Three Mile Island

9:49Josh Clark:Yeah, and we should point out that there were two nuclear reactors there, TMI and not too much information. Three Mile Island 1 and Three Mile Island 2. They built these things in 1968 and TMI 1 opened in 74 and TMI 2 in 78. And TMI 2, the one that had the issue here, had only been open for three months. I think, yeah, just about three months when this accident occurred. So it wasn't even online that long. And so it must have had that leak kind of from the get go, it sounds like.

10:23Chuck Bryant:Yeah, I think you're right. Because, yeah, it must not have ever worked properly. And they just didn't really know it or care.

10:30Josh Clark:Well, they already cut the ribbon with those giant scissors.

10:33Chuck Bryant:Too late. Yeah. So the system, again, is like, guys, I'm going to run another security safety thing. I've noticed that things are really starting to go pear-shaped in the reactor. And I'm going to start sending in emergency coolant. So the system opened up its own valves to let in emergency water flowing into the reactor, try to cool things down. That actually helped make things worse to an extent where like water kept like bubbling and boiling and it was now spilling out of the open relief valve out of the reactor, which is not good. But it still would have helped keep things cool sooner. The problem is the operators, again, were like, that shouldn't be happening.

11:21Chuck Bryant:The pressure seems fine in here. And now there's water flowing in. We got to turn off these emergency pumps. And they did. They turned off the emergency pumps. And that was the final straw. The system was like, I'm not helping anymore. You guys are on your own.

11:38Josh Clark:Yeah. So the water level is dropping, which is very key to keeping that thing stable and cool. and it actually exposed the reactor's core, the top of that thing. And once the core is exposed, that's very, very bad news. That happened, I think everything started at 4 a.m., Night Ranger time, and then at 6 a.m., this is two hours later, an operator finally was like, wait a minute, that release valve that was supposed to close automatically, looks like that thing didn't close. So he ordered it to be closed off, But 100 ,000 liters of coolant had already leaked out of the system at this point.

12:19Chuck Bryant:Yeah, highly, highly radioactive water just spilling out. And eventually it was pumped out of the reactor containment building into other buildings so that they were flooded with contaminated water. It was quite a mess. So these guys have now figured out the main issue. They've closed the relief valve. Now they can put more coolant in and they started to do that. But you said that the top of the reactor core is exposed. That is never supposed to happen. The core should never be exposed above water. And because it had been, now pumping coolant in was not necessarily doing the trick. It certainly wasn't doing it fast enough.

12:58Chuck Bryant:And they realized about 40 minutes after they figured out what the problem was, that the core was really screwed up. Because remember, all this time for those two hours, Chuck, they were just like, ho-hum, everything's fine. They thought their instruments were messed up or that everything was working correctly. And finally, between 6 a.m. and 6.40, they're like, this is really, really, really bad. And five minutes after they figured that out, radiation alarms started ringing around the plant, which if they didn't know it was bad before, those alarms certainly confirmed it.

13:31Josh Clark:yeah and then about 11 minutes later and this is almost seven o 'clock this is almost three hours later they finally declared a site emergency uh right after that happened um you know they tried to and you know partially part part of the problem here was due to the being in the 1970s and you can't get a hold of someone via cell phone like in a moment's notice that's where this kind of comes into play they tried to get in touch with the nuclear regulatory commission uh kind of immediately, they called, the office wasn't open yet. And so they had what, you know, these things still exist, but what used to have a lot more back in the day is like an answering service, like humans had answered the phone and forward the call or call up the doctor or whoever they need to call and say, Hey, I got, I think what's probably a concerning message that you probably need to get right away.

14:21Josh Clark:So they tried to do that. They tried to call the regional duty officer at home, but they were like, no, he already left for work. And so this guy's in his car now, dun-da-dum-da-dum, listen to the radio on his way to work for 40 minutes.

14:33Chuck Bryant:He's listening to beautiful music on the AM dial.

14:36Josh Clark:He probably is. And the long and short of it is it finally, like, I think it takes nearly 40 minutes to even finally make contact with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And, like, time is crucial at this point. Like, every second matters.

14:51Chuck Bryant:Yeah, and the reason why they really needed to get in touch with the NRC is because they didn't know what to do. They weren't really trained for a situation like this. The NRC was the body that had this information they needed to figure out how to handle this. So very quickly, word starts to spread. It hits D.C. The local journalists start showing up. Eventually, national journalists started showing up. And by 9 a.m., everybody knows that there is a big, big problem at Three Mile Island. The problem was no one knew how bad it was. Yeah. Because on the one hand, the first people that started addressing things was Metropolitan Edison, the power company that ran and I believe owned Three Mile Island, both TM1 and 2.

