Civil defense officials are urging you to
take cover.
Please stay indoors with your windows closed.
In March of 1979, Americans awoke 
to a nuclear nightmare.
The potential is there for the ultimate risk of a meltdown
at the Three Mile Island atomic power plant 
outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
In the worst case, a massive amount of radioactive
material would be spewed into an area
5 to 10 miles in diameter and 20 miles downwind.
The president tried to quell the panic,
but the accident had fundamentally changed
the nuclear power industry.
What we have to do is to call for an end to the
nuclear age in its entirety.
Now, more than three decades after Three Mile
Island cast a shadow on the atomic dream,
is America again ready to embrace the promise
of nuclear power?
If we don’t have nuclear, it’s gonna be
a much hotter planet.
One morning, Nuclear Regulatory Commissioner
Victor Gilinsky received some startling news.
Mysteriously high radiation 
and pressure readings were coming
from a new nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island.
The technical experts tell you,
“There’s gotta be something wrong with the meters. Gotta be not working properly.”
Well, it turned out the meters were right.
An accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, which is located on an island in the Susquehanna River,
ten miles from Harrisburg.
The cooling system broke down this morning,
some radioactive steam escaped into the air,
radiation was detected a mile away from the plant.
The plant’s controlled nuclear reaction was supposed to create steam that spun a turbine, generating electricity.
But on this day, a sudden cascade of problems left the reactor’s operators scrambling to regain control.
Some officials began to fear the worst:
molten uranium melting 
through the bottom of the reactor,
what scientists have dubbed the China Syndrome,
as if the fuel could melt through 
to the other side of the world.
A new blockbuster movie had already primed
the public for such a catastrophe.
As federal regulators and the plant’s operator, Metropolitan Edison, struggled to stabilize
the overheated reactor, 
they were confronted with a new worry.
A potentially explosive hydrogen bubble that
had formed near the top of the reactor core.
It prevents the use of the reactor’s ultimate
safety system, increasing the risk of a meltdown.
And if the bubble bursts, then what?
There was a tremendous scare that the reactor
could just blow up.
The simplest solution, having a man open that
valve to release the trapped gas is impossible.
Heat and radioactivity 
would kill anyone making that attempt.
Gilinsky still can’t believe one of the ideas floated.
It was suggested, to my amazement and horror,
that we send in terminal cancer patients.
I remember the very distinct feeling that
senior people are giving you advice that which,
if you took, would send you right off the cliff.
The idea of the men in white lab coats, 
who were supposed to know,
and they’re standing  there scratching their heads.
That, I think shook the public.
I don’t know why we need to tell you each and every thing that we do.
It’s a lot worse than what they are telling us.
Typical lies.
They ought to close 
all those nuclear power plants down.
They have heard so much contradictory 
technical jargon from officials
that the first casualty of this accident 
may have been trust.
On the third day, high radiation readings
of controlled release of gases from the plant
caused the governor to call for an evacuation
of pregnant women and children.
I am advising those may be particularly susceptible
to the effects of radiation
to leave the area within a five-mile radius
of the Three Mile Island facility.
Three Mile Island was not the future 
that was envisioned
when nuclear power emerged decades earlier as an alternative to coal-fired electricity.
Here in fact is the answer to a dream as old as man himself, a giant of limitless power at man’s command.
The complex of images around nuclear power
is quite unique.
There’s nothing outside religious imagery that is so strong, so pervasive and involves so many hooks.
Nuclear energy isn’t waiting to help people
everywhere in some brave new world of the future.
The peaceful atom is here and now.
Nuclear scientists had all kinds of visions
of a new society – energy would be practically free.
We’d have nuclear-powered flying cars.
The deserts would be conquered.
We’d build cities in the arctic wastes.
There was an explosion of wonderful ideas
about how things could be improved.
All of this had been part of a concerted effort
following World War II
to dull the image of the atom as a tool for war.
Yes, this is atomic energy at work.
Not as a force for evil, but as a force for good.
Just think of all the things that can be done.
The pitch worked.
Increasingly powerful reactors, like those
at Three Mile Island, were scaled up quickly,
with regulators telling the public that
nuclear power’s safety was assured.
The plant is operated by highly trained people
who are assisted in their efforts
by the most sophisticated technologies available.
They really believed that major accidents
were essentially impossible.
Three Mile Island proved 
that nuclear power’s experts were wrong.
What are the dreams?
About the Three Mile Island.
People start moving out.
There’s lots and lots of traffic.
Then all of a sudden it blew up.
