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Based on advice
of the chairman of the NRC,

I am advising those who may be
particularly susceptible

to the effects of any radiation,

that is pregnant women
and preschool-aged children

to leave the area
within a five-mile radius

of the Three Mile Island facility
until further notice.

This and other contingency measures

are based on my belief
that an excess of caution is best.

Remain indoors.
Close all windows and doors.

This is only being held
as a precautionary measure.

Businesses have shut down
as owners and workers left the area.

Schools within five miles
of the nuclear plant

were closed indefinitely today.

I remember it being very,
very chaotic in the classroom.

The teachers were
convening in the hallway.

As a six-year-old,
you're just nosy, period.

But you could see by the faces
that it was definitely something alarming.

I know my mother
called the school several times,

but there was no way to get through.

I just remember them telling us
to get back in our seats

and trying to keep us calm,
and keep us busy,

that we would be bussed back home.

Looking out the window,

all you could see
were cars lined up to get out.

The horns were tremendous.

It was something
where you could just hold your ears.

I did see people
that were dressed in white suits

walking up and down the road.

I'm thinking,

"Wow, this is kind of like Star Wars."
You know, stormtroopers.

But I didn't understand
why they were there.

"What is gonna happen?"

Civil defense officials
throughout the adjacent four counties

have established evacuation centers
for those wishing to leave.

And residents within a ten-mile radius

have been urged
to stay indoors indefinitely.

Close all windows and doors.

Tune to your favorite radio
or television station

to await further instructions.

Thornburgh emphasized
more than once

he nor anyone else
has not yet ordered an evacuation,

but he did admit
there's always that possibility.

We are simply asking everybody
to be prepared to move,

but do not move at this time.

Nobody is in any danger at this time.

The governor was very specific in saying,

"This is precautionary
and precautionary only."

But what it did cause
was what we were trying to avoid...

panic.

Where are you going to?

I'm going to my mother's.
I have nowhere else to go at this point.

I'm just gonna go, get out.
I'm not coming back.

Luckily,
my husband was home that day.

We had a preschool child
and I said to him,

"We seriously need to go."

One of the pains that I had leaving was,
"What do you take with you?"

It was very important for me
to have our children's birth certificates

that if, God forbid,
we were ever separated,

I could prove they were my children.

That is one of the things I thought about.

And when we pulled out of that driveway,

I looked back at all that I loved
and wondered if I would ever come back.

Very difficult.

What did you think
when you heard this latest news?

Like runnin'.

When my kiddos came home,

I didn't wanna panic them.

So, I said,

"We're gonna go to Nana and Pop-pop's
for a little mini vacation."

My goal was to get our children
away from this,

whatever this monster was.

Area residents aren't waiting
for an official evacuation to be called.

Nearly half the population has left.

So many people
left Middletown today,

police officials have imposed
a 9:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. curfew here

to forestall the possibility of looting.

It is now apparent

that the nuclear accident
that occurred on Wednesday morning

was a lot more complicated
and a lot more serious

than the public was first led to believe.

As we left our home, I really had
no understanding of what was happening,

but I knew there was something wrong.

And thinking,
"Are we ever gonna be able to come back?"

"Is my house still gonna be here?"

I think about seeing
the people's faces in their vehicles.

People were scared.

Officials disclosed today
that radiation in the building's dome

was measured at 30,000 rems an hour,

Seventy-five times the lethal dose
for a human being,

and 3,000 times the level
for a nuclear reactor in normal operation.

The plume,
which is the radioactive cloud

that travels with the wind.

It was heading in the north direction,

exactly where we were evacuating.

What you want to do
is to try and keep this stuff off of you.

If you would have to happen to get out
and get some on you,

the best way to do is get in,
take your clothes off,

wash your clothes...

When we got to my in-laws,
they had us all...

um, remove our clothes,
and take a shower and change our clothes.

And I remember thinking at the time,
"I felt like a leper."

On this incredible
third day of the accident,

confusion, contradiction, and questions

clouded the atmosphere
like atomic particles.

And as we watched
Walter Cronkite on national news,

I think most of us were shocked

that something like this
happened to our little town.

But not everyone was leaving.
Some said they would stay.

We did not leave Middletown,
didn't think about leaving.

If I was a younger man with kids,
I probably would have.

People who had choices
to leave the area were going to leave,

but there were many people
who did not have those options.

There was a realization

that the community truly
never ever would be the same again.

