Three Mile Island is the Pennsylvania nuclear plant that Gardener cites as a concrete example of the dangers of reactor accidents. In a drunken argument about nuclear power, he invokes both the consequences of a hypothetical accident and reported safety failures associated with the plant, turning Three Mile Island into a focal point for his warnings and for the room’s growing unease.

The Plant as a Warning

Gardener tells his listeners that the site chosen for a 1964 worst-case reactor study was midstate Pennsylvania, where Three Mile Island is located. He gives the study’s projected toll for a reactor one-fifth the size of Chernobyl: 45,000 deaths, radiation contamination affecting seventy percent of the state, and seventeen million dollars in damage. He then scales those estimates up by five, describing a possible toll of 225,000 dead and eighty-five million dollars in damage. The figures are part of Gardener’s argument about nuclear danger, not a report of an accident at Three Mile Island.

Safety Failures in the Argument

When Ted dismisses accounts of nuclear accidents as propaganda, Gardener counters with details about the Three Mile Island plant. He recalls that a leak had reportedly been plugged with a basketball wrapped in friction tape, which was later forced out by pressure and made a hole in the containment wall. He also cites a separate discovery made about a week before the plant went online: plumbers had connected a 3,000-gallon tank for liquid radioactive waste to drinking fountains rather than to the intended outlets. These examples shift his case from hypothetical disaster to alleged flaws in construction and safety practice.

Narrative Significance

Three Mile Island anchors an abstract debate in identifiable place and circumstance. Gardener uses it to challenge dismissals of nuclear risk, but the force of his warning is complicated by his intoxication and by his refusal to stop even when Ted’s wife is crying. The location therefore serves both as evidence within his argument and as the setting’s measure of a larger conflict: serious concerns about technological hazards emerge through a speaker whose loss of control makes the truth difficult for others to hear.