by Joseph M. Hendrie, a physicist who led the Nuclear Regulatory Commission during the nation’s worst nuclear power accident, at Three Mile Island, a mishap that chilled Americans’ confidence in nuclear power for decades, died Dec. 26 in his home in Bellport. New York, on Long Island. He was 98 years old.
His daughter Barbara Hendrie confirmed the death.
An expert in nuclear reactor safety, Dr. Hendrie was chairman of the commission on March 28, 1979, when a commercial reactor located on an island in the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania experienced a sudden loss of cooling water and a partial meltdown of its radioactive fuel. .
Two days later, on Dr. Hendrie’s advice, the governor of Pennsylvania ordered the evacuation of pregnant women and preschool children within a five-mile radius of the area.
Minimal radioactivity was released and there were no immediate deaths. But the lack of official communication and persistent confusion about the severity of the threat inflamed a long-running national debate over nuclear security. That year, theaters were showing “The China Syndrome,” a successful thriller about a nuclear plant disaster. Nearly 200,000 protesters descended on New York City six months after Three Mile Island for an anti-nuclear demonstration.
Dr. Hendrie, who was appointed by President Jimmy Carter in 1977 to head the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the government agency charged with nuclear energy safety, presented himself as a defender of nuclear energy, criticized by environmentalists for supporting too much to the industry.
“My biggest challenge will be keeping nuclear power as a viable energy option,” he told Newsday, his local newspaper, when he was appointed. He promised to end “the tortuous, Kafkaesque hearings” over proposed nuclear plants.
But the president fired Dr. Hendrie eight months after Three Mile Island, following a blistering report from a presidential commission that called for sweeping changes to the way nuclear plants were built and regulated.
The report did not blame Dr. Hendrie by name. But he criticized the regulatory commission, saying he was “unable to fulfill his responsibility to provide an acceptable level of safety for nuclear power plants.” Carter said a leadership change was needed on the commission “in the spirit” of the recommendations he received.
Victor Gilinsky, who served on the commission with Dr. Hendrie, described him in an interview as a non-bureaucratic guy, “given to outbursts of honesty.” whose candor may have led to his dismissal.
In the days after the crash, when asked at a news conference in Maryland about worst-case scenarios, Dr. Hendrie said residents up to 20 miles from the site may need to be evacuated. Governor Richard L. Thornburgh of Pennsylvania was upset, Dr. Gilinsky said, and complained to President Carter. “That was what forced him to leave; he was giving his honest opinion.”
Although he lost the chairmanship, Dr. Hendrie remained one of five members of the regulatory commission until the end of his four-year term in June 1981. In March of that year, President Ronald Reagan reappointed him interim president.
He returned to Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, where he worked for two decades before joining the regulatory commission. In the 1960s, he helped design and build a type of research reactor, the high-flux beam reactor, which provided very intense beams of neutrons. Scientists from all over came to Brookhaven to use it for their experiments.
“He was one of those few people who possessed deep technical knowledge of nuclear science and engineering and the ability to successfully manage a large and diverse workforce supporting many nuclear energy-related activities, including theoretical and experimental work.” , Joseph P. Indusi, a former colleague of Dr. Hendrie at Brookhaven said in an email.
In 1984, when Dr. Hendrie became president of the American Nuclear Society, a professional group of nuclear engineers, he told his publication, Nuclear News, that he had no regrets about leaving a high-profile government career for a more peaceful life. quiet investigation.
“Overall, I’m glad to be out of this,” he said. “The stress level is high enough to make it a very exhausting proposition. You simply deplete your internal reserves. But it is also a very exciting company and I miss the cheers from time to time.”
Joseph Mallam Hendrie was born on March 18, 1925 in Janesville, Wisconsin. His father, Joseph Munier Hendrie, was a General Motors executive who moved the family to the Detroit area. His mother, Pearl (Hocking) Hendrie, was a homemaker.
During World War II, Dr. Hendrie served in the Army Corps of Engineers in the Pacific. He graduated from Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland (now part of Case Western Reserve University) in 1950 with a bachelor’s degree in physics and later earned a Ph.D. in the same subject from Columbia University in 1957.
He met his future wife, Elaine Kostel, an instructor at an Arthur Murray dance studio in Cleveland, on a blind date. Later he worked in public relations for the Navy. He died in 2019.
In addition to his daughter Barbara, Dr. Hendrie is survived by another daughter, Susan Hendrie-Marais; A grandson; and a sister, Jane Heinemen.
In the first uncertain week after the Three Mile Island accident, there were fears bordering on panic that the reactor could melt down and release devastating radioactivity. That never happened, although the full extent of the damage was not known until years later, when it was determined that 50 percent of the reactor’s nuclear fuel had melted.
The accident occurred by a stuck valve, aggravated by human error. The result was that not enough cooling water was reaching the reactor core, causing damage and the release of a “small amount of radioactive material.” according to the Department of Energy.
Several studies A study of long-term health effects found no increase in several types of cancer caused by radiation in the region.
Still, Three Mile Island froze the development of nuclear energy in the United States for decades. For 32 years after the accident, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued no new permits for reactors. Since 2010, only two new reactors have come online, while a dozen closed before their licenses expired because they were uneconomical.
More recently, new interest has emerged in nuclear energy as the largest source of zero-carbon energy at a time of heightened awareness about the climate crisis. Gallup poll Last year found more support for nuclear power than at any time since 2012. The Biden administration has ordered $6 billion from an infrastructure law to bail out economically unstable reactors, which provide about half of the country’s carbon-free electricity.
