nearest town. The voices of thecommissioners in charge of the disaster were recorded by a dictaphone that hadbeen left running on a table.[From the dictaphone recording (various voices)] "...What was [?your time scale] involved there?""Hour." "Hour before what?" "Before we had a coremelt." "Before you had a core melt?" "You... you would havehours 'til when you were generatingfission products in a core-melt kind of situation through thecontainment..." "I think... you know, wegot the best we got, Joe; and they're not coming up with answers we gotthe..." "Well, don't you think as a precautionarymeasure there should be some evacuation?" [long pause] "Probably but I must say it's operatingtotally in the blind and I don't have any confidence at all that if weorder [an] evacuation, we won't move people... [from?] a place where they'vealready gotten apiece of the dose they were going to get into an area where they will get...you know, they will'vehad point-five of what they were going to get and now they move someplace else and getone-point-oh..." "...Joe?" "Yes, sir." "I think [..?..] I've got to call theGovernor " "Yes, sir, I do thinkyou've got to talk to him immediately " "to... do it immediately;we're operating almost totally inthe blind... [?this] information is [?ambiguous], mine is non-existent; Idon't know... [we're like?] a couple of blind men... [..?..] stay around, make a decision here..." "Don't we know that it's been stopped?""...just lost all communications with the control room..."For four days, the engineersat the plant watched helplessly as a bubble of hydrogen grew inside the damagedreactor. What they feared most was a further massive explosion. But they knewthat if they tried to force the bubble out of the reactor, it might movedownwards and completely uncover the core. They would then face the nightmare of a meltdown.The engineers were trappedby the consequences of an accident no-one could've anticipated. It was a pointthey made to the commissioners again and again during the incident.[Back (presumably) to the dictaphone recording] "... this is a failure mode that's never beenstudied; it just... it's unbelievable."Dr. Victor Gilinsky, Nuclear RegulatoryCommissioner 19751984 Well, the thing that impressed me was... how littlewe really knew about the situation. It was very hard to figure out what was happening... There was a lot of confusion on everyone's part both on the company's part and the government's part and [on the part of] a lot of other people who were participating;and I think this had a very strong effect on the public basically, to see allthe men in the white [] lab coats, who are supposed to know, on TV [] scratching their heads... Imean, a lot of people wondered whether things were as much under control as they had been told.[From an American anti-nuclear power TV endorsement] [Voiceover:] "Three Mile Island. The President'sCommission estimated the cost of the accident could reach $1.8billion. That's a lot of money to pay for a power plant that may never workagain. "But Three Mile Island wasn't the first nuclearaccident and it won't be the last. In 1979 alone, there were twentynuclear incidents that could've led to the catastrophic