The nuclear nightmare that almost took out the East Coast

nypost.com:

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.

But things became even more distressing when he saw how the cleanup effort, which was being run by industry powerhouse Bechtel Corp., was unfolding.“There became an impetus on the political side and in the industrial side to push the cleanup faster … they would take every shortcut they possibly could,” Parks says on screen.Most worrisome was that higher-ups wanted to use a polar crane — a device.