1492 – King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain issued the Alhambra edict expelling Jews who were unwilling to convert to Christianity.

1776 – Abigail Adams wrote to her husband John that women were “determined to foment a rebellion” if the new Declaration of Independence failed to guarantee their rights.

1779 – Russia and Turkey signed a treaty concerning military action in Crimea.

1831 – Quebec and Montreal were incorporated as cities.

1854 – The U.S. government signed the Treaty of Kanagawa with Japan. The act opened the ports of Shimoda and Hakotade to American trade.

1862 – Skirmishing between Rebels and Union forces took place at Island 10 on the Mississippi River.

1870 – In Perth Amboy, NJ, Thomas Munday Peterson became the first black to vote in the U.S.

1880 – Wabash, IN, became the first town to be completely illuminated with electric light.

1885 – Binney & Smith Company was founded in New York City. The company later became Crayola, LLC.

1889 – In Paris, the Eiffel Tower officially opened.

1900 – The W.E. Roach Company was the first automobile company to put an advertisement in a national magazine. The magazine was the “Saturday Evening Post“.

1900 – In France, the National Assembly passed a law reducing the workday for women and children to 11 hours.

1901 – In Russia, the Czar lashed out at Socialist-Revolutionaries with the arrests of 72 people and the seizing of two printing presses.

1902 – In Tennessee, 22 coal miners were killed by an explosion.

1904 – In India, hundreds of Tibetans were slaughtered by the British.

1905 – Kaiser Wilhelm arrived in Tangier proclaiming to support for an independent state of Morocco.

1906 – The Conference on Moroccan Reforms in Algerciras ended after two months with France and Germany in agreement.

1906 – The Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States was founded to set rules in amateur sports. The organization became the National Collegiate Athletic Association in 1910.

1908 – 250,000 coal miners in Indianapolis, IN, went on strike to await a wage adjustment.

1909 – Serbia accepted Austrian control over Bosnia-Herzegovina.

1917 – The U.S. purchased and took possession of the Virgin Islands from Denmark for $25 million.

1918 – For the first time in the U.S., Daylight Saving Time went into effect.

1921 – Great Britain declared a state of emergency because of the thousands of coal miners on strike.

1923 – In New York City, the first U.S. dance marathon was held. Alma Cummings set a new world record of 27 hours.

1932 – The Ford Motor Co. debuted its V-8 engine.

1933 – The U.S. Congress authorized the Civilian Conservation Corps to relieve rampant unemployment.

1933 – The “Soperton News” in Georgia became the first newspaper to publish using a pine pulp paper.

1939 – Britain and France agreed to support Poland if Germany threatened invasion.

1940 – La Guardia airport in New York officially opened to the public.

1941 – Germany began a counter offensive in North Africa.

1945 – “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams opened on Broadway.

1946 – Monarchists won the elections in Greece.

1947 – John L. Lewis called a strike in sympathy for the miners killed in an explosion in Centralia, IL, on March 25, 1947.

1948 – The Soviets in Germany began controlling the Western trains headed toward Berlin.

1949 – Winston Churchill declared that the A-bomb was the only thing that kept the U.S.S.R. from taking over Europe.

1949 – Newfoundland entered the Canadian confederation as its 10th province.

1958 – The U.S. Navy formed the atomic submarine division.

1959 – The Dalai Lama (Lhama Dhondrub, Tenzin Gyatso) began exile by crossing the border into India where he was granted political asylum. Gyatso was the 14th Daila Lama.

1960 – The South African government declared a state of emergency after demonstrations led to the death of more than 50 Africans.

1966 – An estimated 200,000 anti-war demonstrators march in New York City. (New York)

1966 – The Soviet Union launched Luna 10, which became the first spacecraft to enter a lunar orbit.

1967 – U.S. President Lyndon Johnson signed the Consular Treaty, the first bi-lateral pact with the Soviet Union since the Bolshevik Revolution.

1970 – The U.S. forces in Vietnam down a MIG-21, it was the first since September 1968.

1976 – The New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that Karen Anne Quinlan could be disconnected from a respirator. Quinlan remained comatose until 1985 when she died.

1980 – U.S. President Carter deregulated the banking industry.

1981 – In Bangkok, Thailand, four of five Indonesian terrorists were killed after hijacking an airplane on March 28.

1985 – ABC-TV aired the 200th episode of “The Love Boat.”

1986 – 167 people died when a Mexicana Airlines Boeing 727 crashed in Los Angeles.

1987 – HBO (Home Box Office) earned its first Oscar for “Down and Out in America”.

1989 – Canada and France signed a fishing rights pact.

1991 – Albania offered a multi-party election for the first time in 50 years. Incumbent President Ramiz Alia won.

1991 – Iraqi forces recaptured the northern city of Kirkuk from Kurdish guerillas.

1993 – Brandon Lee was killed accidentally while filming a movie.

1994 – “Nature” magazine announced that a complete skull of Australppithecus afarensis had been found in Ethiopia. The finding is of humankind’s earliest ancestor.

1998 – U.N. Security Council imposed arms embargo on Yugoslavia.

1998 – Buddy Hackett received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

1998 – For the first time in U.S. history the federal government’s detailed financial statement was released. This occurred under the Clinton administration.

1999 – Three U.S. soldiers were captured by Yugoslav soldiers three miles from the Yugoslav border in Macedonia.

