Rick Parks achieved personal and professional success, without question.
Parks — a former Navy-trained nuclear operator and native of Butler County — was vital in the making of the Emmy-nominated documentary, “Meltdown: Three Mile Island.”
Three Mile Island, located in central Pennsylvania, was the worst nuclear power plant meltdown in American history and remains the worst accident of its kind in the United States.
The accident — due to a valve malfunction compounded by human error — was a partial nuclear meltdown of the Unit 2 reactor of the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station on the Susquehanna River in Londonderry Township, near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
No fatalities were reported, but the concern over growing health problems for the residents became pivotal.
But, from the beginning, the plant’s operators and government officials tried to downplay the disaster, minimizing the accident’s severity, and refusing to mandate an evacuation of the region.
The film, available via Netflix, was released in May 2022.
“In January 2018, I received a call from Carla Shamberg and Dan Levinson. Dan is one half of Moxie Pictures. Carla is a woman who did (the movie) Erin Brokovich,” said Parks, who worked as a nuclear power plant engineer at Three Mile Island.
The film centers around the whistleblowers who wanted to protect the community, as well as illuminate the corporate negligence that took place.
“When Carla and Dan wanted me to tell the story, because they had gone to the Government Accountability Project (GAP) and had asked for a list of people of whistleblowers that they thought had changed world history. The government accountability project first recommended that they talk to me,” said Parks.
Both Shamberg and Levinson had sold Netflix a six-part (one hour per episode) series about whistleblowers, said Parks.
Parks agreed.
“They did a two-hour Zoom video interview with me. I had some reservations,” said Parks. “They took that two-hour video and went to Netflix and Netflix said ‘Yes.’”
For two years (2018-2020), Parks spent countless hours reliving the incident that occurred on March 28, 1979 — discussing all elements of the nuclear disaster and the cover-up attempts that followed.
“I spent hours and hours and hours on the phone, on Zoom calls, sending documents back and forth, answering their questions. They had to substantiate everything I said. I had to prove everything I said,” said Parks. “If I can prove it once, then I can prove it twice.”
Shamberg and Levinson brought in anyone and everyone who would talk.
“They decided it would not be six one-hour episodes, that it would be a four-part documentary,” recalled Parks. “We began filming here in East Texas. They rented a ranch, and that is where they did the filming.”
Filming concluded in early 2021 in Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania.
The meltdown put the nation in a precarious position: “The verge of an apocalypse” capable of initiating “a meltdown that could take out Philadelphia, New York City and Washington, DC,” Tom Devine, of the watchdog group Government Accountability Project, said in the film.
Not only was Parks a valuable engineer, but the war he waged against Bechtel Corp., the company hired to conduct the billion-dollar cleanup effort by Metropolitan Edison and supervised by the government’s Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), has its rightful place in the country’s energy industry history books.
“I went after them big time,” said Parks. “I don’t mean in court, or a monetary fashion or anything, although, I also did that. I made an unholy alliance with the anti-nuclear group, everywhere Bechtel had their fingers involved in a nuclear power plant, I volunteered my services to help them. And I was pretty good at it.”
While Parks now resides in east Texas, he was born in Poplar Bluff and makes the trek back to see family and friends every year.
“My ancestry goes back a long time,” said Parks.
“Meltdown: Three Mile Island” was nominated in the category of Outstanding Historical Documentary in 2023. Also nominated in the category was “Hostages,” which won, and “Watergate: Blueprint for a Scandal.” “Hostages” tells the story of Nov. 4, 1979, when Iranian student activists stormed the U.S., embassy in Tehran and took 60 Americans hostage.