I'm a Cold War baby. My generation lived under the Damoclean sword of nuclear war. I grew up taking part in those laughably pointless duck-and-cover drills which all American schoolchildren participated in in preparation for World War III, also known as “The Big Showdown with the Russians” or simply “The end of the world”. If you were a kid during those years, you remember ducking underneath your desks and clasping your hands behind your head like you were supposed to do when you saw the flash of a nuclear explosion. Never mind that the flash from the thermonuclear devices of that day could instantly fry your retinas to a luscious golden-brown or that the shock wave from those things could flatten the building you were in and everyone in it faster than you could say “Doctor Strangelove”. Perhaps you remember the unmistakable blare of an Emergency Broadcast System (EBS) test as it came over the radio or broke into your favorite TV show. Maybe you held your breath until the announcer came on and confirmed that yes, it was only a test. This time.

When the news of the unthinkable finally reached us, it didn't come in the form of a missile alert, the flash of a nuclear explosion or a hastily-arranged pep talk from the President. Instead, it came in the form of news reports of a nuclear power plant just a few hours south of us blowing its stack.

The political climate at the local university in 1979 was fairly left-of-center and most of us including yours truly were very firmly in the no-nukes camp. At the time I was taking a business course there. Our instructor regularly brought in guest lecturers. One of the speakers which our instructor had booked for that semester was a spokesman for a regional electric utility who was going to give us a pep talk about the benefits of nuclear energy. When that month's guest lecturer was announced, I largely kept my opinions to myself, though as I recall` many of my classmates were not so restrained. Perhaps our instructor was just trying to bring us around to a more fair and balanced point of view about what print advertisements and radio and TV commercials from the power and nuclear industries said was the dirt-cheap, perfectly-clean and absolutely-safe energy source of the future. The presentation was scheduled for the following week.

Not a one of us were aware of just how ironic the timing of this lecture would end up being.

I don't remember exactly how I first learned of the Three Mile Island accident. Perhaps it came in the form of a news bulletin from the campus radio station, which I listened to regularly back then. Perhaps it was by word-of-mouth which spread among my fellow students faster than a runaway chain reaction. The entire campus was abuzz that Wednesday. In the news media, industry spokesmen asserted over and over that only small amounts of radiation were released and there was no threat to public health and safety; government officials told us not to panic.

That Friday the lecturer from the power company arrived to speak to our class. You might have expected him to at least acknowledge the accident and try to calm any fears by fielding questions from the audience, calmly giving spin-doctored but essentially factual answers. Instead, our guest speaker was the consummate public-relations flack. Despite pointed questions from my classmates about the still-unfolding nuclear accident, he very coolly pitched the official electric power industry party line about how safe, clean and efficient nuclear energy was, as though what had happened only a few miles from Pennsylvania's capitol city was merely a glitch, a tech problem which good old Yankee ingenuity would take care of before we knew it, a temporary setback to the otherwise unimpeded onward march of progress. A lot of my classmates didn't respond very politely to having their intelligence insulted. They practically heckled the lecturer. Frankly, he seemed out-of-it to me, not quite all there, like he was either drunk or exhausted. News of a nuclear power plant only a few hours away careening toward meltdown stage with every passing minute would certainly keep me up at night (which it did).

The campus radio station became a clearinghouse for breaking news and opinions expressed with words and with music. Every time an update came in over the station's Associated Press news wire, it would be ripped and read on the air, often with on-the-spot analysis and editorializing by the announcer, or from impromptu discussion panels trying to sort fact from official spin. Chemistry and physics professors sat in on some of these discussions and gave their assessment of the situation along with explanations of nuclear physics and the history of nuclear energy. Student disc jockeys searched for songs which expressed their fear and outrage, but apart from a small number of songs like Gil Scott-Heron's “We Almost Lost Detroit”, the only anti-nuclear songs they could seem to find were about nuclear war, not nuclear power. A novelty track, “(Your Love Is Like) Nuclear Waste” by Tuff Darts (link is NSFW) ended up in very heavy rotation as did the Buzzcocks' “Something's Gone Wrong Again”. Meanwhile at the campus food co-op, someone had posted a one-page paper about how victims of the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima survived by eating a Japanese staple, miso soup which, the writer asserted, had anti-radiation properties.

There were a number of freak-out moments during the Three-Mile-Island accident. When a hydrogen bubble formed in the reactor vessel, the news media were quick to point out that there was no danger of a thermonuclear explosion as in a hydrogen bomb. When hundreds of gallons of radioactive water from the reactor's cooling system escaped or were emptied into the Susquehanna River, there was a mild panic over our local water supply being contaminated even though we were over 100 miles upstream from the reactor. There was still another when radioactive gases were vented into the atmosphere. Someone remarked that not a lot of radiation released from Three Mile Island would fall on our area unless it rained. Which of course it did. It was “spring monsoon” season in our region of the American northeast, so leaden skies and constant, interminable, bonechillingly-cold rain were as inevitable as the rising of the sun, which we seldom got to see at that time of year.

The hardest part of the whole affair was the waiting and the unanswered or unanswerable questions. How bad was it, really? Could we trust anyone in charge to level with us? Were we contaminated? (I certainly remember feeling contaminated. Apparently lots of others felt that way too) Were we all marked for death by cancer 10, 20 or 30 years down the road? How much of the food in local supermarkets came from the affected area? Would we wake up in the middle of the night to police bullhorns ordering us to evacuate? It was definitely not a situation conducive to good mental health.

I've since learned that radiation from TMI was detected as far north as Toronto, Canada. A book by renowned professional photographer Sylvia Plachy contained photographs of deformed livestock and grotesquely-mutated plant life not far from the reactor site.

As of this writing, the crisis continues to unfold at the Fukushima reactor site in northern Japan. Whether the Japanese ultimately end up with a Three-Mile-Island-style disaster or a virtually-unthinkable Chernobyl-style catastrophe remains to be seen. Its effect on the nuclear power industry's renewed ambitions remains to be seen. In any case, it is, as Yogi Berra once put it, deja vu all over again.