1999 – Fabio was hit in the face by a bird during a promotional ride of a new roller coaster at the Busch Gardens theme park in Williamsburg, VA. Fabio received a one-inch cut across his nose.

2000 – In Uganda, officials set the number of deaths linked to a doomsday religious cult, the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments, at more than 900. In Kanungu, a March 17 fire at the cult’s church killed more than 530 and authorities subsequently found mass graves at various sites linked to the cult.

2004 – Air America Radio launched five stations around the U.S.

2004 – Google Inc. announced that it would be introducing a free e-mail service called Gmail.

2016 – Apple released the iPhone SE.

On this day in 1964, residents of the District of Columbia cast their ballots in a presidential election for the first time.

The passage of the 23rd Amendment in 1961 gave citizens of the nation’s capital the right to vote for a commander in chief and vice president. They went on to help Democrat… read more »

At 4 a.m. on March 28, 1979, the worst accident in the history of the U.S. nuclear power industry begins when a pressure valve in the Unit-2 reactor at Three Mile Island fails to close. Cooling water, contaminated with radiation, drained from the open valve into adjoining buildings, and the core began to dangerously overheat.

The Three Mile Island nuclear power plant was built in 1974 on a sandbar on Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna River, just 10 miles downstream from the state capitol in Harrisburg. In 1978, a second state-of-the-art reactor began operating on Three Mile Island, which was lauded for generating affordable and reliable energy in a time of energy crises.

After the cooling water began to drain out of the broken pressure valve on the morning of March 28, 1979, emergency cooling pumps automatically went into operation. Left alone, these safety devices would have prevented the development of a larger crisis. However, human operators in the control room misread confusing and contradictory readings and shut off the emergency water system. The reactor was also shut down, but residual heat from the fission process was still being released. By early morning, the core had heated to over 4,000 degrees, just 1,000 degrees short of meltdown. In the meltdown scenario, the core melts, and deadly radiation drifts across the countryside, fatally sickening a potentially great number of people.

As the plant operators struggled to understand what had happened, the contaminated water was releasing radioactive gases throughout the plant. The radiation levels, though not immediately life-threatening, were dangerous, and the core cooked further as the contaminated water was contained and precautions were taken to protect the operators. Shortly after 8 a.m., word of the accident leaked to the outside world. The plant’s parent company, Metropolitan Edison, downplayed the crisis and claimed that no radiation had been detected off plant grounds, but the same day inspectors detected slightly increased levels of radiation nearby as a result of the contaminated water leak. Pennsylvania Governor Dick Thornburgh considered calling an evacuation.

Finally, at about 8 p.m., plant operators realized they needed to get water moving through the core again and restarted the pumps. The temperature began to drop, and pressure in the reactor was reduced. The reactor had come within less than an hour of a complete meltdown. More than half the core was destroyed or molten, but it had not broken its protective shell, and no radiation was escaping. The crisis was apparently over.

Two days later, however, on March 30, a bubble of highly flammable hydrogen gas was discovered within the reactor building. The bubble of gas was created two days before when exposed core materials reacted with super-heated steam. On March 28, some of this gas had exploded, releasing a small amount of radiation into the atmosphere. At that time, plant operators had not registered the explosion, which sounded like a ventilation door closing. After the radiation leak was discovered on March 30, residents were advised to stay indoors. Experts were uncertain if the hydrogen bubble would create further meltdown or possibly a giant explosion, and as a precaution Governor Thornburgh advised “pregnant women and pre-school age children to leave the area within a five-mile radius of the Three Mile Island facility until further notice.” This led to the panic the governor had hoped to avoid; within days, more than 100,000 people had fled surrounding towns.

On April 1, President Jimmy Carter arrived at Three Mile Island to inspect the plant. Carter, a trained nuclear engineer, had helped dismantle a damaged Canadian nuclear reactor while serving in the U.S. Navy. His visit achieved its aim of calming local residents and the nation. That afternoon, experts agreed that the hydrogen bubble was not in danger of exploding. Slowly, the hydrogen was bled from the system as the reactor cooled.

At the height of the crisis, plant workers were exposed to unhealthy levels of radiation, but no one outside Three Mile Island had their health adversely affected by the accident. Nonetheless, the incident greatly eroded the public’s faith in nuclear power. The unharmed Unit-1 reactor at Three Mile Island, which was shut down during the crisis, did not resume operation until 1985. Cleanup continued on Unit-2 until 1990, but it was too damaged to be rendered usable again. In the four decades since the accident at Three Mile Island, not a single new nuclear power plant has been ordered in the United States.

Citation Information
Article Title
Nuclear disaster at Three Mile Island
Author
History.com Editors
Website Name
HISTORY
URL
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/nuclear-accident-at-three-mile-island
Access Date
{{$root.currentTime | date:’MMMM d, yyyy’}}
Publisher
A&E Television Networks
Last Updated
March 25, 2019
Original Published Date
November 24, 2009

By History.com Editors

At the height of the crisis, plant workers were exposed to unhealthy levels of radiation, but no one outside Three Mile Island had their health adversely affected by the accident. Nonetheless, the incident greatly eroded the public’s faith in nuclear power. The unharmed Unit-1 reactor at Three Mile Island, which was shut down during the crisis, did not resume operation until 1985. Cleanup continued on Unit-2 until 1990, but it was too damaged to be rendered usable again. In the four decades since the accident at Three Mile Island, not a single new nuclear power plant has been ordered in the United States.