Twelve days after the sirens of Three Mile Island turned the communities around the plant into ghost towns,
all public advisories were finally rescinded and the 140,000 people who had fled were told to return home.
It was only realized how severe it was five years later,
when they opened up the reactor 
and discovered half the fuel had melted,
which went way beyond anything 
that anyone imagined before.
No one died at Three Mile Island and in the end,
it was never proven that the radiation releases 
created any lasting harm.
Some of the fears, like the hydrogen bubble
were later shown to have been unfounded.
But the meltdown itself could have been much
worse were it not for several timely discoveries,
including technicians realizing a crucial
pressure valve had stuck open,
an initial contributor to the meltdown.
It would eventually have eaten its way
through the bottom of the pressure vessel, 
and from then on, all bets are off.
It’s kind of like you’re beyond anything
that’s been studied.
The image of the disaster would continue to
linger in the 70 nuclear reactors
that already dotted the landscape.
Not all the promotion in the world can erase
memories of central Pennsylvania
as the place where the worst fear of modern man almost came to pass.
There was an anti nuclear movement before
Three Mile Island, but now it has a new following.
The cleanup after the accident took more than
a decade and cost almost 1 billion dollars.
And despite a host of reforms to shore up
nuclear safety, the lesson to many seemed clear.
Nuclear power is dead 
as an industry in the United States.
It died at Three Mile Island.
Three Mile Island looks like so long ago to millennials.
It's sort of something that your
parents talk about, and worry about.
I remember this Saturday Night Live skit where
Jimmy Carter goes into the reactor
to try to save it and turns 
into this gigantic radiated man.
And it all seemed sort of exaggerated.
One government study estimated in such an event, 45,000 would be killed, a quarter of a million injured.
If it would have melted down it would have probably wiped out the entire Eastern seaboard.
It all just sort of seemed way blown outta proportion.
Michael Shellenberger is among 
a new wave of environmentalists
who began to gain prominence over the last decade.
Their views — recently featured 
in the film Pandora’s Promise
- are strikingly different 
from the types that led the news in 1979.
I think it’s fair to say that the concerns
that young environmentalists have are overwhelmingly
around living in a hotter world and that those pretty seriously outweigh their concerns around nuclear.
The idea that you can power a world of 9 billion people,
all of whom are gonna live energy-rich lives, 
on just solar and wind is a delusion.
And it’s a dangerous delusion.
In 2010, support widened for nuclear power.
Nuclear energy remains our largest source
of fuel that produces no carbon emissions.
President Obama announced roughly 8 billion dollars
in loan guarantees to break ground
on the first new American nuclear plant 
in three decades.
To break through from this 30 year slump,
But we're really talking about a nuclear renaissance.
Although it continued to confront economic
headwinds such as cheap natural gas,
the industry weathered expensive safety improvements,
pushed plant performance, and developed
a host of new theoretical designs that promised
a bright future for a power-hungry public.
Then, in 2011,
First an earthquake, then a tsunami, 
and then a nuclear disaster.
The Japanese government now says two reactors
are in partial meltdown and four more are at risk.
Gilinsky had been raising concerns about nuclear
power since Three Mile Island.
And the disaster at Fukushima – which culminated
in a series of hydrogen explosions,
three simultaneous reactor meltdowns, and a substantial release of radiation
– heightened that unease.
Chernobyl was pretty much dismissed here because
it was not US technology. Then you get to Fukushima.
It is U.S. technology.
That’s a big problem.
It’s triple Three Mile Island squared.
Before the meltdown in Japan,
American support for nuclear power as an alternative to fossil fuels had reached a new high.
But that support appears to be evaporating quickly.
Fukushima showed that when radiation gets out, you may have a certain amount of land that’s off limits,
effectively forever. 
And the economic impact is enormous.
Nuclear energy is still confronting the same
issues that have dogged it for decades,
from investment capital to worries about nuclear waste.
But scientists continue to push boundaries
in the search for new ways to deal
with our constantly growing energy needs.
Thorium is a naturally occurring nuclear fuel.
It’s so energy dense that you can need a lifetime supply of thorium energy in the palm of your hand.
In a normal nuclear reactor, 
you take an atom and split it.
What they are going to do here is taking
pairs of atoms and then forcing
or fusing them together.
There is no good source of energy.
The only thing that’s worse than not having
nuclear energy or coal-fired energy
is not having energy at all.
You have to step back.
It is the first major, new energy source since fire.
It is an impressive thing.
The question is, is it good enough?
Do we need it now?
And, do we want this technology?
