Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective - Reception

Reception

There have been several published reviews of Three Mile Island. John F. Barber from The University of Texas states that Walker's insightful book captures the "high human drama surrounding the TMI accident", sets it in the context of the contentious debate over nuclear power in the seventies, and discusses the social, technical, and political issues it raised. Walker's authoritative account of the days and events surrounding the TMI accident captures the complexities of the situation, clears up some misconceptions, and discusses the aftermath and implications. According to Barber, Walker provides "thoughtful and sober grounds for the continued debate over the role of nuclear power in our contemporary world".

In a review for Times Higher Education, Jack Harris says that Walker is an extremely good writer and even those who do not specialise in technical fields will derive enjoyment from the book. According to Harris, Walker has unique experience as historian to the NRC which has placed him in an unrivalled position to tell the TMI story. But Harris identifies some omissions in the book. There is little on the other two major nuclear that threatened large civilian populations: the Windscale fire (UK, October 1957), and the Chernobyl disaster (Ukraine, April 1986). Harris states that Windscale threw up similar problems to TMI, particularly relating to whether large-scale evacuations should have been initiated, but he could find no reference to the Windscale accident in the book's index which is surprising in a book that aims to put TMI in historical perspective.

In a review for New Scientist, Rob Edwards states that Walker provides a lucid account of the Three Mile Island accident, which is "riveting because of its detail". It gives a graphic insight into the chaos and confusion of the five-day crisis, and shows how the nuclear industry, the regulators and the government all "initially played down the risks, then had to eat their words". Some 144,000 people were evacuated, but Walker points out that "if the full extent of the core meltdown had been known at the time, hundreds of thousands more would have been told to go". Edwards says a "catastrophe was avoided — but only by luck".

Thomas Wellock from Central Washington University recommended the book "for all libraries and students of politics, government bureaucracy, and environmental history".

Bernard L. Cohen, from the University of Pittsburgh, criticized the book in terms of the scope and quality of its technical content: "The book contains little technical information, and many of the technical explanations that do appear range from inadequate to misleading to incorrect."