Current readings are
no higher today than they were yesterday.

We went to my grandmother's home,

which was only
ten miles away in Harrisburg.

I was very inquisitive,

so I was listening to the adult
conversations and what was going on.

The situation here has become
more and more confusing

each day since the initial release
on Wednesday morning...

Company officials
said the radiation leaks had been stopped.

Nuclear regulatory officials
said the leaks were continuing.

It was just overwhelming.

Has the governor set up any...

designating one person
or set up any task force

just to oversee
all the various ramifications...

I think he's starting to think along
those lines of setting up a task force.

The management of information

turned out to be one
of the great challenges of this crisis.

There were a thousand rumors
and conflicting sources of information.

And we had to establish a credible source
that people knew they could trust.

So Governor Thornburgh
called the president.

At the time,

I was the point person
for the president on the accident.

The governor asked President Carter for

one person who will oversee
managing this thing on the ground

and will be the one person
who speaks to the press.

The president got involved
because it was a time

when energy policy
was a constant source of anxiety.

And there certainly was a feeling
that we needed nuclear power.

But he was also
a nuclear engineer by training.

He'd been part of the nuclear navy.

Mr. Carter is no stranger
to nuclear plant accidents.

He has described how in the early 1950s,

as a Navy nuclear engineer trainee,

he led a group of 22 men

down into the core of a reactor
at Chalk River, Canada,

where a meltdown had occurred.

The president says he spent
one minute and 29 seconds there

helping dismantle that reactor.

And so he felt very comfortable
about the integrity of the technology.

The president has dispatched
his personal representative,

Mr. Harold Denton,
Chief Operations Officer of the NRC

to assist me and work with our experts

to monitor the situation
and keep the public fully informed.

Harold Denton
was considered within the NRC

to be one of the more
knowledgeable people on site.

He was Jimmy Carter's personal
representative on Three Mile Island

to assess the situation there
at the utility

and provide him with feedback
on what was truly happening.

We are concerned
about the status of the fuel in the core.

There's also a bubble
in the reactor vessel that means

that any change
in the hydraulics of the core

have to be carefully monitored...

Denton said to us,

"There's a hydrogen bubble
inside the reactor

which, if left to its own devices,
could explode."

And for the first time
from the beginning of this,

I will admit that I got scared.

Because the consequences
of a hydrogen bubble,

potentially, were disastrous.

CBS Reports,
Danger at Three Mile Island.

The situation inside the nuclear reactor
is stable for the moment,

but fraught with danger.

At the top of the reactor vessel,
a bubble has formed radioactive gas.

A new stage
in the accident had opened up.

A hydrogen gas bubble

forming at the heart
of a nuclear power plant

with unknown consequences.

Hydrogen explodes, and therefore,

there was the possibility of an explosion
there inside the reactor itself.

This is what happened,
by the way, at Chernobyl.

Hydrogen gas explosion
blew the entire roof of the reactor apart

leading to radiation
being released into the environment.

That accident took place in 1986,

and for centuries parts of that area
around Chernobyl

will be sealed off.

The bubble that's
in the reactor vessel is mainly hydrogen.

And therefore,
if there is a source of oxygen,

and an ignition source, it could burn.

When I heard
about the hydrogen bubble,

I realized there was such a chance
that we were gonna lose everything.

Everything that we ever worked for, any...

Everything would be gone.

...very current about
the problem in Three Mile Island.

How dangerous is it?

Are we running the risk
of a China Syndrome?

Could there be a massive disaster?
Is it remote or impossible?

There's always been
the possibility of a China Syndrome.

This has been built
into all calculations.

The catastrophes we're talking
about here in a massive meltdown

are tens of thousands of deaths,
hundreds of thousands of cancers,

contamination of thousands
of square miles of land.

Dr. Lapp,
what has been stated...

I was extremely frightened

because there was no place
in Central Pennsylvania that was safe.

The chances of us surviving
even 40 miles away

could have been put into jeopardy.

Everybody
was afraid of nuclear power

by the time they heard about the hydrogen
bubble blowing up the reactor.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission,

the utility just blew it
on their communications.

Not only between each other,
but with the people.

They let the people live in fear

while they tried to decide what to do.

So we are faced
with the remote, but very real possibility

of a nuclear meltdown at
the Three Mile Island atomic power plant.

I've got the staff
continuing to look at the question

of how much time to detonation
and whether or not the temperatures...

