TMI 35 years later
"I grew up in Western Pennsylvania in a small town about an hour north of Pittsburgh by the name of Mercer. I started to work for a newspaper when I was 15 years old. It was a daily paper that was published in Mercer County. A woman that I worked for was the Bureau Chief. She was one of the best journalists I ever worked for. She was a very good teacher and mentor to me. She was a strong influence in convincing me that this was a wonderful profession. I worked there every summer until after I graduated from college."
"After I graduated, I went to work for the Cleveland Plain Dealer as a reporter and worked there for just over four years. I was hired to go to The Philadelphia Inquirer in December of 1972. I was working [at] the Inquirer during its heyday. They brought in a whole new team of editors and reporters. When I started, the editor was Gene Roberts who came from the New York Times. He led the Inquirer for most of the time that I was there and he was just a genius newspaper man. He was a reporter’s dream as an editor because he understood what good journalism was and he gave his reporters a lot of freedom to [do] quality work. The Inquirer won a lot of Pulitzers when he was there, including the coverage of the Three Mile Island accident."
"We had [an] inside track with Governor Thornburgh because Thornburg’s Press Secretary had been [an] Inquirer reporter, so we all knew him really well. He still was inclined to help the Inquirer, but Thornburg’s people were scrambling hard, too. It wasn’t until President Carter sent Herald Denton up on Friday to act as his liaison that there was any real organized attempt to get the information out to the media. [There] was about 50 microphones in front of him and reporters packed all around him [with] the big bulky cameras that they all carried then."
"[They] began working on it from the newsroom, so I served as the rewrite person. I didn’t go out to the plant. I stayed in the office and then the reporters and the photographers who were out at the plant [and] in Washington at the NRC and with the governor, would all call in their notes and I would write the main stories and other reporters would do some of the other stories. There was a joke that if the accident continued Gene Roberts was just going to empty out the newsroom and send the sports reporter, the music critic and anybody he could get out to do it. [He] didn’t have to do that, but there were an awful lot of people working on this."
“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.”
"This accident was the first of its kind. It was an accident that we all had been promised would never happen. It was an accident that involved technology that only a few elite people really understood and that the public had really been kept in the dark about. There was this element of it being a cover up. The flash reporters that went to TMI knew almost nothing about nuclear power but they were really good at digging out inconsistencies and claims that couldn’t be substantiated. Early on, our antennas were up because we realized that there really was something going on here that the utility was trying to cover up, that the NRC didn’t really understand, and that the state government was trying to do the right thing but didn’t know what to do because [it] didn’t have any information."
“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 first morning I called the Union of Concerned Scientists because it was a group that I had worked with before as a source. Daniel Ford who was head of the Union of Concerned Scientists—I called him and he said to me: ‘You know, I don’t know enough yet to say with certainty but it sounds to me like there is a meltdown.’ I am going: ‘Holy smokes!’"
“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.”
"There was this cumulative gathering of information from a whole variety of sources. Like putting together a jig-saw puzzle, because one of them would come in and say we just heard this, we don’t know what it means and then somebody else would come in and say well, we just heard this and we don’t know what that means but if you put the two together then you clearly understood more. We were learning ourselves and we made mistakes. I don’t think, in hindsight, that we really made any major mistakes and certainly nothing that over-sensationalized."
“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 New York Times kept two helicopters on standby at the Harrisburg Airport to get their people out if things got bad. This [was] at the beginning of the fear about the bubble, so Bill Echenberger calls up an editor at the paper and he says: ‘Hey, Johnny, this is really getting dangerous. The New Times has couple of helicopters on standby and there’s a concern that there’s going to be an explosion and we’re really worried about getting everybody out of here. What are your plans?’ And the editor says: ‘Okay, now if there isn’t, I want you to stay with the governor. I want Tom to go down to the plant…’ It was just like who cares about an explosion? Here’s how you need to go cover the story. "
“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.”
"We were going to stick with the story no matter what. I think that’s why all of us got into the business. Newspapers were where you got your information. There was a lot of competition. The Washington Post, The Times and The Inquirer were the three major competitors on the story. The Washington Post and The New York Times had better access to the NRC because they had covered it more comprehensively than the Philadelphia Inquirer had and yet The Inquirer had deeper roots in Pennsylvania, so everybody had strengths."
"In 1980, we got the Pulitzer. It was a matter of great pride. It was a confirmation that if you do good journalism you not only do a great public service but that public service is recognized."
"It really was a team effort. When you look at all the people who contributed to it, it was pretty amazing."
"The other thing that was a moment of great pride for me was that, from the very beginning, Gene decided that he was going to have The Inquirer put together a minute by minute account of the accident. It was genius. The plan was that we would do a complete reconstruction of the accident and it ran two weeks. We ran on the front page and it ran eight full inside pages of some photographs and text. We started working on that on Friday night and it had to be done Saturday morning to get it printed. It was a stunning piece of journalism."
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.
