Before this experience I was sure I made difference. I believed, like Lucy, that a few pieces of well placed correspondence could eliminate the threats of meltdown or cancer in my kids. There was no question that we were smarter than they. We had more PHDs in our ad-hoc group TMI and Peachbottom Nuclear Licensing Intervention Group, called the York Committee for Safety, than the nuclear industries Atomic Industrial Forum. We were right about the waste, about inevitable accidents, about construction flaws, about radiation, and about fuel rod transportation. There was a snake under every rock. They were wrong and they knew it. They invented new ways of looking at risk, credible and not credible. We astutely pointed out their flaws in the dry nonemotional hearings in the licensing hearings held in York and Harrisburg and at their headquarters in Maryland. Their ears and minds were completely closed. They heard nothing at the hearings.

I got out of my car and looked over the roof toward TMI.

During this experience I was terrified. I was on Interstate 83 nearing Harrisburg when I heard on the radio that there was a “general emergency” at the Three Mile Island Nuclear plant. In years of hearings and stacks of legal filings I had never heard or read this term. Could it be something not credible had happened?

I got out of my car and looked over the roof toward TMI. I could see the ridge hiding the plant and the ever present steam plume. I smelled something hot. Radiator coolant? But then I tasted something metallic in the humid air of late March. Terror seized my soul. I jumped back in the car, u-turned in front of the oncoming traffic and sped south. My mind raced with a panic jumble of what to do next. Get my wife and kids? Warn everybody? How? Who would listen? Who am I ? Tell my friends ? How? There was no twitter, no facebook, no instagram, no text messaging, no cell phone able to do anything as quickly as it had to be done.

“Don’t touch that” she yelled. “It could make you sick.”

I decided to find Joe Zajek, the York City Manager and tell him what I knew in depths of my soul was happening.

“Joe,” I stammered. “This is real. They don’t know what the fuck has happened and they don’t know what they’re doing.”

“County control has contacted the City but we haven’t been told what to do either. Go check out the radiation gage at the King Street firehouse.”

I walked up King Street against the pedestrian traffic of mothers with strollers and attorneys on their way to the Central Market for lunch. A plump mother in a flowered house dress yanked the arm of her squirming two year old as he reached to pick up a discarded ice cream wrapper off the sidewalk.

“Don’t touch that” she yelled. “It could make you sick.”

There was no trust in either the plant, the owners, or the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

An additional empathetic panic gripped me. These people don’t know they could at this very moment be walking in a cloud of deadly radiation which could make them a lot sicker than food poisoning. At the firehouse, most of the crew was engrossed in making sure their takeout lunch order included slaw or fries with the pot pie Wednesday special from Les’s greasy spoon next to Central Market.

“Joe Zajek said I should look at your radiation monitor.” I told the firefighter that came over as I opened the side door of the engine bay.”Yea,” he said. “Over here.” I looked through the glass cover at the circular faced gage about the size of a 78 rpm record with a needle scribbling an ink line on a logarithmic scaled sheet of paper.

“It usually makes a small circle here, but for some reason today the circle is this bigger one up here.” Holy shit I thought. “Call Zajek and tell him,” I said as I raced out the door and up the street to tell my wife at the YWCA and then stopped by my office.

We went home and got the kids from school. They were the last ones in their row to be picked up, and drove 30 miles west to a motel in Chambersburg. The other parents in our rural Kralltown Elementary School, 16.5 miles SW of TMI either worked at the plant during construction or had relatives that worked there. They knew the inspection and construction shortcuts that happened during the building of the billion dollar plant. There was no trust in either the plant, the owners, or the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

As I drove my mind raced between things I’d never before had to consider. Could we ever return. Might we never able to return to the house and farm we were building? Were we carrying particles that could kill us ? Is thirty miles far enough? At one time a melt down study predicted a fallout zone the size of Pennsylvania. What about the pets? How will I get back to milk the cow? Feed the chickens? They didn’t listen. It didn’t matter. I didn’t matter.

After this experience I became focused. What was here now and good was what mattered. What idiocy, be it polluted air, water, radiation, unhealthy food, or bad medicines that “they” were dumping on us could well be unstoppable. Living the little pleasures and loves will have to be enough.

John