nuclear-news

Meltdown: Three Mile Island – powerful new Netflix documentary series

The partial meltdown at the nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island in
Pennsylvania in 1979 was a perfect coalescing of factors in two senses.
First, a series of cascading mechanical and human errors brought the plant
close to a catastrophe that would have potentially made much of the East
Coast uninhabitable, we’re told in the new documentary “Meltdown: Three
Mile Island.”

Second, coming as it did both within memory of the height
of Cold War paranoia and days after the release of the film “The China
Syndrome,” the disaster was perfectly primed to set off anxieties about
the danger of atomic energy. “Meltdown: Three Mile Island,” a new
four-part documentary on Netflix, does an elegant job of braiding those two
truths — that Three Mile Island was a narrowly averted nightmare scenario
and that it lives on in the public imagination as an argument against
nuclear energy. It can default, especially in its early going, to tools of
the trade that feel underbaked — reenactments of, say, a phone ringing in
a school where children wait for news about the disaster, the camera
somewhat schlockily pushing in to amp up what’s already dramatic enough.

But the power of the story “Meltdown” tells, as well as the insight of
those on whom director Kief Davidson trains his camera, ultimately carries
the day.

 Variety 3rd May 2022

https://variety.com/2022/tv/reviews/meltdown-three-mile-island-netflix-1235256986/

May 5, 2022 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | incidents, media, USA