[insects chirping]
[somber music playing]
[Rick] I've been pretty frightened at times in my life.
That time was pretty close to the top.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Rick] You get pushed into a corner.
You don't have anywhere to go but to come out swingin'.
And so that's why I made the decisions I made.
[sirens blaring]
[Rick] After everything that happened to me at Three Mile Island,
I was convinced that plant had the potential
to cause another accident scenario
that would not only destroy the nuclear industry
but could destroy people.
Millions of lives were at stake.
I live in East Texas.
I grew up in the state of Missouri during the Vietnam era.
Like all young guys in those days, I knew I wasn't gonna survive the draft.
And sure enough, one night, my wife was sitting at the table,
and I could tell she had been cryin',
and she handed me my draft notice.
So I went down the very first thing the next morning
to the local Navy recruiter,
but the only thing they had available was a naval nuclear power program.
It was a six-year enlistment.
So, I took it.
Your next six months will be at a Navy nuclear prototype facility.
[Rick] When I first got to nuke school, there was a sign that said,
"Men that pass through here are about to receive a $50,000 education."
And one of my classmates climbed up there one night and wrote,
"Shoved up your butt a nickel at a time." [chuckles] You know?
You went through everything from all the chemistry,
the metallurgical aspects of reactors, reactor physics, pump theory,
electrical theory, you name it.
And I was one of the few non-degree'd guys.
So, yeah, I had to bust my butt.
[speaking indistinctly]
[Rick] And both my sons were born when I was in the Navy.
And they wouldn't let me go home to see 'em.
But everyone aboard the ship has a responsibility
in the area of safety.
[Rick] In the Navy, I discovered a love that I never knew existed before
because nuclear power was just it for me.
But I'd never had anybody
place such a high expectation on performance on me
like the admiral did.
[alarms blaring]
This is the reactor of the Navy's first nuclear-powered submarine,
the Nautilus.
[Rick] Admiral Rickover is considered the father of the nuclear navy.
He created a reactor in a submarine that would make a submarine,
a true submarine, never have to surface.
I would charge Hell with a bucket of sand if that man was leading me
because he made the nuclear submarine world safe.
Now this is made just as safe
as the plants in the Atomic Energy Commission.
[Rick] And the admiral gave me a professional code that is unrivaled.
"Be responsible." That was his philosophy.
Every decision you made had to be responsible.
[reporter] The accident at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island nuclear plant
shocked the nation,
which has been looking to nuclear energy
as a way to solve our dependence on foreign oil.
And now, in the wake of TMI,
utility companies have canceled plans to build 51 new nuclear plants.
[reporter 2] Nuclear opponents who would shut down every reactor in the country
simply are not in touch with our needs for tomorrow.
But nuclear advocates who would pretend that nothing was changed
by our vigil at Three Mile Island simply are out of touch with reality.
[Rick] The accident really threw a curveball
into the general public's acceptance
of power produced by nuclear reactors.
We must now begin the long and perhaps more arduous task
of assessing what the long-term consequences
of this event will be.
[Rick] But I believe in the promise of nuclear energy.
And so when I was presented with a golden opportunity
to take part in the cleanup at Three Mile Island,
I leaped at the opportunity to do it because I could focus
on making the future of the entire nuclear industry safe.
I got everything all set up,
made all the arrangements I needed to make.
A few weeks before I was to report
to start work at Three Mile Island…
my wife was killed in a wreck.
There was a car wreck leavin' a bar one night,
and she did not make it.
I don't wanna talk about it.
[grunts]
[somber music playing]
[Rick] So that was it.
In June of 1980, I arrived at Three Mile Island and began work,
myself and my two sons.
[reporter] Cleaning up the mess left by the accident at Three Mile Island
has spawned a new industry
with more than a thousand government workers now on the scene.
[Lake] In 1980, I was sent to basically be
the director of the NRC's on-site office
at Three Mile Island,
and ensure public health and safety for the cleanup.
[reporter] Radioactivity levels are so high,
one hundred times the lethal dose now inside this containment area,
that there's a massive cleanup job ahead.
[Lake] Now, cleanup is not a short job at all.
