Answer:
The correct answer is B. The Three Mile Island incident led to a surge in activism and protests against the use of nuclear power.
Explanation:
The Three Mile Island accident was a nuclear accident suffered by the nuclear plant of the same name on March 28, 1979.
Three Mile Island is an island on the Susquehanna River near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
The generating station consists of two pressurized light water reactors built by Babcock and Wilcox with installed capacities of 786 MW (TMI-1) and 900 MW (TMI-2). In October 2009, the NRC, the regulatory agency in the United States, authorized the renewal of its operating license for an additional 25 years, until April 19, 2034.
At the time of the accident, some 25,000 people lived in areas less than four miles from the plant. The amount of emission of radioactive gases into the atmosphere varies between 2.5 and 15 million curies depending on the sources chosen. The pro-nuclear industry maintains that "studies conducted on the population show that there was no harm to people, neither immediate nor long-term." However, Greenpeace, supported by other independent studies, maintains that there has been and there is a clear increase in cases of cancer and leukemia in the area near the plant.
Three Mile Island has been an object of interest for scholars of the human factor as an example of how groups of people react and make decisions under stress. There is a general consensus that the accident was aggravated by incorrect decisions made by operators overwhelmed with information, much of it inapplicable and useless. As a result of the TMI, the training of nuclear reactor operators was changed. Before, training focused on diagnosing the underlying problem. Afterwards, training has been focused on reacting to the emergency by going through a standardized checklist to make sure that the base is receiving enough coolant.
Cleaning the reactor after the accident needed a difficult project that lasted 14 years. It began in August 1979 and did not officially end until December 1993, with a total cost of about 975 million dollars. Between 1985 and 1990, almost 100 tons of radioactive fuel were removed from the site. TMI-1 was restarted in 1985.
