Parents weigh teen driving issues
to AAA.
Meredith Blake of Carrick said she’ll be limiting the number of passengers who ride with her daughter Taylor when she gets her license.
“I understand she wants to go out with a bunch of her friends,” Ms. Blake said. “She’ll be one of the first to get her driver’s license. But at least at first, I don’t want too many of her friends with her. That’s at least something I can try to control.”
Taylor got her learner’s permit on her 16th birthday in early April.
Earlier this month, she and her mother waited on their front porch for her driving instructor to arrive for her first professional lesson.
Taylor’s instructor, Frederick Fenner of Kennedy-based Cindy Cohen School of Driving, said that if there’s one thing he wants his teenage students to remember, it’s that driving “is not a video game.”
“You don’t get a second life,” Mr. Fenner said. “This is the first serious life skill that they’re going to learn, so they have to take it seriously.” partially disintegrated.
Human error dramatically escalated the situation when operators misunderstood how and when to activate the reactor’s manually operated relief valve. Radioactive coolant began to leak from the valve, which had become stuck open, but that did not become clear to employees for nearly three hours after the initial problem began.
The Three Mile Island incident ultimately resulted in very little radioactive exposure to local residents. On average, people in the area were exposed to roughly 1.5 millirems (mrems), a measure estimating the biological effects of radiation exposure.
In comparison, a chest Xray exposes patients to about 3.2 mrem. However, officials had an incomplete understanding of the danger posed and badly mismanaged the escalating media barrage.
Then-Pennsylvania Gov. Dick Thornburgh held a news conference two days after the accident to advise pregnant women and preschool children that they should evacuate Middletown. Everybody else was told to remain indoors as much as possible. To this day, there are disagreements over whether those announcements created unnecessary panic and conflicting accusations over who recommended particular courses of action.
“I’m very frightened,” evacuee Judith Ebersol of Falmouth, Pa., said the Saturday following the accident, according to The Pittsburgh Press. “I’m wondering if what happened is really worse than what they’ve been saying. I feel we’ve been lied to and I don’t trust the reports.”
Despite the government’s bungled response, however, some citizens remained unfazed by the accident.
“I don’t think it’s very serious, and I think they should repair the plant and put it back into operating order,” one unnamed Harrisburg resident told The Press three days after the accident. “This country can’t exist without nuclear power.”
Only one of the plant’s reactors was damaged during the meltdown, and thenowners Metropolitan Edison decided to reactivate the functional reactor in 1985. That decision drew massive backlash from lawmakers and the public, inspiring the protesters seen here and many others around the world. Some activists even called for the plant to be converted into a park.
“We all live in Pennsylvania,” German protesters chanted when the accident occurred, according to The Associated Press. Those chants were renewed upon the plant’s reopening.
The accident would prove to be a turning point for the country’s energy policies. Prior to 1979, nuclear energy was hailed as the gateway to a clean energy future. But that growth stopped almost immediately following the Three Mile Island debacle. The number of reactors under construction in the U.S. declined every year from 1980 through 1998, and authorizations to build new nuclear plants halted completely until 2012.
Although the ultimate fate of the Three Mile Island facility is unknown, the crisis that consumed it remains a defining moment of the 1970s and the nation’s fight over how best to harness the atom.