We were in a situation which was never encountered before.
Nobody had ever had an internally melted core,
all this damage, all this radioactivity.
So there's the stabilization phase, the first couple of months.
Then for the next year, you gotta disassemble the core
to put the fuel into engineered canisters and ship it off site.
[reporter] The cost of what has been called "a historic cleanup"
is so high because of the extremely sensitive
and potentially dangerous nature of the accident.
The estimated cost of all that is one billion dollars.
[Eric] Three Mile Island cost 700 million to build,
and it operated for less than 90 days.
So, we're thrown into this.
Where's the money gonna come from,
and where is the technology gonna come from?
So the people that own the plant outsourced the job to Bechtel.
Bechtel is like the 51st state, the nuclear state.
It's your one-stop-shop for nuclear cleanups.
[Rick] Bechtel had been involved in the nuclear industry since day one.
They were the largest privately-owned construction enterprise in the world.
Very well politically connected.
I, Ronald Reagan, do solemnly swear…
That I will faithfully execute…
[Rick] When Ronald Reagan was meeting with all the powers that be
to get him to throw his hat in the ring for the 1980 election,
Steve Bechtel was one of the people that was there.
What contracts have we got?
[Eric] You have people like Caspar Weinberger and George Shultz
that served on their board, and there's a power play.
The cleanup was larger than Three Mile Island itself.
It was about the survival of the nuclear industry.
[Lake] So Bechtel had become
the major decommissioning contractor for the cleanup.
And we knew we needed to do it safely.
But we also had a sense of urgency to it.
[reporter] The longer the cleanup continues, it's generally agreed,
the greater the chance something else could go wrong with the plant.
[Lake] There were major milestones set up with the management
to recover from the accident.
We had nine feet of water in the basement that was highly radioactive.
We had to get that out.
Then gather up contaminated materials, with the ultimate being
the melted fuel core inside the reactor vessel itself.
That was the goal.
But, first and foremost, you had to vent the containment.
[reporter] It's supposed to take as long as a month
to force radioactive krypton gas into the air
from inside the crippled nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania.
[reporter 2] The question of credibility has cropped up many times
since last year's accident.
[Paula] People were terrified.
We've already been exposed, our children, our family,
everybody's been exposed to God knows how much.
And then they want to vent on top of it.
[reporter] The people's feeling was summed up very quickly.
All for releasing the krypton applaud.
Those against releasing the krypton…
[cheering]
[Paula] I never used to question before,
and now I question everything.
[reporter] According to the vice president of the power company,
residents have nothing to worry about.
[Robert Arnold] That's not to say that we won't encounter
additional equipment problems,
but there's not a need for concern.
[Joyce] That infuriated me because to me it was really a dog and pony show.
This is real life. This is what we are living.
And we wanna have answers to what our options are,
and what we can do, and what you are gonna do to protect us.
[reporter] Joyce Corradi bought this van with double gas tanks for a quick getaway.
She is one of those who can't stand any more anxiety.
It's hard to live here when you know that when a siren blows,
that you hope it's a friend's house on fire
instead of something wrong on the island.
That's a hard way to live.
[reporter] Despite assurances,
people living close to the plant decided to leave.
[Paula] We evacuated, we left while they vented.
It's just not worth it.
My family is too important.
I'd much rather be home today, but…
[reporter] Can Metropolitan Edison and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission
ever dispel the fears of nearby residents?
[Joyce] We went to meet Lake Barrett who was the head of the NRC on the island.
I told him, "I want you to look into my face,
and I want you to remember
every decision that you make about nuclear power."
"There are people like me that you involve,
and you must take us into consideration."
[Lake] Well, the community was very concerned about anything nuclear going on.
There was an air of distrust.
So people say this, that, "They mislead this…"
I don't have time for drama in my life, okay?
And emotion, uh… I, I respect people's emotions.
I respect Joyce and those people very, very much.
But I'm so saddened
by them being further traumatized by scare stories in the news.
[reporter] The NRC held this meeting to explain
Met-Ed's proposed plan to vent krypton gas from the containment building.
Keep your krypton! Keep your krypton!
[Lake] They are hysterical, non-meaningful arguments.
