In April 1979, just days after the accident, Helen Ferguson, a teacher at Cedar Crest Middle School in Lebanon, PA gave an assignment to her 7th and 8th grade students. She had these 12 and 13-year olds explain how they felt after the accident. Below are excerpts from the students’ papers.
7th and 8th grade Reactions to TMI Accident
“It’s like a science fiction story, unreal and unplanned. It was a frightful experience for my family and me. In Europe the story was really blown out of proportion because my sister lives in Germany and I could tell she was really upset after reading their papers.” AR
“You had the news media blowing it out of proportion. You had the NRC and TMI saying opposite things. This scared me because I didn’t know what to believe.” JL
“One of our friend’s father works at Three Mile Island and was present when the accident occurred. He has radiation and so do his fellow workers. Could he die? I hope not.” CB
“It wasn’t just the accident that got me upset. It was the way everyone was saying that the accident was another omen saying that the world would come to an end.” MB
“The international news was making a big deal out of everything. Even my uncle heard it on his truck radio while he was in Texas and again when he was at home in Ohio.” AK
“I myself am for nuclear energy. It may be our power for the future. However, we will definitely need to have stricter safety standards in the future.” DS
“People took advantage of their neighbors when they were evacuated. They went around telling people that they had to evacuate their premises and then they vandalized their homes. I think people should help other people in an accident as bad as this one. Instead of helping people they helped themselves and didn’t care about other people.” EB
“I still don’t know if all that was done was necessary, but people scared me more. They made the situation worse.” LL
“This experience has given me a feeling about nuclear energy which is not good. It scared me very much and I’m glad I lived to tell about it.” AG
“I think this accident for the most part restored confidence in the people that even in the bad dangerous situations, our government and people can handle it. I think in time to come most people will forget this, but I won’t. It will be a great story to tell our children.” BH
“My reaction to the TMI accident is that although it was serious the news media greatly overplayed the incident. My feelings are that too many people don’t understand nuclear power. When people see the word “radiation” they freak-out. If the public understood these things I would not have objected to this coverage of the story, but the way they did it drove people into panic.” TM
“More time should be spent on finding new ways of energy than on nuclear energy and nuclear plants. They should give money towards other ways of finding energy. They say that there is one in a million chance that something can go wrong but that one could wipe out almost all of Pennsylvania.” RY
“The thing that really bugs me is that the government is more interested in the loss of money than the people’s safety. They are more worried about the damage to the reactor than the damage to the people, the land, and the people’s belongings. I guess we’re lucky this time though.” KG
T-shirt that was popular immediately after the accident (FRONT)
“The press really made it sound bad, and that made almost everyone around me frightened. Whenever I heard someone saying something against it, I knew that he or she overestimated the accident. I also learned that many people seem to have forgotten, or never knew that a nuclear reactor cannot explode. This even got to the press, and soon everybody talked about the impossible chance of an explosion. I guess that shows how stupid some people are when something like that happens.” RS
“On April 1st, about every one of our relatives called us from as far away as Kentucky. My grandmother who lives there asked if we were going to evacuate, however my dad said no, so that she would not be afraid. My mother said that in Kentucky, they must be getting worse reports about the accident than what we were getting, that they were holding things back from us.” TP
“I feel that the Three Mile Island accident was very dangerous but not quite as major as the news media played it up to be because the news was constantly saying how much radiation was released and was floating around in our area. I got curious as to exactly how much was really floating around my home area, so I asked my mother to bring home a small Geiger counter from where she works. I then tested how much radiation was around my house and it wasn’t even one millirem more than the usual amount of radiation in our atmosphere. I do agree, however, that there was an increase closer to the plant and if I would live close to TMI I would have evacuated.” RK
T-shirt that was popular immediately after the accident (BACK)
“The only problem is that after a week everything will go back to normal and no one will think about having a nuclear disaster again. The same thing happened in 1976 when there was a gas shortage. We had three days off school and had to turn down the heat, but after that no one cared.” ED
“As the bubble grew, I began thinking about what I would do if the bubble did burst. I decided that I shouldn’t worry about something that didn’t even happen yet. I decided I would just leave the whole thing up to my parents. I hoped that they knew what they were doing or going to do.” PK
“People were going around their normal everyday lives, but I knew everyone was scared inside.” GL
“Everybody made such a big deal out of it. All during homeroom Friday everybody was saying we are going to die! Everybody was scared! My mom is pregnant, and I wouldn’t let her out of the house, but when she was, I was scared that something would happen. I wasn’t scared for her, but for the baby!” AB
“Everyone was worried in my family, especially my mom. This was because a man where she works helped to design the plant. He said to her, “I’ll tell you what I think of it. I have two suitcases packed and reservations made.” NB
“When I got home, I was really scared. We went inside to listen to special reports. It was awful because someone that was for nuclear energy would say, “everything’s under control” and someone against would say the opposite. Finally, some friends from Maryland called us and told us to evacuate and go to their house. We packed up, but it ended that we never went. We didn’t know whether to take anything seriously or not.” AG
“Nuclear energy is a very technologically advanced type of energy. Man is what makes it unsafe.” AO
“I am totally against nuclear energy… We could survive without it. How do you think they made out without it years ago? I think the human race is just plain spoiled. We can’t leave well enough alone.” TC
“I saw the diagram in the Sunday Philadelphia Inquirer. It showed that we were 17 miles away from the plant in the windward direction. My mother became frantic. That scared me a little, but by Monday, I was over it. Through the whole thing I stayed cool, maybe a little too cool.” JH
“I feel that this accident at Three Mile Island was something that had to happen. Not that I’m glad it did, for I would feel sorry for the people who might have had to permanently leave their homes. I think that confronting the fear – the-accident – I hope, made people realize that the world they live in is not perfect and the constant need for energy causes people to build new ways for creating energy and with these come accidents.” AP
(Names have been omitted to protect the privacy of the students.)