
The Three Mile Island accident was a partial meltdown of reactor number 2 of Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station (TMI-2) in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, near Harrisburg, and subsequent radiation leak that occurred on March 28, 1979. It is the most significant accident in U.S. commercial nuclear power plant history. On the seven-point International Nuclear Event Scale, the incident was rated a five as an "accident with wider consequences."

The China Syndrome is a 1979 American drama neo-noir thriller film directed by James Bridges and written by Bridges, Mike Gray, and T. S. Cook. The film stars Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon, Michael Douglas, Scott Brady, James Hampton, Peter Donat, Richard Herd, and Wilford Brimley. It follows a television reporter and her cameraman who discover safety coverups at a nuclear power plant. "China syndrome" is a fanciful term that describes a fictional result of a nuclear meltdown, where reactor components melt through their containment structures and into the underlying earth, "all the way to China".

Musicians United for Safe Energy, or MUSE, is an activist group founded in 1979 by Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, Bonnie Raitt, Harvey Wasserman and John Hall. The group advocates against the use of nuclear energy, forming shortly after the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in March 1979. MUSE organized a series of five No Nukes concerts held at Madison Square Garden in New York in September 1979. On September 23, 1979, almost 200,000 people attended a large rally staged by MUSE on the then-empty north end of the Battery Park City landfill in New York.

No Nukes is a 1980 documentary and concert film that contained selections from the September 1979 Madison Square Garden concerts by the Musicians United for Safe Energy collective, with Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, Bonnie Raitt, and John Hall being the key organizers of the event and guiding forces behind the film. Also included were scenes of the organizers getting the event together, expounding upon the dangers of nuclear power, and staging an anti-nuclear rally at Battery Park in New York City.

No Nukes: The Muse Concerts For a Non-Nuclear Future was a 1979 triple live album that contained selections from the September 1979 Madison Square Garden concerts by the Musicians United for Safe Energy collective. Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, Bonnie Raitt, and John Hall were the key organizers of the event and guiding forces behind the album.

Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies is a 1984 book by Yale sociologist Charles Perrow, which provides a detailed analysis of complex systems from a sociological perspective. It was the first to "propose a framework for characterizing complex technological systems such as air traffic, marine traffic, chemical plants, dams, and especially nuclear power plants according to their riskiness". Perrow argues that multiple and unexpected failures are built into society's complex and tightly coupled systems. Such accidents are unavoidable and cannot be designed around.

The Three Mile Island accident was a partial meltdown of reactor number 2 of Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station (TMI-2) in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, near Harrisburg, and subsequent radiation leak that occurred on March 28, 1979. It is the most significant accident in U.S. commercial nuclear power plant history. On the seven-point International Nuclear Event Scale, the incident was rated a five as an "accident with wider consequences."

Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station (TMI) is a closed nuclear power plant on Three Mile Island in Londonderry Township, Pennsylvania, on the Susquehanna River just south of Harrisburg. It had two separate units, TMI-1 and TMI-2. The plant was the site of the most significant accident in United States commercial nuclear energy when, on March 28, 1979, TMI-2 suffered a partial meltdown. According to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) report, the accident resulted in no deaths or injuries to plant workers or in nearby communities. Follow-up epidemiology studies have linked no incidents of cancer to the accident.