[Rick] With the advent of the accident,
the future of the entire nuclear industry was cast into doubt.
So there became an impetus on the political side
and in the industrial side to push the cleanup faster.
And my experiences at Three Mile Island was,
yes, they would take every shortcut they possibly could.
[speaking indistinctly]
[Rick] Bechtel had a reputation
for a "get it done no matter what" type of company.
To begin with, in order to vent, the Bechtel personnel had decided
they would build this huge filtration train,
and they would pump all of the radioactive gases out of there.
Well, in the process, they put duct tape over it.
Duct tape is good for a lot of things. You can ask any redneck.
They can do anything with duct tape and baling wire.
But you can't stop radioactivity with it.
[alarms blaring]
[Teletector pegging]
[reporter] A small amount of radioactive gas
drifted through a filter, up the stack, into the air.
The vent was stopped at 8:04. They got an alarm on the stack monitor.
[reporter] The venting of krypton gas from the containment building
is just the beginning of the cleanup.
[Rick] Following all that, we were going to have to design a shield
to protect the people working in the reactor compartment
from radiation exposure.
And Bechtel was asking people to volunteer to go in, trying to make it look like
you were really accomplishin' something great for humanity.
I refused to make any reactor building entry
because you don't know what you're walkin' into.
[Teletector pegging]
[Teletector pegging louder]
[suspenseful music playing]
[Rick] People were limited to minutes at the most
to be inside the reactor building.
This took a period of months,
and we had not started to process
any of the high-level radioactive waste from the accident.
[reporter] People are concerned about how slowly
the cleanup of the damaged plant is going.
Some don't believe those working on the plant know what they are doing.
[reporter 2] The utility says the cleanup will be finished in 1983.
The NRC says it will take at least through '84.
But the two sides agree on one thing, the fact that the cleanup cost is soaring.
[Robert] Some of it has not progressed as rapid we'd like,
and I think that it will eventually operate again.
Uh, I'm personally dedicated to ensuring that
we have the opportunity to do that.
[Rick] The cleanup's over-budget, behind schedule.
So the owner of the plant, GPU, establish a milestone schedule.
Additional dollars would not be turned loose to Bechtel
until each milestone had been accomplished.
And so the closer it came to a milestone,
the more pressure was put on us by Bechtel to accomplish the schedule.
Millions of dollars were at stake.
And that was about the time Larry King was hired.
[man] The executive vice president was unhappy with the way things were movin'.
So they decided to hire me, figurin' that I could help out.
And I got off to a bad start with Bechtel
because they were trying to get it done fast.
Larry demonstrated to me his attitude about gettin' the job done is,
"Get it done right the first time."
The milestone that started the trouble was the reactor building polar crane.
That became the only important thing to pay attention to.
[tense music playing]
The accident caused melting down in the core.
There were melted fuel rods and debris in the bottom of the reactor.
And we were going to lift the reactor vessel head with the polar crane
to get all that stuff out of there.
But the accident,
combined with venting all of that radioactive water and steam,
had exposed the polar crane to radiation.
We had to replace it all with brand-new cable,
put all brand-new brakes on.
Everything had to be spiffy neat
to ensure that you're operating your polar crane safely.
And so I went to review all the modification documentation
that would've been done about the polar crane.
There was none.
The head Bechtel manager on site didn't wanna spend the money.
He wanted it done faster.
[Teletector pegging]
As Parks found out, Bechtel had jury-rigged some parts.
They didn't put in the parts that were there before the accident.
I thought, "This is a serious situation."
"It's no time to be foolin' around, or cutting corners or anything else."
And right after that, Ed Gischel,
who was the director of engineering workin' for me, came and said,
"We shouldn't allow that crane to be lifted unless they load test it first."
So when they both came to me, I decided, "I agree with you."
"We're not gonna lift the head, and I'm not gonna sign for it."
[speaking indistinctly]
[Larry] So I went up to the next level, called the Vice President of GPU.
And I remember, he got very angry with me
because I told them either he knew what was goin' on,
and he didn't pay any attention to it,
or he didn't know what was goin' on.
And in either case, it was a problem.
