IEEE Spectrum - North American - March 2014 - 8

SPectraL LineS_

03.14

AFTER THE ACCIDENT at the
Three Mile Island nuclear plant in
Pennsylvania, a police officer and
security guards stand outside the
facility's front gate.

Ouch. It turned out that
U.S. nuclear power would
face considerably greater
public-relations challenges.
During the early morning
hours of 28 March 1979, a
cascade of improbable mishaps led to a partial core
meltdown in a reactor at
the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, in Pennsylvania.
Some of the initial news
accounts of the incident
were atrocious: hysterical,
wildly speculative, and
wrong. There were suggestions that the plant was in
imminent danger of blowing up like a bomb, prompting tens of thousands of
IEEE Spectrum's coverage of nuclear disasters, old and new
people to panic and flee
Editor's note: In this 50th anniversary year of IEEE Spectrum, we are using each month's
the area. Part of the probSpectral Lines column to describe some pivotal moments of the magazine's history.
lem was that, in the critical
Here we consider Spectrum's coverage of nuclear disasters in two different eras.
first hours, even the operators of the plant didn't have
a good grasp of what was
hree years ago, a tsunami came crashing down on the Fukushima Daiichi
happening inside the reactor.
nuclear plant in Japan, leading to the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl.
Amid the chaos, Donald Christiansen,
As Associate Editor Eliza Strickland explains in this issue in "Fukushima's Next then IEEE Spectrum's editor in chief, saw
40 Years," that accident still reverberates strongly in Japan, where all of the
an opportunity. "He immediately felt we
country's nuclear plants are currently off line.
had a special obligation to try to determine
Strickland's report continues a decades-long history at Spectrum of rigorous what had gone wrong," says Ellis Rubinstein,
coverage of nuclear technology. A milestone was our November 1979 issue
then a 34-year-old staff editor at Spectrum.
on the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in
Christiansen directed Rubinstein to get
the United States. Though Fukushima and
to the bottom of the mishap, and gave him
Three Mile Island were very different technically, the
an unexpected suggestion. "Every jourparallels between them are enlightening.
nalist is going to go to Three Mile Island,"
We started covering nuclear power back in July 1964,
Rubinstein remembers Christiansen tellin our seventh issue, with an encyclopedic 11-page feaing him. "They'll all be competing with
IEEE SPECTRUM 1964 / 2014
each other, and there will be a lot of noise
ture titled "Nuclear Power Today and Tomorrow." It
and confusion."
predicted that in the United States, "by year 2000, 45 percent of electric power will
Christiansen's advice was to skip that
be nuclear" (the actual percentage turned out to be around 20 percent). The article
concluded that "experience to date, and a series of specific tests have shown that media circus and go instead to Babcock &
nuclear power is inherently safe. That the public be convinced of this is most impor- Wilcox, the company that had manufactured
tant because the growth of metropolitan areas will result in a growing need for reac- the stricken reactor. "Get them to describe,
step-by-step, what happened," Christiansen
tor plants in or near population centers."

From Three Mile Island to Fukushima Daiichi

Mar 2014

north aMerican

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum - North American - March 2014