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.
For the first time, the threat of a reactor disaster had caused a large-scale evacuation in the U.S., disrupted hundreds of thousands of lives, temporarily disabled the economy of four counties, and plainly revealed the dark side of nuclear power. The atomic-age pioneers in the rolling farmlands of Pennsylvania who had lived through the unnerving ordeal were left with emotions that ranged from simple and utter relief to seething anger at the combination of forces that had exposed them to such danger. Declared Middletown . Resident Ann Martin, who felt her past belief in the safety of the plant had been betrayed: "They ought to make sure that thing never opens again. They should knock it down and give the island back to the kids and the fishermen."
With forced bravado, some sought to laugh off their experience. A radio station in the area broadcast a mock weather forecast: "Partly cloudy tomorrow with a 40% chance of survival." Another: "Two thousand degrees and bright." Yet another: "What's the five-day forecast for Harrisburg?" "Two days."
At the Elk's Bar in Middletown, just three miles from the crippled plant, bartenders concocted a new drink combining gin, vodka and bourbon and called it the Bubble Buster, because "it melts down everything." At Dickinson College in Carlisle, 25 miles to the west, students dreamed up such T-shirt slogans as KISS ME, I'M RADIATED. Other area residents wore more defiant slogans: HELL, NO, WE WON'T GLOW. Needling the lack of scientific certainty about the effects of radiation, some T-shirt wearers proclaimed: I SURVIVED THREE MILE ISLAND—I THINK.
Neither the jokes nor the downplaying of the accident was appreciated by most of the workers who pulled on their discardable yellow boots, plastic radiation-protective overalls and hard hats, and crossed guarded bridges to put in harrowing shifts at the plant throughout the period of greatest danger. For days, the engineers had not known for sure just what was happening in the overheated reactor building where radiation levels reached as high as 30,000 rems—a concentration that would instantly fry a human, like a microwave oven cooking a steak.