[Rick] Myself, Ed Gischel, and Larry King
knew all of these modifications had been made,
but we could not come up with how many.
Where the material all came from?
Who did the verification?
Nothin'.
Bechtel management, they…
"No. We gotta get it done. Just do it. Do it now."
Organizations rot from the top down. They do not rot from the bottom up.
If management does not establish the control parameters
that everybody is expected to behave in a nuclear power plant,
you're flirtin' with tickling the belly of the dragon.
And the potential consequences with a reactor…
are damn dangerous.
You can stumble into a situation you can't walk out of.
There is still over a thousand pounds
of highly-radioactive nuclear fuel
within the bowels of the reactor at Three Mile Island.
If something failed on that reactor building polar crane
when we were in the process of removing that head,
there was a concern that if you dropped the head,
that we could cause enough of a fracture in the reactor vessel
where we could approach a China Syndrome.
We could disturb that fuel to the point where we would initiate supercriticality,
at which point it would've ejected masses of radioactive metal,
or it would've burned through the bottom of the reactor.
And if it broke, we would not be able to keep the core covered.
[alarms blaring]
[Rick] We would never regain entry to that reactor building in any of our lifetimes
because the radiation levels escaping would be horrendous.
You would be evacuating Eastern Pennsylvania,
possibly all the way down to Washington, DC.
At that time,
two million people lived within a 50-mile radius of Three Mile Island.
If Bechtel had used the reactor building polar crane
as they intended to do in March of 1983,
those people won't have a chance.
We had the potential for killing 'em.
Period.
[reporter] At 4:00 a.m., March 28th, 1979,
the accident began on the number two reactor
at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island nuclear plant.
Later, federal investigators said
the reactor had come within 30 to 60 minutes of a meltdown.
[reporter 2] It took nearly three years just to complete
the first phase of the cleanup, but the hardest,
most uncertain part of the radioactive cleanup has not even begun,
the reactor itself.
[Eric] The community is focused on two issues.
One is we're starting to deal with the emerging impacts of the cleanup of TMI,
and also Unit 1, the reactor that wasn't involved in the accident,
was shut down during refueling.
People were freaked out that this plant may start again.
[reporter] Unit 1 has been shut down ever since the accident three years ago.
The owners, General Public Utilities,
have asked the NRC for permission to restart Unit 1.
[Eric] And at this point,
the standing of GPU, of Bechtel, of Met-Ed in the community is very low.
[reporter] A local referendum showed that, by more than two to one,
people in the area are opposed to the reopening of the power plant.
[Eric] That was the prevailing public sentiment,
"We don't want this plant restarted." And opposition coalesced.
No, no, we won't go! No, no, we won't go!
[Joyce] When I found out that they wanted to restart Unit 1,
I joined a group along with my friend Paula
called PANE, "People Against Nuclear Energy."
Gentlemen, we live in the daily repercussions of this accident.
Daily ventings, the storage of high-level waste on that island,
and the total incompetence of GPU.
[cheering]
Every Sunday, I went to the island.
I would be at the gate with a sign to keep Unit 1 from going back online.
No restart! No restart! No restart!
[Joyce] After we had become active in the community,
I saw government cars would come and write down license plates
of people that were in these meetings.
[shutter clicking]
I naively said to Paula, "Why are they here?"
You know, I said,
"Look, you're bein' paranoid. We're small fish in the sea."
So naive.
[Joyce] It really frightened me.
And so I called Eric Epstein in Middletown at their meeting headquarters.
I said, "Eric, do you hear that?"
He goes, "Yeah, Joyce, our phones are being tapped."
[Eric] The main driver here is still makin' money.
These companies went to any lengths,
any lengths to make sure that Three Mile Island Unit 1 would restart.
[Paula] I didn't want my kids exposed to anything else.
I did not want that plant to reopen more than anything.
[Joyce] That has been the driving force of both of us.
I really wanted to be able…
[clicks tongue]
[voice breaks] …to look my children in the eye
and tell them I had done my very best,
that I had really tried to make sure that they were safe.
That was the thing that meant the most to me.
[somber music playing]
[interviewer] Is it possible that you're going to have a billion-dollar mausoleum?
