US court rejects Three Mile Island accident appeal

["Michael C. Baker" <mcbaker@lanl.gov>]

US court rejects Three Mile Island accident appeals
USA : June 6, 2000

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court cleared the way
on Monday for the operators of the Three Mile Island
nuclear plant to face lawsuits from 1,990 people who
say that they were harmed by radiation from the
nation's worst nuclear accident in 1979.

But the court rejected an appeal by 10 people who saw
their lawsuit against the central Pennsylvania plant
operators dismissed. The plaintiffs had argued that a trial on
the merits should have been held rather than just a pretrial
hearing on the admissibility of expert evidence in the case.

The accident occurred south of Harrisburg in the predawn
hours of March 28, 1979, when a stuck relief valve in TMI's
Unit-2 reactor released radioactive water as steam.

Plant operators then mistakenly shut off cooling water for
the 150-ton reactor core, prompting a partial meltdown and
the evacuation of 140,000 people.

All 2,000 cases, filed by people who lived near the plant,
named eight defendants that owned, operated or supplied
materials to the nuclear power facility. Among the
defendants was the Morristown, New Jersey-based holding
company GPU Inc. and its utility unit, Metropolitan Edison.

A federal judge in 1996 ruled in the test case involving 10
"typical" plaintiffs that there was insufficient evidence to link
their claims of cancer and birth defects to exposure to the
radiation leak. The judge threw out all 2,000 cases.

A U.S. appeals court upheld the dismissal of the claims of
the 10 plaintiffs, but ruled that the dismissal could not be
extended to the other 1,990 cases. Those cases were sent
back to the trial judge.

The Supreme Court rejected and refused to hear both
appeals without any comment or dissent. The legal battle
over the accident dated back to the early 1980s, when
some of the first personal injury claims were filed.

REUTERS NEWS SERVICE

__________________________
Michael C. Baker

Environmental Technology Group
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Mail Stop J594
Los Alamos, NM 87545

mcbaker@lanl.gov

(505) 667-7334 (phone)
(505) 665-8346 (fax)
(505) 996-3519 (pager)
__________________________


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