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I worked in the Harrisburg area, and in the late 90's, a disproportionate number of my co-workers, or their family members, were dying of various cancers. They had all been in Harrisburg in 1979 during the Three Mile Island incident, which released large amounts of radiation. The utility didn't notify the state for many hours after the leaks started, and even then the official news releases denied danger. However, the link below details huge amounts of radiation, with uneven fallout resulting in hot spots of exposure.
www.ratical.org/radiation/SecretFallout/SFchp17.html
This information made it clear to me that evacuation of the people, and particularly pregnant women, living within a few miles of the reactor should have been ordered long before, since the total doses to internal organs from inhalation of the fission gases were likely to be ten to one hundred times greater than the external gamma dose levels Kendall had told me about. Just as in the case of the Albany-Troy incident years ago, where the external whole-body dose was only about 100 millirads over a period of ten weeks, it would be the doses to the thyroids of the infants and the unborn in their mother's womb that would be much greater and far more serious in their effects. Perhaps in a single day, thyroid doses to the unborn would reach the values of a few hundred to a few thousand millirads, equivalent to a series of abdominal X-rays, for which Dr. Alice Stewart's data had indicated as much as a doubling or tripling of the risk of leukemia and cancer for those in the early phases of development.
Yet on the radio and television news that evening, there were still the bland reassurances from the Metropolitan Edison Company officials who operated the reactor. According to the president of the company, Walter Creitz, the public was not in danger, no one was killed, and no one had been injured by the accident.
There were also the usual reassuring phrases by the public-relations people of the NRC, with their carefully chosen qualifying words. According to them, there was "no immediate danger to life." Put in this way, it was literally true; so far, there were no immediately lethal doses, and any infants in their mothers' wombs who were endangered would not die until many months or years later, while some types of chronic diseases and cancers would not show up for decades.
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Soon it came time for landing, and once again I turned on the survey meter to see what the radiation levels were a few thousand feet in the air, a few miles northwest of the Three Mile Island plant. As we both watched with growing concern, the needle began to move up-scale, until when we were just a few hundred feet in the air over the river close to the end of the runway, the meter indicated a dose rate fifteen times what would be normal. There could be no doubt about it: Some thirty-six hours after the accident, large amounts of radioactive gases were still escaping from the reactor whose twin cooling towers loomed ominously only a mile or so away through the haze. Apparently, the wind had shifted and the invisible gases were now drifting northwestward -- up the river and toward Harrisburg.
The plane was delayed and so I was late for the news conference scheduled for noon in the Friends' Meeting House in downtown Harrisburg. This meant that there was no time to check the radiation levels still closer to the plant. But a quick measurement outside the airport terminal showed the readings to be ten times their normal value, confirming the high reading in the plane.
On the way into the city, I noted down the readings every mile as the taxi driver read me the distances. Three miles from the airport, the readings dropped to only three to four times normal, but at 4 miles, they rose again to eight and nine times their usual rate. This meant that there were hot spots, either due to gas pockets or to fallout deposited on the ground in the course of the past day and a half of releases.
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