Op Eds

By Diane Farsetta, Senior Researcher, Center for Media and Democracy. 

The following article appeared in the June 2008 issue of The Progressive magazine.

 Sun editorial:

A critical look at Yucca?

April 8, 2009

A panel of judges from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission held a three-day hearing last week on objections to the Energy Department’s application to build a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The judges are scheduled to decide who can challenge the government’s plan during licensing hearings and what they can raise as objections. There have been 320 objections filed by 14 groups. The fact that President Barack Obama is against the Yucca Mountain plan went virtually unnoticed.

By Victor Gilinsky

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

March 23, 2009

Shortly after I arrived at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)'s headquarters in Washington, D.C., at 9 a.m. on Wednesday, March 28, 1979, I got a call from the commission's emergency center in Bethesda, Md.

The number two reactor at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania had declared a general emergency.

There weren't supposed to be serious accidents at nuclear power plants and having to deal with one led to some, let us say, out-of-the-ordinary, and even absurd, behavior.

Political Habitat: The lie of Three Mile Island

By Peter Dykstra

by Eric Joseph Epstein 

Nuclear Trash On The River 

 Remember TMI, March 28, 2009: Thirty Years since the Atomic Accident

The NRC and the nuclear industry are attempting to revise the history of the Three Mile Island accident on March 28, 1979. They say no significant amount of radiation got out and nobody got sick or died. The nuclear industry's sophists-for-hire call TMI a nuclear industry success story.  Nothing is farther from the truth.

Please visit our TMI Accident 30th Commemoration link at www.beyondnuclear.org

 March 18, 2009         

A Nuclear Waste

New York Times Op-Ed By STEPHANIE COOKE (author of the forthcoming “In Mortal Hands: A Cautionary History of the Nuclear Age.”)

PRESIDENT OBAMA has made clean and efficient energy a top priority, and Congress has obliged with more than $32 billion in stimulus money mostly for conservation and alternative energy technologies like wind, solar and biofuel. Sadly, the Energy Department is too weighed down by nuclear energy programs to devote itself to bringing about the revolution Mr. Obama envisions.

Below is a letter to the editor of Suffolk Life, written in 2005 by Diane Screnci, Public Affairs Officer for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The letter claims to clarify the facts published in an article on the Three Mile Island accident of 1979. 

Following that letter is a recent response to it from David Lochbaum, Nuclear Safety Engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists. 

Security Is Better, but Steps Don't Go Far Enough

By Scott Portzline

In the summer before the 9-11 attacks, Al Qaeda operatives traveled to Three Mile Island on a surveillance mission. 

To read the full story, open pdf: 

Re-published by Three Mile Island Alert - February 2009 

Originally published March 2004 

Because the Nuclear Regulatory Commission continues to publicize false 

information about the TMI accident, we correct the record once again. The 

NRC’s erroneous statements are listed in the red text which follows. 

“The main feedwater pumps stopped running, caused by either a mechanical 

or electrical failure, which prevented the steam generators from removing 

heat.”