Jimmy Carter offered calm to Pennsylvanians after Three Mile Island partial meltdown

Rachel McDevitt

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I report on energy and the environment for StateImpact Pennsylvania at WITF.

My work focuses on responses and solutions to climate change in the state legislature and communities around the state. I trace my interest in these issues back to my time as a Girl Scout and this episode of Rocko’s Modern Life.

I look forward to winter just for the chance to ski a few times each season. I try to keep myself from doom-scrolling on my phone by keeping my hands busy knitting and learning to play the piano.

I grew up in Cambria County, Pa. and graduated from Temple University. I started at WITF just after Christmas in 2014.

The Associated Press

FILE PHOTO: Three Mile Island nuclear plant incident - President Jimmy Carter, second from left, visits the nuclear plant near Harrisburg, Pa., USA, April 4, 1979.

December 30, 2024 | 11:54 AM

Former President Jimmy Carter brought calm and hope to central Pennsylvanians in the wake of the most serious accident at a commercial nuclear plant in U.S. history.

Carter died Sunday after starting hospice care in February, 2023. He was 100.

Carter visited the midstate on April 1, 1979– four days after the partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant’s Unit 2 reactor.

Local officials at the time said Carter’s visit helped to quell panic in people living near the plant and gave a needed morale boost.

“My primary concern in coming here this afternoon has been to learn as much as I possibly can as President about the problems at Three Mile Island nuclear power plant and to assure the people of this region that everything possible is being done and will be done to cope with these problems,” Carter said that day.

He said the levels of radiation coming from the plant were safe and promised an investigation into the incident.

It was later determined that a combination of human and technical error caused the reactor to lose cooling water, exposing the core and putting the plant at risk of a meltdown.

AP Photo

File: U.S. President Jimmy Carter shown April 1, 1979 in the control room of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Middletown, Pa. Standing with Carter from left: Harold Denton, Director of the U.S. Nuclear Agency; PA. Gov. Dick Thornburgh; an unidentified control room employee.

Carter trained as a nuclear engineer. TMI was not his first brush with a nuclear crisis.

In 1952, Carter led a Navy crew that helped safely dismantle the damaged Chalk River reactor in Ontario, Canada. Mechanical problems and human error at that experimental reactor led to overheating fuel rods and significant damage to the reactor core.

Carter supported nuclear power as “an energy source of last resort” to help lessen reliance on foreign oil.

The incident at TMI sparked a backlash that significantly slowed the industry’s growth in the U.S. According to the Energy Information Administration, plans for 67 nuclear power plants were canceled between 1979 and 1988. Many plants that had started the lengthy permitting process in the 1970s continued to come online through the early 1990s. Only two new plants have come online in the U.S. in the past 20 years.

TMI-2 never reopened after the accident. A subsidiary of Utah-based EnergySolutions is now cleaning up at the site.

TMI’s Unit 1 reactor, owned by Exelon, generated power until Sept. 20, 2019. It shut down because it was not economically competitive with other energy sources such as natural gas. This year the plant announced plans to reopen, fueled by a deal to provide emissions-free electricity to Microsoft.