Doublespeak: Nuclear Power Plants

Doublespeak: Nuclear Power Plants

Harrisburg, Pennsylvania is the home of a large, efficient, and threatening nuclear power plant, Three Mile Island. Nuclear power plants have the awesome ability to create large amounts of power with very little fuel, yet they carry the frightening reality of a meltdown with very little warning.

Suppose you live in Harrisburg and you here that the nearby nuclear plant had a partial meltdown, how would you react? When most people here the word meltdown, they automatically think radiation, cancer, and death. Now suppose your living in Harrisburg and you here the nearby power plant experienced a "normal aberration", you would probably react differently.

Even with the highly proven safety of nuclear power, there is still fear from citizens and the chance of an accident. The nuclear power industry uses misleading language, and words understood by nuclear employees only, or euphemisms and jargon, to mislead the public and make them believe that there is nothing to be afraid of and that there is no possibility of a major accident.

They take the public's biggest fears, meltdowns and contaminations, and make them into "events" and "infiltrations." This use of doublespeak is misleading to the public and may make them believe that a major accident hasn't happened, or the accident was a normal event or minor incident.

In 1979 a valve in the Three Mile Island stuck open, allowing coolant, an important part of the plant, to escape from the reactor. An installed emergency system did its job and supplied the reactor with necessary coolant, but the system was shot off for a few hours due to employee error. Corrective action was eventually taken, and only a partial meltdown occurred. The plant's containment building was able to hold most of the radioactive products from entering the local environment. Only a small amount of activity escaped, that activity was carried by coolant water that had overflowed into an auxiliary building and then to the environment. Though the event didn't pose any extreme harm to citizens, this one billion dollar incident wasn't an everyday event or normal occurrence, as the industry's doublespeak makes you believe.

In 1986 a similar but more serious event occurred in the USSR. A nuclear power plant at Chernobyl exploded and burned. The explosion was caused by an unauthorized testing of the reactor by its operators. Radiation spread rapidly forcing 135,000 evacuations within a 1000 mile radius, and more then 30