That Saturday was a very,
very unnerving day.

Scientists concerned

that the 600-degree temperature
in the reactor fuel

was hot enough
to detonate the gaseous bubble.

We had a problem
which was almost pure mathematics,

and we had to wait while
the experts were trying to figure out

whether we had
a seriously dangerous bubble.

The 1,000 nuclear scientists
and technicians

who are gathered here
in an effort to save the reactor

still have a number
of problems to resolve.

Engineers were being called in
from around the world.

"How dangerous is this?
How do you defuse it?"

The future of nuclear energy
was in the balance.

One government study
estimated in such an event

forty-five thousand would be killed,
a quarter of a million injured.

It is that possibility that
has authorities considering evacuation.

And at the highest levels,

there were discussions
about evacuating millions of people.

We were living the worst-case scenario.

Officials at the company
and government

say the situation is stable,
but disagree on vital facts.

Experts are unable
to draw meaningful conclusions

about the size of the hydrogen bubble.

I knew there was
differences of opinion in part of the NRC

of what in Heaven's name is going on.

"It could explode,"
and, "Should people move?"

I got calls from relatives
that lived in Philadelphia,

"We're downwind, should we go
to our cousin's in New York?"

I said, "Slow down, slow down." You know?

There is no way
for nuclear scientists

to eliminate the dangerous
hydrogen gas bubble inside the reactor

without running at least
some risk of a core meltdown.

We were doing analysis,
working on the issue,

trying to put it into relative risk terms.

But it becomes a hugely emotional risk,

and things can just go crazy,
especially in the public media.

Under present conditions,

oxygen may slowly
be entering the hydrogen bubble.

The more oxygen, the more danger
of a hydrogen explosion in the reactor.

Two dangers persist.
One from that trapped gas bubble.

The other from the build-up of radioactive
material in the containment room.

Saturday night, in an AP bulletin

that ran right across
the bottoms of the TV screens,

"Hydrogen bubble in reactor

is showing signs of becoming
potentially explosive."

...showing signs of becoming
potentially explosive.

The chairman of the NRC said,

"It may be prudent
to evacuate people from the area."

At that moment, 25 reporters
burst through the doors of my office.

"Should we leave?"
They were shouting at me.

One of them was even crying.

Palpable panic set in.

As anxiety builds,
many people have relocated to shelters,

including this sports arena,
11 miles away from the plant.

I couldn't make sense of it but ask,
"What's going on?"

"Are we gonna die?"

It was like living on the edge,
like just holding on, white-knuckled.

What happens to this plant?
Does it blow up like nuclear bombs?

What does a meltdown really mean?

The fear became greater
because it was the fear of the unknown.

It may not show up now,

but what's 25 years from now
if there was an exposure?

I had a wife who was pregnant.

And I went to the evacuation center
with the governor and my family.

We wanted to stop rumors
that were upsetting people,

that only generated greater fear.

Can you explain
what dangers there are left?

How dangerous are things?

Only if the efforts that are now
underway prove unsuccessful

will we have to turn to another option.

And with the growing concern
about the hydrogen bubble,

Governor Thornburgh said to the president,

"I would like the Federal Government's
recommendation,"

as to whether or not

he should go beyond the five-mile
precautionary evacuation

and order a broad scale
360-degree evacuation.

But the concern was the lasting impact
on the nuclear industry.

This is a very tough call to make

when you don't have
really clear knowledge to go on.

So the president decided late on Saturday,

the most important thing he could do
would be to go visit the reactor

as a way to quiet public fears.

We are going
to pray to God to take care of us

in the midst of all this confusion

and uncertainty about these times.

We trust the Lord

that nothing further is going to happen
other than what has.

When President Carter got there,

everything was still pretty much
in a state of chaos.

There was a potential that
the hydrogen bubble was gonna blow up.

But with the president showing up
at Three Mile Island,

that reinforced
to the nuclear industry that,

"Hey, you know, guys,
I'm kinda on your side here,"

and showing everybody,
"Nuclear is not bad."

And the main job of President Carter
coming to Three Mile Island

was to reassure the American public
they had nothing to fear.

My primary concern
in coming here this afternoon

has been to learn as much
as I possibly can as president

about the problems at
the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant.

And to assure the people of this region

that everything possible is being done

and will be done
to cope with these problems.

President Carter was
making an effort to explain,

"We know what we're doing.
We're gonna take care of you."