[Dick] The people of this area are rightfully skeptical about this facility.
And the burden of proof lies with those who would…
an extraordinarily heavy burden of proof,
lies with those who would reactivate this facility.
[Rick] Previously, I thought that people wavin' their arms in the air
and sayin' "no nukes" and all that,
I thought they were really uneducated to how safe the plant was.
But what started changin' my mind
was my experiences at Three Mile Island.
And then when I lived in Middletown,
I thought the people there were amongst the nicest people I've ever met.
And I was introduced to Betty Quackenbush, and I started dating her.
Her daughter was catchin' the bus on the mornin' of the accident
within 1,000 yards of Unit 2 reactor.
[Nicole] There, that's me.
My mom met Rick Parks when I was ten, almost eleven.
Pictures of Rick and my mother.
I took to him right away.
He had that accent that I liked with a little twang.
That's what I said, "You're twangin'."
[chuckling] Oh, my gosh. It's so long ago.
He came into our lives
and made the family unit that I've always wanted.
[Rick] Nikki was the closest thing to a daughter I'll ever have.
And so I tried to be as much of a father to her as I could.
[Nicole] I knew that Rick worked at Three Mile Island.
And one of the things that I really started going back to
is I always had these re-occurring nightmares.
[Rick] Nikki told me a lot about her fears with Three Mile Island.
She did tell me one time that she wasn't as worried about it anymore
because she knew I'd take care of 'em.
[clears throat]
Definitely reminded me, "Be responsible."
You had to show unfailing protection for the general public.
And at that time, Bechtel was going forward with the polar crane.
Myself, Ed Gischel, and Larry King
were asking them to review everything with an approach to overall safety.
But Bechtel did not wanna hear anything.
So Larry said, "Well…"
"Go tell the NRC."
So, I did.
[uneasy music playing]
[Lake] Parks felt that they weren't following the procedures well,
that there could be an explosion of some sort. It's not safe.
Bad things are gonna happen when they use that crane.
I think I looked at it, and I didn't agree with him, okay?
And if the merits of the argument don't warrant action, I'm done with 'em.
The head NRC agent on site, Lake Barrett, was lettin' 'em get away with it,
sayin', "We're gonna do this with Bechtel construction,
and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission
can take their silly-ass rules and shove 'em."
And whatever he told me, I didn't, obviously… go along with it.
He may not have liked it.
He said, "Because of the procedures of this and this and this…"
And I did not go into the drama and the soap operas
about whose procedures were the better procedures.
We certainly want them to speak their piece.
But we analyzed what he had to say.
I was satisfied that that crane was safe enough.
Now, is it zero risk? Never zero.
Okay? Was it acceptable risk to move forward and defuel? Yes.
And therefore I approved it.
[Rick] I asked him for confidentiality.
But Lake Barrett compromised my identity to Bechtel…
intentionally.
No, I did not. It's a small place, right?
Kind of, people know that he, he had a problem with it.
Would it be a secret that he probably came to see me? Probably not.
[chuckles] Okay?
[Rick] If you got the head guy on the NRC
playin' patty-cake with the utility and lettin' 'em run wild,
how can you trust the NRC?
You'd have to have a camera on both corners of their mouth
to figure out which one they were lying out of.
[Larry] Having the NRC watch nuclear plants
is like having a fox watch the hen house
They're not regulating the industry.
They're hand-in-hand with the damn Bechtel.
And then Bechtel came to me on the use of the polar crane and said,
"What am I worried about? The NRC says it's okay."
"You ought to sign off."
And I refused to sign off on it.
So I was actually, uh…
stoppin' progress, stoppin' 'em from gettin' their money.
They fired him.
That is how they handle dissent.
There were intimidation factors with Gischel too.
After he identified the problem with the polar crane,
they wanted to get rid of him.
They ordered Ed Gischel to a psychological evaluation
and not allowed to come back on the job site until he,
"passed the psychological evaluation."
Now, that sounds to me
like the Stalinist tactics I read about when I was studying history.
I knew my days were numbered.
Got up the next morning to go out and go to work.
My van wouldn't start.
