Three Mile Island (book)

[...] Thornburgh (foreground), Pennsylvania's governor at the time of the Three Mile Island reactor accident, and Harold Denton, from the NRC and President Jimmy Carter's personal representative on the site, talk to the press AbOUT the situation.

Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective is a scholarly history of the Three Mile Island accident, written by J. Samuel Walker, published in 2004. Walker is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's historian and this is the first detailed historical analysis since the accident. The accident at Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station in Pennsylvania on March 28, 1979, was "the single most important event in the fifty-year history of nuclear power regulation in the United States," according to Walker. Many commentators have seen the accident as a turning point for the nuclear power industry in the USA.

The main part of the book consists of six chapters, one covering each of the five days (Wednesday, March 28, through Sunday, April 1, 1979) of the crisis phase of the accident and another covering its immediate effects. Walker draws on a wide range of sources, but principally on the report of the Kemeny Commission, which President Carter appointed immediately after the disaster, and the Rogovin Report, which resulted from the NRC's own inquiry.

The Three Mile Island accident is largely seen as a failure of crisis management. According to one reviewer of the book:

Reactor operators were not trained to deal with accident conditions, and the NRC had not established effective communication with utilities. Moreover, once the accident occurred, the lines of authority proved to be ill defined. The public received conflicting reports that caused needless panic and evacuations. It was these systemic weaknesses in the regulatory system that allowed gifted people to make the mistakes they did.

Walker concludes that the episode left a mixed legacy. It did force regulatory and operational improvements on a reluctant industry, but it also increased opposition to nuclear power. In Walker's balanced analysis, neither the critics nor proponents are completely vindicated. Anti-nuclear advocates were right: a nuclear accident was likely, and the industry was not prepared for it. But their predicted worst-case accident, called the "China Syndrome," did not transpire. For its part, the industry claimed that it had reformed itself, but by then few seemed to be listening.

One criticism of the book is that it contains little technical information.