TMI 35 years later
"I'm originally from Middletown. Born here in 1945 and I've lived here ever since. My wife and I got married in 1966. She moved here from the coal regions. [I] came out and took a job for the state and worked for the liquor control board for 35 years. I was a budget analyst. We lived in Middletown at the time. A lot of people didn't question nuclear power and TMI because they were phasing out the Air Force base, which had been the employer of probably about 10 or 12,000 people. People were glad for the job."
"Three Mile Island Alert had a meeting in Middletown in the summer of ’78. I had heard some stories about nuclear power and didn't know much about it so I thought I would go and see what I could find out. I picked up a handout by Dr. Helen Caldecott. She was a very compassionate, compelling pediatrician. She was talking about the effects of nuclear power on babies and so on, and that really caught my attention. Then a lot of people get involved in the waste issue and it's like: ‘This is crazy— we’re generating all this waste and we've got no idea what we're going to do with it.’ You’re building a house without the outhouses."
"We met local elected officials and they did pass some proclamations opposing the reopening of the plant. We started at the local level, now we went to the state level and what we found out was there was this organization in DC called the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and they were the sole deciders. We started researching what we [could] do. We called our organization PANE [People Against Nuclear Energy.]"
"Thursday I get that they certainly had a serious problem but they were making progress and solving it and everything was going to be all right. Friday morning I was at work and they detected a high level of radiation. They were releasing some steam because some pressures were building up. That's what lead Thornburgh to recommend the evacuation of young children and pregnant women. I tried to call my wife to tell her we're getting out of here."
“Well, I had only been there for 5 weeks. I’d just gotten the job [and] moved here. No one was ordering me to cover [TMI]. For the first night I went down, I went down to see it— I had a friend and I asked him to drive me down. There were people in moon suits taking radiation readings the first night.”
"I couldn't get through on the phones; everything was all tied [up]. Busy signal was all you could get so I went to a pay phone and was able to get through. Ann had already had Leigh [his daughter] and she said, ‘What are you going to do?’ And I said, ‘We’ve got to leave.’ My mom was here living on her own and Ann's parents were here, so we were concerned. We didn't want them to stay here so I talked to my brother and I said: ‘I’d like to get [mom] out of here.’ He said, ‘We'll take care of her.’ Ann met me with the truck and the kids, her parents were in their car, and we left. We left on the 30th and we came back about ten days later. I had to get back to work."
“Well, I had only been there for 5 weeks. I’d just gotten the job [and] moved here. No one was ordering me to cover [TMI]. For the first night I went down, I went down to see it— I had a friend and I asked him to drive me down. There were people in moon suits taking radiation readings the first night.”
"I’m like: ‘What are we doing here?’ We didn’t really wanna move, we just got a feeling we ought to move. We’re being forced out of our homes. We went, we looked. I was kinda heavy at heart looking at another home because we didn’t want to go. We just decided this is ridiculous— we’re not the ones that should be gone. They’re the ones that should be gone. This is our home, so we’re gonna fight to protect our house and our safety and our children. Let’s not give in and leave. Let’s stay and fight."
“Well, I had only been there for 5 weeks. I’d just gotten the job [and] moved here. No one was ordering me to cover [TMI]. For the first night I went down, I went down to see it— I had a friend and I asked him to drive me down. There were people in moon suits taking radiation readings the first night.”
"When we were evacuated I said ‘I’m gonna do everything that I can to see you guys are not gonna have to go through this again.’ I came to the conclusion that we needed to work through our government officials. So, we first went to our council in Middletown and said ‘You guys need to petition Thornburgh that you don’t want the plant to reopen. We need to figure out this accident and get this put away before we even talk about reopening Unit 1.’ "
“Well, I had only been there for 5 weeks. I’d just gotten the job [and] moved here. No one was ordering me to cover [TMI]. For the first night I went down, I went down to see it— I had a friend and I asked him to drive me down. There were people in moon suits taking radiation readings the first night.”
