ML19275A951
| ML19275A951 | |
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| Site: | Crane  |
| Issue date: | 10/31/1979 |
| From: | Rubin D PRESIDENT'S COMMISSION ON THE ACCIDENT AT THREE MILE |
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| NUDOCS 7910300395 | |
| Download: ML19275A951 (25) | |
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SLTIARY OF THE REPORT OF THE PUBLIC'S RIGHT ~~ ;NFOR'iATION TASK FORCE TO PPISIDENT'S COM.'.!ISSION ON THE ACCIDENT AT THREE ?!ILE ISLAND ADVANCE CCPY NOT FOR PUBLIC RELEASE 3EFORE A>!s, EDNESDAY, OCTCSER 31, 1979
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PUBLIC INFOR".ATION TASK FORCE SLTLARY BY DAVID M. RUBIN, HEAD THE PUBLIC'S RIGHT TO 1:TORMATION TASK FORCE OCTOBER 1979 WASHINGTON, D.C.
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SUMMARY
OF THE REPORT OF THE PUBLIC'S RIGHT TO INFOPJ1ATION TASK FCRCE For every group even remotely connected to the nuclear power industry, th? accident at Three Mile Island was a time of truth. The training of plant personnel, the durability of cquipment, the planning of civil defense officials, the responsiveness of public health officers --
all were tested under harrowing conditions in the glare of national publicity.
, Members of the news media and public information officials were also.ested far more severely than ever before in the history of the nuclear debate. Journalists were not unfamiliar with most of the issues in this debate.
Battles between pro-and anti-nuclear forces, sit-ins at plant sites, acrimonious public hearings, and statements of " visible" experts have alerted the public and the media to such issues as radioactive waste disposal and the health hazards frca low-level radiation.
One study, prepared by the Eattelle Human Affairs Research Center, estimates that there was a 400 percent increase in print media coverage of nuclear power issues between 1972 and 1970.
Reporting the TMI story, however, posed new and different problems.
For the first time, reporters had to cover a potentially sertous accident as it was happening.
Past accidents -- none as serious as TMI -- had ended before the media were fully aware of the problem.
Coverage of accidents at Fort St. Vrain (Coloradc) and Browns Ferry (Alabama), for example, was largely retrospective. The drama and urgency of an on-going news event were missing.
Officials of Met Ed and the Nuclear P.egulatory Ccmaission were not permitted the luxury of responding to questions in a matter of hours or days, although it sometimes took them that long.
Rather, they were besieged with inquiries almost as soon as the news media learned that a general emergency had been declared at the site. Instead of a regional story, TMI quickly became a national and international story that attracted a worldwide press corps numbering at any one time from 300 to 500 journalists, including reporters frca Japan, France, Sweden, West Germany, Italy, Spain, and Great Britain.
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The accident at Three Mile Island became a test of the ability of reporters to deal with technclogical complexity and factual uncertainty while working under enormous pressure.
It was, equally, a test of the ability of Met Ed and NRC public information officials to inform the public under crisis conditions.
The quality of inform 3rion available to the public in a potentially life *Pr-atening situation is of critical importance.
This information has a significant bearing on the capacity of people to respond to the accident, on their emotional health, and on their willingness to accept guidance frc'm responsible public officials. Those managing the accident, as well as journalists, must meet a rigorous standard in providing timely, accurate, and understandable information to the public.
During the accident at Three Mile Island, neither public informatica officials nor journalists served the public's right to know in a manner that must be achieved in the event of future accidents.
Each side failed for different reasons, and to a different degree. The most common explanations -- that the utility lied, that the NRC covered up to protect the nuclear industry, or that the media engaged in an orgy of sensationalism -- do not hit the mark.
Indeed, reporters often showed great skill in piecing together the story, and some NRC officials disclosed information that was trulf alar. ming and damaging to the industry's image, because they thought the public had a right to know it.
Even the utility's shortcomings in the public information area (and there were many) are attributable, in part, to self-deception, as well as to a lack of candor.