15:40Chuck Bryant:And they were just lying their faces off. They just said whatever they thought people wanted to hear. And they would even do it in private. Like the governor, Dick Thornburg, and the lieutenant governor, William Scranton, they were just lying to them about how like not how not a big deal this was from the outset. So they proved that they were just untrustworthy from the outset and they got quickly pushed aside as far as the people who are really trying to handle this problem went. They just they were like, you go stand over there. We'll deal with you later.

16:12Josh Clark:For sure. Sure. They on the 28th, they briefly considered evacuating the area. This is FEMA. They're on the scene now. But they said no. And then the governor, like you were saying, Governor Thornburg, he declined to evacuate again on March 29th because they're getting reports that there was no radiation that had escaped and everything was like completely contained. Finally, on March 30th, the governor got a report that said, all right, well, some radioactive gas has escaped the reactor. So he said he makes an announcement like, all right, all pregnant women and preschool children need to evacuate and like get out of the area.

16:52Josh Clark:And that caused a pretty big panic.

16:54Chuck Bryant:It did. I think one hundred and forty thousand people left. Did you see the American Experience, the PBS documentary on this? Yeah. It's called Meltdown at Three Mile Island. So a lot of people were panicking and leaving. But there were also a lot of people around there like they can they can take my house out of my cold, dead hands. I'm not leaving.

17:13Josh Clark:Yeah, that always happens.

17:14Chuck Bryant:Right?

17:15Josh Clark:Yeah.

17:15Chuck Bryant:So there were people that stayed, but a lot of people left because they were scared to death. No one knew exactly how bad this was. And so I think a lot of rumor and unsubstantiated stuff was really spreading very quickly. At the same time, there was no one who really knew how bad it was that could say, that's not true. That's not true. I can unequivocally say this is how bad it is. So you really couldn't say, like, don't worry. It was, we don't think you should worry. We hope you don't have to worry. But there was nothing that they could really reassure the public with at this point.

17:51Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. All right. That feels like a great time for a break, if you agree.

17:55Chuck Bryant:I agree.

17:57Josh Clark:So they are trying to get this thing cooled down. And then very quickly, another problem would pop up. And we're going to address that right after this.

18:25Chuck Bryant:Every parent should know the car ride soundtrack. Are we there yet? How much longer? I'm bored. Well, if you're taking an extensive car ride anywhere and you've downloaded the Lingo Kids app prior to leaving the house, you may experience something strange. Right, Chuck?

18:39Josh Clark:That's right. You may experience silence from the backseat. Your kid may go an entire car ride without asking once if they were there yet. How about that? And by chance of miracle, they may even ask if you could drive longer.

18:50Chuck Bryant:Yeah, that's the magic in Lingo Kids. Over 4 ,000 interactive games, songs, and shows, including their favorite Disney characters. It turns the longest drives into the easiest ones. And honestly, you won't understand why you didn't download it sooner. That's right.

19:04Josh Clark:Lingo Kids is the number one entertainment platform for young kids, and it's free to download or go plus with a Lingo Kids subscription and unlock even more content your kids won't be able to get enough of. You can save up to 60 % on the yearly plan. Just search Lingo Kids in the App Store or Google Play. Lingo Kids, everything kids love.

19:28Josh Clark:Hey, everybody. I want to talk to you a little bit about Tide Evo because it represents over 10 years of innovation and product development. Tidevo is a first-of-its-kind technology where tens of thousands of minuscule fibers are spun together to form a six-times-powerful layer packed with scrubbers, brighteners, pretreaters, and fresheners. And that's going to deliver a breakthrough clean that's so powerful, it feels like magic.

19:50Chuck Bryant:Yeah, it is kind of like magic. Tidevo is revolutionary. A 100 % concentrated waterless laundry tile that's made of compressed microfiber soap layers rather than liquid or powder. And it's not like pods or sheets because it uses six layers of detergent fibers to deliver superior cold water cleaning without plastic packaging of any kind. And it provides a mess-free, lightweight solution that dissolves lickety-split. So whenever you run into a laundry challenge, turn to Tide Evo. It's revolutionary. It's magic. Try new Tide Evo. Real laundry magic.

