The chief question about the partial meltdown of the nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island, which occurred on this day in 1979, was not how much damage had been done but how close it had come to an irreparable catastrophe.
Every public issue generates a ready supply of stock phrases and arguments. In the debate over nuclear power, which has grown to national proportions only since the accident at Three Mile Island, a favorite point of the supporters of nuclear power has been: “The fact is that at Three Mile Island no one was killed, no one was injured, and no one lost any property.” And they are likely to add that life is full of risks anyway.
These novel methodological problems arise because nuclear meltdowns belong to a small but apparently growing class of possible man-made disasters that cannot be permitted to happen even once. It would be hard to say at what point a conventional disaster crosses the threshold of the intolerable. Crashes of airliners are in a way intolerable, yet we do tolerate them: when one occurs, we do not halt all air travel. The same holds true for car accidents.
In attempts to prevent one-time catastrophes, the usual tools of prediction are useless. Statistics—normally the best instrument for calculating risks—needs repetition in order to make its generalizations, and is helpless in the face of unique events. In attempts to assess the likelihood of these, prognostication is thrown back on judgment and intuition—both notoriously imperfect faculties.
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