PJ Vogt

It pooled within the vessel that was meant to hold it in the disaster.

Nobody died.

And the radiation that was released was small enough that long-term studies have not found clear evidence of health effects in the people who lived by the plant.

The facts of Three Mile Island offer a story really about the airbag deploying, the seatbelt working.

But that's not how the story of Three Mile Island was metabolized by the American public.

Seven years later, of course, there'd be a real deadly nuclear disaster in the Soviet Union, Chernobyl.

But America had turned on nuclear before that.

And Dr. Slabaugh thinks part of the reason really was this movie, The China Syndrome.

People treated it almost like a documentary.

Yeah, and nuclear in particular is, like, it's both super complicated, kind of...

hard to picture outside of most of my nuclear reactor reference or pop culture.

And then when it breaks, it's so visceral.

And so the way it shows up in your imagination and the way it shows up on a graph are just very divergent.

Right.

It's so strange that part of solving the energy problem is about solving a problem of human psychology.

That problem only got harder to solve a few years later, of course, with Chernobyl, somewhere around 30 immediate deaths, thousands more expected in the long term from cancer.

Of course, the plan at Chernobyl had insane design problems you would not find in an American nuclear plant.

For instance, the Soviet reactor was a kind of design where if it started to overheat, the reaction would actually speed up, not slow down like in an American reactor, just a rundown late Soviet experiment.

But for many Americans, this kind of mental composite image formed.

Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, atomic bombs, movies about nuclear death.