Today, the Washington Post repeated an old canard about the “deadly” accident at Three Mile Island (in the fourth paragraph — see update below).

If they mean the effects that the media coverage of Three Mile Island had on the U.S. nuclear-plant construction industry, “deadly” is certainly appropriate. But one gets the feeling that they imagine that people actually died.

The Manhattan Institute’s Max Schulz authored a report in 2006 called Energy & the Environment: Myths & Facts, which included Zogby polling that found that 38 percent of Americans thought Three Mile Island was deadly in the conventional sense. 

But that’s a myth.

UPDATE: The WaPo site has corrected the error online, but its doubtless still in the print edition, considering its still on the RSS feed on my Kindle. 

Correction to This Article
Earlier versions of this story, including in the print edition of The Washington Post, wrongly described the 1979 Three Mile Island accident as "deadly." Although the accident was the most serious in U.S. commercial nuclear power plant operating history, it did not cause any deaths or serious injuries.