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20:48Chuck Bryant:Yeah, with the battery that's optimized for the way you work and built-in intelligence that quiets distractions the moment you're trying to focus, your tech won't slow you down, even when you're getting bounced from an office you forgot to reserve. The Dell Pro, built for those who stay in the flow. Find technology built the way you work at dell.com slash dell-pro. Built for you.

21:15Stump. You know. Stump. Stump. You should know.

21:30Chuck Bryant:Okay, Chuck, so where we left off, Three Mile Island TMI-2 reactor had reached a different shape of a certain kind of fruit. Things were going badly, in other words, right?

21:43Josh Clark:Not yes, it's bad, but I'm just glad you're saying it again.

21:46Chuck Bryant:So it went from bad to worse, actually. They're like, they wouldn't call it a meltdown. It took years before they officially started calling this a meltdown. It was an accident. It was a problem, an issue, that kind of thing. But on top of that, the reactor having huge problems, they now realized that there was a hydrogen gas bubble that during this two, three hours of the accident had developed because it got so hot that the zirconium tubes that held the fuel pellets, it reacted with the steam that was being generated. and it actually tore the water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen, and the hydrogen just started to build up.

22:29Chuck Bryant:Well, obviously, if you listen to our Hindenburg episode, you know that a big bunch of hydrogen gas in one place is very, very dangerous, especially when it's in the middle of a nuclear reactor.

22:41Josh Clark:Yeah, so all of a sudden there's this more concerning problem. They're like, if this thing explodes, you know, if this gas bubble explodes, it might rupture the actual building that this thing is housed in. And we're in real trouble if that happens. So from, I think, well, we should say that the World Nuclear Association, they say that that never would have been possible. But, of course, they don't know this at the time. And who knows if it was possible or not. But from March 30th, just a couple of days later, through April 1st, they managed to decrease the size of that bubble by venting that thing out and, you know, basically kind of slowly just reducing the size of the bubble.

23:22Josh Clark:But this is also, if you're venting, you know, melting down, I guess they don't, what'd you say? They didn't call it a meltdown. It's having a tantrum, I guess. You're releasing that stuff in like more radiation into the environment by doing so.

23:35Chuck Bryant:Right. But they really had no choice, essentially. It was either that or let the thing blow up. So they did. They managed to get the bubble under control. And on April 1st, Jimmy Carter, who was president at the time, I didn't know this. He was a trained nuclear engineer. So he was essentially the president to be in charge for this to happen. You knew that? Yeah.

24:01Josh Clark:Yeah. I knew from my visits to the Carter Center and I read a book and I've seen a documentary. He's one of my guys, one of the smartest dudes we've ever had in the White House.

24:09Chuck Bryant:Oh, I know. He was a fantastic president. It's a shame. So he was president at the time, and he was like, you know what, I'm going to come there. I'm going to be shown touring the plant. Rosalind's going to come with me. That will reassure the public that it's fine. It's under control. The problem was, according to that PBS documentary, at the time, it was not a certainty that the hydrogen bubble wasn't going to blow up while the president was there. There are two dueling mathematicians who had conflicting results about whether the bubble was going to blow up. And so Jimmy Carter took a real risk, so did Rosalind Carter, by going there to tour the plant.

24:48Chuck Bryant:They had to wear yellow rubber boots because, again, there's really highly contaminated radioactive water that had spilled out of the coolant on the floor. It was a big deal, but apparently it had the impact he was looking for and the public started to calm down.

25:03Josh Clark:Yeah, I don't know if you could get if they would let a president do that these days.

25:08Chuck Bryant:Yeah, it was the 70s, man. What can happen?

25:12Josh Clark:It was. Yeah, just put on these booties. Um, so he obviously orders a, uh, a committee to convene and investigate this thing. Um, it was, it ended up being called the, uh, Kimini report because it was led by Dartmouth college president, John Kimini. And they, um, the NRC ended up coming out of this, not looking so great. And we'll, we'll get to why, um, as we go, but they really took it on the chin. Um, the training program, like met ed was like, Hey, we, we trained up our guys as, as well as we were able to and to meet your standards. Like we did everything you told us to do. All your requirements were met.

25:51Josh Clark:It was the NRC apparently who like had lax requirements. And, you know, when it comes to like emergency training and stuff like that, they were really ill prepared.

26:01Chuck Bryant:Yeah, these these guys were fully trained, but their training hadn't prepared them for that. And it was the NRC's fault. The NRC showed that they weren't prepared to handle this either. Like it was just really poor planning, again, based on over-optimistic ideas about the safety of nuclear energy, right? So the NRC also conducted its own examination. They're like, yeah, we should probably do a little better. There's a lot of confusing stuff in training. I think there was this one passage that said insert key into the control panel, turn key to the left, break off the key in the control panel and eat what remains of the key.

