Tell Your Story Fall 2022 Writing Contest — 3rd Place
Zombie on the River
The deserted towers stand as silent witnesses, forever casting shadows on the Susquehanna River as it journeys south toward the Chesapeake Bay. Buildings hold secrets buried deep within. No more wind-borne plumes of radiation fuel the ticking Geiger counters. Millions of dollars will be needed to shut it down because it’s still too hot to handle. Gotta’ wait years and years until it’s cool enough, safe enough. But that’s the next generation’s problem. Concrete monoliths dead in the water serve as airport landmarks and a weird sort of tourist attraction. Harmless now, or so we think. But there may still be flickers of life, a few radioactive tentacles reaching out to poke the sensitive tissue.
As I crest the top of the hill driving home, the horizon looks different without the thin plume of steam spiraling lazily from reactor unit one. The giant cooling towers are still there and will be for decades. From here it all looks so peaceful, like a futuristic settlement on a far planet. Three Mile Island has been part of the landscape for so long, that I seldom think about the time we fled. It’s old news, occasionally trotted out by the media during an anniversary year, or most recently, because the plant began the decommissioning process in September 2019. But those of us who lived here at the time of the accident never saw the steam from those towers as something completely benign.
Forty years ago, we ran from heat we could not feel. Heat masquerading as something pure and wholesome, generated from the coolness of the river. We ran from the heat of atoms cavorting in concrete tombs deep beneath the earth, creating the newest form of energy to power our lives. That same heat which seared my mother’s scarred chest, leaving her depleted and ravaged, sent us scurrying in all directions, like animals sensing the onslaught of the tsunami long before it reaches shore.
Inside the plant, men wearing shirts with giant armpit stains shouted, “Christ, this wasn’t in any of the drills. Somebody call the governor,” as their trembling hands hovered, terrified to pull that lever. “Make it stop, shut it down, Jesus, do something. We’ve got a pot about to boil over on half the state.” Outside, carefully crafted words were spoken into bouquets of microphones, reassuring the public there was nothing to fear, as metronome-like machines recorded deadly molecules of radiation. Tick-tick-tick. If the tempo got too fast, we would all die.
I was the sixth grade safety patrol captain, assisting the crossing guard at the main highway through town, when I saw the giant turbines rolling by on flatbed trucks. They were headed for the new power plant being constructed on a sandbar on the Susquehanna River known as Three Mile Island. It was like a science story from our Weekly Reader sprung to life. We had just landed a man on the moon, and now this clean, modern energy produced without smoke or pollution would be generated twenty miles north of us. We didn’t understand a lot about it, but nuclear energy was being touted as the wave of the future — not dependent on fossil fuel and beneficial to the local economy as well as the environment.
Ten years later, on March 28, 1979, we began to hear news coverage about a minor incident occurring in unit two of the nuclear reactor. I was shopping for wedding shoes with my mother. We listened to the reports on the car radio, shrugged, and went to lunch. My mother was fighting advanced breast cancer, so spending a normal day with her was a rare gift.
Outside, there was no mushroom cloud or strange light in the sky. It was a typical end-of-March week in the mid-Atlantic, still more winter than spring. Nothing led us to believe something terrible was about to happen. No sirens were sounded nor were there any sinister red chyrons scrolling across our TV screens. The next day my fiancé and I rode our bikes on a road that ran parallel to the river. We joked about holding our breath and glowing in the dark.
News reports told us that a pressure valve in unit two failed to close, and contaminated water draining into adjoining buildings caused the core to dangerously overheat. Emergency cooling pumps were activated but human operators in the control room misinterpreted the readings and mistakenly shut down the pumps and the reactor. Residual heat from the fission process was still being released which caused the core to overheat to just 1000 degrees short of a meltdown.
Most of us had no concept of what any of this meant. Men in short sleeve dress shirts and narrow ties reassured us from our television screens. Governor Thornburgh, calm and professorial in his horn-rimmed glasses, initially suggested a precautionary evacuation of nearby towns but was quickly silenced by the corporate owners of the plant.
Shh. Don’t wake the sleeping babies. This too shall pass, nothing to worry about, it’s all been taken care of. Go on about your business. Nothing to see here.
