On March 28, 1979, America experienced its worst nuclear accident - a partial meltdown of the reactor core at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Middletown, Pennsylvania. During the tension-packed week that followed, sketchy reports and conflicting information led to panic, and more than one hundred thousand residents, mostly children and pregnant women, fled the area (Tong, 1996).
A combination of equipment failure, human error, and bad luck, the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island stunned the nation and permanently changed the nuclear industry in America. Even though it led to no immediate deaths or injuries to plant workers or members of the nearby community, the TMI accident had a devastating impact on the nuclear power industry - the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has not reviewed an application to build a new nuclear power plant in the United States since. It also brought about sweeping changes involving emergency response planning, reactor operator training, human factors engineering, radiation protection, and many other areas of nuclear power plant operations.
Many improvements in radiation protection and emergency preparedness have been made possible by the Three Mile Island experience and we are also able to develop a more accurate assessment of the impact of this accident (Samuel, 2004). Under the auspices of the NEA Committee on Radiation Protection and Public Health (CRPPH), supported by other international bodies, the most outstanding progress since the Three Mile Island accident has been in learning about inter-governmental communications and co-operation in the case of nuclear emergencies. The International Nuclear Emergency Exercises (INEX) bear witness to this.
Governments, initially reluctant to publicly discuss nuclear accident preparedness and management issues, now ask for such exercises to be carried out, operators are no longer reluctant to offer their sites for this purpose, and local authorities are pleased to invite the participants involved to appear before the media (Samuel, 2004).................