26:38Chuck Bryant:That was part of the safety training. Anyway, they were like, we also have to say, though, it wasn't just us. It wasn't just the operators. But the design of this stuff is pretty nuts, if you ask us.

26:52Josh Clark:So one of the big problems was why it took so long to realize there was a problem. Like all that time was going by when things were leaking out. And, you know, the NRC, again, took it on the chin. They found that their training requirements weren't good enough and that the operating procedures were confusing during an emergency. Like from what I gathered from the documentary and by reading up on this was that like they were trained to run the place and like turn the keys and push the buttons. Right. But if something went wrong, that's where they really, really failed to know like what to do. So they were at, you know, while this emergency was unfolding, they're misinterpreting data that's coming through and they're making bad decisions based on that.

27:36Josh Clark:They, you know, you mentioned earlier that the water started boiling really violently. that caused the coolant pumps to shake really hard. And they thought they didn't know that's what that was. They thought they were overfilling and the things were shaking because it had too much coolant in there and that the pumps, you know, were going to be damaged because of that. So, you know, just to not even know that, like, hey, by the way, if this thing really starts boiling hard, the pipes might shake. Like they didn't even know that could happen.

28:02Chuck Bryant:Right, exactly. Like you said, they were trained to operate it, basically. Exactly. One other thing to say about the system, too, is in that documentary, I think the guy who wrote The China Syndrome, he was interviewed a lot in it. He was saying that, like, if they had done nothing, the system would have taken care of itself from the outset. Oh, interesting. It was when they intervened those two times that threw that safety sequence off. And so it really truly was a combination of all sorts of different stuff. The complexity of the system, human error, malfunctions, poor planning. And there's a sociologist named Charles Perrault who calls this a normal accident, which is basically an accident that is essentially inevitable because it's accidentally designed into the complex system.

28:54Chuck Bryant:Somehow, someway, all these things are going to come together and cause an accident. That's what happened at Three Mile Island. Yeah.

29:02Josh Clark:If you're waiting for your Homer Simpson moment, wait no further, because one of the things they found when they did the big investigation was that there was an operator there that had a large belly. sound like he had a big beer gut yeah and his beer gut was blocking the view of some of the panel indicators and like they literally didn't see these things because of homer simpson standing there in the way uh there was a printer a computer printer that malfunctioned that was recording like real-time data that got jammed for 90 minutes uh just the the communication with like wearing face respirators and masks and all that stuff like they they just weren't able to to talk in an effective manner while this is all going down.

29:47Chuck Bryant:Yeah, and that computer printer that was giving them that real-time information being jammed for 90 minutes meant that the data they were working from was 90 minutes old in the middle of a meltdown. So these guys really just had no genuine clue what was actually going on. They didn't even seem to suspect anything was going on in part because of that 90-minute-old data they were working from. Yeah.

30:11Josh Clark:So if it wasn't bad enough already, there are two more big factors here. And just how sort of janky this thing seemed to be laid out. The control room didn't have any direct measurements of the water. Like we kept talking, you know, earlier in Act One about, you know, the water levels and they didn't, you know, they thought it was filling up too much. So they shut the water off. But this was all happening because it didn't have just direct measurements of the water level. So they didn't even know. They were guessing at how much water was in the system. And then the second big one was that automatic release valve has an indicator light in the control room.

30:51Josh Clark:It shows, you know, it was supposed to close automatically, but I think you can also order it to close. And eventually they tried to order it to close. but it doesn't actually show whether it's closed or not. The indicator lit up when it was ordered to close, not confirming that it was closed.

31:08Chuck Bryant:Right. But they took it like that. They took it to mean like, oh, well, the light's on, the thing's closed.

31:13Josh Clark:Yeah. Ask the guy with the big belly blocking the screen.

31:16Chuck Bryant:Exactly. So, I mean, like, that's just nuts that, like, all of this was happening. Just the sequence of events. I mean, if you went back and did it all again, surely it couldn't possibly follow the same steps because it was just so intertwined with all these different weird things.

31:35Josh Clark:Oh, for sure.

31:37Chuck Bryant:So there's a lot of, you want to talk about the radiation that may or may not have been released?

31:42Josh Clark:Yeah, because, I mean, that's one of the biggest, obviously, issues at hand is like how much of this stuff is getting out to the local community in Pennsylvania.

