 March 28, 1979. The accident at the Unit 2, 3-mile island nuclear power plant was a searing crisis for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the plant's owner and most especially residents near TMI-2, southeast of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Four days of confusion and panic only subsided when President Jimmy Carter visited the site on April 1. Eight days later, Governor Richard Thornberg canceled the evacuation of pregnant women and children, local schools reopened the next day, and the scores of reporters who rushed to the scene went home. The crisis was over. Living with TMI's consequences was another matter. I'm Tom Wellock, Historian for the NRC. The crisis lasted four days, but it took 14 years to clean up TMI's damaged reactor and contaminated buildings. Near the NRC, nor the nuclear industry, were well prepared to begin the cleanup. A year after the accident, progress was stalled by financial questions, lawsuits, regulatory uncertainty, technical problems and miscommunication. To solve these problems, the NRC had to become a stronger advocate for the cleanup's importance, and it developed a more open and cooperative relationship with other government agencies, the nuclear industry, and citizen groups. The accident not only damaged a reactor, it damaged the credibility of the NRC and the plant's owner, General Public Utilities, known as GPU. The NRC was a relatively new agency in 1979, but opponents of nuclear power had already criticized for lax regulation and secretive behavior. And the accident led to accusations that GPU and the NRC had acted incompetently, even dishonestly during the crisis. The agency had to oversee the cleanup under a cloud of mistrust. That mistrust was soon evident as cleanup operations met resistance over radiation hazards. Whether it was solid, liquid, or gas, contamination that had to be removed or released from TMI, understandably increased public alarm. Several controversies raised the specter that TMI's radioactive wastes might become prisoners on the island. State governors blocked low-level waste shipments from TMI to commercial disposal sites in South Carolina and Washington State, which required extensive efforts by the NRC to reassure them that TMI waste was safe. The NRC was also caught off guard when the city of Lancaster sued to halt the discharge of accident-contaminated water into the Susquehanna River, from which the city drew its drinking water. The NRC argued that the filtered water would be decontaminated to the same purity as discharges from operating reactors. But the city demanded a public environmental impact statement on all facets of the cleanup. Opposition to river discharge grew, and in early 1980, the NRC agreed to find a different technical solution. A crisis point came in early 1980, when a small amount of radioactive krypton gas inadvertently escaped from TMI into the atmosphere. In small quantities, rubbed on is routinely discharged from operating plants. But for Pennsylvania residents who had lived for a year with the stress and uncertainty of the damaged plant, the incident was too much. At angry public meetings, residents accused the utility and the NRC of lying and operating under a cloak of secrecy. Robert Reed, mayor of nearby Middletown pleaded, we want someone in there to tell us the truth, someone we can put faith in. With distrust growing, an NRC task force warned. Without local public acceptance of the cleanup operation at TMI 2, an orderly and expeditious cleanup will be difficult, if not impossible to accomplish. Public fears and stress can be expected to persist until the plant is cleaned up. The NRC responded with initiatives to involve the public in cleanup operations. Nuclear power critics were consulted on the best means to vent the krypton gas, which was done in June 1980. To provide an independent source of information, local residents received training through a Department of Energy program in radiation monitoring and data recording. The NRC also formed a citizen advisory panel that met every quarter for 13 years, providing local communities with an effective channel of communication with both the NRC and the utility. The NRC established a well-staffed project office at the site to allow for a more decentralized and efficient cleanup, and it completed an environmental impact statement that set out safety criteria for all cleanup operations. As the NRC resolved regulatory issues, technical questions still loomed. GPU needed assistance with the cleanup, and the damage reactor offered important opportunities for safety research. The NRC persuaded the Department of Energy to commit the expertise of its national laboratories to research and clean up support. The Department of Energy also provided disposal sites for highly contaminated equipment and storage of the damaged fuel. Under the watchful eyes of NRC inspectors, cleanup operations moved forward. On July 23, 1980, utility workers made the first post-accident entry into the reactor containment building. Over the next year, plant staff collected data and prepared to decontaminate systems and buildings and remove the reactor fuel. GPU's hopes that it could refurbish and restart TMI-2 rested on finding only limited damage to its fuel assemblies. Uranium fuel pellets are inserted into thin 12-foot tubes. The tubes are bound into assemblies, and hundreds of assemblies are packed together to make up what is called the reactor core, where the nuclear chain reaction takes place. On July 21, 1982, more than three years after the accident, the utility got its first look at the core. Personnel lowered a camera probe into an opening to inspect the core. At the top of the core, they anticipated the camera would find damaged but mostly intact assemblies. There was nothing there but murky water. As a technician called out its progress to his astonished co-workers, the camera plunged deep into a large empty void. What that was, investigations showed, was rubble, a bed of shattered fuel assemblies more than a foot thick. Below it was a hardened mass of melted fuel and other metals. Later inspections revealed some melted fuel even flowed to the bottom of the reactor vessel. In all, about half the reactor fuel had disintegrated or melted down. Talk of restarting the reactor ended and the workers turned to permanent decommissioning. The NRC worked with the nuclear industry and the Department of Energy to develop procedures, tools and equipment to remove the damaged fuel and transport it in specially designed casks to Idaho National Laboratory for temporary storage. And rather than river disposal, the filtered accident water was evaporated and the solid residues disposed of in a low level waste facility. In 1993, TMI2 was placed in monitored storage where its remaining radioactivity will decay to lower levels until complete decommissioning is scheduled in accordance with NRC regulations. Like the accident itself, the TMI cleanup was a unique challenge to the NRC. The long cleanup was a source of great stress to local communities. And the NRC learned from their residents that regulating required more than making technically sound decisions. It requires substantive public involvement. Today the NRC draws on lessons that helped turn around the TMI cleanup by communicating about decommissioning in public forums and encouraging participation in citizen advisory panels for power reactor decommissioning. Ensuring adequate protection of the public is a very public business.