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Last week, nearly a third of a century after that first surge of power and four years after the notorious incident at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island generating station, the business of nuclear power in America was still in disarray, and it has turned out to be anything but cheap. The industry is plagued by searing cost overruns, unfinished plants, waste-disposal problems and environmental suits, shoddy workmanship, tricky technology, constantly changing safety regulations, disillusioned shareholders, weak political support and public mistrust...
...Three Mile Island brought the nuclear industry, barely progressing before the incident, to a near standstill. There have been no new domestic orders for nuclear generating plants since 1978. After Three Mile Island, moreover, cancellations came in a flood tide. Work on 18 reactors was halted last year alone, bringing total cancellations since 1972 to 97. Half of those occurred after the Pennsylvania accident. Says Eric Van Loon, executive director of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a group critical of the nuclear-power industry: "Three Mile Island showed that a $2 billion investment could disintegrate in 30 seconds...
...makers of nuclear paraphernalia-Westinghouse, Combustion Engineering, General Electric and Babcock & Wilcox-have scaled back their nuclear-equipment sales, but are doing a brisk business supplying fuel and repairing and retrofitting existing reactors. Much of the work involves upgrading the reactors to new federal safety standards passed after Three Mile Island, and simply replacing parts of older, worn-out reactors. Westinghouse, in fact, was sued by two California utilities last week over steam-generator breakdowns that have caused a 14-month shutdown of a 15-year-old nuclear plant near San Clemente...
PAtricia Smith's two daughters were exposed to radiation when the worst U.S. nuclear-power accident struck Three Mile Island. Now Smith, who lives within sight of the crippled generating plant owned by General Public Utilities, wears anti-nuclear-power buttons and frets about her two daughters. Says she: "They had been standing out at the bus stop that morning, so as soon as they come down with any sickness I start to worry about cancer...
Such anxieties infect the Pennsylvania communities around Three Mile Island. Four years after the accident that thoroughly clouded the future of nuclear power, the psychological impact lingers. For some residents it may never end, despite assurances that the radiation leaks were minor. Notes Robert Holt, a New York University psychologist who has pored over all the studies made of the emotional consequences of the mishap: "Significant portions of the population were emotionally shocked by the accident, believe that they have been or will be harmed by radiation, and feel threatened by Three Mile Island...