Harold R. Denton, Voice of Comfort at Three Mile Island, Dies at 80

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/23/us/harold-r-denton-died-three-mile-island-accident.html

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Harold R. Denton, the unflappable federal bureaucrat who comforted Americans worried that the nation’s worst commercial nuclear power accident, at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979, would escalate into a doomsday catastrophe, died on Feb. 13 at his home in Knoxville, Tenn. He was 80.

The cause was complications of pulmonary disease and Alzheimer’s disease, his daughter, Elizabeth Baird, said.

Dispatched to the scene of the accident as President Jimmy Carter’s personal envoy, Mr. Denton was transformed overnight from a faceless government functionary into a very visible expert spokesman. He was hailed as a hero for the reassuring demeanor, forthright responses and resourcefulness that helped prevent a complete meltdown, by both the reactor and the public.

“It was quite clear that Denton’s easy manner, apparent candor and ability to speak plain English as well as nuclear jargon would make him the world’s most believable expert on the technical situation at T.M.I.,” Dick Thornburgh, who was governor of Pennsylvania at the time, wrote in his autobiography, “Where the Evidence Leads” (2003).

A complex series of human and mechanical errors signaled by a raucous blast of steam early on Wednesday, March 28, 1979, resulted in a partial reactor core meltdown and touched off a crisis that threatened not only thousands of lives but also the future of nuclear power.

The accident was a catalyst for sweeping safety regulations. The damaged reactor, on the Susquehanna River near Harrisburg, was never restarted. No new commercial nuclear power plant was licensed by the federal government until 2012.

Mr. Denton, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s director of nuclear reactor regulation, flew by helicopter to the power plant the next morning with a platoon of government experts.

Their immediate mission: to assess the likelihood that the relatively small amount of radiation detected in the atmosphere would reach perilous levels and that the reactor core would burst through the thick steel and concrete walls that contained it.

He later described the plant, operated by the Metropolitan Edison Company, as chaotic, after discovering that technicians had blundered into releasing radiation and that the intense heat had created a potentially explosive hydrogen bubble above the core.

Emotions ran so high that a local police chief recommended that Mr. Denton wear a bulletproof vest at a public meeting in case any angry neighbors or antinuclear protesters might be tempted to shoot the messenger.

But his measured remarks, delivered in a North Carolina drawl, helped calm residents and educated the largely uninformed press corps.

“The president’s stand-in crisis manager Denton began to emerge more and more as the most important and the most trusted source of information as the acute crisis continued,” Brigitte Lebens Nacos concluded in “The Press, Presidents, and Crises” (1990).

Nonetheless, Mr. Denton’s qualified assurance on March 30 — that the possibility of a total meltdown was “very remote,” that there was no “imminent” danger and that no one need evacuate or remain indoors except pregnant women and preschool children — was issued too late to keep tens of thousands of nearby residents from fleeing.

Two days later, he toured the site with Mr. Carter and Mr. Thornburgh. By midweek, most of the people who had been evacuated had returned home, the hydrogen bubble had dissipated and the reactor had begun to cool.

After emerging from obscurity as the effective face of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Mr. Denton became director of its public affairs office. He retired in 1993.

Harold Ray Denton was born on Feb. 24, 1936, in Rocky Mount, N.C., east of Raleigh. His father, Samuel, drove a bread delivery truck. His mother was the former Sula Alga Lamm.

In addition to his daughter, he is survived by his wife, the former Lucinda Oliver; two sons, Harold Jr., known as Hal, and Spencer; seven grandchildren; and a great-grandson.

Mr. Denton’s fascination with atomic energy started in high school, when both he and the science were coming of age. The first in his family to attend college, he graduated from North Carolina State College (now North Carolina State University at Raleigh) in 1958 with a bachelor of science degree in nuclear engineering.

He was hired as a reactor physicist at the Savannah River Plant in South Carolina, which was operated by DuPont and produced fuel for nuclear weapons. He joined the Atomic Energy Commission in 1963 and became the director of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation in 1978.

Just a week before the Three Mile Island accident, Mr. Denton and his wife had gone to see “The China Syndrome,” the Oscar-nominated film about cover-ups of flaws at a nuclear power plant that might have caused a reactor meltdown. (In such a disaster, the overheated core might pierce its cocoon and, theoretically, bore all the way to China.)

“Harold thought it was a pretty good portrayal of the way things might happen, if it ever happened,” Mrs. Denton said of the movie. “But what he really liked was that Jane Fonda.”