William Scranton

You need a graphic understanding of a situation to make a complete judgment and we didn't have that.

They're calling their Washington sources at the NRC or in Congress and they're not hesitating to give their opinion, but their opinion, frankly, in those early days was not very well informed.

When I started walking and I looked down and I saw on the floor this water, which looked like, you know, water in your basement except it happened to be in the auxiliary building of a nuclear power plant.

There are allowable limits for radiation going - I mean there's radiation all around us. There's radiation from your television set. There's radiation from your computer. There's radiation actually occurring in the ground.

And I remember walking in there and, I must say, I was quite unnerved the closer I got to it.

The first one, obviously, was walking into my office at eight o'clock in the morning on Wednesday, and being told there was a telephone call saying that there was an incident at Three Mile Island, and that it had shut down and that beyond that we didn't know.

The value of government to the people it serves is in direct relationship to the interest citizens themselves display in the affairs of state.

Another very strong image from the first day was giving my initial press conference in the morning - going down and finding out that everything I had said, the essence of what I had said, was wrong.

Obviously, I'm not looking in the core of the reactor, but I am looking at what, at that time, was considered the source of the trouble, which was the water and where it was.

All of the information that we were getting up to that time from the NRC people, from our people who knew something about nuclear power, was that the breach of the core was not a likelihood to happen.

My time inside there was very short compared to the amount of time it took to take on and take off this suit and to test me for how much radioactivity I have.

And at ten, or whatever time, in the morning we had the press conference, what we knew is there had been an incident at Three Mile Island, that it was shut down, that there was water that had escaped but it was contained.