Three Mile Island: A Day Like No Other -- Until Now

"The world has never known a day quite like today," the somber network news anchor said. "It faced the considerable uncertainties and dangers of the worst nuclear power plant accident of the atomic age."

This was not Japan. It was not Chernobyl. It was Walter Cronkite in March 1979 telling the nation about Three Mile Island.

The most trusted newsman in America sounded alarmed about what he knew and wary about what he was being told.

This pretty much summed up the feelings many us had about what was happening on a long, narrow island in the middle of the Susquehanna River near Middletown, Pa., on March 28, 1979.

At 6:56 a.m., the plant supervisor at Metropolitan Edison's Unit 2 at Three Mile Island declared a "general emergency," the highest of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's four categories of possible incidents. This meant there was the potential for serious radiological consequences to the general public.

It was 8 a.m. before the team leader at the NRC's emergency control center 117 miles south in Bethesda, Md., was told that the event that the nuclear industry insisted could never happen had happened.

The message said it was a "transient event," but there was nothing short-lived, temporary or benign about what was going on inside the nuclear reactor a few miles south of Harrisburg. This would be the first of days of underestimated or overstated or flat-out-wrong misinformation from Met Ed and its owner, General Public Utilities.

"It didn't take long before we quickly realized that Met Ed either didn't understand what was happening in their reactor or had no clue at all on how to handle what was unfolding," Victor Gilinsky, an NRC commissioner at the time, recalled, speaking to AOL News Friday.

State and federal emergency planners were not told how dire the situation was. It was two days before the NRC learned that damage to the fuel rods was greater than Met Ed had reported.

It was more than month before it became public that the operators in Unit 2's control room had measured temperatures close to the melting point of the fuel.

"It was years -- until the reactor vessel was physically opened -- that we learned that by the time the plant operator called the NRC at about 8 a.m., roughly one-half of the uranium fuel had already melted," recalled Gilinsky, a physicist who long fought for improvements in nuclear safety.

In a sense, the accident was over before the government even heard about it, and "it had been many, many times worse than we envisioned at the time," Gilinsky said.

But the people who lived in the area around Three Mile Island didn't know that. They were left to scramble.

The Siren Wouldn't Stop

The wail of dozens of rotating sirens atop buildings and tall poles within miles of Three Mile Island didn't trigger much anxiety at first. Since the plants went on line -- Unit 1 in April 1974 and Unit 2 in February 1976 -- those who lived in the nearby small farm communities heard the sirens being tested every week.

But this time, it didn't stop after the usual 90 seconds. It just kept screeching. On and on and on. It just wouldn't stop, a volunteer firefighter sitting the following morning in a riverside park off Route 441, a couple of miles south of the plant, told a reporter now with AOL News.

First, he said, he though the screaming sirens were broken. Then, finally, it dawned on him that maybe it was for real and something was happening at the plant. He stared at a gauge atop a yellow, Cold War era Geiger counter that was pulled out of a dusty civil defense storage closet in his town hall. His chief told him to watch the needle and call if it moved.

The largely Scottish, Irish and Amish farmers living in the small communities surrounding the reactors were inclined to trust authority.

"These people had faith in the government and the power plant operators. They thought it was run by scientists and that they were safe," recalled Michael Barber, a reporter who lived and worked in Harrisburg at the time.

"These farmers would be standing on the porches of their homes -- some going back to the 1700s -- looking out at TMI's cooling towers, waiting to be told what was happening, what was that metal taste, what should they do," Barber told AOL News on Sunday.

"But the longer their questions weren't answered, the more that faith unraveled. These are essentially good, salt-of-the-earth people who give anyone the benefit of the doubt until they are betrayed. Then you have a hard time earning back trust. "

An Instant Crisis

The plant's redundant safeguards fell like dominoes. Within eight minutes, an accident caused by a series of minor mechanical failures drastically worsened because of inconceivable mistakes by those in the control room.

Workers on the night shift had done routine maintenance on an in-line filter that cleaned condensed steam. To do so, they had shut off three auxiliary pumps that were to be automatically activated to rush in water to cool the reactor in an emergency. Disabling these pumps on an operating reactor is a violation of NRC regulations.

