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    ‘Dodged a bullet’: how whistleblowers averted a second US nuclear disaster

    May 05, 2022 5 minutes

    Shortly after 4am on 28 March 1979, a pressure valve failed to close in the Unit 2 reactor at Three Mile Island, a nuclear power plant on a strip of land in central Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna River. The technical malfunction, compounded by human error – control room workers misread confusing signals and halted the emergency water cooling system – heated the nuclear core to dangerously high levels. The film The China Syndrome was still in theaters, starring Jane Fonda as a television reporter investigating cover-ups at a nuclear power plant whose meltdown could release radioactive material deep into the earth, “all the way to China”.

    Three Mile Island – still the worst commercial nuclear accident in US history – was no China Syndrome, but it got terrifyingly close to catastrophic, Chernobyl-level damage.

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