A little before 4 in the morning on March 28th, 1979.

A roar like a huge release of steam.

I heard a very loud noise that sounded like a huge release of steam and I looked out the window.

It was dark but you could see from the lights over there that there was a geyser of steam that was raising up in the air.

The source of the sound was the three mile island nuclear power plant sitting in the middle

of the Susquehanna River. The plant's cooling system had malfunctioned, causing steam to shoot into the air.

And later that morning, as technicians scrambled to fix the problem.

Radiation from the reactor core escaped the plant's containment walls.

The nation and much of the world has been watching as this nuclear nightmare unfolds in this plant on the Susquehanna River.

The telephone lines in the Harrisburg area are jammed and immediate highways are too as more people decide to leave.

The Pennsylvania governor at the time, Richard Thornburg, ordered a partial evacuation.

I am advising those who may be particularly susceptible to the effects of any radiation.

That is pregnant women and preschool-age children to leave the area

within a five-mile radius. The danger faced by man for tempering with natural forces, a theme familiar from the myth of Prometheus to the story of Frankenstein, moved closer to fact from fancy through the day.

The problem was fixed in a matter of days and the faulty reactor

was permanently shut down. There were investigations. Government officials

concluded that the radiation released from Three Mile Island

did not have significant health or environmental impacts.

They even continued to operate the one nuclear reactor that didn't melt down.

It worked without major incident until it was shut down in 2019.

But Three Mile Island was still the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history. It's important to say that the meltdown

was relatively minor compared to catastrophic accidents like Chernobyl and

...