TV Quote of the Day (‘SNL,’ With Rodney Dangerfield on ‘The Pepsi Syndrome’ at Three Mile Island)

Rosalyn Carter [played by Laraine Newman]: “Where is Jimmy? I have a right to see him!”

Ross Denton, head of public relations [played by guest host Richard Benjamin]: “Mrs. Carter, the president is receiving special treatment right now.”

Mrs. Carter: “What kind of special treatment? Why can’t I see him?”

Denton: “Mrs. Carter, this is Dr. Edna Casey. Perhaps she can explain better than I what has happened to the president.”

Dr. Edna Casey [played by Jane Curtin]: “Mrs. Carter, your husband was exposed to massive doses of radiation. Now this has affected the entire cell structure of his body and greatly accelerated the growth process.”

Mrs. Carter: “Well, what does that mean?”

Dr. Casey: “It means, Mrs. Carter, your husband, President Carter, has become [camera zooms in on Dr. Casey] the amazing colossal president.”

Mrs. Carter: “Well, how big is he?”

Dr. Casey: “Well, Mrs. Carter, it’s difficult to comprehend just how big he is but to give you some idea, we’ve asked comedian Rodney Dangerfield to come along today to help explain it to you. Rodney?

”

[Rodney Dangerfield enters]

Rodney: “How do you do, how are you?”

Denton: “Rodney, can you please tell us, how big is the president?”

Rodney: “Oh, he’s a big guy, I’ll tell you that, he’s a big guy. I tell you, he’s so big, I saw him sitting in the George Washington Bridge dangling his feet in the water! He’s a big guy!”

Mrs. Carter: “Oh my God! Jimmy! Oh God!”

Rodney: “Oh, he’s big, I’ll tell you that, boy. He’s so big that when two girls make love to him at the same time, they never meet each other! He’s a big guy, I’ll tell you!”

Mrs. Carter: “Oh no! Oh Jimmy! My Jimmy!”

Rodney: “I don’t want to upset you, lady, he’s big, you know what I mean? Why, he could have an affair with the Lincoln Tunnel! I mean, he’s really high! He’s big, I’ll tell you! He’s a big guy!”

Mrs. Carter: “No! No! No!”

Denton: “Rodney, thank you very much. You can go.”

Rodney: “It’s my pleasure. He’s way up there, lady! You know what I mean?”—Saturday Night Live, Season 4: Episode 16, “The Pepsi Syndrome” skit, Apr. 7, 1979

The nuclear accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania may have occurred 40 years ago today, but we live in its shadow even now. The techno-utopia pushed by the nuclear power industry to that point proved, as utopias invariably do, a chimera. An industry that took wing through Dwight Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” program received a decisive check in the early spring of 1979, and subsequent incidents at Russia’s Chernobyl and Japan’s Fukushima plants proved far more damaging, both to the environment and to public trust in institutions.

Only two nuclear power plants are currently under construction in the U.S., and the average age of existing ones is 40 years old, according to an Andrew Maykuth article in the Philadelphia Inquirer last month. The industry has been forced into expensive safety and security measures, with its representatives increasingly compelled to explain themselves.

Speaking of explaining themselves, Saturday Night Live gave a hilarious preview of the parlous future in the week for industry mouthpieces in the week following the accident. The skit title, “The Pepsi Syndrome,” was a send-up of The China Syndrome, the Jane Fonda-Michael Douglas-Jack Lemmon thriller that was still only in its second week when Three Mile Island gave it the kind of unexpected boost that film flacks can only dream of.

“The Pepsi Syndrome,” cited by ex-Senator Al Franken as one of his 10 favorite SNL political sketches, kicked off with Bill Murray spilling the soft drink over the plant’s control board, leading to a meltdown in the plant’s core. Two unconventional people come either to clean up or inspect the damage: a female maintenance worker (Garrett Morris, in drag) and President Jimmy Carter, who, as a former self-advertised “nuclear engineer,” walks in to inspect the core, wearing yellow boots that prove inadequate to the danger he faces. 

