inning environmental journalist Karl Grossman, makes a chilling case that people did die as a result of TMI and that, in the "valley of death" surrounding the damaged reactor, the illness and the dying still continues.

When TMI-neighbor Jane Lee conducted an extensive door-to-door survey using forms provided by a sympathetic epidemiologist, she discovered that only "a very small percentage" of the area's residents had been contacted by state health department officials. Lee also found citizens suffering from a variety of cancers "in nearly every other house."

Lee's "cancer map" provides one of the documentary's most horrifying images. Small, colored circles pasted onto a map of Harrisburg show a massive clot of cancer cases representing 500 homes. Cancers in this region were 600 percent above expected occurrences. Lee's map reveals 23 cancer deaths, 45 "living cancers," 53 benign tumors, 39 thyroid disorders and 209 respiratory problems.

To maintain the myth that there were no fatalities from TMI, Grossman reports, the plant's owners "have quietly given cash settlements — some as high as $1 million — to [victims'] families."

"I used to be a super patriot," says one woman who lives five miles downwind from the plant. Her child was born with Downs Syndrome nine months after the accident. "I learned that our government covers up many, many things..."

Harvey Wasserman, co-author of the nuclear exposé," Killing Our Own," likens a visit to the region a year after the TMI disaster to encountering "the aftermath of a nuclear war."

"It was the greatest industrial accident in U.S. history," Wasserman notes, yet no more than five journalists bothered to question the lingering health impacts. Wasserman, on assignment from Rolling Stone, encountered a population traumatized by fear and slowly awakening to a nightmare of stillbirths, childhood leukemias, strokes, birth defects and a world altered by the appearance of mutant plants and animals.

Plants surrounding the site have come to resemble the mutated vegetation documented downwind from Chernobyl [Summer '88 EIJ] "This is a wild rose with a bud with a full set of leaves growing out of the center," says Goldsboro resident Mary Osborn as she holds a photo up to the video camera. Osborn has other photos — of zinnias colored half-red/half-white and daisies split apart by wildly mutated centers.

Following the accident, children suffered swollen joints and hair loss. Dogs and cats began to shed. Hens laid eggs that failed to hatch. Butchers remarked that they had never seen animals with such "soft bones." Residents complained of nausea, diarrhea, inflamed eyes and reddening of the skin. And then there was the "metallic taste."

Even before residents knew of the accident, they began to complain of a "metallic taste" in the air. As Wassermann points out, this sensation has been reported before: by soldiers and ranchers downwind from U.S. atomic blasts; in the aftermath of a plutonium fire at the Rocky Flats weapons plant; high above Hiroshima by the crew aboard the Air Force bomber, Enola Gay…

When outraged residents began their own investigations of TMI, they discovered that they had been repeatedly exposed to radiation releases even before the accident.

"One of the things the public doesn't know," Lee says,"is that reactors are specifically designed to release iodine 131, tritium, krypton and radon on a regular basis." Nuclear reactions produce radioactive gases and these wastes must be "burped" into the air. With a malfunction or accident, other radioactive wastes — strontium and cesium, for instance — are also released into the air.

The survivors of the TMI accident have discovered that even the "clean-up" operations are not so clean. In 1980, 50,000 curies of radioactive gases, mainly krypton, were vented from TMI as part of the clean-up operation.

"They told us that TMI was better than Chernobyl because it had a containment building," one resident tells the film crew. "But they let the radiation out a year later, so what's the difference?"

The nightmare is not yet over. Even though the damaged core has been removed, a study by General Public Utilities, the owner of the plant, has warned that the 200 pounds of debris still remaining in the bottom of the reactor building could shift, consolidate and trigger a nuclear reaction.

"It is now generally believed that the accident could start all over again," says Michio Kaku, a professor of nuclear physics at the City University of New York. Triggered by a hydrogen explosion, chemical reaction, human error or an earthquake, Kaku says, "the neutron count would start to rise, water would start to boil again, enormous heat would be generated. However, this time [uncontrolled fusion would occur] without any of the safety systems intact."—GS

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