Possibly more than any other film, The China Syndrome's popularity benefited from a chance occurrence. The China Syndrome showed many Americans their worst vision of technology gone wrong, but it proved entirely too close to reality when its release coincided with a near meltdown at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania. In the film, Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas play the television news team who, while researching the newly perfected nuclear technology, capture on film an accident resulting in a near meltdown of the power plant. Fonda and Douglas's characters find themselves trapped between the public's right to know and the industry's desire to bury the incident. The nuclear accident depicted by the film became the platform for "NIMBY" culture, in which expectations of comfort and a high standard of safety compelled middle-class Americans to proclaim "Not in my backyard!" Together, these incidents—one fictional and another all too real—aroused enough concern among Americans to prohibit nuclear energy from ever becoming a considerable source of power for the nation.