nuclear-news

Intrigue as authorities tried to cover up danger of Three Mile Island nuclear accident

Gordon MacLeod had, in his words, “recommended and, on the next day, urged the governor in the strongest possible terms to call for the departure of pregnant women and young children from an area within five miles of the Three Mile Island plant.”

`Gordon,’ the governor said, `I’m going to have to ask for your resignation.'”

People Died at Three Mile Island    http://www.ratical.org radiation/KillingOurOwn/KOO14.html   Gordon MacLeod sat across from the governor of Pennsylvania. It was October 9, 1979. MacLeod had been state secretary of health since twelve days prior to the accident at Three Mile Island.

A tall, trim Bostonian, MacLeod was a lifelong Republican who had served in Richard Nixon’s Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. As both a medical doctor and an engineer he had moved from a research fellowship at Harvard Medical School to a chairmanship at the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public Health.

In 1979 Governor Richard Thornburgh, a neighbor of MacLeod’s, had urged him to take charge of the state’s Department of Health, which was in disarray. MacLeod had resisted, but finally agreed, with the understanding he would serve just two years, then return to academia.

Now, eight months later, as controversy still raged over how much radiation had been released at Three Mile Island, the governor’s office called the secretary of health for a conference. The meeting began with some small talk, MacLeod told us a year later. And then Thornburgh got to the point. “`Gordon,’ the governor said, `I’m going to have to ask for your resignation.'”

“I just sat there,” MacLeod told us, “stunned. After going to all that trouble to get me to come on board, he was now telling me to leave after just eight months because things were `just not working out.'”[1]

Thornburgh’s public explanation for MacLeod’s firing was a “difference in institutional style.” But the state media had other ideas. As the UPI reported it, MacLeod had been “state government’s harshest critic of the way the Thornburgh administration responded to the Three Mile Island accident. And that may have been why he was fired.” Indeed, MacLeod’s problems with Thornburgh had begun on March 29, the day after news of radioactive releases from TMI began to spread. MacLeod had, in his words, “recommended and, on the next day, urged the governor in the strongest possible terms to call for the departure of pregnant women and young children from an area within five miles of the Three Mile Island plant.” MacLeod told us later that if he had a chance to do it over, he would also have urged the departure of children in puberty, who are also extraordinarily radiation-sensitive.

But the state’s nuclear engineers and radiation health physicists disagreed with MacLeod, and they told the governor there was no need for an evacuation. Initially Thornburgh advised area residents to stay indoors, but said nothing about evacuating.[3]

Meanwhile Dr. Ernest Sternglass had gone to Harrisburg the day after the accident. After testing on his own and finding high radiation levels, he urged that the state evacuate pregnant women and small children. He was worried in particular that I-131 doses could prove devastating to the small children and infants in utero who were particularly vulnerable to miscarriages, stillbirths, malformations, childhood leukemias, and other radiation-linked problems. Thornburgh publicly charged Sternglass with being an alarmist and stood firm in his refusal to call for an evacuation.

That night the state’s Department of Environmental Resources announced that because the holding tanks at TMI were overloaded with radioactive liquids, Met Ed had been flushing them for hours into the Susquehanna River. No one had bothered to notify communities downstream that were continuing to draw their drinking water from the river.[4]

Finally Thornburgh asked NRC chairman Joseph Hendrie, a nuclear engineer, what he would do if he had a pregnant wife in the area. Hendrie replied that he would get her out “because we don’t know what is going to happen.”

Thornburgh then decided to do what MacLeod had quietly urged and what he had attacked Ernest Sternglass for publicly suggesting. At noon on March 30–two days after the start of the accident–he announced that he was “advising those who may be particularly susceptible to the effects of radiation, that is, pregnant Women and pre-school-age children, to leave the area within a 5-mile radius of the Three Mile Island facility until further notice.”

September 28, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | history, secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA