Word: edisonizing
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While Metropolitan Edison--one of the owners of Three Mile Island--worked with NRC technicians and nuclear engineers trying to stabilize the haywire reactor, local residents were left uninformed. Hazardous Xenon 131 gas seeped into the atmosphere, and high-level bursts of radiation escaped to the containment building as plant officials released steam from the overheating equipment. Such steam releases were made, initially, without notifying local civil defense officials, who later expressed outrage at the situation's handling. These releases may have left their cancerous mark on thousands...
...Curry, Metropolitan Edison's top public relations man, explained initially that a pump had broken down in the reactor's secondary loop, which carries nonradioactive water into the steam generator, where it absorbs heat that is transferred from the nuclear chain reaction in the core by the primary loop, turns to steam and drives the turbine that generates electricity. Lacking the steam's push, the turbine automatically shut down. This, said Curry, was regarded by the engineers as a routine mechanical failure that under the plant's safety rules did not have to be immediately reported to state or federal...
...honest about it, I don't know," replied Metropolitan Edison President Walter Creitz when reporters persisted. The first estimate came from William Dornsife, a nuclear engineer who had flown in the state helicopter. He put the radiation reading taken downwind from the plant at 1 millirem per hour?not an alarming or unalarming level. By 3 in the afternoon, Creitz put the reading at 2 to 3 millirems per hour, measured at the outer edge of the 200-acre plant site on the island...
...this time, in Harrisburg, Lieut Governor William Scranton III expressed alarm that he might be getting inaccurate reports from plant officials. He told reporters: "This situation is more complex than the company first led us to believe. Metropolitan Edison has given you and us conflicting information." Indeed federal investigators from the nearby headquarters of the NRC in King of Prussia reported later in the day that radio activity had been detected as far as 16 miles from the plant, and claimed that radiation within the reactor containment building had risen to a startling 1,000 times its normal level...
...legal challenges by opponents. Says Charles Cicchetti, chairman of the Wisconsin public service commission: "It's time to jump off the nuclear bandwagon." Nonetheless, the industry contends that nuclear plants now in operation deliver power at a lower cost than those fueled by almost any other means. The Edison Electric Institute, a utility-company group, estimates that atomic plants produce electricity at a cost of 1.71? per kwh, vs. 1,74? to 2.08? for coal-fired plants and 3.96? to 4,54? for plants burning...