reasons the Task Force was unable to identify, not conveyed to the NRC's incident response center. The hydrogen detonation or burn may have been an indication of substantially greater core damage than Federal or State officials had believed up to that point, or indeed until Friday. While it is not clear that the failure to transmit this information contributed to any increased threat to health and safety, the failure did serve to diminish the NRC's ability to understand what was happening in the reactor and it denied both State and Federal officials information that was essential to their consideration of the need for evacuation. The Task Force received testimony indicating that following the accident there existed no clear procedures spelling out the role of the NRC in its relationship to the utility with respect to how decisions regarding reactor operation were to be made. A working relationship evolved that may or may not be considered satisfactory upon further analysis. 6) The adequacy of radiation monitoring in the area surrounding the plant was not examined but is, of course a very significant issue. STATEMENT BY HON. JIM WEAVER, CHAIRMAN, COMMITTEE ON INTERIOR AND INSULAR AFFAIRS As chairman of the Task Force, and having been present continually at all Task Force interviews and the on-site tour of Three Mile Island, Unit 2, I would like to give the Committee my personal ovservations and evaluations. These comments will be as objective as possible; they are the result of considerable thought and review. One very personal story provided me an acute insight. Its background is the movie, "The China Syndrome", in which a nuclear plant is in the throes of a potential accident. An operator of the plant, played by Jack Lemmon, believes there is great danger and attempts to tell the truth about what is happening in the plant. A public relations man for the utility company brushes Lemmon aside and, instead, tells the news media that "everything is fine". The movie makes it clear as only fiction can do that the PR man is lying. - As our committee toured Three Mile Island, I had the opportunity to talk with Mr. Jack Herbein, one of the top officials of Metropolitan Edison and its spokesman in the first days of the TMI accident. His comments to the news media in those first days of the accident were amazingly similar - sometimes word for word to the "everything is fine" statements by the PR man in the movie. |