Lightning Strikes Twice: Three Mile Island Survivor in Japan Facing Another Nuclear Crisis

The Rev. Russell Becker considers himself lucky to have survived America's worst-ever nuclear accident, at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island in 1979. But 30 years later, he's living in Japan -- and wonders if he'll be a nuclear survivor for a second time.

Friday's 8.9-magnitude earthquake north of Tokyo and the massive tsunami it triggered have killed at least 10,000 people. The quake also destabilized nuclear power plants, unleashing what's believed to be low-level radiation and sparking a second hydrogen explosion today, amid growing fears of nuclear fallout. U.S. military forces maneuvered farther offshore after detecting small amounts of radioactivity in the air. Workers are scrambling to cool reactors with seawater, and nearby residents are being told to stay indoors.

For Becker, who's originally from Buffalo, N.Y., such fears take him back 32 years.

"They say it's just like Three Mile island, and oddly enough, I was in Harrisburg [Pennsylvania] when Three Mile Island went off," Becker told AOL News by phone today from Tokyo. "Now I'm thinking, 'How did I miss Chernobyl?' I seem to be traveling around the world for these things," he joked. "I'm just a little disaster magnet."

Becker is now a Catholic priest who runs an English-language parish in Tokyo, the Franciscan Chapel Center, and has spent the past few days counseling his faithful on how to be survivors.

"People are really scared," he said. "But I tell them, Three Mile Island was the first time something like this happened, and they learned how to respond and take care of it and contain it, and that's what they're doing here."

In 1979, a mechanical or electrical problem in a water pump set off a chain reaction that led to a partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear generating station in Dauphin County, Pa. Even though there were no immediate injuries, the accident was the worst nuclear disaster in U.S. history and stoked concerns about the safety of nuclear-generated electricity as well as the long-term effects of even low-level radiation exposure. Nearly 150,000 people were evacuated from the Harrisburg area at the time.

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About 180,000 residents have been evacuated from areas around Japan's Fukushima Dai-ichi plant in recent days. The country's nuclear safety agency has rated the danger there at 4 on a scale of 1 to 7. The severity measure for Three Mile Island was 5 on the same scale, according to Reuters.

"They're saying this is more like Three Mile Island than Chernobyl, and if that's the case I think the radiation risks to me personally are probably OK. I don't think people around me are all going to get thyroid cancer or something," Brooke McShane, another American living in Tokyo, told AOL News.

But McShane said she's more worried about the longer-term impact the earthquake and its damage to nuclear power plants will have on Japan's energy landscape.

"It worries me that one-third of Japan's energy comes from nuclear, and because of this accident I think the world is really going to turn against nuclear energy," she said. "A country like Japan can't import all the resources it needs to maintain its power needs, so I worry about the long term, what it's going to do to the Japanese economy."

While the economic impact of the quake and its continuing aftermath are far from known, aftershocks continue to rattle nerves -- and homes -- across Japan.

"We're having aftershocks, but it's nothing compared to what people are going through up north," Becker said, describing the areas of northern Japan hardest hit by the quake and tsunami.

"People are just unbelievably devastated. I was talking to a woman who let go of her daughter's hand, and she was swept away and they can't find her daughter now," he said. "That kind of stuff you just never recover from."