Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

This day, March 28th, 1979, at 4 a.m. Eastern time, a pump stopped working and sending water to the steam generators that removed heat from the reactor core at the

three-mile island nuclear generating station which is located near Harrisburg

Pennsylvania. Operators in the control room reacted poorly because of missteps and misinformation,

and by early morning the Corps had heated to over 4,000 degrees,

just 1,000 degrees short of a full-on nuclear meltdown. On the 7-point international nuclear event

scale, the partial meltdown at 3 Mile Island was rated a five, which is, quote,

an accident with wider consequences.

Those consequences will get into it,

but were, to some extent, environmental

and health related, but to a much larger

extent about the narrative surrounding

nuclear power. That really is the legacy of Three Mile Island is the way that it

changed the conversation around nuclear energy in that moment. So here to discuss as always is

Nicole Hammer of Columbia and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wellesley. Hello.

Hello Jody. Hey there. So Nicky let's talk a little bit about just the tick talk of this event and specifically

kind of how this event played out in terms of a communication and people finding out about it.

So what do we need to know?

All right, so you gave a really great description

of all of the little things that went wrong

that led to this catastrophic moment.

...