When I started my new job for a large public utility in 1980, my cubicle wasn't built yet and I was given a desk in a makeshift space shared by the agency's new Manager of Disaster Preparedness, who was also awaiting his new office.  For two weeks, I listened to his animated telephone conversations while reading through my orientation materials for my low-level community relations job.

The public utility operated two nuclear power plants, along with hydro and coal burning plants in the most heavily populated part of the East Coast.  I had been excited about the recruiting conversations about their new efforts in recycling and energy efficiency.  Instead, I overheard one side of telephone discussions about potential kill zones, death rates if the wind blew south instead of north, evacuation bottle necks.  I guess I knew that disaster planning was part of an organization like this, but I went home from work frightened every day, feeling like I was eavesdropping on critical and highly confidential conversations.  We were not very far distant, in time or geography, from the Three Mile Island disaster.

Then I moved into my cubicle, and focused on more mundane tasks, until other aspects of the disaster plan were required to be implemented.  The utility needed a large number of employees to volunteer to be responsible for execution of the plan.  For example, they asked employees to train to drive school buses, and to get the class driver's license that would qualify them for that role.  I remember my manager, an older, adventurous woman with a bold laugh, bragging about driving a school bus around orange cones in her training.  I don't even remember what I trained for -- some coordinating or staffing role -- but I still have the badge with picture ID, because it is so impressive, stamped "PREVENTION/MITIGATION/RECOVERY/RESPONSE.  This is to certify that the person whose name and picture appears here may have emergency access through military and police control points."

At the time, I thought, that if execution of a disaster plan in the event of a nuclear accident relied on my manager driving a bus for the first time on an expressway and me managing some panicked crowd, we were in trouble.

I do not have a sophisticated understanding of the pro's and con's of nuclear power as part of our energy future.  I have been inside the control room of those nuclear power plants, and worked with the dedicated, but very human, staff who ran them.  I do know --as does the world-- that worst case scenarios happen.  I also know, unless things have changed dramatically in 30 years, that the "mitigation-recovery-response" relies on activation of many marginally trained personnel to respond to impossible situations.