Given the enormous investment at stake for Met Ed, the company's unwillingness to recognize the severity of damage to the reactor is not surprising. But such hesitancy presents serious problems for serving the public's right to know during the early stages of an accident.
The public information problems of Met Ed and the NRC were rooted in a lack of planning. Neither expected that an accident of this magnitude --
one that sent on for days, requiring evacuation planning -- would ever happen.
In a sense they were victims of their.own reassurances about the safety of nuclear power. As a result, neither.had a " disaster" public information plan. Neither had personnel trained in dirr ter public relations.
Coordination between the utility and the NRt was so weak that responsibility for informing the public in the first crucial hours of the accident was undefined. The NRC did not know when, or whether, to send its cwn public information people to the site, or when or where to set up an NRC press center. Met Ed's public information department was an operation with low status and no policy input.
It had never dealt with a national press corps.
It was experienced at prcducing educational materials promoting nuclear power, but inexperienced at fielding specific questions about auclear power from critics or journalists.
The utility did not have an appropriate spokespersen during the accident.
The job fell to John Herbein, the vice president for generatica, and he proved unsuited to the task.
-Perhaps the most serious failure in the planning stage was that neither the utity nor the NRC made provision for getting information from the people ms had it (in the control room and at the site) to the people who needed.
This group included other utility executives, the 1 1 8 1
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governor of Pennsylvania, the NRC's Region I headquarters in King of Prussia, Pa., the NRC's Incident Response Center (IRC) in Bethesda, public information officials, journalists, and members of the public.
These people all needed information to make technical decisions in managing the accident, or to make decisions on evacuation and public health.
Met Ed officials at the company's headquarters in Reading, Pa., or officials with the parent company (General Public Utilities) in New.
Jersey often did not know what employees at the plant knew.
NRC officials in Bethesda did not know what their colleagues from the Region I office kncw, nor did they know what Met Ed was planning. These fundamental communication problems persisted for at least the first 4 days of the accident. The internal communication problem proved particularly damaging to Met Ed because the inadequate flow of information was of ten mistaken for intentional cover-up.
On the morning of the first day of the accident, for example, while Met Ed President Walter Creitz was telling some reporters that there had been small off-site radiation releases, Met Ed public information officials in the same building were telling reporters there had been none.
Creit7 end Blaine Fabian, Met Ed's public information head, had neglected to pass on this information to their own staff.
This is one reason the utility lost credibility early in the accident.
In addition, little effort was made by the NRC (until day six) to supply the media with technical briefers who could answer questions. Met Ed was almost as deficient in this regard.
Both organizations left reporters pretty much to their own devices.
Given this confusion among sources, and given that reporters are almost entirely dependent on such sources for their information, it is not surprising that news media coverage of the accident in the first few days was also confused. For a number of issues during the accident --
such as the danger posed by the hydrogen bubble, ce the size of a radiation release that led to evacuation concerns on Friday -- it is obvious that the only type of " accurate" reporting posst31e, under the circumstances, was the presentation of contradictory and tempeting statements from a variety of officials.
The news media were also somewhat unprepared, and tnis added to the prevailing confusion. While it is a goal of many journalistic organizations to develop specialists who are expert in part".cular areas (such as business reporting, science and medical reporting, or national political reporting), few reporters who covered TMI had more than a rudimentary knowledge of nuclear power.
Some, by their own admission, did not know how a pressurized, light water reactor worked, or what a meltdown was.
Few knew what questions to ask about radiation releases so that their reports could help the public evaluate health risks.
A number of reporters in the first group to arrive were assigned to the story because they were available, and because they could cover almost anything on short notice -- not because they had nuclear power as a regular " beat."
Good journalists can absorb vast amounts of unfamiliar material while on the job; that happened during TMI, but the effort rect. ired to make sense of the story was enormous.
It was not like c-rin3 a political campaign or an airplane hijacking, where at least th? vocabulary of the sources and the vocabulary of the reporters are the same.
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The nuclear industry has developed its own language, and this was a handicap for the many journalists who did not speak it.
