By Victor Gilinsky
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
March 23, 2009
Shortly after I arrived at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)'s headquarters in Washington, D.C., at 9 a.m. on Wednesday, March 28, 1979, I got a call from the commission's emergency center in Bethesda, Md.
The number two reactor at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania had declared a general emergency.
There weren't supposed to be serious accidents at nuclear power plants and having to deal with one led to some, let us say, out-of-the-ordinary, and even absurd, behavior.