The China Syndrome (Columbia Pictures, IPC Films, Major Studio Partners, 1979)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 7:15 p.m. I put on a Turner Classic Movies showing of the 1979 film The China Syndrome, which had the good fortune to come out just before the real-life accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. In its first days of release The China Syndrome had flopped in spite of an all-star cast – Jane Fonda as lifestyle reporter Kimberly Wells, who works for an L.A. TV station amd kist ja[[ems tp be at the Ventana nuclear power plant when it has an accident and a near-meltdown; Michael Douglas as Richard Adams, her aggressively progressive camera person; and Jack Lemmon as Jack Godell, the staff engineer in charge of the nuclear plant who discovers that the data indicating the plant is safe have been faked. Then Three Mile Island happened, and all of a sudden public interest in this movie about a nearly devastating accident at a nuclear power plant zoomed up and the film became a surprise hit. (There’s even an eerily prescient bit of dialogue in the script by James Bridges, who also directed, with Mike Gray and T. S. Cook, in which one of the engineers trying to explain the consequences of a core meltdown says it could contaminate “an area about the size of Pennsylvania”) When The China Syndrome first came out I had already long since decided that nuclear power was a bad idea. The technology is so unforgiving of human error and the inevitable constraints of technologies being used for profit under capitalism that the consequences of getting it wrong in the normal human ways could lead to a land area near the plant being uninhabitable for literally thousands of years. One of my main concerns about nuclear power is that the spent fuel rods from the reactors have to be kept in perfect physical isolation for millennia – and the longest-lived civilizations in human history, the Western and Eastern Roman Empires and the Han Dynasty in China, have only lasted about 1,200 years each.

Bizarrely, since The China Syndrome came out a lot of so-called environmentalists and so-called progressives have actually embraced nuclear power on the (false) argument that nuclear power does not emit greenhouse gases and is therefore “clean.” This not only ignores the immense inputs of energy needed to produce nuclear fuel – most of it drawn from fossil fuels – but also the sheer devastation a nuclear accident could cause. I’ve long regarded nuclear technology of any sort – whether to build weapons or so-called “peaceful” uses for power – as one of those things that man was meant to leave alone, as they used to say in the 1930’s horror films, and more recently I’ve come to regard genetic engineering as another one, and for the same reason: once you create a genetic monstrosity, you can’t un-create it, It will just keep reproducing itself indefinitely until natural forces kill it off – assuming that happens and you haven’t created it so effectively in terms of ensuring its own survival that it simply doesn’t die. While I wouldn’t go whole-hog with what some environmental activists in the 1980’s and 1990’s called “The Precautionary Principle” – the idea that no new technology should be created if its potential negative effects could not effectively be mitigated – because there are a lot of technologies today that would not exist if that had been the guiding criterion – surely there should be some social consideration of the trade-off between the potential risks of a new technology and the promised benefits.

Re-engineering the genetic structure of tomatoes by adding flounder genes to make them flatter so more of them can be packed in a shipping crate does not strike me as a legitimate use of technology, and neither does building humongous nuclear reactors just to boil water to turn huge turbines to generate mass amounts of electricity seem a legitimate purpose, especially since one promising alternative is using solar power and other renewable resources to decentralize the production of electricity and eventually eliminate the need for a power grid at all. Then again, in the real world we have gigantic power utilities and other large corporations who have a vested interest in making sure that electrical power remains centralized so they can continue to profit from it – and it’s interesting that the script for The China Syndrome references that very fact. The principal villains in the piece are the executives of the fictitious “California Gas & Electric” utility that owns and operates the Ventana nuclear plant, and their main obsession is keeping Ventana on line so they can get approval to open their already constructed new nuke at Point Concepcion. Never mind Jack Godell’s warnings that shoddy welds at Ventana threaten a huge release of radioactivity in the environment that could lead to the deaths of millions of people in Los Angeles, some immediately due to radiation sickness and some long-term from the cancers and other long-term health problems radiation can cause.

My husband Charles said he hadn’t seen The China Syndrome since at or near the time it first came out, and while I’d seen it more recently it had still been decades for me. It holds up as quite a movie; TCM hosts Ben Mankiewicz and Molly Haskell (who “made her bones” in the 1970’s with a book about the treatment of women in film called From Reverence to Rape, a title which really says it all) particularly praised director and co-writer Bridges for maintaining suspense in a film filled with technical jargon about nuclear power that was probably unfamiliar to most audiences of its time. Like a lot of other movies from the 1970’s, The China Syndrome is quite cynical not only about nuclear power but about capitalism in general; the corporate villains in the film will literally stop at nothing, including murder, to keep the truth about Ventana’s shoddy workmanship and dangerous defects from coming out. In the film, Godell gives a packet of X-rays ostensibly showing various welds at the plant, but he recognizes them as photos of the same weld reprinted many times over. He gives them to Richard Adams’ assistant Hector Salas (Daniel Valdez) to bring to the Point Concepcion licensing hearing, but Hector’s car is run off the road by a hit man hired by the contractors who built Ventana in the first place and, though he survives and is rescued, the person who ran his car off the road removes the tell-tale packet of photos.

Eventually Godell steals a gun from a plant security guard and uses it to take the entire plant off line, demanding as his price for returning it to the CG&E executives that he be given a live interview with Kimberly Wells – whose character arc was probably made somewhat deliberately similar to Jane Fonda’s real-life one: a woman hired for her good looks to do feel-good stories about birthday parties for tigers at the zoo and other fluff, she grows a political and social conscience as a result of witnessing the first of two “accidents” at the Ventana plant. By the end of the movie she demands more serious assignments from her bosses, even though her interview with Godell gets cut off after three minutes and, when she emerges after the security people at the plant have shot and killed Godell, she asks how much of it got on the air and is told, “Just enough to make him seem like a drunken nut.” The staff at the power plant and the utility that owns it quickly coalesce around that story (the scene in which the utility cuts the power to the control room as Godell is doing his interview is very reminiscent of the scene in which bad-guy Edward Arnold cuts the power from good-guy Gary Cooper just as Cooper is about to expose him in Frank Capra’s 1941 film Meet John Doe), and it takes Godell’s best friend at the plant, Ted Spindler (William Brimley), to stand up and contradict it, calling Godell a hero who tried to warn the people of L.A. about the dangers of the nuclear power plant in their midst. One ends the movie feeling sorry for Spindler, whose one gesture of conscience at the end of the film means he is risking not only being blacklisted from the business but actually losing his life at the hands of the totally amoral and evil people who run the industry he works for!