A seemingly simple question of whether the core of the reactor had been uncovered and damaged elicited responses couched in terms of " ruptured fuel pins,"
" pinholes in the cladding," " melted cladding," " cladding oxidation,"
" failed fuel," " fuel damage," " fuel oxidation," " structural fuel damage,"
or " core melt."
The distinctions are real, but for reporters not speaking the language, it was like suffering from color blindness at a watercolor exhibition. William Dornsife, a nuclear engineer with the Pennsylvania Bureau of Radiation Protection, describes the language problem:
"It was an experience.
.considering the technical questions I was being asked and the lack of understanding of my answers.
It's difficult for an engineer to respond to a technical question with anything except a technical response. And I knew by the questions I was getting back that the press people just didn't understand what was going on, and I knew there was going to be a real problem about getting information out to the public." Neither Met Ed nor the NRC provided enough technical briefers in the first 5 days of the accident to help journalists interpret what they were being told.
Reporters also arrived with different objectives.
Some were science writers with an interest in the reactor. Some were medical writers with an interest in public health and safety. Others were sent to write
" color" stories and focus on reactions of citizens and evacuees.
It.
would have been difficult under ideal circumstances for a public information program to serve the many needs of the reporters who covered the accident. Given the public information orogram in place when the reporters arrived, it proved to be an impossibility.
In the important first few days of the accident, when evacuation decisicnt had to be made, the public's right to know was not served because the conditions under which all parties operated were such that the public's right to know could got be served.
Imagine, for a moment, the problems confronting a reporter who arrived at the TMI site Wednesday afternoon. Met Ed had no central information facility. No one was distributing schematics of the plant or answering basic technical questions about the reactor.
No one was describing what a general emergency was or why it was important.
There was no central source, or good source, of r to-date radiation information (not Wednesday, and not any day durn g the first week, when this was, arguably, the most crucial type of information for the public). There were no telephone f acilities for reporters.
The utility was answering phone queries from its Reading, Pa. headquarters nearly 60 miles from the site, but the information being dispensed was late and, as it turned out, much too optimistic about conditicas in the plant.
There was no official spokesman for the utility until John Herbein took the part at an impromptu press conference early Wednesday afternoon.
But no transcript was made of his remarks to aid reporters _ or Met Ed public informatian people who missed the press conference.
The situation was no better for the reporter trying to reach the NRC by phone.
In Region I, Karl Abraham, the caly public affairs officer, was swamped with calls beginning at 9:00 a.m.
He found it impossible to get accurate updates on reactor status frcm the NEC technicians at work on the floor above him, in part because their information was poor, and 6
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in part because of Abraham's reluctance to take the technicians away from their work to answer questions.
He knew little more Wednesday af ternoon, and evening than he knew Wednesday morning.
In Bethesda the small public affairs staff manning the phones was relying en aa information chain stretching from Met Ed operators on site, to NRC investigators on site, to the NRC's King of Prussia and Bethesda centers, to Joseph Fouchard, the NRC's chief public information officer.
When Fouchard had information to relay to the other public information officers, he was of ten stymied by jammed phone lines. This information chain was destined to produce confusion, inaccuracy, and frustration.
In addition to Abraham, other public information and technical officials at Met Ed and the NRC were also reluctant to interrupt those trying to manage the accident with requests for information. They did not want to distract them frcm what was viewed as a more important task.
The lack of technical liaison people who could perform this function without getting in the way was a serious deficiency.
The flow of information was so weak that at one point, on Wednesday afternoon, Blaine Fabian, Met Ed's public information chief, drove f rom Reading to the site vowing to send back current information to his staff. He was not successful.
Abraham says he did not really find out what was going on at TMI until late Wednesday night when he was driving to'the site and heard on his car radio a press conference involving Et.
Governor Scranton and NRC Region I representatives.
What, then, was a journalist working the phones on Wednesday and Thursday collecting? Fragmentary and often contradictory bits of information from a variety of uncoordinated sources.
