The Bright Green Line - Highlighted Article

From: environMENTAL - Substack

By: Environmental

Date: October 13, 2024

The Bright Green Line

“Of course, the world is full of problems. But on the other hand it's important to get the sense... are we generally moving in the right direction or the wrong direction?” - Bjorn Lomborg

At the 1979 Cannes Film Festival, an American film with rather uncanny timing (pun intended) previewed. In The China Syndrome, a television reporter and her camera man happen to be inside nuclear power plant during a turbine trip event and the emergency shutdown process known as a SCRAM.

What unfolds is a story of sticking gauges, panicked plant operations, safety coverups, intrigue, and ultimately State-sponsored assassination to keep a lid on the whole affair, all in order to hide from the public the fact that a power plant outside Los Angeles came dangerously close to a core reactor meltdown.

The film made its debut in American theaters on March 16, 1979. Twelve days later, at around 4:00 a.m., an incident began at a nuclear power plant built on an island in the Susquehanna River near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. When the dust had cleared at the Three Mile Island (TMI) Nuclear Generation Station, an uncontrolled partial thermal meltdown destroyed reactor unit 2.

At the time of the TMI accident, “environmentalism,” was a growing political force in the U.S., fueled by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968), and the discovery in the late 1970s of Hooker Chemical Company’s contamination of the Love Canal neighborhood in Niagara Falls, NY. (Love Canal would ultimately lead to the U.S. Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act, CERCLA, aka “Superfund”).

After TMI, new nuclear power generation in the U.S. was over, killed by a public fear and panic which no fact, data, reason, or logic would penetrate for nearly half a century. Falling oil and natural gas prices after two 1970’s “energy crises” changed the economics of nuclear energy, to be sure. But, after TMI “environmentalists” (and even fossil fuel interests) exploited the public’s fear of nuclear energy, and it could not be overcome. The Chernobyl disaster seven years later in 1986 was similarly exploited. When the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident occurred 25 years later in 2011, the loudest and most angry voices were “environmentalists”. (continue reading)

The Bright Green Line