A mysterious bubble hidden from view created pressure, pressure, until bang went the door. Was that a door or was that something else? The men loosened their ties and wiped nervous sweat from their foreheads. They were terrified and hadn’t slept in days. This fragile bubble, this lethal bubble, what was it going to do? Pregnant women and young children ordered to leave. Panic and mass exodus ensued, and what if we came back to rubble and fall-out dust? Would we all be hot with cancer, our bodies forever scorched earth?
The core had come within an hour of a complete meltdown and over half the core was destroyed, but it had not broken its protective shell. No radiation had escaped. Sighs of relief. Crisis averted. No need to evacuate or hustle into those buildings with the ubiquitous yellow Fallout Shelter signs left over from the Cold War days.
On March 30, we were told there was a bubble of highly flammable hydrogen gas within the reactor building, created two days earlier when exposed core materials reacted with super-heated steam. The day of the incident, some of this gas exploded, releasing a small amount of radiation into the atmosphere. The sound at the time was attributed to a ventilation door closing. The experts weren’t sure if this bubble would create a further meltdown or, worst case scenario, a giant explosion. Residents were ordered to stay indoors. The governor advised all pregnant women and young children who lived within a five-mile radius to evacuate. The floodgates of panic burst open.
I was in the first days of my teaching career, shadowing a very pregnant orchestra director whom I was to replace the following week. I remember her disappointment when she wasn’t allowed to travel to the elementary buildings to teach her beginning students again before she started maternity leave. The school district didn’t want her to go outside any more than necessary. Just in case.
This was long before the days of cell phones and push alerts, so we were not immediately thrust into the center of the latest tragedy or emergency the way we are now. No twenty-four-hour news networks existed to analyze every detail of what was happening, so most of us felt once removed from the situation. We knew a technical glitch had occurred, but it appeared the operators of the plant had it under control. Many of us who lived here were descended from a long line of taciturn Germans and not easily prone to excitement and hysteria.
The afternoon of March 30, students were dismissed early and told to go directly home. All after-school sports and activities were cancelled, and students who walked were provided bus transportation if someone couldn’t pick them up. Many arrived home to find anxious parents waiting with the family car loaded with food, clothing, and whatever else was needed to survive for an extended period, somewhere else. The mass at TMI had turned malignant.
We suddenly found ourselves living in an apocalyptic atmosphere, and yet everything appeared so normal. We couldn’t smell, hear, or see the threat of radiation gone amok. There was skepticism and an underlying sense of “Is this for real?” Fire trucks and emergency vehicles patrolled the streets, advising people through loudspeakers that they should evacuate. Schools and businesses closed. My uncle, a retired physician who had been shepherding my mother through her cancer treatment, told her it was time to head out, especially for someone with a weakened immune system. Our family lived just outside the ten-mile radius of the plant and never really felt a sense of urgency or panic, partly because what little information we received was filled with reassuring platitudes. In those days, no one questioned the media. We believed what we were told.
Lines formed around gas stations, banks were emptied of cash, and roads were jammed with traffic. Caravans of people who never dreamed they would be refugees found themselves leaving their homes, not knowing if they would ever return. With the looming specter of nuclear annihilation now a reality, we remembered the naive innocence of the duck and cover drills we did at school during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
My parents went to the New Jersey shore to stay with my mother’s college friend. It would be the last time the two women would see each other. My mother found it ironic that she was being evacuated to avoid radiation exposure.
I took our dog and went to my fiancé’s apartment outside Philadelphia. We practiced being newlyweds while waiting for Armageddon. We poured cocktails and watched TV, cooked meals, and walked the dog, all the while pretending we were grown-ups, just in case we didn’t get to do it for real. We found it darkly romantic. Huddling together safe from the threatening bubble. Waiting for news.
Flip-flip-flip went the helicopter blades and President Jimmy Carter arrived, calm and cool in his haz-mat suit. He was a nuclear engineer, so he knew what to do. He fixed one of these in Canada once, didn’t he? They wouldn’t have let the President in there if it wasn’t safe, right? Whew. Saved in the nick of time, like the arrival of the plumber when water from the burst pipe in the basement begins to cover the steps. Hydrogen released ever so slowly. Dials gradually creeping out of the red-hot danger zone, cooling down and down. All clear, come on home, you’re going to be fine. No extra cancer. All safely contained, minimal exposure.
