Of course. Nuclear power is a topic of interest to me. I’m 23.
My father worked there for a year or so, after the meltdown. I don’t know when exactly it must have been early 80’s. He had worked reactor clean-up years before after an accident at Idaho Nuclear Engineering Laboratories in the mid 60’s. That was the one where they couldn’t find one of the workers until they spied him skewered by a control rod pinned to the machinery in the top of the reactor. Good times…
My kids are 14 and 16, they know about it. I’ve thought it was in NY as well.
30,and I’ve heard of it, but originally as a landmark which Amtrak passes on it’s way to Harrisburg…
I think the general concesus is that your coworker is not as well-read/well-watched/well-high schooled as your average young doper.
I do find it strangely fascinating that most think of NY (as did I). :dubious:
Not only have I heard of it (born in '79…always heard stories from my mother about her getting worried that it would go off nearby) but I once had an apartment where, if you went out on the patio, you could see the cooling towers.
That was the SL-1 reactor, and that’s a fairly gruesome story. They found the guy pretty quickly, but as you say he was impaled by a shield plug that had blown out of the reactor and pinned to the ceiling.
Yep. Dad worked for the N.R.C. He woke up around 5 am that day and didn’t come home for weeks.
Somewhere is a faded day-glo yellow button that said " I Survived T.M.I. "
Quite unnerving to be close to. I grew up in Philly, and have never visited the site.
Cartooniverse
Early 30s, British. I’d heard of it and I knew what happened, but bizarrely I also associate it with New York. I didn’t hear about Love Canal until years later, so where on earth did I get that from, and why does everyone seem to think the same thing?!
Odd, I’m 33 and Morris is b4 my time watching SNL.
27, know the basic gist but couldn’t give you solid details. I do, however, know that the phrase “worse than Three mile Island” means “bad.”
I can recall originally learning the term reading Mad Magazine circa 1990. I believe it was a joke about somebody having extra limbs.
I’m nineteen and Australian. I just know it was an incident at a nuclear power plant that wasn’t as bad as Chernobyl. But only because it was mentioned on The Simpsons. :o
23 and English, and until this thread I thought it was in the Pacific Ocean - I think I’d mixed it up with the Bikini Atoll atomic testing when I was younger, and never questioned how a power plant in the middle of the sea would help America (although if you use twisted logic, it makes sense from a safety standpoint…)
I didn’t learn the specifics until the thread on Japan a few weeks ago. If you’d have said “3 Mile Island” I would have known that you were talking about some nuclear brou-ha-ha, but nothing as specific as if you had mentioned Chernobyl.
I’m 30 and knew about it before the Japanese earthquake. I thought it was in NY, also, but I’m not totally surprised to find out that I was wrong in this case. I was under the impression that TMI wasn’t nearly as bad as sensationalist media would have had you believe if you were watching the news at the time. Not one person died as a result of it, correct?
I’m currently deployed to Afghanistan, so I haven’t watched really any news for the last four months, but it’s interesting to me that TMI is being brought up again because of the earthquake in Japan… why is that? My understanding of the two incidents is that the one in PA was nearly a huge disaster caused by human error in an otherwise well-built facility, while the one in Japan was nearly a huge disaster because of environmental factors but was SAVED by good engineering.
Because they’re both somehow “evidence” that nuclear power is inherently unsafe - or at least some people think so.
I think you’re probably right. I was really surprised by her (non) reaction, hence this thread. I guess it’s heartening that most youngsters know about it.
I’m not sure that’s it. Any news about a nuclear meltdown is going to bring up comparisons to similar events. As there have now been only three that have been truly newsworthy, of course they’re all going to be mentioned. Much in the same way that if a President is impeached, all other impeachments are going to be mentioned.
All it took was for the power to go out for a few hours and we now have an increasing evacuation zone and any dead bodies found in the area are too radioactive to be properly disposed of. TMI is frequently mentioned because TMI was a level 5 nuclear disaster and Fukushima blew right past that to a maximum level 7 disaster.
Very familliar with TMI, but then, we’re a nuclear family (both ways 
). Dad did cleanup there for a time, and it had a devestating effect on the plant he works at and their ability to get licensed and start producing power.
I can see why you’d ask. For today’s youth and many of us here, all TMI means to them is Too Much Information.
20, and yes, but im kind of a nerd.