March 28, 1979 -- Three Mile Island

By James M. Seif, Former Administrative Assistant to Gov. Dick Thornburgh

At 3:53 a.m., March 28, 1979, the cascading failures of valves, pumps, gauges and reactor operators combined to produce the worst accident in the U.S. commercial nuclear power industry.

The accident occurred at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant Unit 2 near Middletown, a few miles downstream from Harrisburg. For 48 hours, the reactor was dangerously out of control.

James Seif was working as Administrative Assistant To Gov. Dick Thornburgh at the time.

Here is his remembrance from a recent speech--

I think we all know what "TMI" means, right?

It's modern lingo for "Too Much Information."

But for me, TMI will always be the Three Mile Island Nuclear power plant, on the island of the same name, in the Susquehanna River about ten miles below the Pennsylvania state capitol in Harrisburg.

[I do acknowledge the possibility that in about 18 minutes, some of you may STILL think TMI means "too much information." But. . . you're seated and quiet right now -- so here goes.]

Let’s go back forty-five years, to March 28, 1979.

I was one week past my 34th birthday.

Jimmy Carter was President.

The movie Grease was released.

Jane Fonda was in a film called China Syndrome, about a nuclear plant meltdown.

The first cell phone system went online that year’

Nobody had email!

And Bravo! My Steelers beat the Cowboys in the Superbowl.

I was Administrative Assistant to Governor Dick Thornburgh, one of five senior staff members in the Governor's Executive office.

(One of my jobs was to create and then implement the Governor's schedule, for which I am still known to some as the "Abominable NO Man.")

Dick had been inaugurated as Governor just 78 days before, following a bruising two-year campaign.

I was involved from the start, and in fact had met Dick as a college junior in 1966.

Later, I had been an Assistant US Attorney in his office in Pittsburgh, and on his staff at the Justice Department in the Ford Administration.

The five of us had all been in the campaign and were a tight-knit group for the next 8 years, and indeed to this day.

On that Wednesday morning of March 28, many of us were still finding our way, meeting new people and even looking for homes, as I was, in a new City.

I was an eager beaver early riser, so I got to the office that morning at about 7:00 a.m.

The plain clothes State Trooper who had been tending the ancient switchboard overnight put on a "fresh pot," and told me that a guy from GPU wanted to talk to the Governor.

"What's GPU?"

"The utility, you know, the electric people."

Every day was bringing new mysteries, so why not find out what this guy was up to?

A very polite man – whose name I never did knew -- explained that he needed to inform us that there was an incident at the plant at about 4:00 a.m, but it wasn’t serious.

What plant? And why call the Governor? It was part of my job to sound like I knew what I was doing, so I started playing lawyer.

"Was anybody hurt?"

"No," he said.

"Did you call the Public Utility Commission, or the police, or whoever?"

"Yes."

"Well, are you still operating?"

Of course, I didn't know exactly what they were operating.

"No, we're in temporary shutdown."

"So, there was damage?" I asked.

"Yes," he said. "But the Reactor is fine."

To myself, (I hope it was to myself,) I said: "REACTOR!!! Oh SHIT!!"

[Apologies for that expletive, but the Speakers Rulebook clearly says to "tell it like it was."]

As you'll recall, TMI did turn out to be a full-scale accident, not INcident, and I wanted to share some of my memories of those very interesting first few weeks of the Dick Thornburgh gubernatorial Administration.

Mankind has had lots of fears through history, but as Dick put it later, radiation is one of "the worst fears of modern man."

The accident at TMI involved a broken valve, the loss of cooling water to the white-hot operating reactor, and then a series of cascading failures of gauges, pipes, and operators.

It's possible that more modern fail-safe software would have been helpful then, but what we had was an increasingly hot reactor, broken pumps, rising steam pressure and the possibility the heat could penetrate the reactor vessel built of cement and lead.

The threat was not an explosion, which would be physically impossible, but rather a "meltdown," the spread of toxic radioactive debris and water exposing thousands of people and untold acres of land and staying toxic for hundreds of years.

That’s Chernobyl, of course, and Chernobyl did happen, exactly eight years and one month later.

