Nation: Back From The Brink

Atomic-age pioneers start their lives again

The threatening bubble had dissolved. The radiation readings outside Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island nuclear power plant were nearing normal. Slowly the nightmare was ending without anyone receiving a lethal overdose of radiation, either inside the plant or out. The 100,000 or so of the area's 650,000 residents who had left started to trickle home, although many children and pregnant women, on the advice of Governor Richard Thornburgh, were staying away until the government said flatly that the reactor that had so nearly run away was safe.

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