[Three Mile Island History by Dickinson College - images, videos, audio, and text]
MIDDLETOWN, Pa. - The money for research is gone. The scientists and the government have moved on to other problems. And a judge threw out the big lawsuits eight years ago.
Twenty-five years after the Three Mile Island accident, no one seems interested anymore in whether it made people get sick.
Except, that is, for people like Helen Hocker. And Jolene Peterson. And Tracy Long.
Long's father, former TMI worker Sam Retherford, died of bladder cancer last year, convinced that he got sick from cleaning up the "hot stuff." His daughter agrees.
"In the back of our minds, we knew there had to be something with TMI," said Long, 37, whose father died after his cancer spread throughout his body. "I just think they tried to hide a lot of that."
Most scientists believe that the radiation doses from the accident were low and that although radiation might have caused a handful of cancers, the increase in illness would be difficult to detect because plenty of people get cancer anyway. Two in five Americans develop cancer; one in five dies of it.
But some questions remain unanswered.
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No one ever studied cancer among the workers who did the 10-year, $1 billion cleanup. Federal officials were unable to persuade the plant owner, Metropolitan Edison Co., to maintain a registry of workers so their health could be tracked.
And while numerous studies were done on the health of nearby residents, the most recent one looked at cancer deaths only through 1998. That was 19 years after the accident; some cancers thought to be caused by radiation might not occur until 30 years after exposure.
Not that anyone can say for sure what the exposure was. There were few radiation monitors around the plant at the time of the accident. The studies of residents' health have had to fill in the gaps with estimates of likely exposure, based partly on weather patterns at the time.
Some of the gauges simply were not able to measure amounts as high as what was released, said Jan Beyea, a nuclear physicist who estimated radiation doses for a Columbia University cancer study of TMI.
"It was insane," Beyea said of the inadequate monitoring. "It was sort of a sign of the optimism that nothing would ever go bad."
In 1995, Pennsylvania's Health Department stopped keeping track of residents who lived within a five-mile radius at the time of the accident.
A federal judge threw out 10 lawsuits in 1996, rejecting experts' claims that the plaintiffs got sick because of the accident. Nearly 2,000 cases lingered in the legal system before being dropped in 2002.
And no money remains in a $5 million public-health fund established as part of a legal settlement with the plant's insurers. The final $100,000 or so was paid out last year to a citizens' group that operates radiation monitors, said Jonathan Berger, the fund administrator.
The lack of continuing study angers Helen Hocker, 77, whose daughter Patricia Burkholder died of cancer of the thymus gland in 1986.
"I think it's inexcusable," Hocker said. "They should be keeping track of it."
Various scientists agree there is room for further study. But most say that they would not expect to find much, and that disagreements about the radiation doses will leave the cancer debate unsettled forever.
The most recent effort, led by epidemiologist Evelyn Talbott of the University of Pittsburgh, looked at the number of deaths among 31,246 residents who lived within five miles of the plant at the time of the accident.
Researchers found a slight connection between exposure to the plume of radiation and the number of deaths from cancer of the blood and lymph systems. Men with an estimated exposure above 20 millirems of gamma radiation were about 2.5 times more likely to die of these cancers than other Central Pennsylvanians.
But that finding was "barely" statistically significant, Talbott said, and could have been due to chance.
Talbott acknowledged that some radiation-related cancers among the population might yet occur.
With additional study, she said, "you may begin to see things that you wouldn't have seen even five years ago."
The researchers at Columbia had previously looked at the rates of various cancers, including among people who survived the disease. Researchers found higher levels of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and lung cancer but did not establish a connection with radiation exposure.
At the request of consultants for lawyers who had sued the utility, University of North Carolina epidemiologist Steven Wing reanalyzed the Columbia data. Using different assumptions, he linked radiation exposure with an increase in lung cancer.
He said the number of cancers was too high to be explained by the various dose estimates, and he concluded the actual doses must have been higher. That view is not shared by most radiation experts.
The federal government estimates that the maximum dose was no more than 100 millirems - equivalent to about five chest X-rays.
Beyea, who did the Columbia dose work and now is president of a scientific-consulting firm called Consulting in the Public Interest, estimates the maximum was 200 millirems. He said the figure could be up to four times that much, but said that was "very, very unlikely."
Average doses in the area northwest of the plant - the direction in which the radiation plume traveled - were about 28 millirems, he said.
Wing did not estimate a specific dose, but agreed with Beyea that the question would remain unsettled.
"I think that we will never know exactly what happened," Wing said.
For Jolene Peterson, there are no questions.
Five years after the accident, in 1984, she could see a lump growing on her throat. It was a tumor on her thyroid, and she blames it on the power plant - visible from the kitchen window of the house where she lived with her mother.
"I definitely believe that," she said.
Peterson, now 46, was tired all the time and lost weight, dropping from 130 pounds to 100 pounds while working part-time as a waitress and taking care of her son.
Surgery was successful, and yearly checkups show that she is fine. Peterson now lives in Steelton, a few miles up the Susquehanna River from the plant.
The damaged reactor on Three Mile Island remains silent, but its sister unit is humming along.
Peterson said she is not scared of her nuclear neighbor. But she remains wary.
"I think we've just probably grown accustomed to the fact that it's there," Peterson said. "You can't just leave. It's home."
Contact staff writer Tom Avril at 215-854-2430 or tavril@phillynews.com.
source: http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/front/8278648.htm 28mar04
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