Officials are attempting to determine how workers cutting a pipe stirred up radioactive dust at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant. Plant spokesman Ralph DeSantis said Monday that the public was not endangered Saturday when 12 workers were exposed to radiation. DeSantis said the radioactive dust came from reactor cooling system pipes the workers were cutting. He said a radiation monitor “temporarily went up” slightly, but a later survey detected no contamination. Specifically, investigators were trying to determine the cause of radiological contamination inside the nuclear facility's containment building on Saturday afternoon. About 150 people were working inside a containment building when the contamination was detected, and some were exposed to low levels of radiation, a Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) spokeswoman said Sunday. “Based on the information that was provided to us by the company, the level of the [radiation] dose they received was a small fraction of the NRC's regulatory limit,” Diane Screnci told Reuters. According to Screnci, the NRC sent a radiation specialist and a regional manager to the central-Pennsylvania site on Sunday to review the assessment by the operating company, Exelon, which said no contamination was found outside the containment building. Three Mile Island, near the Pennsylvania state capital of Harrisburg, created global headlines in 1979 when one of its two reactors suffered a partial meltdown and was decommissioned. The second reactor is still in use, but it has been shut down since last month so steam generators could be replaced. The 1979 accident made Three Mile Island a symbol of the dangers of nuclear power and helped stop the expansion of the U.S. nuclear industry.