So, it was clear as Wednesday wore on, that there was, possibly a catastrophic public safety problem, or at the very a least, a public panic problem.

Through that Wednesday, the Reactor core kept getting hotter, and the version of events supplied by GPU kept getting more vague and less consistent.

The Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency, (PEMA,) had no expertise in nuclear reactors.

The State Department of Environmental Resources did regulate radiation, but only from X-rays in doctors’ and dentists’ offices.

The Regulatory Agency officially in charge was the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, (NRC,) but they were in Washington DC, and monitoring the situation through the eyes of GPU and the increasing number of news outlets on site.

In that regard more than 300 accredited reporters from all around the world were in Harrisburg by Friday morning -- a True Tower of Babel, feeding on rumors, talking heads and man-on-the-street guesswork.

Dick called it the “garble gap,” and it even included on-air comments from Tom Brokaw and Walter Cronkite that had to be corrected.

In emergencies, we can say the person in charge has a lot on their hands, but maybe the definition of a truly serious emergency, is when there is NOBODY in charge.

All eyes turned to the Governor.

Later, commentators, editorial writers, documentarians and ordinary Pennsylvanians would conclude, that he was very much up to the challenge.

Dick's undergraduate degree was in Engineering, but he knew little of nuclear reactors, and realized he could not rely on the Utility.

One of his actions early on was to call President Carter and ask him to send us a real nuclear expert to help us get accurate information about what was going on inside the reactor.

A man named Harold Denton showed up. He was a true expert and had an avuncular and professorial manner, and could speak plain English, in a soft Tennessee accent.

He and Dick became a team providing regular and calming leadership and information for the next five days.

The next few days were capped by a Sunday morning visitor from Washington directly to the reactor control room; he was an actual nuclear expert, who had learned from Admiral Hyman Rickover himself, and he was a veteran of nuclear submarines.

It was Jimmy Carter, and Rosalyn came as well.

This was a true gesture of confidence that was very helpful in restoring calm. By then the reactor had finally begun to cool and the end was in sight.

Jimmy Carter was then, and is, a real class act.

Before that denouement, of course, there was lots of action:

For example:

There was an unplanned, unannounced and LOUD steam release, which included radioactive material. It was detected by an NRC helicopter that was coincidentally directly overhead. They then falsely concluded that the whole area was “hot.”

On another occasion, the plant's emergency siren went off -- maybe GPU thought it was a good time to test it then, but they didn't tell anyone beforehand. More jitters.

A truckload of potassium iodide doses was sent up from Washington. That drug blunts the effect of radiation poisoning to the thyroid gland.

But it was mislabeled and in the wrong dosages, so those demanding that the Governor release it, were disappointed, and of course noisily so.

The Governor did suggest that pregnant women and children should leave the region if they wished, and he also suggested school closures.

But a full evacuation would have been impossible because neither the Emergency Management people nor the local authorities had any plan ready run one.

We could not say that at the time, of course -- but the director of that agency was one the folks in state government who later had to look for work elsewhere.

In any case, we think as many as 100,000 people did leave, out of an area population of a million-plus.

Also, during that time, on Saturday night, a rumor about a huge hydrogen bubble in the reactor, ready to explode, emerged.

The rumor and the bubble were both deflated, by careful explanations from the Thornburgh/Denton duo in a midnight press conference.

Well, I certainly did learn a lot about people, government, and myself during that period, and in the years that followed while TMI's aftermath played out.

One interesting footnote is that about five years ago, when the robotic cleanup equipment finally reached the reactor itself, it was discovered that there had, in fact, been a breach in the reactor core.

China Syndrome, anybody? That movie was running in the region at the time, and one of the scare lines was that a meltdown could scorch land “the size of Pennsylvania.”

That saga continues; this morning I saw an Op Ed in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette about how the full cleanup can be funded.

You can imagine five days of cold pizza, bad coffee and dumb jokes about trying to find some lead underwear. From that blur I remember several vignettes.

I mentioned the Governor's Office’s old telephone Switchboard.