Often reporters were feeding these fragments bach to ignorant sources, so that reporters were, in a sense, briefing information officers with what they heard elsewhere. Fabian, for example, learned from a reporter that the utility had declared a general emergency Wednesday morning.
This is information that he should have had immediately for dissemination to the media.
Complicating matters further, some members of Congress were receiving dif;erent, often more speculative and pessimistic reports from the NRC on such subjects as core damage and operator error. Reporters who had not received this informatica heard it second-hand from Congressional sources. One result of this was to make reporters even more suspicious of the information they were getting from Met Ed and the NRC's Region I officials on-site.
The NRC made no effort to coordinate the informatica going to Congress with that going to the news media.
The communication problems were not just organizational, hcwever.
Certain kinds of information were slow to reach the news media and the public. A close examination of utility and NRC press releases and public statements during the first few days shows a reluctance by Met Ed and the NRC to discuss cperator error as a cause of the accident, blaming it instead on equipment malfun: tion.
The utility minimi:cd tha catent of damag'e to the reactor core. and it was not forthecming about present (and the likelihood of future) radiation releases beyond the boundaries of the plant.
In light of what was known at the time, its early statements to the media on radiation releases and core damage were misleading and deficient in inf ormation.
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Utility officials acknowledge they were unwilling to release
" pessimistic" information to the public until it was confirmed to their satisfaction.
But, on the questions of core damage, operator error, and radiation releases off-site, confirmation came well af ter some members of Congress and the NRC were aware of the problems.
Utility officials were also more optimistic than e*.ners that the accident had run its course, and that the worst was over.
Given the utility's stake in the resolution of the accident and in the public's perception of the accident, this optimistic approach is understandable, but not excusable. While there is not unambiguous evidence of cover-up, some utility officials showed a marked capacity for self-deception, and others hid behind technical jargon to obscure answers to troubleseme questions.
The NRC's behavior in the area of public information is more difficult to categorize. From the first day the NRC distanced itself from the utility, refusing to participate in joint press conferences or issue joint press releases.
In this regard the commission chose to adopt the role of. regulator rather than the role of booster. With the exception of some of the NRC's Region I people on-site (who tended to side with the utility's view of the accident), NRC staff members spoke more bluntly about the accident. An analysis of " alarming" versus " reassuring" statements quoted by the press during the accident shows that the NRC.in Washington /Bethesda was a chief source of " alarming" statements about such subjects as the possibilty of meltdown and the explosiveness of a hydrogen bubble in the reactor.
Along with anti-nuclear groups, some NRC officials provided the news media with some of the most ftightening information during the accident.
On the other hand, the commissioners were frequently less candid than their own staff.
On Friday afternoon, for example, the commission took the unusual step of writing a press release to undercut a CPI story on the chance of a meltdown at TMI. The story was based on information provided to the media by an NRC staffer -- information which NRC Chairman Joseph Hendrie conceded was accurate.
In anothc. Instance, a commissioner was reluctant to label what happened at IMI an " accident" because of the damage this could do to the industry's image.
For the first 2 days of the accident reporters were given almost no help in reporting this extremely complex story.
Such basic public information techniques as setting up a press center where reporters could gather and question sources, holding regular press conferences, or providing background information kits and graphics, were virtually neglected in the heat of the crisis. Nor, by Friday morning, the third full day of the accident, were plans afoot to improve the flow of information.
Indeed, a number of officiais thought the emergency had ended on Thursday, and that by Friday the press corps would be heading home.
The catalyst for change came on Friday at about 9:00 a.m., because of the extraordinary confusion over a 1,200 millirem per hour release of radiation from the plant. Not only were the public and press unable to learn what Met Ed was doing that morning in releasing' radioactive gas into the atmosphere, but the NRC in 3ethesda could not either.
Alarmed at how large the release was, and not knowing whether ine release was controlled or uncontrolled, planned or unplanned, stopped ::
continuing, 2n-o r of f-site, NRC o f ficials a t the Incident Response
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Center in Bethesda, under Harold Denton's direction, recommended to the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency (PEMA) that an area around the plant be evacuated out to 5 or 10 miles.