"You're in no danger."

After the president
left the island,

Harold Denton's staff
went through all of its calculations.

They were going back and forth,

but it wasn't until they found a mistake

that finally confirmed
that the hydrogen bubble

did not present a serious threat.

Is there danger
to people in the surrounding area?

I don't consider
there is any imminent hazard today.

The situation has stabilized.

But it's very important
that the way they bring the core

to a cold shutdown condition
with this bubble...

I was so relieved.

We had gotten through it
without the loss of life.

And to me,
the immediate crisis phase was over.

This nuclear accident
obviously causes all of us concern.

You deserve a full accounting,
and you will get it.

I've directed the establishment

of an independent
presidential commission of experts

to investigate the causes of this accident
and to make recommendations

on how we can improve
the safety of nuclear power plants.

It was a week ago today
that the accident began

at the Three Mile Island
atomic power plant in Pennsylvania.

And today, that damaged plant

still is venting some radioactivity
into the surrounding air.

Government scientists
spent the morning in helicopters,

measuring radiation
still leaking from the plant.

They had to get the hydrogen
out of the reactor.

So what they came up with was a method

that they could vent off noble gases
and anything else.

That would lower pressure.

Expected release
of radiation today

from Three Mile Island nuclear power plant
has led to a series of consequences.

But every time
they opened that vent valve,

there was an uncontrolled release
of radiation to the environment.

They had no choice.

They had to do it.

What were my children and myself
exposed to in those three days?

And the irresponsibility of Met-Ed,
and the irresponsibility of NRC,

and how could this ever happen?

And, uh...

I just hope
that we do not become a statistic

ten, 20, 30 years from now,
but I know we're gonna be a statistic.

Have you lived through a cancer death?

I have.

If that one is my son,
or my wife or me, I think it's wrong.

We spent a lot of time
trying to determine how much radiation

actually was continuing
to release into the atmosphere.

In a van nearby,
a government scientist used a computer

to analyze air, water,
and vegetation samples.

But the level,
they were telling us, was not significant

when it comes to the health
of people in the area.

The entire
federal medical establishment

said people in the Harrisburg area
have nothing to worry about.

We would expect to find
no additional cancer deaths

in this population as the result
of radiation exposure today.

A nuclear specialist
had been quoted as observing

that alarming reports had probably
caused more psychological harm

than did the radiation
during these seven days of tension.

The fact is that at no time
have a variety of test measurements

shown levels of contamination that were
dangerous to normally healthy people.

This industry
was in a rush to exonerate itself

immediately after the accident.

And our best measurement tool,
unfortunately, are human beings.

If you don't look, you don't find.

And a number of the monitors

were not capable of picking up
the amount of radiation that escaped.

Every dose of radiation is an overdose.

A little of that radiation
does a little harm,

more of it does more harm.

Nobody really knows
how much radiation came out

because we don't have the numbers.

The estimates of radiation damage
at Three Mile Island

neglect all sorts
of different kinds of variables.

Anyone who says definitively how much
radiation came out of that accident

is either lying or a fool.

Small traces
of radioactive iodine

have turned up in milk samples
from the area.

Hershey has not used any new milk
since the accident

and is testing its products
for radioactivity.

Areas where the plant dumped waste water

are also testing positive
for radioactive iodine.

After the evacuation
when we came back,

I wanted to go to the boat ramp.

That used to be one of my fun places to go
where you take rocks and skip 'em.

But what I remember seeing were a lot...
a lot of dead fish.

And it was up and down the river banks.

I remember thinking,
"There was something released in there

that was more powerful
than what they let on."

People were still kind of leery
of what happened.

For the first time in ten days,
the Governor of Pennsylvania

lifted all of his orders
regarding the power plant accident.

This allowed the schools to reopen

and pregnant women to return to their
homes in a five-mile radius of the plant.

It looks normal, seems normal,

but we came back,
and everything we had was still in limbo.

I was down
around the plant and, uh...

on certain days, you could taste
a metallic taste in your mouth.

Those few days we spent
across from Three Mile Island,

we did get sore throats.

And everybody around the area
had had a sore throat.

My son, he said,
"Mom, I threw up."

Just this unbelievable
green-colored mucus.

And it really frightened me, and, um...

I called our pediatrician immediately,
and he said to me,

"Joyce, I really don't know."

A girl who was in high school at the time,

she had been outdoors
Wednesday, Thursday, Friday,

riding around all day
on a bike in Middletown.

