The man who has his mojo back
(according to Bob Smith)
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The fallout

 

It takes a long spoon

to sup with the world's

nuclear industry

 

Norman Fenton

It's frequently said that most people of a certain age can remember exactly where they were the day President John Kennedy died. I can also remember where I was when the nuclear power station at Three Mile Island became a potentially big problem for the USA, and a harbinger of similar problems for the rest of the world.
     I was in a hospital near my home having my knee x-rayed, having twisted it badly while running with the crowds through the streets of Teheran as the Iranian Imperial Guard attempted to put down one of the more heated moments of the Iranian Revolution.
     I was called over by a nurse at the hospital and told, quite surprisingly, that someone in America was very keen to talk to me on the phone. It was a friend and former colleague, now working in New York for ABC Television. He had worked on Harold Evans's Insight team (viz Thalidomide) on the pre-Murdoch Sunday Times, and had not lost any of his instincts. 'You've got to get over here – this is the big one'. The big one was the Three Mile Island nuclear power station in Pennsylvania.
     Within days, I was there with a camera crew. It was a curious experience as, at the time, the incident at the nuclear power station was not being recognised as being as significant as it would later prove to be.
     Then, the American public's knowledge of problems within the nuclear industry was most likely based on the film 'The China Syndrome'. In the film, Jane Fonda uncovered a reactor accident which would 'render an area the size of Pennsylvania permanently uninhabitable' [sic].
     But that was just a movie, wasn't it? Allowing for the confusion over what was actually happening within the nuclear power station, there was little sign of any great concern amongst the locals. The nearby authorities had told those living within five miles of the power station that any evacuation was entirely voluntary, though schools were closed, people urged to stay indoors, and animals kept under cover and not allowed to graze.
     It was a very strange time. Swallowing the recommended potassium iodide tablets, to protect your thyroid from any possible damage from radiation, you drove along roads whose houses all appeared to be conducting their own car-boot sales, as the house-owners prepared for a possible evacuation. Sadly, I bought and still treasure a beautiful old Pennsylvania-Dutch bed cover.

 

     But then, 'the big one' of my colleague's phone call manifested itself, suspected, until then, only by a knowing few. A hydrogen bubble had been created within the reactor by the water being used in the attempts to cool the reactor’s core. This in turn could lead to a massive explosion blasting the reactor's radioactive contents over the outside world. This now-known possibility led to a major change in the quality of the information being provided publicly. Until then, this came from the commercial operators of the power station. Concern about the reality of the situation climbed slowly through the pay-grades and, via the governor's mansion, reached the White House.
     President Jimmy Carter had at one time intended to take up a full-time naval career in nuclear submarines, and he was sent as the naval officer in charge of the US team to Canada to assist in the shutdown of the Chalk River nuclear reactor, which had suffered a partial meltdown of its nuclear core. At some stage, all Carter's team members, including himself, wearing protective gear, had entered the reactor for only a few seconds at a time to minimise exposure to radiation, and had used ordinary hand tools to help disassemble the reactor. This experience shaped Carter's views on nuclear power, and as far as Three Mile Island was concerned, his views percolated down through the food chain, and serious questions started to demand serious answers.
     The incident had started off with some simple if regrettable human errors, such as misinterpreting the meaning of a warning light. I managed to set up and film reconstructions of what had probably led to these human errors in the Susquehanna control room used in training sessions for control room staff,
     But once the human errors had occurred, what happened next?
     I was picked up at a hotel in Idaho Falls and driven, under armed escort, to the high-security 900-square-mile complex of the 'Idaho National Engineering Laboratory', set up on President Carter's watch in the high desert land of eastern Idaho. I was on the way to a nuclear reactor that was to be allowed deliberately to overheat. This was known as LOFT – Loss of Fluid Test. Even if things went wrong, there would be fairly little damage done other than to those of us in the reactor's test area, and to a large population of coyotes. It went well, although when we left the site, the radiation alarms scanning our departure went crazy, with some distinct concern from our hosts. It was the camera; or rather the different coatings on the lenses, which did, in fact, emit some radiation.
     During the drive back, we passed a strange site. Standing alone in the sagebrush were the remains of an atomic-powered aircraft, the X-39, a project abandoned by President Kennedy.
     The Three Mile Island incident did not lead directly to any loss of life, but it did lead to distinct changes in the American nuclear industry.
     But returning the UK to finish the programme, one became only too aware that the opinions of many of those, political or other, pursuing, rightly or wrongly, the furtherance of British nuclear power generation, had to be supped with a longish spoon. The cover-up over the Windscale fire alone surely gave one reason to be cautious.
     'It could never have happened here', they would chorus.

 

Norman Fenton wrote and produced for Thames TV a dramatised version of the inquest in Pretoria into the killing of Steve Biko, the black South African activist. Later, he extended his original version to stage-length and 'The Biko Inquest' was performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company