THE FALLOUT OF THREE MILE ISLAND

Updated: Aug 26, 2022

This is my personal and professional journey by Jill Murphy Long

Can’t see it. It is invisible.

Can’t hear it. It is silent.

Can’t smell it. It is odorless.

Can’t taste it. Undetected in produce, meat, milk, and water.

Can’t feel it. Undetected on skin.

“It” = Radioactive Isotopes also called Ionizing Radiation.

What they did not tell us is that low dose of exposure to radioactive isotopes (ionizing radiation) causes cancers of the soft organs of the body and brain, neurological diseases like Multiple Sclerosis, and tumors of the brain and central nervous system.

Our cancers and diseases are diagnosed decades later.

It is like having a mini x-ray machine inside you.

And exposure is accumulative.

This is the latent nature of being exposed to radioactive isotopes (ionizing radiation).

Before my brain tumor diagnosis, I did not know this, either.

THIS IS A “SUPER PLANT.”

(PA) Three Mile Island Nuclear Plant one of the U.S.’s largest in the 1970s. Four cooling towers and two nuclear reactors on a three-mile long sandbar in the middle of the mile-wide Susquehanna River, our drinking water.

The nuclear industry stated that Three Mile Island was “Too big to fail" and "Too cheap to meter.”

In 1984, five teams of five brave men entered the destroyed nuclear vessel to visually confirm the meltdown of Unit-2.

The pile of molten fuel rods containing the radioactive isotope plutonium-239 was puddled in solid form at the bottom of the nuclear reactor.

During the meltdown in 1979, the heat of the fuel rods when left uncovered by water also melted a hole in the side of the nuclear reactor that measured 2.5 feet by 5 feet.

This is the story about the fallout of the wartime “atomic” industry rebranded now as “nuclear”.

My objectives have always been about awareness and action.

From the first time that I learned that my classmates, my neighbors, and teachers were being diagnosed with cancer and neurological diseases or dying too soon, I started to research what happened on March 28, 1979, from many different sources including those who were there.

As the number of friends being diagnosed began to climb, I started researching cancer-clusters around other nuclear "accidents" incidents, leaks and tunnel collapses. The similarities were uncanny.

I compiled and cross-referenced this data to create an overlay of the cancer-clusters and the number of nuclear plants in the U.S.

I added the locations of other countries’ nuclear plants.

I added the radioactive nuclear waste dump sites.

I added the locations of the former sites of the Manhattan Projects.

I also researched what was happening to our atomic veterans, who served in the “Pacific Theater” - as the industry called it, and those who went back to clean it up and create the Runit Dome to hold all of the radioactive material from the blasts.

Basically, the inhabited Marshalls Island and Bikini Atolls in the Pacific Ocean where our government blew up 67 atomic bombs on the ocean. Despite their efforts to silence us all of us, to discredit our diagnoses and to dismiss our growing cancer-clusters as "chance" the meltdown occurred and people were affected.

All of my on-going efforts of writing a movie, conducting health surveys, circulating petitions, posting updates on social media and my blog, and attending a protest in Washington D.C., have always been to let others to know what I learned.

I want you to know that nuclear is NOT our future's energy solution - like the industry is currently selling it as.

And they neglected to include us: the collateral damage.

They ignore their enormous carbon footprint in the ten-year process to build a nuclear plant.

They ignore the massive carbon footprint of decommissioning nuclear plants that take six decades like TMI.

They ignore the fact that small modular nuclear reactors create even more highly radioactive garbage AND they still do not have a long-term or safe storage solution.

They neglect to count the huge carbon effect of transporting this highly radioactive garbage by truck or train across the country to unsuspecting communities.

And they say “nuclear power is safe, clean and green”?

No, it is not.

I appreciate your support in signing and sharing this petition.

https://www.change.org/Nuclear-is-NOT-Clean-Safe-or-Green

Now with your help, I can deliver this message to the White House.

Thank you,

Jill Murphy Long