Her skin broke out with lesions.

When you dig deeper
and talk to people in the community,

they had metallic taste, eye irritation,
diarrhea, projectile vomiting.

All the experiences you would have
with being exposed to radiation.

And radiation has long-term,
adverse health effects

that could cause cancer.

Middletown's 11,000 residents

have serious concerns
about their health and safety.

Prior to the accident,
I was in my own little world.

No thought about radiation,
or the dangers, or anything.

Nothing.

Pick this flyer up on low-level radiation.

But when something like that
happens to you,

that you can lose everything...

Your children's lives were on the line.

I knew I had to stop living in la-la land,

and it was time to educate myself
and see what actually happened.

For Harrisburg,
it was a large gathering

on the front steps of the Capitol.

They said it was time
to shut down for good

the crippled Three Mile Island plant.

People were beginning to say,
"No nuclear power,"

which was something
you were never gonna hear of

under normal circumstances
in our community.

For a community like ours,
that's probably part of the problem.

Nobody really questioned nuclear
when it came to the community.

Three Mile Island Alert
planned this rally today.

Three Mile Island Alert
was organized in 1977

out of concerns about nuclear power,
and we were on the margins.

But there's nothing like an accident,
and a meltdown,

to turn you from a pariah into a messiah.

There was a time when
I would believe the government officials.

But now I don't wanna
even be asked to believe.

Right here is why we're here.

I decided to start to go
to community meetings.

And the NRC was going to be down there.

They started out by telling us,
"The radiation that your children got

was no more than
if you had smoked a cigarette

or had drunk a glass of wine."

In the state of Pennsylvania,

you can't give my children
wine and cigarettes.

Why are you allowed to give me
radiation that's equated to that?

More than 300 residents
confronted the city council.

We're gonna take
all these things under advisement.

But there was a point in going
to the different meetings in the township

where I realized
when one question was asked,

the NRC answered,

and then at another meeting,
the same question was asked,

and it was a completely different answer.

Officials insisted that
the residents have nothing to worry about.

And I thought,
"They're either lying to us,

or they don't know what they're doing."

Fear of what
could happen spawned

one of the strongest
anti-nuke movements in the country.

No nuke! No nuke!

The real message
of The China Syndrome

is that if we continue
to place our health and safety

in the hands of utility executives
whose main goal is to maximize profits,

then we will see more Harrisburgs,

and we will see an increase
in the cancer epidemic

that is already
running rampant in this country.

I remember high school in '65.
Vietnam War in full swing.

I was so against protesters.

People marching down Pennsylvania Avenue
questioning our government.

"How dare they?"

The rose-colored glasses
were ripped off my face.

I mean, it changed me.

I went from housewife to activist.

And I marched down the same streets
in Pennsylvania Avenue,

fighting what Three Mile Island did to us.

What we're doing here today is
more important than dealing with racism,

than dealing with sexism,
than dealing with hunger,

'cause I can feel hunger!

I can see war! I can feel racism!

I cannot see radiation!
I cannot smell radiation!

I look around one day, and I am damned!

The accident
at the Three Mile Island plant

has instantly intensified the debate
over the safety of nuclear power,

and this could call the whole future
of the nuclear industry into question.

The president's commission
on the Three Mile Island nuclear plant

presented its final report today.

All the key personalities
came to the hearing,

like the men at the controls
when the light started to flash.

Each was asked to recite

just what he did
that made a bad accident worse.

I'm the one that turned off
the reactor coolant pumps initially.

In my own mind,

just the failure to recognize
that we had a relief valve

that was still partially open
or open was probably the biggest event.

People before Three Mile Island
always looked at,

"An operator will always
assist you in a problem."

We found out the operator,

doing well-meaning actions
from their mind,

actually did something that was
very detrimental to cooling the core.

I also throttled
the high-pressure injection.

They were in a condition
they had never been trained for,

and there were many cases of
miscommunication and misunderstanding.

So they were a little lost.

But at the time,

everybody was trying to do
what they thought was the right thing.

A large number of the errors
made in the course of this accident

were human errors.

Out of the six things that went wrong,
about four and a half were people errors.

One was an equipment malfunction,
and maybe one was a design error.

The presidential commission

says one piece of testimony
shocked its chairman.

Before the Three Mile Island accident,
there had been repeated problems

with pressure safety valves
of Babcock & Wilcox reactors.

