Review : Three Mile Island

You may recall that I'm a big fan of HBO's Chernobyl, so it seems only fair that I should give Netflix's own version a go.

Meltdown : Three Mile Island clearly tries to compete/not-compete by being a documentary rather than a drama. Ironically, given that Chernobyl was entirely at liberty to bend the facts, Three Mile Island falls short in the important regard of explaining what actually happened. It does not have Jared Harris explaining the technical details using a series of flash cards, which is a sequence it badly needs. But then, so does pretty much everything.

For this reason the first couple of episodes are honestly a bit lame. It just doesn't cover the technical details nearly well enough to explain what went wrong, which makes the focus on the humanitarian side of things feel strangely hollow. Their stories would have been a lot more powerful, not less, had they properly explained how the (arguably near) disaster happened. I do feel it would have worked better as a trilogy, cutting out a lot of baggage in the first two episodes and replacing it with some much-needed science.

But stick with it, because in the second two episodes the show is easily as good as anything Chernobyl has to offer.

While the first half covers the incident itself and the reactions of those involved (the townspeople, the government, the engineers), the second half branches out to cover the repair operation - and the truly Chernobyl-scale disaster that was avoided by only the narrowest of margins therein. The main focus shifts from the ordinary public to two prominent figures : one who is clearly unaware of how much of a colossally stupid tit he sounds like, and the other a more straightforward tragic-hero type.

Recently I postulated that maybe one reason for such poor decision-making in the Soviet era was due to its intensely hierarchical structure. When you can't have any discussions without consequences, when everything you do becomes accountable and have no choice but to rise or fall, you get a system where everyone punches downwards. In such a system, lying and self-interest are virtually one and the same. In contrast, a more egalitarian framework, where discussions with peers are largely consequence-free, allows far more respect for the truth, because most of the time no-one is punching anyone in any direction.

The second half of Three Mile Island thus presents an excellent counterpoint to Chernobyl. To oversimplify somewhat, the Soviet system gave the government far too much power. In capitalist America, the government did not have enough power - at least, not enough power independent of its corporate overlords. The unfettered drive for wealth inequality leads to corporations having no real, effective oversight. Indeed the show makes it clear that they actually murdered at lease one prominent anti-nuclear activist, that in this system profit comes before truth every time.

(It would be a very interesting study to compare if and how extreme wealth inequality leads not just to corruption but also the hierarchical structure characteristic of mismanagement, or if incompetence here occurs in a different structure.)

What makes the show at least feel like it has a high degree of credibility is that we hear from a wide variety of sources. When accusations of corruption are levelled, we get to hear the response from those in charge. Predictably, there responses are lame beyond belief, with the main respondent from the Nuclear Regulatory Council dismissing everything as "drama" for some reason. And you really have the urge to shout at the guy that he's being absolutely pathetically arrogant. It's the sort of "I'm sorry you were offended" non-apology that characterises the corrupt, just as murdering the messenger is all but openly admitting culpability.

Best of all, the main protagonist is avowedly to this day pro-nuclear. It's not the technology that's the problem, he says. It's the management structure, the profit motive. A nuclear industry run like this will never be viable.

I do have to wonder if this is a lesson that applies more generally. Honestly, transparency and accountability would have likely prevented the disaster in the first place. An independent system for monitoring the radiation release would have indicated just how bad things were, rather than - FFS ! - letting them mark their own homework by having the NRC trust the energy company's own reports. And it probably would have made this cheaper, by avoiding the need for the hugely expensive clean-up operations.

Likewise, American healthcare is preposterously expensive. I daresay that a free and fair competition does, under some circumstances, lead to lower costs for consumers. But it seems utterly mad that anyone is still insisting that the free market is always the answer. Ironically, sometimes it seems that it's profit that drives costs up, not down. 

It's not even that you can't have profits. You can. You can have a safe, profitable nuclear industry, for sure. But you can't have profit be the overriding motivation in any industry where the consequences of mistakes are people's lives.

Anyway, great show. 6/10 for the first two episodes, 9/10 for the second two. Well worth a watch.