"Gene had assigned an editor by the name of Steve Lovelady, who was a great writer, and he sat down and just started writing this thing and all of us were contributing to him. The story ran on Sunday and he printed up I think a quarter of a million papers because he figured that there would be such demand for it and it sold out. That was part of what was recognized by the Pulitzer Committee for this piece. We heard later that the NRC read it and learned things that they didn’t know."
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.
"After TMI in 1980, I got promoted to go up to the Editorial Board and so I worked on the Board for about ten years. I wrote a lot about TMI then because of the restart. That was a whole issue. There were some other reporters that continued to follow this and then the strike came so we didn’t write about it and it was a shame because there’s a hole in that legacy of the coverage. We have that gap in our historical record of coverage. That was a shame because that was just such a critical issue."
"I got interested in nuclear power then and wrote about [it] on the Editorial Board and since then have written quite a bit about it. To me, it was a wakeup call and it was something that I felt deserved a lot more attention. The thing that struck me in doing this Fukushima Book was the similarities. We had 35 years to learn the lessons of TMI and we haven’t. There were so many similarities between the mindset that prevailed at TMI and the mindset that prevailed at Fukushima. The cover up and the response [that] prevailed at TMI and the response and the deception that existed at Fukushima."
"After Fukushima, the NRC created this thing called the ‘near term task force’ and they had 90 days to come in and make recommendations to the NRC about what we learned from Fukushima and what changes need to be made. They came up with some good proposals and you had the commissioners basically saying the system isn’t broke and we don’t need to fix it. My jaw just dropped when I saw that because here you had the NRC’s staff saying the safety net is full of holes and you have the Commission saying the system isn’t broken and it’s like the disconnect that exited after Three Mile Island."
"We point out in the books that you have got a sizable number of nuclear plants sitting downstream from major dams. If one of those dams failed, which is conceivable, you have a Tsunami-like wave of water washing into the plant doing exactly the same thing [as Fukushima] and yet the NRC just says: well, you know we don’t need to worry, it couldn’t happen here."
"The team effort covering Three Mile Island has to be one of the most meaningful stories that I did. The Inquirer had a grand total of 40 reporters and photographers working on the TMI accident story during the worst of the accident and then continued to follow it for many years thereafter. Gene recognized right from the beginning that this was an incredible story on many levels. He was going to pull out all the stops and cover it."
Story of an Inquirer Journalist:
Susan Stranahan
"I happened to have got to the paper very early that morning. I got there [at] about 8 and at that point one of the reporters in the Harrisburg Bureau called into the city desk and said something is going on down in Middletown. ‘We don’t know what it is but there’s beginning to be some reports down there.’ I had been out at Three Mile Island the previous fall doing a story on low-level nuclear waste and had toured around the plant, so by virtue of the fact that I was the only other reporter in the newsroom, I said, ‘Well, I will start making some calls.’ By about midday, the editors recognized that this was going to be something that they needed to pull a lot of resources into, so they began rallying the troops and getting more reporters out to the scene. "
Check out Susan's latest book: Fukushima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster
"They argue that all plants provide an adequate margin of safety; they safe enough. The point being: who is defining what’s safe enough? It’s not the public. The public has been shut out of this process, and until the public gets an equal say with industry and with regulators who listen to industry, it’s just going to be a matter of time before there will be another accident."
"The Achilles heel of nuclear is not going to be the safety— it’s going to be economics. As long as natural gas is cheap, I don’t think anybody in their right minds going to build a reactor. Will there be a resurgence? Not unless U.S. taxpayers are going to keep footing the bill. If the average utility had to walk down the street and go into State Farm or Nationwide and say I want to insure my nuclear plant, there would never be another nuclear plant ever. But as long as the Price and Anderson Act is there and the public is one that’s going to foot the bill [when] there’s an accident, then nuclear can hang on."
"[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. "
"They didn’t learn anything. They kick the can down the road consistently on tougher safety regulations. ‘We’ll study it, or [it’ll] cost too much or it’s such a low probability, we don’t need to address it.’ So, consistently tougher regulations on safer equipment are put off, and this was so true at TMI. It’s true now [at] Fukushima. The NRC has itself in this box: it can’t require newer plants to be safer than other plants because then nobody is going to want to live next to the other plant."
"I think that [activist] intentions are really good. I think they, sadly, get drowned out by the very effective media campaign by the nuclear industry. The public has a very short memory span. The nuclear industry has re-fashioned itself into a green, environmentally-friendly energy source. Part of it is that people forget what an accident was like and how frightened and disruptive it was. Japan is 7,000 miles away, so we don’t really have to worry about it. I mean I think that young people just don’t think about it and that’s too bad because something may affect them."
"As idealistic as it is to think that we will get solar and wind, I just don’t see it. That’s why I think the public is going to have to say if nuclear is going to be part of the mix. We get to set the threshold and safety—not the industry. I think that’s the message that has to get out."
"These press conferences were shouting matches of trying to get him to answer reporters’ questions. He would do these briefings, trying to explain and people were shouting questions at him and stuff. He was a southerner; he spoke slowly and was [a] very laconic kind of guy and he was caught in the crossfire of all this. He became the face of the source of information."