This should have forewarned
the possibility of an accident.

There's been in, in the past,
a certain philosophy developed in NRC

about reactor safety
that these accidents couldn't happen.

Jim Creswell was an NRC inspector

who was sent to look into a set of events

that had taken place at the Davis-Besse

nuclear power plant in Ohio.

They didn't actually have an accident,

but they came close enough
to arouse concern.

So, Creswell requested an appointment
with me about these valve issues.

And we met just six days before
the accident at Three Mile Island.

I obviously thought
that they were serious.

We developed a memo

with a request that they treat it
with some urgency at NRC headquarters.

But, unfortunately, the response came back
on the second day of the accident saying,

"You don't really have to worry
about this sequence."

Clearly, the Davis-Besse event is one that
the NRC and everybody wishes had been

more widely disseminated
and understood before Three Mile Island.

While an investigation
was conducted,

sources say the NRC didn't take
Jim Creswell's concerns seriously,

and the inquiry was designed less
to solve a problem than to quiet Creswell.

Days prior to the core melt accident
at Three Mile Island,

Jim Creswell sent up a flare,

and nobody listened.

...that these accidents couldn't happen.

Three Mile Island was avoidable.
The accident didn't need to happen.

If the NRC and the industry
would just listen to their staff.

Perhaps post-TMI,
there's a different philosophy.

But there's not a culture of safety.

There's a culture of bottom line.

The bottom line is,

"At any cost we need
to make this thing profitable."

"We need to make it work."

So the reality was that the investigation

into the severity of the accident
at Three Mile Island

by the president's commission
was a whitewash.

Thank you very much.

The commission
found very serious shortcomings

in the way that both the government
and the utility industry

regulate and manage nuclear power.

But we cannot shut the door
on nuclear power for the United States.

It's quite clear that
the president's commission has given us

and the American public
a simple message on nuclear power.

Proceed, but proceed with caution.

People who live
near the nuclear accident

are struggling to deal with it.

It proved that they are so far

from seeing the reality of our community.

Local residents
and government officials

greeted the commissioners with anger.

You could feel
the anger and the frustration.

Where do we really count
in making these decisions,

or do we count at all?

When you're talking about the future
and the lives of your children,

your grandchildren,
your future great-grandchildren...

it is raw. It is raw.

At a nuclear regulatory study
released today

found that the Three Mile Island accident

drove 44,000 people from their homes

and cost 18.2 million dollars
in evacuation expenses and lost wages.

When the fire
and the hurricanes are over,

you can come back, and you can rebuild.

We came back,
and the problem was still here.

I could either accept what they said,
and go with the flow,

or I could be the master of my own fate,

and I wanted to know the truth.

Even after President Carter came,
after the hydrogen bubble,

the whole accident scenario
that occurred at Three Mile Island

had a huge impact on the nuclear industry.

But nobody knew for sure
how much damage was done to the reactor.

Until now, experts
could only guess the true damage done

to the nuclear power plant
at Three Mile Island,

but today technicians will have
first-hand evidence

of what really happened
inside the reactor core.

July of 1982,

we performed a procedure
that we termed "quick look."

We sent radiation monitoring equipment

and a camera down into the core
where we could survey the damage.

There was great technological debate

about how much damage was in the core.

So we had live TV,
and we had live audio as he lowered it in,

and it was complete silence in the room.

Both cables are going down.

We're now two feet into the core.

We... We are approaching four feet.

Four feet.
People are saying, "Oh, my goodness."

It's five feet down. Go slow
right there. See if we can get that.

- All right. Let me slow down here.
- Just slow...

We've got so much light. Can we...

Beautiful picture, Norman.

Well, I'd love to know
what the hell it is.

We discovered that
the upper one half of the core

had literally just
collapsed in on top of itself.

It was a molten mess.

There was a lot more damage
done to the reactor

than anybody thought we had done.

Anybody.

We're talking about massive core damage.

When they lost cooling water,

the core had been exposed
and melted at that point.

Meaning that we came within of
maybe 30 minutes of a catastrophe

involving a steam explosion
blowing the entire reactor apart.

Thirty minutes.

I didn't realize it was 30 minutes.

Dear God...

It was a meltdown.

The accident at Three Mile Island

was the worst nuclear accident
that ever happened on American soil.

Little did we know
there was another scenario awaiting us

that was potentially
much more dangerous than the accident.