Because Governor Thornburgh was receiving conflicting advice from people within his own administration, he did not seriously consider carrying out the NP,C's recommendation, which had been made without consulting the commission.
He settled instead on an advisor; that the public stay indoors, followed by a recommendation that pregnant wcmen and young children leave the area. These developments, plus the discovery of a hydrogen bubble in the reactor, made it clear that the crisis was not over and that the communications problems could no longer be ignored.
Given the inability of either the utility or the NRC to fashion a communications policy, the White House stepped in with a solution.
After telephone calls involving President Carter, Governor Thornburgh, Chairman Hendrie, Press Secretary Jody Powell, and Thornburgh's press secretary Paul Critchlow, Hendrie dispatched Harold Denton to the site on Friday. Denton, director of the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation, had one assigned role. He was to improve the flow of information about the reactor to the governor, the President, and the NRC..Upon his arrival he fell into a second role:
chief briefer for the press on technical matters.
Over the next 2 days the White House - principally Jody Powell, Jack Watson, and Eugene Eidenberg -- orchestrated other moves to centralize communications and limit the number of people talking to the press in an official capacity. On Friday'it was decided that Denton would be the sole source of news on-site on the status of the reactor; Governor Thornburgh would be the sole source of news on evacuation ma~tters; and the White House would be the sole source of news about the federal emergency relief effort that had been assembled in Harrisburg.
(The governor's press secretary, Paul Critchlow, was already establishing a system at his level for curb Mg statements frem the Bureau of Radiation Protection (ERP), the Departme.nt of Environmental Resources, and the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency, the logical sources of news for the media.)
First to withdraw from the public information scene was Met Ed.
The utility was more than happy to comply with a White House suggestion following a disastrous press conference Friday morning for which John Herbein had been improperly prepared. Herbein found himself unable to answer questions about the dumping of waste water into the Susquehanna on Thursday and the 1,200 millirem per hour venting that morning. His performance fueled press fears that the utility was covering up infor-mation, and made Denton's arrival Friday afternoon a welecme event.
The NRC in Bethesda was next to withdraw, although they were less willing to close their doors to the press.
Throughout Friday, Saturday, and Sunday morning NRC experts in Bethesda viewed the reactor as less stable, and potentially more dangerous, than did Met Ed or NRC experts on-site.
This alarm reached the public through the NRC's Bethesda press center.
Ca Friday afternoon, a CPI story quoted an NRC official on the subj ect of meltdown as saying that although it was not likely, it was not impossible. And on Saturday night, an AP storf quoted 2n unnamed NRC official as saying that the hydrogen bubble in the reactor could explode in as little as 2 days.
Both of these stories were
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considerably more pessimistic than the news coming from the site, and both alarmed the public in the area of the plant. The stories angered Gov. Thornburgh, the White House, and NRC officials on-site.
After the AP story, the White House requested that the press center io Bethesda be closed and that all NRC comment come frca the site.
By the time the President visited the site on Sunday, this policy had been carried out.
Given the prevailing confusion, the White House effort to centr;lize information was not an unreasonable response. Reporters did not make much of a fuss at the time. Denton proved to have an easy manner -- the provost of Pennsylvania State University praised him for his " clear, understandable voice" -- and his job was made less difficult because most of the unpleasant surprises occu :ed before he arrived on the scene. After Saturday his tenure coincided with the shrinking of the bubble, and the ic_:reasing stability of the plant.
In retrospect, however, most journalists interviewed by this task force disapprove of this centralization. They point out that although 3enton was reassuring, and an improvement over his predecessors, he had some faults. His language at press conferences was filled with jargon.
He was usually unavailable to the press, and giving a single press conference each day, he could not possibly have discussed all the subjects of interest to the media. He did not really attempt to handle radiation information; and he had trouble explaining the term " man-rem" to reporters.
His first few press conferences at the Middletown press center were chaotic.
The most serious drawback to this approach, however, was that Denton could not speak for the many groups with a different perspective on the accident, such as the utility, and the various state and federal agencies monitoring radiation releases and reporting on public health consequences.
