Tale of the Tee: Three Mile Island
The design is based on an old sign at the nuclear plant.
It has been renamed the Crane Clean Energy Center by its owner, but there’s no escaping from Three Mile Island.
After all, that’s the name of the land mass in the Susquehanna River, just south of Harrisburg, Pa., where the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station Unit 1 nuclear reactor has resided since construction began in 1968.
It’s also where the sister Unit 2 operated commercially for all of three months before experiencing a partial core meltdown in March 1979.
Given that ignominious history, you can’t wipe the slate clean with a new name.
It’s always going to be Three Mile Island, just as it says on our newest tee.
The design was inspired by a sign that was said to have hung on a building at the power plant. It’s printed in Carolina blue and yellow ink on a period-appropriate gray unisex ringer shirt accented in denim.
‘Nuclear error’
We kicked around the idea of an overtly Three Mile Island shirt for a long time, never suspecting that anyone would restart Unit 1 after its decommissioning in 2019.
The cooling towers of the crippled Unit 2 reactor.
We addressed Three Mile Island obliquely with one of our first tees, Working Hard in Harrisburg, introduced in 2017. Its name derives from a line in the title song of “London Calling,” by the legendary punk band The Clash. It’s considered one of the best albums in rock history, certainly in my book.
The British band wrote and recorded the double album against the backdrop of what was happening across the pond, on Three Mile Island. The song “London Calling” references “meltdown expected” and “nuclear error.” Another song, “Clampdown,” includes the lyric, “Yeah, I’m working hard in Harrisburg … begging to be melted down … .”
While much of the record has to do with England’s decline (“London is barely alive”), a similar sentiment prevailed in the United States at the time.
In November 1980, Jimmy Carter lost his bid for re-election to Ronald Reagan, in the face of high inflation and unemployment and a 444-day Iranian hostage crisis. Perhaps Carter’s most memorable speech described an American “crisis of confidence”; it is commonly known as his “malaise speech,” although he never uttered the former word.
The Three Mile Island accident was just more nuclear fuel for the fire. It also was fodder for a hilarious “Saturday Night Live” sketch tied to Carter’s visit to the damaged plant.
In it, the chief engineer (played by Bill Murray) of the “Two” Mile Island reactor spills a cola on the control panel, setting off a core meltdown.
Carter (Dan Aykroyd), against the wishes of wife Rosalynn (“Oh, look, Jimmy, why don’t we just go visit the Hershey factory?”) enters the containment vessel and is exposed to a massive dose of radiation, accelerating his growth and turning him into The Amazing Colossal President.
REPORTER 1: “Is it true the president is 100 feet tall?”
PLANT SPOKESMAN: “No, absolutely not.”
REPORTER 2: “Is the president 90 feet tall?”
SPOKESMAN: “No comment.”
Humor aside, the real-life meltdown at Three Mile Island was a frightening time. If you need a refresher or never knew the history, I recommend the 2022 Netflix documentary, “Meltdown: Three Mile Island.”
Nearly five decades on, Three Mile Island’s meltdown remains America’s worst nuclear disaster.
Changing the power plant’s name can’t change that fact.