31:51Chuck Bryant:Right. Right. Yeah. And like you said, to get rid of the hydrogen bubble, they definitely vented radioactive gas into the air. That's just there's just no two ways around it. They also had to do that a couple more times during the cleanup, as we'll see. But the EPA, the NRC, Pennsylvania itself, the Union of Concerned Scientists, just countless different organizations, including nongovernmental organizations, have conducted all sorts of studies. People have done meta-analyses of these studies. Three Mile Island is a very, very heavily studied area to find out exactly what happened. And essentially, almost everybody agrees that there was not enough of a radioactive release to actually affect human health or the environment.

32:39Chuck Bryant:And it seems to be one of those times where it actually is true. I can barely get it out, but I think they might be right.

32:47Josh Clark:Yeah, I mean, they claim that there was like the radiation was about the estimated levels of a like a chest X-ray. The Department of Energy said it had negligible effects on public health and the environment. uh i guess we'll we'll end up talking about the lawsuits later but uh because there obviously would be some but you know they there were some interesting things like uh i think the uh 43 increase in infant deaths in the area around the time of the accident there was a study in 97 that found increased cancer rates in the area uh there was a 2017 study that found a correlation between thyroid cancer and living in that region.

33:28Josh Clark:But in each of these studies and in each of these cases, they're like, well, you can't absolutely prove that was the absolute cause.

33:36Chuck Bryant:Yeah. And these studies are few and far between. Most of the other studies are like, I didn't turn up any statistically significant correlation even.

33:45Josh Clark:Right.

33:47Chuck Bryant:I saw that the highest exposure during cleanup with a peak in 1989 was 0.98 REMS. And that That is a tenth of a chest X-ray. And that on-site, the EPA found on-site, so at the Three Mile Island reactor, the radiation in the environment was what you would get from flying on an airplane per hour.

34:11Josh Clark:Yeah.

34:12Chuck Bryant:So it really does seem like there was just not that much of an exposure. Again, I'm quite sure if you go to Three Mile Island and talk to some of the older residents, they will tell you otherwise. Because a lot of people reported, especially right afterward, that they were suffering from vomiting, nausea, hair loss, rashes. And I'm sure that people just have dismissed them over the years as like that's placebo effect or nocebo effect or something like that. So, I mean, if you believe that your, you know, wife or husband or mom or dad or kid died of cancer because of this nuclear accident and everybody's telling you like, no, it's fine.

34:52Chuck Bryant:You're hysterical overreacting. I can't imagine not being deeply bitter about that. Yeah, of course.

35:00Josh Clark:Speaking of deeply bitter, I think that triggered another ad break.

35:03Chuck Bryant:Oh, OK.

35:04Josh Clark:And we'll be back to finish up on Three Mile Island right after this.

35:27Chuck Bryant:Every parent should know the car ride soundtrack. Are we there yet? How much longer? I'm bored. Well, if you're taking an extensive car ride anywhere and you've downloaded the Lingo Kids app prior to leaving the house, you may experience something strange, right, Chuck?

35:42Josh Clark:That's right. You may experience silence from the backseat. Your kid may go an entire car ride without asking once if they were there yet. How about that? And by chance of miracle, they may even ask if you could drive longer.

35:53Chuck Bryant:Yeah, that's the magic in Lingo Kids. Over 4 ,000 interactive games, songs, and shows, including their favorite Disney characters. It turns the longest drives into the easiest ones. And honestly, you won't understand why you didn't download it sooner.

36:06Josh Clark:That's right. Lingo Kids is the number one entertainment platform for young kids, and it's free to download or go plus with a Lingo Kids subscription and unlock even more content your kids won't be able to get enough of. You can save up to 60 % on the yearly plan. Just search Lingo Kids in the App Store or Google Play. Lingo Kids, everything kids love.

36:31Josh Clark:Hey, everybody. I want to talk to you a little bit about Tide Evo because it represents over 10 years of innovation and product development. Tide Evo is a first-of-its-kind technology where tens of thousands of minuscule fibers are spun together to form a six-times-powerful layer packed with scrubbers, brighteners, pretreaters, and fresheners. And that's going to deliver a breakthrough clean that's so powerful, it feels like magic.

