March 1979: Reactor meltdown at Three Mile Island, PA. 140, 000 people evacuated.
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The 1979 U.S. meltdown at Three Mile Island is also rated a five.
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The nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, for example, elevated the importance of environmental risk factors in the markets.
The 1979 accident at Three Mile Island was much smaller in scale, and emitted far less radioactive material into the atmosphere.
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Accidents at Three Mile Island in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986 were pivotal events in the history of nuclear power plants.
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The reactor buildings and equipment at Fukushima Daiichi also are damaged and leaking radioactive water, something that didn't happen at Three Mile Island.
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There was a small release of radioactive steam at Three Mile Island in 1979, and there have also been a few releases at Fukushima Daiichi.
The 825-megawatt pressurized water reactor at Three Mile Island, about 10 miles outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, has been in service since 1974 and can power about 800, 000 homes.
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Then, just when miners thought there would be a commercial market from a proliferation of civilian power plant orders and plans, came the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island.
While the nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl turned public opinion in the United States and Europe against nuclear energy, in France nuclear power never went out of fashion.
It isn't known if operator error played a role, as it did three decades ago at Three Mile Island, but it's clear the earthquake exceeded the level for which the plant was designed.
In many ways, Japan's cleanup and restoration plans are more ambitious and challenging than those following the nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island in the U.S. and Chernobyl in the former Soviet Union.
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No new plants have been ordered there since the accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979 (when radioactive gas escaped from a nuclear power plant), though some that were being built were completed.
The basic thing that happened at Three Mile Island is that the operators, due to the grossly flawed monitoring and control systems, misunderstood what the problem was and did exactly the wrong thing to correct it.
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But uranium mining collapsed along with the price of uranium after accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and the cancelation of 100 planned reactors in the U.S. There are now only four productive uranium mines.
There could be the kind of meltdown, I guess, like occurred -- partial meltdown that occurred at Three Mile Island, and that would -- another agency might have the lead -- because they would have the expertise, so they would have the lead in responding to that.
Even after radiation levels in the Fukushima main control room had spiked to 1, 000 times normal levels, radioactive steam had been vented into the environment, and hydrogen explosions had demolished large parts of two reactor buildings, sending radioactive debris a thousand feet into the air, NISA only raised the threat assessment to level 5 the same as the far less catastrophic accident at Three Mile Island.
But then at 4:00 a.m. on Mar. 28, 1979 a cooling valve got stuck at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station's Unit 2.
Still, it would be foolish to ignore the possibility that the repercussions of the present crisis will be made much more far-reaching if it precipitates the sort of panic that took hold after the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear facility in 1979 or the oil leak off Santa Barbara a decade earlier.
Following the 1979 near-meltdown of a reactor at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island, the nuclear power industry suddenly had all the appeal of Dr. Strangelove in his doomsday bunker.
Following the 1979 near meltdown of a reactor at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island, the nuclear power industry suddenly had all the appeal of Dr. Strangelove in his doomsday bunker.
Peter Bradford, a member of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission at the time of the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania in 1979, said the accident exposes shortcomings in risk analysis as well as engineering.
The ongoing drama at the power plant in Fukushima -- a name now ranked alongside Three Mile Island and Chernobyl as history's worst nuclear accidents -- has erased the momentum the nuclear industry has seen in recent years.
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