(Radiation information was being collected and coordinated by the Department of Energy (DOE) every day at 5:00 p.a. at an airport meeting near the site, but reporters were not infermed of these meetings and were not invited to attend.) Reporters believe that the public's right to know would be better served through seme sort of structured contact with all these groups.
Was the public's right to know served by the NRC and Met Ed?
Clearly not.
Both institutions suffered from a lack of planning, an absence of specialists in disaster public relations, a shorcage of technical briefers strategically placed throughout the system, and an inability to correct these shortcomings in the pressure of the moment.
The utility also permitted itself to underestimate the seriousness of the accident, leading to a loss of credibility with the news media and the public. As for the state, it failed to make information on radiatica releases available and it kept county ciril defense directors around the state uninformed by cutting PEMA out of the information flow.
It is not quite as clear how well the news media served the public's right to know-in large part because reporters do not act alene in covering such a story.
They are dependent on the quality of tneir sources, and these sources, for the most part, were anavailaole or misinformed at IMI.
In addition, although the number of public 10 1181 292
information people at Met Ed, the NRC, and the state is relatively small, and their problems were similar, hundreds of reporters covered the accident for a wide variety of news organizaticas.
Since no two performed the same way, it is more difficult to characterize the performance of the media.
Before the accident, the media located in the vicinity of the plant engaged in little investigative reporting.
By their own admission reporters ignored the regular press releases from Met Ed on technical problems at TMI-2 and no serious effort was made to connect the weekly releases into a pattern indicating that the new reactor was experiencing operating difficulties. Etcause the news releases from Met Ed were written in technical lanruage, which reporters could not understand, and because the media did not adept a questioning or adversarial stance toward the utility, the public could not have been prepared for the events beginning March 28.
In reporting events during the accident, confusion among sources was mirrored by confusion in the media. The media reported denia.ls by Met Ed (now known to be misleading) that the core had been uncovered and that operator error hao contributed significantly to the accident. The burst of radiation Friday morning found reporters quoting sources saying that the rele se was bo h planned and unplanned, controlled and uncontrolled, expected aad unexpected. Directly conflicting statements on the possibility of a hydrogen explosion, the size of the bubble, and the status of the accident (growing more or less serious) also appeared with frequency.
Some stories, such as the core being uncovered and seriously damaged',
and the relatively benign industrial waste water being dumped by the utility into the Susquehanna River, reached the aedia late.
The media did not report at all during the week
'at Met Ed had to clear IMI's control room of unnecessary perscanel because of high radiation levels; that coolant pumps had not been acting properly on Wednesday; and that NRC engineers had been wrong in their predictions that the hydrogen bubble would explode if left alone_ None of this inform 3 tion was made available to reporters at the time, and they 'ere unable to dig it out on their cwn.
The media also missed a number of political stories during the week.
They failed to report the dispute between the NRC and the state over who should take responsibility for the dumping of waste water into the Susquehanna on Thursday. They missad the confusion at the FRC Friday morning that led to the recommendation that the governor order an evaca cica a recommendation he did not accept.
The media were forced to report some stories second-hand because first-hand sources were not making the information available.
These stories included the extent of fuel damage; the role of operator error in the accident; and the very fact that a general emergency had been declared.
Also significant for the public's right to know is that many "f acts" about the accident were not presented in a context that could be understocd by the layperson.
For example, the media did not explain the significance of a general emergency; nor did they provide backgraand or contextual 11 1181 293
e information in their coverage of the health hazards posed by radiation releases at the plant. Here the reportage was almost always incomplete.
Rarely was a radiation number accompanied by a unit of aeasurement (such as millirems), a rate (per hour), an explanation of the type.of radiation being measured, an indication of where it was being measured, when it was measured, and the amount of time a person would have to be exposed to this source of radiation to incur some sort of health risk. Neither Denton nor Thornburgh was giving out such information with regularity or precision and net many reporters had the bickground to know what questions to ask.
