“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Early last Wednesday an ominous development began unfolding at Three Mile Island, the nuclear-power-plant located on an island in the Susquehanna River below Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. It seems that through a combination of mechanical failures and human error, unit 2, one of the plant’s two nuclear reactors, overheated and discharged radioactive water into the river, and began releasing small amounts of radioactive gasses into the atmosphere. [The entire plant is idle, since unit 1 had already been shut down for refueling.] By now the situation is much more serious, however: There’s a chance of a catastrophic “meltdown” of the uranium fuel rods in the damaged reactor’s core—the worst possible accident that can occur in such circumstances, short of an explosion, and a kind that proponents of nuclear power have long maintained “almost certainly cannot happen.” If the meltdown takes place, spewing great clouds of radioactive materials into the atmosphere, several hundred thousand people could ultimately become casualties in one form or another.

(Now there’s talk of evacuating up to a million people who live in the counties surrounding Three Mile Island. Some refugees have already reached the Elmira area, where we live, and upon checking a map Jane and I were surprised to see that we’re only about 130 airline miles north of Harrisburg. We’ve driven the much longer road distance comfortably enough in one day. “Strange,” I mused to Jane, “that of all the nuclear power plants in the world, we end up living that close to the one that goes wrong….”

(Our region is supposed to be outside the danger zone—yet we see conflicting newspaper reports about whether the prevailing wind currents would make us vulnerable to the aftereffects of a meltdown. Even now local civil defense officials monitor the air several times daily with radiological survey meters—equipment similar to Geiger counters. Jonestown was far away, remote in another land, I said to Jane, but the potential mass tragedy of Three Mile Island hovers at the edges of our personal worlds. The whole affair has a sense of unreal immediacy, because there’s nothing to see, and because I don’t think most people really understand the probabilities involved. It would hardly be a coincidence, I added, that the mass events at Jonestown and Three Mile Island took place within less than six months of each other, and that they represented the two poles, or extremes, of mankind’s present main belief systems: religion and science.

(Certainly we hope that as he continues with Mass Events. Seth will comment extensively on Three Mile Island, just as he’s in the process of doing about Jonestown. In fact, material on Three Mile Island developed in the session this afternoon—which is the main reason we decided to give these excerpts here.

Look at your nuclear reactor troubles at the plant by Harrisburg (Three Mile Island). The entire idea of nuclear power was first a dream—an act of the imagination on the part of private individuals—and then through fiction and the arts a dream on the part of many people. Instantly, probabilities spun out from that dream in all directions with vast potentials and dangers.

(The movie is The China Syndrome, of course, with Michael Douglas, Jack Lemmon and Jane Fonda, which opened to rave reviews perhaps two weeks or so ago. The short story referred to above was reported on a TV program about Three Mile Island: Jane and I caught a glimpse of, I believe, a local newspaper or magazine in the Harrisburg area that had printed a short story about a nuclear accident at that plant, on the same day that the troubles began at Three Mile Island. We hadn’t heard of the story. If I’m in error and the story was printed in a national magazine, for instance, we still haven’t heard of it. Nor have we heard or read about this amazing “coincidence” since seeing that one mention of it on that TV newscast.

(I might as well use this opportunity to point up what I think is an obvious connection between the nuclear mishaps at Three Mile Island, and the mass suicide at Guyana [Jonestown] earlier this year. It could hardly be a coincidence, I remarked to Jane this noon that both mass events had taken place this year, and represented the two poles, or extremes, of mankind’s present belief systems: religion and science. Then this afternoon Sue Watkins called Jane from Dundee—and proceeded to tell Jane about the “obvious connections” between Guyana and Harrisburg....)