That name was picked on the fly. I went to the school district to ask if we could use the high school gym to have a public meeting. They were trying to resist, [but] finally the superintendent said: ‘Okay. What’s your organization?’ I said: ‘Well, it’s just a group of people who are concerned about this. We are gonna bring some people in [who] know about nuclear power because of their involvement and we want to just have a question and answer session.’ The superintendent kept insisting that we have to have an organizational entity to hold this meeting. So Andy, a council guy, blurted out: ‘People Against Nuclear Energy.’ So that’s how we got our name. Down the road, we looked at that and learned that it’s not good to have a negative— it should be People for Safe Energy or something like that.
“Well, I had only been there for 5 weeks. I’d just gotten the job [and] moved here. No one was ordering me to cover [TMI]. For the first night I went down, I went down to see it— I had a friend and I asked him to drive me down. There were people in moon suits taking radiation readings the first night.”
"The community was divided along the lines of those that worked at the plant or had relatives that worked at the plant versus those who didn’t. The wound that that created went on for a long time after the accident…I think, probably, [still] today. When I got actively involved there were some bad feelings. We have gotten threatening phone calls, so we had to change our phone number."
"This is a pretty conservative area. At that time, we looked at some of the people who were involved in Three Mile on Alert who had been anti-war [in] the aftermath of Vietnam and we have been involved in that. We are kind of new comers to the activism since I think we were a little all skeptical. TMI, early on, had a bit too radical approach. So we kept our distance, but we obviously had to rely on them because they had a lot of information and so it was arm’s length."
"We realized that what we got to get involved with the hearing at the NRC. We had to convince them to have a hearing discussing the issue of whether Three Mile Island Unit 1 should be allowed to restart. For PANE, the question became: what do we wanna talk about? We had a young attorney that was involved. He looked at the Atomic Energy Act and the National Environmental Policy Act, two pieces of Federal Legislation, [that] the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had to operate within. He said the NRC’s comfortable when they’re talking about technical issues. Why don’t we raise the issue of psychological stress? Because there’s no provision in here; they don’t have any arms within their agency to deal with that."
So Denton had a press conference at about 10 o’clock on a Friday night. They used to have an old media center— really small room up on top floor of the capitol. And I can remember waiting for that. The click of the cameras… in the old days, the cameras would make a clicking noise and it was almost intense the way he walked out there; no one had seen him [before]. He was able to start relaying information in a more folksy style. A calming style from the start. Denton was a real change in terms of just trying to understand it. I had no reason to doubt him.
The UPI, the United Press, was talking about a meltdown fear. It was later, I think, later on you were getting the [hydrogen] bubble story. [It] was developing later that day maybe even. So that might have been what Denton was addressing when he first got here, into that Saturday and Sunday.
"We contacted a few attorneys and they said we’ll try to help you but we’re not really sure of what’s going on here. So then we decided that we would look to DC and see if there were some activist-related, little firms down there. Ellen Wise was the chief counsel to the Union of Concerned Scientists. We told her what we wanted to do and she said: ‘Our firm is willing to represent you.’ So we went with them.They gave us some advice on organizing and what we needed to do to become bonafide organizations and not just split off radical groups."
So Denton had a press conference at about 10 o’clock on a Friday night. They used to have an old media center— really small room up on top floor of the capitol. And I can remember waiting for that. The click of the cameras… in the old days, the cameras would make a clicking noise and it was almost intense the way he walked out there; no one had seen him [before]. He was able to start relaying information in a more folksy style. A calming style from the start. Denton was a real change in terms of just trying to understand it. I had no reason to doubt him.
The UPI, the United Press, was talking about a meltdown fear. It was later, I think, later on you were getting the [hydrogen] bubble story. [It] was developing later that day maybe even. So that might have been what Denton was addressing when he first got here, into that Saturday and Sunday.
"The law firm gave us some tips on what we needed to do to attract potential funding from liberal foundations and so on. We went to these few funders while the other groups were doing the same thing. Everybody was looking and knocking on the same door. So they said you have to have an [umbrella] organization. So we called it TMI PIRC, Public Interest Resource Center; the legal fund became the receiving entity. Ellen Weiss came and she brought a writer and a publisher along with her and we had meetings and that was with the representative of different groups and we actually came up with a funding letter. We started our own direct mail campaign to fund these efforts."
