Meanings of a Meltdown, After the Facts

摘要

Some 25 years after the accident at Unit 2 of Three Mile Island (TMI-2), J. Samuel Walker has produced a superb and balanced account, one of the few that attempts to set both the accident and the efforts to understand and cope with it into a broader historical and regulatory context. The bulk of Three Mile Island is devoted to the events themselves and their short-term political and social consequences. Walker combines this with a history of the prior controversies over nuclear regulation and plant safety design that framed the design, construction, and operation of American pressurized-water reactors. He thereby provides a coherent and useful framework for understanding how and why the nuclear industry, and its regulators, acted and reacted the way they did as the events unfolded and afterward.