Parks, a Missouri native and navy-trained nuclear operator who provides colorful, refreshingly straight-shooting narration throughout the series, moved to Middletown, Pennsylvania – the town directly adjacent to Three Mile Island – to work on cleanup three years after the accident. “We should be able to look at the people who risk everything in order to save communities from a potential disaster.” “We should know about these stories,” he added. “We dodged a bullet a second time, and it was entirely due to the fact that Rick Parks and Larry King stood up. “While a lot of people know about the disaster, they don’t know about what happened in the cleanup phase and how close we were to another disaster,” Davidson told the Guardian.
In its second half, Meltdown, directed by Kief Davidson, homes in on the story of Rick Parks, a cleanup supervisor turned whistleblower on the Bechtel Corp, the company hired to conduct the billion-dollar cleanup by Metropolitan Edison and supervised by the government’s Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). But the story of Three Mile Island did not end with the five-day red-alert saga – not for the workers tasked with safely cleaning up the molten reactor, nor for the surrounding community, disillusioned and furious.
The first two of Meltdown’s four 45-minute episodes focus on this chilling near-miss, as well as the obfuscation and confusion that greatly eroded public trust in nuclear power. That is the story of Three Mile Island that most Americans will find in the history textbooks, if they have heard of the accident at all.
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