While the media can be criticized fc r tissing some stories and failing to provide a context for others, aey were generally not guilty of'the most common criticism leveled at t,:
that they presented an overwhelmingly alarming view of the accident. To test this hypothesis cask force on public information noted each time the news media in wue sample quoted a source on such topics as the likelihood of a meltacin or a hydrogen explosion, the status of the accident, the health threat posed by radiation releases, the general threat of danger, and the like.
The numbers of alarming and reassuring statements were then compared.
Overa.11, the media offered more reassuring statements than alarming statements about the accident. This was true for such topics as the status of the accident (seen as improving); the threat of danger (seen as none, or not immediate); the health effects of radiation exposure (seen as none); the necessity for evacuation of the area (seen as not necessary); and the management of the accident (seen as being handled by competent and knowledgable individuals).
The media were,omewhat more alarning than reassuring on meltdown (seen as a possibil; ty); the quality of information being made available during the accident (seen as unreliable); the future of nuclear power (seen as not bright); and the state of evacuation preparedness (seen as inadequate'.
In general, no special effort by th media was detected to portray the accident as any worse than it was.
This was true for both local and national media.
Nor was the hypothesis supported that other news media around the country were more sensational in tone than the main disseminators of news:
the wire services, the broadcast networks, the New York Times, the Washington post, the Los Angeles Times, the philadelphia Incuirer, and the Harrisburg News. A non quantitative examination of 43 newspapers from Alaska to Hawaii to Maine showed that, with just two exceptions (the New York Post and the New York Daily News) the papers did not sensa*.ionalize or overplay the story in headlines, captions, use of pictures, or choice of material.
If anything, headlines throughout the first waek were more sober than the real confusion at the site and in Bethesda warranted.
One positive result of the TMI experience is that reporters and nuclear engineers were introduced to sich others' problems, needs, and peculiarities. Nuclear experts shs.
now realize that technical language, which to them offers precision and ev_.uy of expression, can be maddeningly opaque when aimed at report:;s under deadline pressure.
Instead of leading to more accurate stories, a reliance on technical language can produce ambiguity, confusion and frustration.
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.. ~
Nuclear experts should also recognize that reporters are fond of "What ef?" questions that inevitably lead to discussions of worst possible ou*eomes. Unless such questions are handled candidly, but with sensitivity, the answers can produce an unintended sensational effect. The likelihood of a meltdown or hydrogen explosion occurring must be communicated in a concrete, specific manner. Journalists as a group view abstract constructs of uncertainty with distaste - particularly at a press conference called to discuss a potential public hazard about which there is already great concern. Over time, scientists and journalists may find it possible to develop jointly a commonly accepted set of definitions in this language of uncertainty.
Finally, nuclear experts should be preparea
- .o cope with the media's need for an instant reaction to events. Says Haro ' Denton, "[There]
was this feeling that you couldn't ever have even a setend or 5 minutes to reflect on [a new development].
And engineering doesn't work that way."
The task force on public information believes the material in its staff reports, and the larger body of material in the Commission's archives, supports the view that the public's right to know during the accident at TMI was ill-served by Met Ed, the NRC, and most of the other institutions directly involved. There were serious lapses in planning and an unwillingness, particularly by the utility, to be candid. Where the news media erred, those errors are usually traceable to the sources on which the media relied. Reporters, however, ccapounded these errors through a general ignorance of nuclear technology and the language of radiation. Both sides had difficulty communicating the probability of catastrophic events and the limits to scientific knowledge.
One hopes that, in the area of public information, the response of the NRC and the utilities will be to develop a disaster public information program. A proper information role for the utility must also be found.
The basic decision to be made is whether any utility can be trusted to provide accurate and prompt information about the accident. Met Ed did not meet this test at TMI.
To the extent that journalists learn about nuclear technology and develop a standard of comparison for fut'ure accidents, they can help reduce the confusion that surrounds such accidents.
But the major and initial burden in the area of public information falls on those who cperate and regulate the nuclear plants. They failed to serve the public's right to know at Three Mile Island.
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