Remembering Three Mile Island and Exxon Valdez

Remembering Three Mile Island and the Exxon Valdez

Anniversaries have a way of kindling deeper reflection and thought than we generally muster. So this month finds many of us thinking about the partial core meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant that occurred 20 years ago and about the Exxon Valdez oil spill that occurred 10 years ago. Both events had dramatic impact on public attitudes about our sources of energy. The TMI accident brought into question claims that had been made about the safety of nuclear power—yes, an accident

is possible, even in this country. The uncooled reactor core melted through 3 or 4 feet (about a meter) of concrete before being quenched; had it gone a little further, it would have melted through the bottom of the containment and then down into the groundwater, where massive vaporization would have spewed lethal radioactivity over a wide area of Pennsylvania (the “China Syndrome”) and most likely rendered Harrisburg, the state’s capitol, uninhabitable.

Ten years later, we were reminded that the transport of crude oil carries risk. Eleven million gallons of crude escaped the Exxon Valdez tanker and devastated a 1,300-mile (2,100 km) stretch of Alaska’s Prince William Sound coastline, killing hundreds of thousands of birds and mammals, devastating the region’s fishing industry, and greatly damaging the delicate ecosystem there. What is perhaps even more shocking is that this oil spill was only the world’s 53rd largest, and in the ten years since, approximately 1 billion gallons (3,785 million l) of oil have been spilled worldwide—100 times as much as the Valdez spilled. And the unmeasured spills—used motor oil dumped into storm sewers or into the groundwater each year by homeowners, and gasoline spilled from cars through overfilling—are many times greater than what was spilled that day 10 years ago in Alaska.

Three Mile Island and the Exxon Valdez remind us that there are social and ecological costs to our profligate consumption of energy. But these events also demonstrate just how important our collective efforts to reduce the use of conventional energy sources are and how important the transition toward renewable energy is. The architects, designers, builders, and developers of the green building movement have the knowledge and tools to reduce those risks and help to ensure that our grandchildren can crawl out from the shadow of TMI and the Exxon Valdez.

—Alex Wilson