I look at the battery cables, and sure enough,
the negative cable is just a little bit loose.
So I go to get my little toolbox beneath the passenger seat
and what do I find?
A bag of marijuana.
I mean, there is a Santa Claus,
but he never dropped pot in my house or my van before come Christmas time,
and it wasn't Christmas time.
So, I took the pot in the house and flushed it.
And then, sure enough,
as I'm drivin' on the island that day, I'm waved over.
I had never been searched.
Never.
They were settin' me up to be fired
with no recourse.
That same day,
all of my positions of authority in the reactor building polar crane
were removed from me by Bechtel management.
So, I no longer had anything that I could stop them with.
I was the one that was the danger
because I had put it in writin' to the NRC
that this is an unreviewed nuclear safety question.
And when I left work that day, I was scared.
And when I walked in, Betty took one look at me and said,
"What is wrong?"
And I told her, "I think I need an attorney."
"I think I'm in trouble at work."
[woman] I was working late, and I got a phone call.
I answered, "Hello, Government Accountability Project."
The voice on the other end of the phone said,
"I'm not gonna tell you who I am."
He said that he had significant issues at a nuclear plant.
He wasn't gonna tell me the name of the plant.
But he needed help.
At that time, the Government Accountability Project, or GAP,
was the leading organization representing nuclear whistleblowers,
and I persuaded him that if there were issues of that big significance,
I was willing to meet with him that night.
He told me the name of a bar, and he would be sitting at the bar,
wearing an oxblood leather jacket
and holding a tube of engineering drawings.
[people speaking indistinctly]
I introduced myself, and then I just sat there for a while,
and he didn't say anything.
And I thought, "Okay."
This is not going well. [laughs]
[Rick] Billie was my first contact with the Government Accountability Project.
And I know I was cagey with her because,
for all I know,
you could be the biggest anti-nuclear organization in the world,
and here I'm gonna give you something
that's gonna slap the nuclear industry around.
[Billie] He was incredibly nervous.
But when he finished his beer, he said,
"Okay, let's go talk." And we went to a booth.
[Rick] It didn't take long for me to find out that she too was a whistleblower.
[Billie] In my own case,
my boss threatened to see to it that I lost custody of my kids
if I ever exposed what he did.
And it happened. I lost custody of my children for a year.
And I'm thinkin', "This woman is someone to respect."
"Someone to admire."
And I threw the dice.
[Billie] Rick rolled out the drawings and started to explain to me
what was supposed to have been inspected
to ensure that the polar crane had survived all those years
in a highly-radioactive environment and would still work.
The documents not only contained proof that it was a potential problem,
but the proof that his management team knew about it
and were determined to proceed anyway.
It's the kind of document you look at and you go,
"Somebody's going to jail for this."
[Rick] I explained, "We're runnin' out of time."
"If we screw this up,
we won't have a second chance."
[Billie] The NRC commissioners were scheduled to vote next week
on whether or not to allow the cleanup to proceed.
We had five days.
And so I try to persuade him
that he was gonna have to do more than just talk to me.
It's not a happy existence when you make yourself known to people,
and you cast a very negative light on their actions.
People tend to wanna come after you with a little bit of hurt in their eyes.
[Billie] It was a legitimate fear in their decision-making process
about whether or not to go forward.
I mean, I would say at least half of the workers that I've represented
over the years from the nuclear power industry
at some point early in their disclosures
say, "I don't wanna be the next Karen Silkwood."
[reporter] Karen Silkwood was a 28-year-old union activist
in November 1974,
working here at Kerr-McGee's Cimarron facility as a lab technician.
[Billie] Karen Silkwood had worked at a nuclear facility in Oklahoma
and was reporting issues about the failure to keep workers safe.
[reporter] Silkwood died in a car crash on this road,
on her way to meet a New York Times reporter.
[Rick] She had concerns about excess radiation.
And when she was on her way to meet with this newspaper reporter
to give proof of her allegations,
she died in a car wreck.
A single-car car wreck.
[reporter 1] The late Karen Silkwood found contaminated with plutonium.
[reporter 2] Traces of radiation poisoning showed up in her blood.
