About as counterintuitive as can be, William Tucker over at the New York Times' Freakonomics blog argues that The China Syndrome was a net positive for the nuclear industry. Why? Because the movie accurately portrayed what could go wrong in a plant of that time and TMI, happening less than two weeks after the release of the film into theaters, acted as a real-life correlative: At Three Mile Island things were much worse [than in the movie, where a stuck gauge causes all the problems]. Nothing on the control panel told the operators the level of cooling water in the reactor. Reading other gauges incorrectly, they mistakenly drained the core. The result was a partial meltdown. One does wonder if the operators needed the "missing" gauge if they'd read the gauges they did have correctly, but Tucker is essentially correct. You can read a detailed explanation of the Three Mile Island accident here and here . (NEI and NRC - Wikipedia is kind of barren on it.) ...
Former blog for NEI featuring news and commentary on the commercial nuclear energy industry. Head to NEI.org for the latest blog posts.