I had not seen (or read a transcript of) this scene until now, but I have always recalled my surprise and delight when Rodney Dangerfield came out of nowhere to describe the President’s medical “condition.”

If you want to know more about the scientific and political fallout from Three Mile Island, there are plenty of background sources. (For instance, this past weekend, C-Span re-ran a 2004 interview with J. Samuel Walker, author of Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective.) But comedy forms part of the historical record, too, in telling later generations how contemporary society reacted to events—and in this case, it was just plain fun to see.

Song Lyric of the Day (“No Nukes,” Urging an End to “Atomic Poison Power”)

“Just give me the restless power of the wind
Give me the comforting glow of a wood fire
But take all your atomic poison power away.”—“Power,” by John and Johanna Hall, from the No Nukes CD (1980)

For a long time, I felt that “Power,” the anthem of the 1979 all-star "No Nukes" concert at Madison Square Garden, was a song of the moment, with no lasting relevance. Events of the last week have proven how wrong I was.

If a country such as Japan—which has taken extraordinary measures to prepare for an earthquake—can suffer the kinds of horrors we are now seeing associated with nuclear power, how much hope do we have of evading a similar fate in the United States, where industries have become accustomed to chipping away at regulations meant to ensure the public good?

The next time politicians—Republican or, amazingly enough, Democratic—ask us to consider expanding atomic energy in this country, just remember this: They’ll do to the environment what they did to our financial system a few years ago.

This Day in Scientific History (Ground Broken for 1st U.S. Nuclear Power Plant)

September 6, 1954—On Labor Day, a crowd witnessed President Dwight D. Eisenhower—in town recovering from a heart attack--waving a ceremonial neutron wand over a neutron counter in Denver, Colorado, sending a radio signal to another site 2,500 miles away in Shippingport, Pa. that construction could begin on what was expected to be the world’s first nuclear power plant.

Another plant in Great Britain beat the one near Pittsburgh to the punch, opening nearly a year before. But the life of the American plant—from its opening in 1957 to its decommissioning in 1989—illustrates how initial optimism about a new technology can often give way to disillusionment.

The Shippingport plant, begun 10 months after Eisenhower unveiled his “Atoms for Peace” program before the United Nations, inaugurated the American love affair with the nuclear power plant. Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, thought that this facility—the nation’s first full-scale central station nuclear power plant--was not merely a “pioneer venture” but would even exceed in importance the first railroad to the West. He predicted a future in which energy would be “too cheap to meter.”

Dreams die hard.

A little more than 20 years later, as a high-school sophomore, I attended a school assembly in which a representative of the atomic power industry appeared to present a dog-and-pony show about the industry.

Though hardly a hotbed of radicalism, my school viewed the presentation with irony. The follow-up questions, though polite, were pointed about safety issues. And this was three years before Three Mile Island.

The 60,000-kilowatt Shippingport demonstration project was built jointly by Westinghouse Electric Corp. and Pittsburgh’s Duquesne Light Co., under the direction of Admiral Hyman Rickover’s Naval Reactor Group. Philip Fleger, head of Duquesne, conceived of the project as a way to eliminate the coal and the pollutants that fouled the Pittsburgh air in those days.

According to an interview Fleger gave American Heritage nearly a quarter-century after the plant’s opening, the company needed an alternative to the coal mines it already owned because new urban development laws in Pittsburgh involved strict smoke controls. Opposition to a coal-fired plant they had planned for the Allegheny River forced them to look to something else.

Under Rickover’s typical ferocious prodding, the Shippingport plant opened in two and a half years, compared to the 12 to 14 years required from inception two decades later. Unfortunately, the project went considerably over its budget.

Two decades later, the Beaver County plant was converted to a light water breeder reactor. The plant achieved another first in 1989: the first successfully decommissioned nuclear power plant, involving decontamination technology and nuclear waste-handling techniques. Its nuclear remains were transported more than 8,000 miles across country, finishing its journey on a barge on the Columbia River to be buried on the Hanford Military Reservation in the state of Washington.