Everyone who has cancer, raise your hand. Oops, shouldn’t ask that, because statistics reflect typical occurrence in the general population. No significant increase. High incidence of thyroid tumors in those who lived here at the time of the accident. Lots of lung cancer in non-smokers. Just a fluke, an aberration.
We returned home after Jimmy Carter assured us that the danger was past, relieved that the brief dance with our own version of Hiroshima was over. TMI became a touchstone, a reference point. “I started teaching the year TMI blew up.” “Our first child was born during TMI.” “We couldn’t sell our house because it was too close to TMI.” I never think of those three letters as standing for “too much information.”
In the years following the incident, disturbing studies on cancer rates of those who lived within a close radius of the plant occasionally popped up, along with reports of odd genetic mutations in livestock on nearby farms and fish with tumors in the Susquehanna River. Representatives of the company’s owners quickly discredited these reports as faulty interpretation of statistical data. The company line was that residents were exposed to less radiation than that of a chest x-ray. When we took one of our dogs who had lymphoma to a veterinary specialist in the late 1990’s, one of the questions on the intake survey asked how close we lived to TMI.
The persistent cough interrupts the pastor’s sermons for months until finally, he is diagnosed with more than a cold. The teacher on the cusp of retirement buys the camper and plans his cross-country trip. He’s been feeling a little under the weather, blaming it on his gall bladder, until the images on the screen indicate he is terminal. His childhood backyard lay well within the shadow of Three Mile Island. The community activist, now in his 70’s, steps back from volunteering to become his wife’s caregiver. Within six months, he is dead from thyroid cancer.
There’s a lot of cancer in these parts including a significantly high incidence of thyroid cancer in patients who lived here at the time of the accident. Thyroid cancer resulting from exposure to low-level doses of radiation presents a different mutational signal than other forms of the disease. Researchers at Penn State University’s College of Medicine in Hershey found a definitive shift in the genetic markers of those patients that can be attributed to radiation exposure during the time frame of the accident. Although the study does not prove TMI caused the cancer, it shows a direct correlation.[1]
The 2019–20 Emergency Planning for the Three Mile Island Area brochure reminds me of those old black and white educational films we sat through as kids with a cheerful narrator telling us exactly what to do if those darn Communists pushed the red button. On the front are pictures of neat little houses, and inside, carefully worded text provides those of us living within a ten-mile radius of the plant with information we would need in the event of a nuclear emergency. Included are listings of television and radio stations that are part of the emergency alert system, a packing checklist, evacuation routes and reception centers, and phone numbers for agencies who can provide transportation assistance. Residents are warned to avoid “shadow evacuations” because those not living within the declared evacuation area who choose to leave could impede the traffic flow of those who must leave. The infrastructure of roads in this area can barely handle the traffic of a normal workday let alone a massive evacuation.
Residents are reassured that emergency sirens will be tested once a month and that the state government offers free potassium iodide tablets, thought to protect the thyroid from absorbing radioactive iodine, for those living and working near the plant. Also included is information for farmers who may be asked to remove all livestock from pasture and provide them with stored feed and protected water for an indefinite period. These handy little brochures were not available to us in 1979.
Since the advent of shale drilling lowered the cost of natural gas, nuclear energy generation is no longer profitable, and the state government refuses to subsidize it. This spelled doom for the unit one reactor which continued to operate after the accident. TMI’s closure will take years, with final dismantling of the plant not slated until 2075 when the structures should be cool enough to allow safe access. There is concern about the safety and security of storing nuclear waste for that long on an island in the middle of a river near an airport and heavily populated areas. Beyond the environmental impact, there is also fear that reduced security at the closed plant could make the waste itself more vulnerable to attack by anyone with a deadly agenda.
The dancing atoms are finally stilled. The prevailing winds over central Pennsylvania no longer carry spores of radiation. TMI will become an island wasteland, an abandoned behemoth rising out of the river — a permanent shrine to one of the greatest human errors in modern history. Its deadly innards will be sealed in lead and concrete but always hold the potential to come back and destroy, given the right circumstances.
Three Mile Island is our zombie on the river.
[1] Brett Sholtis, “Thyroid Cancer Study Re-ignites Debate Over Three Mile Island Accident’s Health Effects,” York Daily Record, March 21, 2019.
