Is the AIR Supposed to be Blue?

By: Aaron Datesman

The archive at Three Mile Island Alert (TMIA) is an invaluable resource. When I first read the stories in the archive, I thought, “How can it be that this never made it into a newspaper anyplace? How can this possibly be new to me?” Certainly, the explanation must involve failures on the part of government and the media, as well as corporate malfeasance. But there’s an additional fundamental factor: we have very limited information about the weather. Consider our inability to forecast the weather very well, and you will begin to understand the scope of this restraint.

Radioactive materials released to the atmosphere during the partial meltdown at TMI could have landed as fallout basically….anywhere. For instance, it’s widely understood that the fallout from Chernobyl covers the entire Northern hemisphere. In a subsequent post, I’ll explain how the cloud of fallout from TMI was tracked from its source in central Pennsylvania, past Albany, NY, and all the way to Portland, ME.

When you further consider that the weather varies a lot on geographically small scales – have you ever watched it rain on the other side of the street? – you begin to understand that it’s quite hard (unless the accident is a total catastrophe, as Chernobyl was) to identify regions affected by fallout, especially some time after the event.

As pattern-seeking, reasoning creatures, we’re not well-equipped to understand a situation like this. When the residents of one farm some distance away from the reactor complained about dead animals and a metallic taste in their mouths persisting for days, while neighbors down the road but closer to the reactor site were fine, hysteria probably seemed a likelier explanation than nuclear catastrophe. But this doesn’t make it so.

This leaves us with the task of evaluating the anecdotal evidence in the archive to see whether the stories are believable or even physically plausible. The interview in yesterday’s post with Marie Holowka is valuable in this regard. In 1979, Holowka lived on a dairy farm in Zion’s View, PA. From what I can tell using GoogleMaps, Zion’s View is about 7 miles from Three Mile Island.

We stayed in the house. It was blue. You couldn’t see anything or nothing. And we were scared. Everything was blue. Everywhere was blue. Couldn’t see the buildings or anything. It was just heavy blue all that time. We closed up our doors. We stuffed rags underneath the door so this wouldn’t come in. But I think it was all the way in. And we stayed there. It was a warm day. It was a hot day. It was so hot. We shut all the windows and all the doors and we stayed inside. And about nine [a.m.] we listened to the local radios. But they wouldn’t say anything. They were only playing Dolly Parton’s music.

Now, if you know a little bit about fission and nuclear reactors, when you read “blue”, you think "Cerenkov radiation". Cerenkov radiation (which refers to optical photons, not nuclear decay) is an interesting physical quirk which arises from the fact that light travels more slowly in a medium (such as water) than it does in a vacuum. However, the index of refraction of air is so nearly identical to that of vacuum that I cannot believe Cerenkov radiation explains what Marie Holowka observed. Therefore, I’ll refrain from saying more about it.

Unfortunately, the explanation is actually more terrifying. The fission reaction utilized by a nuclear reactor releases several million electron volts (MeV) of energy per fission in the form of gamma rays – that is, in highly energetic photons. Gamma rays interact with matter by a process known as Compton scattering. You are welcome to Google on this topic if you like, but the basic takeaway is that energetic photons are able to strip electrons away from neutral atoms – in this specific case, from nitrogen atoms in the atmosphere. When the free electrons reunite with nitrogen ions, they emit blue light.

Therefore, a plausible physical explanation for what happened to Marie Holowka is that she was bathed in a field of gamma rays so intense that it literally TURNED THE AIR BLUE. It is conceivable – but impossible to prove – that the source of these gamma rays was fissionable material released from TMI which settled on her farm as a cloud of fallout.

I simply cannot imagine the terror.

It is also noteworthy that the TMI accident occurred at the end of March, when it is not ordinarily so hot in Pennsylvania. In fact, on March 29, 1979, the high temperature in nearby Middletown, PA, was 68 degrees. One would certainly feel hot, however, immersed within an intense flux of gamma rays produced by a cloud of radioactive fallout.

Among the other stories in the TMIA archive, I recommend also the long interview with Bill Peters:

We were gone seven days. We had a four-year-old male German shepherd. He was healthy when we left. He knew how to take care of himself because we go to Florida every winter normally, and he would stay in the garage. We had food prepared. We had 200 pounds of Purina Dog Chow separated out in boxes. I had ten five-gallon cans of water that he always used. Same cans he ever used. And, we left a window cracked in the garage, and he had a mattress in the back. When we came back, he was laying on his mattress dead. And his eyes were burnt white. Both eyes were burnt white. He didn’t eat no food, hardly any food. He drank a whole five-gallon can of water, and he threw it up all over the garage. He was dead a lot more than a day. We walked in, we were sick. And you could still taste this like a burning galvanized steel, metal.

This material is available at a couple of different sites on the web. On one of them, I recall reading that Marie Holowka died some time in the later 1980’s. I have thought of her story often since I first read it about a year ago. I try to think of it every time I encounter the claim that the accident at TMI had no verifiable adverse effects on human health or on the environment.

- Aaron Datesman



Posted at March 16, 2011 09:28 PM

