## Facts

- On March 28, 1979, an accident at the Three Mile Island (TMI) nuclear facility near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania released radiation into the atmosphere.
- Thousands of area residents and businesses sued the plant’s owners, operators, and related entities, claiming injury from radiation exposure; more than 2,000 personal-injury claims were consolidated in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania.
- Earlier procedural battles over federal jurisdiction ended when Congress enacted the Price–Anderson Amendments Act of 1988, which created a federal cause of action for “public liability actions” and made such actions removable to federal court and subject to consolidation.
- The key pretrial dispute was the duty of care governing defendants’ conduct during the accident:
  - Plaintiffs contended that federal radiation-dose limits were designed for normal operations and did not define operator obligations during an accident, and they urged use of the NRC’s “as low as reasonably achievable” (ALARA) principle as an actionable safety standard.
  - Defendants conceded that radiation levels at the edge of the TMI facility exceeded federal permissible levels, but argued that the excess did not reach areas where plaintiffs lived or worked.
- The district court ruled that federal NRC regulations supplied the standard of care, reasoning that both the numerical off-site dose limits and ALARA were part of that standard.
- The district court certified an interlocutory appeal under 28 U.S.C. § 1292(b) to decide whether the ALARA provision (10 C.F.R. § 20.1(c)) or the numerical off-site dose limits (10 C.F.R. §§ 20.105 and 20.106) governed the standard of care.

## Issues

1. In a Price–Anderson “public liability action” arising from the TMI accident, does federal law (rather than state tort standards) supply the duty of care?
2. If federal law supplies the duty, do the NRC’s numerical off-site dose limits in 10 C.F.R. §§ 20.105 and 20.106 define the standard of care, or does ALARA in 10 C.F.R. § 20.1(c) also operate as a separate, liability-creating standard?

## Decision

- The Third Circuit held that a Price–Anderson public liability action is a federal cause of action and that federal law supplies the governing standard of care for radiation-exposure claims.
- The court concluded that the applicable standard of care for off-site exposures is set by the NRC’s numerical dose limits in 10 C.F.R. §§ 20.105 and 20.106.
- The court rejected ALARA (10 C.F.R. § 20.1(c)) as an independent, actionable tort standard for determining breach in these off-site personal-injury claims, treating ALARA as a regulatory objective and planning principle rather than a jury-enforceable negligence yardstick.
- The court therefore affirmed the federal-source-of-duty ruling but reversed the district court to the extent it treated ALARA as part of the liability standard, and remanded for further proceedings consistent with using the numerical dose limits as the standard of care.

## Legal Principles

- A Price–Anderson “public liability action” is a federal cause of action; federal law governs the substantive duty of care for claims arising from a nuclear incident.
- Because nuclear safety is regulated through a comprehensive federal framework, state tort law may not supply a different standard of care that conflicts with NRC requirements.
- For off-site radiation exposure claims under the NRC framework at issue, the numerical limits in 10 C.F.R. §§ 20.105 and 20.106 provide the operative benchmark for breach of duty.
- ALARA (10 C.F.R. § 20.1(c)) is not, by itself, a civil-liability standard for off-site personal-injury claims; it does not replace the numerical dose-limit regime as the measure of negligence.
- State law may still fill in other elements (such as causation, damages, and defenses) only to the extent it is consistent with the federal statutory and regulatory scheme.

## Conclusion

In *In re TMI*, the Third Circuit held that federal law supplies the duty of care in Price–Anderson public liability actions and that the NRC’s numerical off-site dose limits in 10 C.F.R. §§ 20.105 and 20.106—rather than the ALARA principle—define the standard for assessing breach in off-site radiation personal-injury claims arising from the Three Mile Island accident.


In re TMI, 67 F.3d 1103 (1995)