Zed's dead, baby. Zed's dead.

Still kinda freaked out by the American Experience piece on Three Mile Island I downloaded and watched. I'm not sure what disturbed me more: the fact that the entire thing would never have happened had the guys running things simply not done absolutely the wrong thing by countermanding the facility's automatic procedures or the way the press in their fear for their own lives admittedly turned into a raving pack of hyenas (please note I gave them the benefit of the doubt and said "turned into"...I'm feeling generous). I wonder if there was ever a real investigation of the fact that they did the one thing that they should not have done. Cue the Michael Moore music. That single event pretty much shot down nuclear power in the United States. Sure Chernobyl hlped later, but just uttering the words Three Mile Island in the early 80's was guaranteed to send a chill down people's necks. Add to that the whole "NO NUKES" movement and it's no wonder the cleanest and cheapest source of energy available to us was shelved.

I know I am tempting fate by even thinking about this, much less writing about it, given my proximity to Indian Point, but the thing that was lost in the whole thing was that the plant funtioned correctly and would have saved itself had men not intervened. The technology worked. But because the people fucked up, we blamed everyone nd shelved the technology. How many nuclear accidents has the Navy had? The operate a feet of nuclear powered vessels that prowl the earth up to 1,000 feet below the surface of the ocean. How many reactor incidents have they had? Even the Soviets who were admittedly a tad less safety conscious. What was their total record over how many years?

No fossil fuels used. No greenhouse gasses produced. Completely home-grown. If it were anything else, there would be a plethura of conspiracy theories abounding about how it had been scuttled by the oil industry or the coal industry or the wind industry or the sun people. But now we just don't talk about it.