Much of the book focuses on the public relations issues as the NRC, White House, state and local officials, reporters, company representatives, their critics, and the public sought to determine how dangerous the accident truly was. The worst of the crisis was over by Monday, April 2, 1979, but the political consequences lasted much longer. Not surprisingly, anti-nuclear opinion soared. The presidential commission on TMI blasted the designers, owners, operators, and the NRC on training, design, management, communication, safety, licensing, and "complacent attitudes" (p. 212). Both the government and industry instituted a number of changes to remedy these defects. Walker writes that the "most serious, or at least the most visible, failure in the decade after Three Mile Island was the discovery in 1987 that plant operators and shift supervisors routinely slept while on duty" at the Peach Bottom reactor (p. 224), but concludes this section with a quote from The New York Times which supports the notion that things have changed since TMI.
In fact, there have been a number of other failures on the part of both nuclear plant operators and the NRC. (For example, in the mid-nineties, it was revealed that Connecticut's Millstone plant was illegally off-loading its entire fuel core at once. The problem was not addressed until whistle-blowers went public after being repeatedly rebuffed by the NRC.) Walker's underlying optimism leaves some unanswered questions. While Walker is mostly even-handed, his discussion of the health and environmental issues is quite limited. His summation of the medical research on TMI suggests that there has been little health impact, yet a recent Bulletin of Atomic Scientists article challenges this same research for its limitations: "Nothing exists in the literature on infant mortality, hypothyroidism in newborns, cancer in young children, or thyroid cancer, even though data for all of these were routinely collected in 1979. All of these conditions are especially sensitive to ionizing radiation."[1] In addition, the footnoting in the book is inadequate, with many paragraphs uncited.
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