"So that’s how PANE carved out it’s little niche. Then, what we did was, through our law firm, they had done some work with a sociologist at Yale. There was also a psychiatrist that had done work with the Atomic Veterans who were adversely psychologically harmed by being forced to witness the ground testing of nuclear weapons that they had done before they dropped the bombs in Hiroshima, Nagasaki."
"They had done some testing above the ground in different places and forced these guys to kinda stand there to see the flash of the light and feel the precaution of the wind rushing by. They were called the Thai War Veterans. And so there were some parallels drawn between that. Ours was a lot less traumatic, so to speak, [but] hey were standing on the sidelines waiting to help us bring this issue before the NRC."
"There were different studies done that the NRC commissioned. The NRC hired an organization called MITRE, and they held a meeting in Washington and they invited us to come down. MITRE actually commissioned a study through the University of Pittsburgh and they basically did interviews with people and determined that there was a significant amount of psychological stress among the general population. The issue became: what do we do about it? PANE continued to focus on that issue."
"By September, the NRC agreed that they were gonna hold hearings. There were five members on the NRC and at that time there was a vacancy so there was four and they voted 2-2 not to to hear the issue, not to hear the psychological issue. So we appealed that decision to the Third District Court of Appeals in DC on whether they have a requirement to hear the issue, and they decided in our favor that they did have to hear the issue."
"Then, low and behold, comes March of '79 and little did I realize that my little bit of information would be very helpful. I remember the weather was unusually warm for March, and when I came home from work on that Wednesday night, the 28th, we had planned to go work on the garden. Andy was helping me. He was about five years old at the time. We spent an hour or two working until it got dark in the garden and then we heard about this potential problem at Three Mile Island."
Story of an Activist:
Jim Hurst
"The Lieutenant Governor at the time, Bill Scranton, was the emergency management coordinator for the state so he was on the evening news reassuring people.You could tell he wasn't really buying what he was being told but he was doing the compassionate thing and leading us to believe everything was okay based upon the information he had from the utility."
One Supreme Court Justice said something to the effect of: ‘Well, if we agree to hear this decision, are we duty bound to also do the same thing if somebody wants to build a federal prison somewhere? You have to consider all these psychological impacts on people.’ Obviously the answer there is: ‘Yeah, I think you should be required to consider [psychological effects on surrounding populations.] But the decision that should have been made was: ‘We’re not talking about building a federal prison here. We’re talking about reopening a federal prison that had this massive outbreak because the prisoners broke out and scared the hell out of the populace. We’re talking about relicensing [TMI]. It’s obviously been operated poorly.’
"It involved so much of my life and so much of my time committed on it. It was a real disappointment, but you get over it. We still felt we were right, [and] there [was] some hope of redemption."
"[I feel] satisfaction that I opened my mouth and I didn’t sit still, and sadness that there isn’t a real answer to it yet. I have no regret. Absolutely none. "
"Then the Federal Government in General Public Utilities in the honor of Three Mile Island at that time appealed that district court ruling to the Supreme Court. I remember sitting at the hearing at the Supreme Court and it was obvious that they were concerned, so they were very careful about it and making whatever decision they were gonna make because of the effect it could have on other government-related projects."
"When] Leigh went to graduate school at Florida University, we went to take her down. We were in the library and she was getting some of her textbooks. I saw the section on Law. So I picked up something on environmental law; I thought there’s a chance PANE’s cases are in here. It was in the textbook: PANE versus NRC. I said: ‘Andy, look at this book! I can’t believe it.’ Somebody is concerned enough that people studying the law should [be] somewhat acquainted with the issue. I felt good about that."
"My impression of NRC is there aren’t a lot of people there that have any true memories of what happened [at] Three Mile Island. It’s almost like an arrogance, and that’s not really changed. There was arrogance there then, too. As the plants live out their usual lives, we should just close the book on it. I think there’s many safer ways to boil water. I can’t think of any other industry that has the potential danger for destruction a nuclear power has."
"I can’t think of any other industry that has the potential danger for destruction a nuclear power has."