March, 25 2009, 04:45pm EDT
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167
Assessing Nuclear Power 30 Years After Three Mile Island
WASHINGTON
HARVEY WASSERMAN
Author of the new book "Solartopia: Our Green-Powered Earth, AD 2030" (which includes an introduction by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.), Wasserman just wrote the piece "People Died at Three Mile Island," which states: "In March of 1980, I went into the region and compiled a range of interviews clearly indicating widespread health damage done by radiation from the accident. ...
"In the mid-1980s the citizens of the three counties surrounding Three Mile Island voted by a margin of 3:1 to permanently retire TMI Unit One, which had been shut when Unit Two melted. The Reagan administration trashed the vote and re-opened the reactor, which still operates. Its owners now seek a license renewal.
"Some 2,400 area residents have long-since filed a class action lawsuit demanding compensation for the plague of death and disease visited upon their families. In the past quarter century they have been denied access to the federal court system, which claims there was not enough radiation released to do such harm. TMI's owners did quietly pay out millions in damages to area residents whose children were born with genetic damage, among other things. The payments came in exchange for silence among those receiving them. ...
"As the pushers of the 'nuclear renaissance' demand massive tax- and rate-payer subsidies to build yet another generation of reactors, they cynically stonewall the obvious death toll that continues to mount at the site of an accident that happened thirty years ago."
More Information
Audio of the radio special "Voices From Three Mile Island" by Robbie Leppzer is available here.
Video of the "CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite" for March 30, 1979 is available here.
A nationwide consortium, the Institute for Public Accuracy (IPA) represents an unprecedented effort to bring other voices to the mass-media table often dominated by a few major think tanks. IPA works to broaden public discourse in mainstream media, while building communication with alternative media outlets and grassroots activists.
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