At 4 a.m., the reactor immediately scrammed, or shut down, as it was designed to do. But without cooling pumps, the water quickly boiled off, exposing the rapidly heating fuel.

Those working in the control room did not realize that the main feed-water pumps had failed. Transcripts would later show that piercing danger alarms blared and warning lights flashed all over the long switch- and gauge-covered control panel, but the operators repeatedly ignored them or shut them off. Also shut off was another backup water pump, which operators decided wasn't needed.

The metal cladding on the skinny, long tubes filled with uranium pellets began melting, releasing potentially explosive hydrogen.

"The experts told us that perhaps about 1 percent of the fuel rods had overheated and suffered pinhole damage to the long zirconium tubes that encased the uranium fuel pellets," Gilinsky recalled. But they insisted there was no chance that the fuel melted.

Radiation and temperature monitors on the ceiling of the containment structure -- six feet thick of concrete and steel -- pegged to the extreme reading and became useless. Later, it was found that the temperatures reached 4,000 degrees.

By late Wednesday afternoon, some answers were starting to surface. Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. William Scranton held a news conference and said, "This situation is more complex than the company first led us to believe. Metropolitan Edison has given you and us conflicting information."

He said that radioactive steam was intentionally released into the air by Met Ed between 11 a.m. and 1:30 p.m., "but there is no evidence yet that it has resulted in the presence of dangerous levels."

By the following morning, Pennsylvania and federal agriculture inspectors were sampling the grass and fresh milk in nearby diary farms for radiation. Only traces were found, like the spinach and milk in farms downwind from the Japanese nuclear plants. Or in the slightly radioactive Japanese fava beans detected Sunday in Taiwan. Nevertheless, during TMI, convenience and grocery stores as far away as Baltimore and Rockville, Md., quickly posted large signs saying their milk did not come from Pennsylvania.

Congress Weighs In

Through the days and far into the nights, congressional investigators and staff members were buttonholing every nuclear expert they could find, pressuring their sources with an intensity unmatched by the hungriest reporter.

Henry Myers, former science adviser to the House of Representatives' Interior Committee, had some of the best sources. He and his committee chairman, Rep. Mo Udall, ferreted out information they feared would be concealed from the public.

The blatant dishonesty from the promoters of nuclear power is going to do more harm to the future of nuclear power than the meltdown itself, Udall, an Arizona Democrat, told reporters the second night of the event.

One of the documents that Udall and Myers made public was a scrap of paper with a quick drawing of the reactor on it.

"It was a handwritten list of times and temperatures in the reactor, some of them up to 4,000 degrees. It was March 28 around 8:30 a.m. I think," Myers recalled for AOL News. He says it showed that Met Ed knew what was happening and hid it.

"The plant managers and the corporate people knew things were bad, but I think they believed that at any moment things were going to get better and if they accurately reported what they were seeing, they feared it would have caused a panic," explained Myers, who also served with the Energy Department and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.

The Anti-Nuke Buildup

Long before the sirens tripped in Middletown, Americans had been besieged by real and imagined tales of the peril of nuclear power. By the 1970s, the "ban the bomb" protesters of the 1950s and '60s were chanting "stop the nuke."

The nuclear industry and the public were stunned by continuing and swelling opposition to building a twin reactor nuclear power plant in the middle of New Hampshire's tiny, 16-mile seacoast.

Protests against the construction of Seabrook Station started with a handful of local activists who called themselves the Clamshell Alliance. But month after month, the demonstrations grew, first to dozens and scores and then hundreds. Perhaps enticed by the network news coverage, the demonstrators came from throughout the U.S. and Canada.

The New Hampshire and Massachusetts governments approved the wiretapping and surveillance of the headquarters of the protest groups and the homes of politicians supporting the halt of construction. Special security teams, reportedly hired by a coalition of companies building the plant, infiltrated the protest leadership and leaked fabricated stories about weapon caches and bomb-making supplies.

On May 1, 1977, more than 2,000 anti-nuke protesters clogged U.S. Route 1 in front of the plant. Scores of others used small boats and handmade rafts to evade the hundreds of police called in from surrounding states and crossed the chilled salt marshes to reach Seabrook's fences.