[reporter 3] Her supporters say the car was run off the road,
and the documents disappeared.
Sure does make you wonder.
[reporter] Whether she was murdered or not, her death is fuel for an issue
that is still hot with controversy in this country:
The safety of nuclear power plants.
[Rick] There were a lot of people that were threatened,
intimidated by various utilities across the country.
It can cost you your life.
[Billie] The Karen Silkwood case was still goin' on in litigation,
and it was still a high-profile discussion.
So, the ghost of Karen Silkwood's death created a culture of fear.
[Rick] Meeting with Billie was a blur.
But she reassured me enough that I was willing to go down
and talk to Tom Devine, the legal director of GAP.
[Tom] At the Government Accountability Project,
we worked on around 8,000 cases supporting whistleblowers.
Rick was something exceptional because the stakes were much higher here.
There was a greater sense of urgency
than anything that I've ever worked on before.
Bechtel had scheduled the head lift for five days after I met Rick.
If the polar crane dropped the reactor vessel head in the wrong spots,
that would trigger a meltdown
that could take out Philadelphia, New York City, and Washington DC,
the East Coast of the United States might not be habitable indefinitely.
We're on the verge of an apocalypse.
[Rick] We started working on the affidavit,
and we worked on it non-stop all weekend.
Non-stop.
[Billie] We finished the affidavit to present
to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
But, for Rick, knowing what was going to happen next was unclear to him.
[Rick] Tom says,
"Well, I think, maybe you should consider going public with this information."
It would have been the death knell of the nuclear industry.
[Tom] That was the big irony.
Rick deeply believed in nuclear power.
I mean, it was his loyalty to the technology that drove him.
His disclosure would mean permanent blacklisting in the nuclear industry.
That's the way organizations react to whistleblowers.
They're a threat, and they have to be destroyed.
Bechtel and General Public Utilities would stop at nothing to silence him.
[uneasy music playing]
[Rick] I've wondered, "Why did I do this?"
"Is it worth my career?"
"Is it worth going public?"
I was very concerned, worried.
And when I tried to explain to Betty what had been going on at work,
and that I was thinkin' of going public,
it was a very tense and difficult discussion
because she was scared.
She wanted me just to quit and walk away.
But I just could not get her to understand
the potential significance of what could happen.
[Nicole] You could feel like there would be a little bit of tension,
but they never really expressed, like, exactly what was going on.
You know, we always felt safe,
and we had that family unit that we all wanted.
And when…
When things started to change, so did the family, and the relationship.
[Rick] I loved her. I did not want to lose her.
And I definitely loved the kids.
So, I picked up my sons,
came home, and as we were walking to my apartment,
I noticed my door was slightly ajar.
It was unlocked. It was open.
I knew then that somebody had been in my apartment.
That's why I made my boys wait downstairs with my neighbor.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Rick] My intent to go into my room was, "That's where my guns were."
I walked down the hallway to where the bathrooms were,
and my sons' bedroom, and my bedroom.
I just kinda kicked the doors open to see what was in there.
By that time, I knew the apartment was empty.
No person in there.
It did not appear that there was anything taken.
The TV was there. Stereo was there.
But they had gone through the closet where I had my paperwork stored.
It was patently obvious.
The only thing they were interested in was documentation.
If I had left the documentation there
that I took to Tom Devine in Washington, DC,
I could not have proven anything.
[man speaking on TV]
[Rick] I talked to the lady downstairs.
She confirmed she heard someone in my apartment
the night before while I was gone, and my boys were not home.
That scared me beyond reason for my family's life,
after my apartment was broken into.
I took that as a message that,
"Your sons are vulnerable, and we will get you through them."
That's exactly how I took that.
And that made me an enemy for life.
Because you don't threaten my sons.
That's a step too far.
I will kill for them…
and not hesitate.
[police sirens blaring]
[Rick] I knew that they were out for blood, and they weren't gonna stop.
[police sirens blaring closer]
[Rick] It was the determination to not let 'em get away with it.
I mean, I didn't know what else I could do.
I would tell the world what I thought they needed to know
before they were goin' to do it,
and I went public.
[theme music playing]