Other agencies include : Nuclear power plants are some of the most sophisticated and complex energy systems ever designed . Any complex system , no matter how well it is designed and engineered , can not be deemed failure-proof . Veteran journalist and author Stephanie Cooke has argued : The reactors themselves were enormously complex machines with an incalculable number of things that could go wrong . When that happened at Three Mile Island in 1979 , another fault line in the nuclear world was exposed . One malfunction led to another , and then to a series of others , until the core of the reactor itself began to melt , and even the world 's most highly trained nuclear engineers did not know how to respond . The accident revealed serious deficiencies in a system that was meant to protect public health and safety . The 1979 Three Mile Island accident inspired Perrow 's book '' Normal Accidents '' , where a nuclear accident occurs , resulting from an unanticipated interaction of multiple failures in a complex system . TMI was an example of a normal accident because it was " unexpected , incomprehensible , uncontrollable and unavoidable " . Perrow concluded that the failure at Three Mile Island was a consequence of the system 's immense complexity . Such modern high-risk systems , he realized , were prone to failures however well they were managed . It was inevitable that they would eventually suffer what he termed a ' normal accident ' . Therefore , he suggested , we might do better to contemplate a radical redesign , or if that was not possible , to abandon such technology entirely . A fundamental issue contributing to a nuclear power system 's complexity is its extremely long lifetime . The timeframe from the start of construction of a commercial nuclear power station through the safe disposal of its last radioactive waste , may be 100 to 150 years
Three Mile Island
Three Mile Island accident
Nuclear safety and security