effects of metal whiskering were chronicled on History Channel's program Engineering Disasters 19. Mitigation and elimination Several approaches are used to reduce or eliminate whisker growth, with ongoing research in the area. Conformal coatings Conformal compound coatings stop the whiskers from penetrating a barrier, reaching a nearby termination and forming a short. Altering plating chemistry Termination finishes of nickel, gold or palladium have been shown to eliminate whisker formation in controlled trials. Tin whisker examples and incidents Galaxy IV Galaxy IV was a telecommunications satellite that was disabled and lost due to short circuits caused by tin whiskers in 1998. It was initially thought that space weather contributed to the failure, but later it was discovered that a conformal coating had been misapplied, allowing whiskers formed in the pure tin plating to find their way through a missing coating area, causing a failure of the main control computer. The manufacturer, Hughes, has moved to nickel plating, rather than tin, to reduce the risk of whisker growth. The trade-off has been an increase in weight, adding per payload. Millstone Nuclear Power Plant On April 17, 2005, the Millstone Nuclear Power Plant in Connecticut was shut down due to a "false alarm" that indicated an unsafe pressure drop in the reactor's steam system when the steam pressure was actually nominal. The false alarm was caused by a tin whisker that short circuited the logic board that was responsible for monitoring the steam pressure lines in the power plant. Toyota accelerator position sensors false positive In September 2011, three NASA investigators claimed that the tin whiskers they identified on the accelerator position sensors of sampled models of Toyota Camry could contribute to the "stuck accelerator" crashes affecting certain Toyota models during 2005–2010. This contradicted an earlier 10-month joint investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and a large group of other NASA researchers that found no electronic defects. However, in 2012 NHTSA maintained: "We do not believe that tin whiskers are a plausible explanation for these incidents...[the likely cause was] pedal misapplication." Toyota also maintains that tin whiskers were not the cause of any stuck accelerator issues: "In the words of U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, 'The verdict is in. There is no electronic-based cause for unintended high-speed acceleration in Toyotas. Period. According to a Toyota press release, "no data indicates that tin whiskers are more prone to occur in Toyota