Nuclear power: Celebs Rumors

remains the worst accident of its kind in the United States, but, as a new documentary shows, it could have been so much worse.In the four-part Netflix docuseries “Meltdown: Three Mile Island,” which debuted Wednesday, May 4, Rick Parks — a former leading engineer at the facility — reveals how cover-ups, falsifications of safety tests and downright dangerous corner-cutting caused the terrifying nuclear event and could have potentially triggered a second, bigger one that would have affected a huge chunk of the Eastern Seaboard.What Parks found risked America being on “the verge of an apocalypse” capable of triggering “a meltdown that could take out Philadelphia, New York City and Washington, DC,” Tom Devine, of the watchdog group Government Accountability Project, says in the doc.The partial meltdown — caused by a valve malfunction — occurred on March 28, 1979, and was rated a level five out of seven on the international nuclear event scale as an “accident with wider consequences.”But, from the beginning, the plant’s operators and government officials tried to downplay the disaster, minimizing the accident’s severity and refusing to mandate an evacuation of the region.For Parks, a former Navy man and a longtime believer in nuclear energy, the accident immediately put the industry’s future “into doubt,” he says in the documentary.

James Earl Carter Jr., now 97, actually rescued Ottowa, Ontario from nuclear destruction as a 24-year-old way back on December 12, 1952.“Do you remember the world’s very first nuclear meltdown? That time the US President, an expert in nuclear physics, heroically lowered himself into the reactor and saved Ottawa, Canada’s capital?,” asked Canadian physicist University of Ottowa professor Jeff Lundeen in his now-viral thread, originally posted Tuesday but officially trending two days later.“Sounds like schlocky action movie, but it actually happened!”Lundeen’s revelatory tweet to his modest 1,078 followers now boasts nearly 50,000 likes, more than 20,000 retweets and hundreds of cheerfully shocked comments.