By midnight that Sunday, 1,414 people had been arrested amid tear gas, fire hoses and a few club-wielding cops. Almost all those arrested refused to accept bail and were held for days. Construction on Seabrook Station was stalled for eight years, and in the end, only one unit went on line.

But there was also concern among those who worked in the nuclear industry.

In late 1978, a young Boston physician who specialized in blood diseases -- Dr. Thomas Najarian -- met in the middle of a New Hampshire blizzard with about two dozen retired submarine workers from the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine, where the boats were repaired and refueled.

Standing before the group of well-worn shipbuilders, in a social club's meeting room, the Veterans Administration doctor told them that because of the absence of proper safety rules, the Navy had done them wrong. In a soft cracking voice, he explained to the men -- mostly his patients -- that while working on the nation's first nuclear subs, including the Nautilus, they had been exposed to enough radiation to cause the leukemia that had already killed many of their friends and was sickening them.

Adm. Hyman Rickover, the overly protective father of navy nuclear power, wasted no time in trying to discredit the physician, ridiculing the dying workers as being careless and barring union health experts from examining the work site.

But to the poorly concealed anger of Rickover, investigations by the Government Accountability Office and independent scientists confirmed what Najarian had reported -- that nuclear sub workers at eight military and civilian shipyards were dying of cancer at a rate six times greater than those who worked on nonnuclear ships.

Then, on March 16, 1979, 12 days before TMI seized world headlines, "The China Syndrome" hit big screens throughout the country.

Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon and Michael Douglas kept audiences on the edge of their seats in a drama about a near nuclear meltdown at a California plant, and the plant owner's efforts to conceal the hazards of potentially deadly faults in the plant's construction, which was exacerbated by corporate greed and cost trimming.

And soon the moviegoers were seeing elements of the film played out in real life.

Fear of the Unknown

On Friday, March 30, 1979, Pennsylvania Gov. Richard Thornburgh closed 23 schools within five miles of the plant and ordered the evacuation of pregnant women and preschool children. People were being told to run from something they couldn't see.

Thornburgh and his emergency mangers had anticipated that about 5,000 people would leave the area. Within two days, more than 120,000 had fled central Pennsylvania and parts of Northern Maryland.

A few years later Thornburgh reflected on the panic:

"Thanks not only to the premature disclosure of an erroneous evacuation advisory -- but also to the mysterious tripping of an emergency siren that soon had hearts pounding and eyes widening all over the city -- people were throwing their belongings into trucks and cars, locking up their shops and homes and packing to get out of town. If ever we were close to a general panic, this was the moment."

Short convoys of yellow school buses fled along farm roads and highways, many not sure where they were going.

By late Friday, reports on the existence of a hydrogen bubble in the reactor and an expected explosion were leading news reports around the globe. And more people rushed to leave the area and traveled farther away.

On Saturday, April Fools' Day, President Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalyn, toured the plant and the control room. But all that most people talked about were the yellow rubber booties the presidential party wore.

Industry Arrogance and the Future

Today, the TMI‑2 reactor is permanently shut down and de-fueled, but its smaller sister reactor, Unit 1, continues to generate power.

Long after the radiation dissipated from Pennsylvania, there were years of congressional and NRC investigations, presidential commissions and demands for improvements by anti-nuke and public health activists.

"There is no doubt that the accident permanently changed both the nuclear industry and the NRC. Public fear and distrust increased, NRC's regulations and oversight became broader and more robust, and management of the plants was scrutinized more carefully," the commission wrote about itself.

Hundreds of specific demands were made on the nuclear industry, such as upgrading and strengthening plant design, identifying human performance as a critical part of plant safety, revamping operator training and staffing requirements, and improving emergency preparedness.

However, the NRC privately admits that it doesn't know whether the safeguards have been instituted by nuclear plant builders and operators.

Energy Secretary Stephen Chu told reporters over the weekend that regulators will examine whether reactors should be constructed in less populous locations in the future.


"Anytime there is a serious accident, we have to learn from those accidents and go forward," the secretary said.

This may be the time to do it, Gilinsky said.

"With the vivid images of burning buildings, destroyed structures and explosions fresh in everyone's mind," he said, "the public's concerns about safety are going to be very hard to overcome."

Before TMI, Andrew Schneider, while with The Associated Press, spent two years investigating the history of nuclear power in the U.S.