I'm a bookworm. Always have been. When I was a kid you'd often find my nose stuck in some adventure paperback or thriller. In March of 1979, the year I graduated high school, I saw the almost nuclear meltdown thriller The China Syndrome directed by James Bridges and starring Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon, and Michael Douglas. Totally captivated I followed my natural pattern of going to the library to check out one fiction and one non-fiction book on the subject of nuclear catastrophe.
The closest thing I could find to a novelization of the movie was The Prometheus Crisis by Thomas N. Scortia & Frank M. Robinson. Scortia and Robinson had previously co-written "The Glass Inferno," one of the two books that Irwin Allen's production of "The Towering Inferno" was based on.
The other non-fiction book I checked out was We Almost Lost Detroit by John G. Fuller. This is an account of an incident that occurred at Detroit Edison's (Enrico) Fermi-1 nuclear plant on October 5, 1966.
I was totally immersed in these books and was on the last chapters of both when one of the most serendipitous events of my life occurred on a Wednesday morning, the 28th of March 1979, within two weeks of the movie's release:
The incident at Three Mile Island began.
I remember lying in my bed, listening to the 6 o'clock hourly news summary on my AM radio after the alarm had gone off, these two books laying next to me, my head swirling with images from the movie; even more frightening images depicted in the novel; thinking about the account of a real nuclear accident that happened 13 years before and less than 20 minutes drive from where I lived (and which the public was never truly informed)...and at this same moment, five hundred miles away, a real nuclear event was unfolding in real time.
I couldn't move, couldn't get up, was almost catatonic. When I went to school I was surprised more people, my fellow students and our teachers, weren't more alarmed. It all felt so casual, like we were all one step removed, that the wind would carry any radioactive fallout east.
Seven years later, on April 26, 1986, the RBMK reactor in Chernobyl, Ukraine exploded. I was at work, sitting in my cubicle in Troy, Michigan, when news of the event began to circulate among my co-workers.
It would take another seven years for Piers Paul Read to publish Ablaze in 1993. For me this is the definitive account of the Chernobyl disaster, though more recent books have since been written.
And now we have Chernobyl, the HBO miniseries. I knew I'd be watching. It is very bleak viewing. I recommend the miniseries if for no other reason people become aware of the dangers posed by nuclear energy if it is not properly maintained and administered. One thing I really appreciated was episode five, where they go back and explain the series of disastrous decisions (human error) and events (compounded by the design of the RBMK reactor) that led to the explosion in a manner that is easily understandable. Essentially, the operators stalled the reactor and instead of coughing to a stop it blew up.
Still seven years after Chernobyl the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk was destroyed during naval exercises in the Barents Sea. Note this tragedy was not nuclear related. It was the result of the explosion of a torpedo that had not been maintained during Russia's tough economic period following the collapse of the Soviet union.
Nuclear power, all forms of energy, has always fascinated me. I have a cousin who served on an American nuclear submarine. I strongly support all green energy technology and initiatives, and believe them to be economically viable in the long term.
- The China Syndrome 40th Anniversary
- 50 years after We Almost Lost Detroit - LA Times
- We Almost Lost Detroit by Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson
- We Almost Lost Detroit performed by Gil Scott-Heron live
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