36:53Chuck Bryant:Yeah, it is kind of like magic. Tide Evo is revolutionary, a 100 % concentrated waterless laundry tile that's made of compressed microfiber soap layers rather than liquid or powder. And it's not like pods or sheets because it uses six layers of detergent fibers to deliver superior cold water cleaning without plastic packaging of any kind. And it provides a mess-free, lightweight solution that dissolves lickety-split. So whenever you run into a laundry challenge, turn to Tide Evo. It's revolutionary. It's magic. Try new Tide Evo. Real laundry magic.

37:53Chuck Bryant:work in built-in intelligence that quiets distractions the moment you're trying to focus, your tech won't slow you down, even when you're getting bounced from an office you forgot to reserve. The Dell Pro, built for those who stay in the flow. Find technology built the way you work at dell.com slash dell-pro. Built for you.

38:32Josh Clark:All right, so they had resolved this bubble issue, and they got to cool this thing down. And that's really the main thing, that reactor core that had been exposed, like everything is super hot. So first things first, they really just need to get it cooled down. So they worked on that for a while. Finally, on April 27th, I guess this is almost a month later, they said that it was in cold shutdown. They had reached that point where water was less than 100 degrees Celsius at atmospheric pressure. And so they could start cleanup. And that was it for TMI2. That thing shut down and did not reopen.

39:08Chuck Bryant:No, it didn't. Three months of energy production and that's it. Yeah. It's crazy. And it is still actually technically under cleanup today. today um the cleanup effort started pretty much right out of the gate i think it was in 1979 that they first started but i'm sure the first couple years were like okay what are we going to do part of the problem was is they couldn't see into the reactor they couldn't tell with what kind of a problem they were dealing with and it wasn't until the 80s that um they started getting actual video confirmation they put like video cameras in to the reactor and saw that the core had it partially melted down and that not only that, Chuck, the nuclear fuel, the uranium, molten uranium had melted down into the bottom of what's called the vessel, the container vessel.

40:02Chuck Bryant:Basically, the last thing between the molten uranium in China is this vessel. And it actually had not been expected to be able to stand up to something like that. And just by sheer luck, It did. It did not leak, but it definitely could have. And had that happened, it would have been catastrophic had it gotten out. So three cheers to the containment vessel.

40:28Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. The cleanup, I think they started in 79 and 11 years later by 90 was when that whole first phase was done. They had like most of the nuclear fuel had been removed by that point and about 150 tons of radioactive materials. I feel like we talked about this kind of disposal before in other episodes. Yeah, we did. It may have been the disaster in Japan, or maybe it was just one on nuclear, like burying nuclear waste.

41:00Chuck Bryant:Yeah, it was. I think it was 2025. It was a good one. But we talked about that place in Washington, the Hanford nuclear site.

41:07Josh Clark:Yeah, well, this stuff, or at the time at least, it went to the National Engineering Laboratory in Idaho for storage. But then you still had all that water. You had about two and a quarter million gallons of bad water. that took another few years. So that wasn't fully cleaned up until 1993. You had to evaporate that stuff.

41:28Chuck Bryant:Right, which means you got gas on your hands, radioactive gas again, and that's where those further exposures happened throughout the 80s. Yeah. I think 1982 and 1989 were the worst, but even then they were less than a millirem of exposure, which again is about a tenth of a chest x-ray, right? So finally, the cleanup of TMI2 is completed in 1993. But even that is still, like I said, it's still ongoing because they were just like, we got 99 % of the nuclear fuel out of there, out of the reactor. Isn't that amazing? We're just going to call it done now. And so there's still 1 % left and there's a company called TMI2 Solutions that is currently cleaning up that remaining 1 % of fuel from the reactor.

42:18Josh Clark:Yeah, they're solutions-based. That's what they do, Josh.

42:21Chuck Bryant:They are. And I was like, wait a minute, they own TMI2. Why would somebody buy a reactor so that you can pay to clean it up? And it turns out there was a bunch of, not even taxpayer, ratepayer money that Metropolitan Ed had basically added to people's bills as like a tax to set aside to pay for cleanup. And I think there was something like a billion dollars of that left. and I guess that TMI2 Solutions has been receiving that for cleaning it up.

42:53Josh Clark:Yeah. I mean, when they were protesting Met Ed, they had signs that said, first you try to kill us, then you want to bill us.

43:00Chuck Bryant:Yeah.

43:01Josh Clark:This kicked off a lot of, I mean, this nuclear energy was at a probably all-time public low, obviously after Three Mile Island. Like things were kind of humming along and then people really, really turned against it. Yeah. There were a lot of protests, you know, when Jane Fonda shows up that you're in big trouble. And she and her husband at the time, Tom Hayden, did just that. It did lead to, I mean, silver linings. It led to one of the great concerts of all time, the Bruce Springsteen No Nukes concert at Madison Square Garden in 1979. Brought, you know, musicians banded together and formed the Musicians United for Safe Energy, Muse.