One of President Carter's acts was to send a U.S. Army Signal Corps Unit for communications assistance. A huge trailer sat outside the Capitol Building, with large cables up to the Governor's office window.

I do hope the guys in the trailer had some good air mattresses, because Bessie Brenizer, with 20 years on that old board, handled all the communications needs we had, for five days straight, and with no outside help.

That switchboard is now in the State Museum.

On Saturday evening, I spent about an hour with State Police Commissioner Dan Dunn, a big droll Irishmen whom I had met when he was the Agent in Charge of the FBI Bank Robbery Unit in Pittsburgh.

We drove around Harrisburg, noting the closed bars and restaurants and people in the streets responding to the latest scare – that hydrogen bubble -- and we finally wound up in the Governor's office.

A new show, Saturday Night Live, came on. You may remember the comedy team Bob and Ray, who were the guest hosts. They led off with a contest to name a new capital of Pennsylvania and spoke of 10-foot crabs coming up the Susquehanna River.

Very funny -- but think of that 1930s radio program "War of the Worlds."

We had a whole region full of jumpy people. We tried to call NBC, to point out the danger and to tell them, since they were broadcasting live, that they could change the script.

No such luck.

The security guy we finally did reach outside the studio said it was locked tight, standard practice for live broadcasts, and he couldn't help us.

In retrospect I assume he thought it was a crank call.

But I'm also guessing not many South-Central Pennsylvanians were watching Saturday Night live right then, anyway.

Finally, a few weeks later, when things had settled down, another newly elected Governor called my boss to chat about TMI.

Dick wasn't in, so I volunteered to take the call, making sure the caller knew he was not speaking to Gov. Thornburgh.

We had a pleasant and very substantive call, about the press treatment of the incident, the NRC's role, the implications for nuclear power, and so on.

He was kind of a policy wonk, for sure.

To my knowledge, no other Governor made such a call to us.

Some of you know, but can others of you guess who that governor was?

Some clues for you:

-- It was a small state with one nuclear plant;

-- He was the only Governor in the country younger than I was;

-- He would be President of the United States 13 years later;

-- He was calling from his office in Little Rock, Arkansas!

Thank you everyone!

James M. Seif served as an Assistant US Attorney in Pittsburgh prosecuting environmental cases; Chief of the Legal Branch of the US Environmental Agency Region III Office; worked in the Criminal Division in the US Department of Justice in Washington D.C.; served as Administrative Assistant to Gov. Thornburgh; was appointed US Environmental Protection Agency Region III Administrator; worked as an Attorney at Dechert LLP; served as Secretary of the PA Department of Environmental Protection; became Vice President for Corporate Relations at PPL Corporation; and worked as a consultant at Ridge Global.

NewsClips:

-- PhillyVoice.com: PA-Constellation Energy Considering Restarting Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant Unit 1

-- Inquirer: Could Nuclear Power Restart At Three Mile Island? Here’s What To Know About The Plant’s History Amid Questions About Its Future

-- PennLive - Charles Thompson: Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant Reopening Chatter Keeps Getting More Serious

-- StateImpactPA - Rachel McDevitt: Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant Consider Restart As PA Look To New Tech To Meet Demand

Resource Links - James M. Seif:

-- Feature-- Remembering March 28, 1979 At The Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant - The Accident No One Thought Would Happen [PaEN]

-- 1995-2002- DEP Secretary James M. Seif: The Assignment Was Clear - Take The Kick Me! Sign Off DER [PaEN]

-- 1995-2002 - Environmental Accomplishments Of The Ridge & Schweiker Administrations

-- Chesapeake Bay Watershed Agreement At 40: Perspectives On Pennsylvania From Former DEP Secretary, EPA Region 3 Administrator Jim Seif [PaEN]

-- Chesapeake Bay Foundation Blog: Pennsylvania Has Been Growing Greener For 20 Years - Interview With Jim Seif [PaEN]

-- Guest Essay: Before The Federal Clean Water Act, There Was The Rivers And Harbors Act Of 1899 To Help Clean-Up Pittsburgh’s 3 Rivers - By James M. Seif [PaEN]