43:41Josh Clark:And they just released that in 2021. and I just want to say I know you're probably not a big Springsteen guy but if you're a fan of The Boss watch don't just listen to it watch the concert film of the No Nuke show and it is peak peak Bruce Springsteen unbelievable show

44:03Chuck Bryant:1979

44:04Josh Clark:yeah it's incredible because it's before Born in the USA and all that so before he was in I guess this was MSG but before he was at like that level of huge But right after Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town, he was still young and hungry. And it's just like, it's an incredible, incredible show.

44:20Chuck Bryant:That's awesome. Yeah. I have a Bruce Springsteen anecdote if you want to hear it.

44:24Josh Clark:Sure. Let's hear it.

44:26Chuck Bryant:Backstage at one of our Bell House shows, I was meeting the boyfriend of one of my friends. And he was from Jersey. And he was telling me this story about how he and his friends were at a pool once. And he looked over and he's like, and there was Bruce. And I went, Willis? and this guy looked, I was serious too. The look of just like contempt that fell over this guy's face for a second before he could regain himself. Bruce Willis. He was like, no, Springsteen. I was like, oh, okay. He's like, I feel equally about both, you know?

44:59Josh Clark:At least you didn't say Box Lightner.

45:03Chuck Bryant:That would have been really weird. That would have been so much better. Oh boy.

45:07Josh Clark:Keep that one in your hip pocket if anyone ever just throws out a Bruce story again. Say Box Lightner?

45:12Chuck Bryant:Okay. You got it, buddy. He was on V, wasn't he?

45:16Josh Clark:Sure. I don't know. I don't remember. He was Scarecrow and Mrs. King. Okay, Scarecrow. Or was he in Tron? No, he wasn't in Tron. That was a different guy.

45:23Chuck Bryant:That was Jeff Bridges.

45:25Josh Clark:Yeah, but the other guy. The main guy. That was Bruce Springsteen. No. Who am I thinking of? Never mind. We got to finish this one. People are going to be so mad at us. All right. Sorry, everybody.

45:38Chuck Bryant:The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is going to send us a letter.

45:41Josh Clark:I know. So not because of a lawsuit that we're filing, but people certainly did. There was the fact that they falsified those leak test results that you talked about without fixing stuff. And they issued a report to the Department of Justice in November of 1983. They indicted Met Ed for that falsification of the leaks. They had to pay a huge fine of forty five thousand dollars. Yeah.

46:07Chuck Bryant:You're like, OK, well, this is nineteen eighty four dollars. How much is it today? hey, still just$140 ,000 today.

46:14Josh Clark:For falsifying leaks of nuclear material.

46:17Chuck Bryant:Yeah, for sure. And just being general jerks during the whole, you know, crisis.

46:22Josh Clark:Yeah.

46:23Chuck Bryant:But they were like, okay, well, we're also going to help set up a fund for the Pennsylvania EPA to take care of this area for years to come. We're going to give it$1 million. Again, you're like, okay, it's$1984. Nope, just$3.1 million. So all told, I think MetEd officially paid out something like less than$3.5 million. There's a group called Three Mile Island Alert. They're a nonprofit that is essentially watchdogs about Three Mile Island. And I don't think that they feel very good about Metropolitan Ed. But they say that MetEd has paid out lots more than that in civil and personal injury lawsuits to settle those.

47:06Josh Clark:Yeah, settling them because there was in 1996, there were, I think, a couple of thousand active cases for like, you know, exposure, obviously, to the radiation. And a judge said, all right, let me pick 10 of these and try them as a group, as a test case to see if we, you know, if there's merit to the whole thing. And the judge ruled against the plaintiffs, you know, citing what I would talked about earlier, like you can't there's not enough evidence to cite a direct link between the cancer that you have and the radiation that you may or may not have endured. Right.

47:43Chuck Bryant:So this is one of those, I think, instances where I that I'm convinced because there's just so many different people and groups of people from all different sectors of our society who have looked at this and said it actually wasn't as bad. It could have been really bad, but it's not as bad as people fear. That's why I buy into the idea that it wasn't that bad. That's not to say that there weren't people who acted as whistleblowers. And in particular, if you saw a Netflix documentary called Meltdown, three mile island, there was a whistleblower named Rick Parks, who was a supervisor in the cleanup crew during the 80s.

48:24Chuck Bryant:and he blew the whistle because he was saying they were using this crane that was in the reactor to basically dismantle the reactor afterward, even though it had gone through the meltdown. It seemed very unsafe to me. I didn't like how they were testing it. So if like throughout the 80s cleanup of Three Mile Island, that's the most scandalous thing a whistleblower comes up with. It seems like it's about as on the up and up as something like this can be. Yeah.

48:54Josh Clark:He claimed in that documentary that they like retaliated against him and that someone planted drugs in his car during a random drug inspection. There are other people that have come out and said, hey, that documentary is a little misleading. He did raise concerns about that crane, but they didn't ignore them. He just didn't agree with how they handled it and just take that documentary with a grain of salt, basically. Yeah.

49:19Chuck Bryant:So there were, I think, like you said, nuclear power was just humming along and then it just nosedived after Three Mile Island. And I think there were 51 planned nuclear reactors that were canceled in the United States alone. Like this had global repercussions. repercussions. Between 1980 and 1984, 51 of them were canceled. I think I saw in the end of the documentary that was in 1999, they said zero new ones have been ordered since Three Mile Island. I saw a hundred had been potentially, but regardless, the upshot is the reason why nuclear energy is not widespread, especially in the United States, is because of Three Mile Island,

50:03Josh Clark:almost 100 percent yeah for sure uh kind of strangely a couple of years ago microsoft signed a 20-year deal to purchase power from tmi1 starting a couple of years from now in 2028 and i was like that's weird why is microsoft buying a bunch of power and like oh they're using power generated from that to fuel the data centers for ai yeah which i think we talked about

50:29Chuck Bryant:that in the data centers episode and the getting rid of nuclear waste episode.

50:34Josh Clark:Yeah, it feels kind of like a full circle moment.

50:36Chuck Bryant:For sure. So let's leave it at that, huh? Yeah, sure. All right. Well, we came full circle, which means we automatically triggered listener mail, even though we have no indicator light to tell us as much.

50:51Josh Clark:That's right. Hey, guys. This is from Nathan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania guy. I'm a former academic who never lost a love of learning. Your show's both old and new, brighten my daily commutes with fresh knowledge and an open curiosity that genuinely warms my heart.

51:06Chuck Bryant:Nice.

51:07Josh Clark:But that's a very nice setup for a correction. Oh, sure. Very gentle correction on Thomas Hobbes, guys. He didn't actually assume that all or, and this is from our Humanism episode, by the way.

51:16Chuck Bryant:Yeah.

51:17Josh Clark:Hobbes didn't actually assume that all or even most people are inherently bad. Instead, he argued that some people will do bad things sometimes and that the rest of us cannot know who, when, or where. Hobbes would point out that we lock our houses at night and our cars in parking garages, and we do this even though we have laws, courts, and police officers. It's not about human evil. It's about rational caution in an uncertain world. And there's a little bonus here, guys. Hobbes lived an absolutely wild life. He was a scribe for Francis Bacon. He met Galileo in Italy. He tutored the future King Charles II and math and spent years in heated disagreements with Descartes through the mail.

51:55Josh Clark:In fact, a few years after Hobbes died, Oxford University held a public book burning that included his work. That spectacle prompted John Locke to leave Oxford, hide his manuscripts, and flee to Holland for five years. That'll do it. Yeah, that's Nathan from Pittsburgh. I always love the extra info.

52:13Chuck Bryant:Oh, I do too. And thank you for setting us straight on Hobbes too. We didn't mean to misrepresent him.

52:18Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure.

52:20Chuck Bryant:Because he can stick the Leviathan on us.

52:22Josh Clark:if we don't want that.

52:24Chuck Bryant:If you want to be like Nathan from Pittsburgh and send us a cool email like he did and maybe even butter us up first, we like that kind of thing. You can send it to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.

52:39Josh Clark:Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

52:55Chuck Bryant:Every parent should know the car ride soundtrack. Are we there yet? How much longer? I'm bored. Well, if you're taking an extensive car ride anywhere and you've downloaded the Lingo Kids app prior to leaving the house, you may experience something strange. Right, Chuck?

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54:39Chuck Bryant:Yeah. SimpliSafe sent us a setup years back, and I still use mine every day.

54:43Josh Clark:Yeah. And apparently, setup, you can, like, do it by yourself in under 30 minutes. So it's a really good value, and it doesn't take long.

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