by Sara Kelly, PhiladelphiaWEEKLY, © 1999. Used by permission.

"Go ahead, put your hand in," says Tom Kauffman, the PR guy with star quality. It's a sunny day and I'm standing at the base of one of Three Mile Island's two functioning cooling towers, gazing up at 20 years of ignorance, fear and good, old-fashioned Atomic Age romance.

Up close, the very object I once associated with nuclear threat fails to inspire much fear. A ring of wooden slats flanks the bottom edge, water gushing over them. Kauffman explains what happens here.

Nuclear fission heats water running in pipes through the reactor to an outbuilding, where a boiler converts it to steam. The steam powers four huge turbines that between them create 870,000 kilowatts of electricity -- enough to power 860,000 homes.

Cold Susquehanna River water is piped in to cool the steam and return it to its liquid state, so it can begin the process all over again. Each minute, 3,500 to 5,000 gallons of superheated river water cascade down 40 feet of wooden baffles, cooled by air entering the top of the concrete hourglass. Fascinating.

"Go ahead," Kauffman chides smilingly, as if allowing me to indulge a secret fantasy. Though the water's right out in the open -- flowing like Niagara not 3 feet from my nose -- I have a hard time making the leap of faith.

It feels like a game they play with reporters. An an ingenious one, too. While most PR people must pepper the press with polite wordplay and wait till publication to see if their wily lines were bought, a PR man at a nuclear power plant can test a reporter's faith in about a second.

Of course, most reporters, this one included, will take just about any stupid risk for a story. And Kauffman waits in his car as I take my latest one.

He either wants to steer clear of the waters himself or to let me wimp out privately. By the time I'm close enough to the cooling tower to see what I'm up against, I'm already getting showered with a fine mist. How much more damage could come from touching it?

Jesus God, I think. Sticking my hand in a cooling tower hardly seems good for me. But it sure seems good for this story -- whichever way it ultimately ends. So I do it like it's nothing.

And it is nothing. Just plain, old river water. Not that I could tell the difference. I get back in the car and Kauffman hands me a napkin. "Cool, isn't it?" he says, meaning, of all things, the water's temperature, and I quietly imagine my hand tingling.

On a hazy day at Three Mile Island, Tom Kauffman could be Michael Douglas. With his crisp blue windbreaker and tie, I imagine him a 90s version of the crusading cameraman Douglas played in The China Syndrome. Only he likes nukes.

It's hard to imagine Kauffman reporting to work that fateful morning in 1979, when he labored not in an office building like today, but within the plant itself.

His days of taking radiation readings long gone, Kauffman now provides a public face for TMI. But the job might not seem a huge improvement over plant work, considering all the infamy he must now represent.

Perhaps the only entity more in need of good communications than Three Mile Island after playing host to the worst nuclear accident in America was Three Mile Island before the accident, when the closest thing the plant had to a public representative was a faceless man behind a desk somewhere in Reading.

Kauffman is among the first to admit that communication between the plant and its neighbors could hardly have been worse 20 years ago. He's also convinced that the accident wouldn't have lived on so ignobly in the minds of the American public had the plant devised a system for handling the media. Were Kauffman in this job back then, he could've stuck his own hands in the cooling towers as a show of faith.

TOWERS OF POWER

You can see the cooling towers from the Pennsylvania Turnpike -- 372 feet of striated concrete looming hazily from the primordial depths of the lower Susquehanna. Four postmodern pepper shakers studded with red clearance lights to advertise their presence to pilots landing at the nearby Harrisburg International Airport.

South of Harrisburg, the shallow Susquehanna snakes down tranquil banks sometimes lined with high-tension wires to Royalton, a riverside borough of 1,000. Middletown, with 10 times Royalton's population, is just east of the smaller community.

Because of its relative size, Middletown's the place most people connect with Three Mile Island, even though you have to drive through Royalton to get there. The plant proper is in the middle of the river -- on a storied island where prehistoric civilization flourished.

Broad and flat and fringed by rolling mountains, the fertile river valley has supported human life for more than 10,000 years. And Gary Prinkey has the arrowheads to prove it.

Since starting as a budget analyst at TMI 18 years ago, Prinkey has collected more than a thousand arrowheads, most of them predating the Indian civilizations that gave their names to many of the region's native landmarks.

Prinkey conducts his hunts on the wooded south end of the island during lunch breaks and on weekends. Most of his arrowheads are 5,000 to 8,000 years old, though he's uncovered more recent specimens. Once he even stumbled across a human skeleton.

It wasn't, alas, the remains of Pocahontas or Captain John Smith, who first made contact with the river's namesake tribe -- the Susquehannocks -- not far from here in the early 1600s. Rather, it was from the Civil War era. And Prinkey helped rebury it hear where it had washed out in the rapids that are forever carving away all sides of the island.

Though TMI has had several names through the years, it was first identified as "Three Mile Island" on surveying maps at the turn of the century, supposedly because of its length. In truth, the island is now only 2.5 miles long, shortened by a half-mile when the tiny York Haven power plant dammed the river near its lower end some 90 years ago.

Southern TMI resembles a nature preserve. Families of deer graze on open land between stands of trees; upstream from the western shore, toy rowboats bear fishermen trying to capitalize on the American shad migration before a fish ladder is completed in the eastern channel.

Everyone knows Three Mile Island is a haven for wildlife. Few, though, know what kind.

CAN'T TALK -- WE HAVE A PROBLEM

In the early morning hours of March 28, 1979, Mike Pintek, the 27-year-old news director at Harrisburg's WKBO (now a mid-day talk host on Pittsburgh's KDKA), was manning the airwaves when he got a strange call from a traffic reporter.

The reporter said he'd heard emergency equipment was being gathered in Middletown. Pintek said he'd check it out.

His first call was to Dauphin County, whose emergency operations office pled ignorance. When Pintek next reached the reporter, he heart more strange news: There was no steam coming from any of TMI's four cooling towers.

There are two completely separate power plants at Three Mile Island -- TMI-1 and TMI-2. TMI-1 was down for refueling at the time and wasn't producing steam. But TMI-2, the plant which had been in operation for just 90 days, wasn't producing steam either.

When Pintek called the plant, he heard a cacophony of alarm bells and buzzers. Pintek asked the man on the other end what was happening.

The man said simply, 'I can't talk now. We have a problem."

Pintek, who later learned he'd been mistakenly transferred to TMI-2's control room, put the phone down and told his co-anchor, 'I think there's something serious happening."

COUNTDOWN TO DESTINY

It was just before 4 a.m. when a crew doing routine maintenance -- flushing out a filter in a water cooling system deep within the plant -- started the chain reaction that would lead to the worst nuclear disaster in America.

Little did the workers realize at the time that the few ounces of water they left behind in the pipes would travel through the system, ultimately colliding with the air-controlled valves that ran the plant's main turbines.

The turbines shut down suddenly, sending thousands of pounds of steam-propelled air into the sky above the island. Windows vibrated in homes a quarter-mile from the plant, jerking residents from pre-dawn sleep.

The pressure from the turbine trip triggered a reactor "scram" -- the process that stops nuclear reaction by introducing electron-absorbing elements into the reactor. The plant shut down, as designed. But the danger was far from over.

As pressure built up in the reactor, a release valve opened. But unbeknownst to the control room operators, instead of closing after pressure returned to normal, the valve remained open -- for more than two hours -- spewing thousands of pounds of radioactive sludge onto the floor of a containment building and exposing about 5 feet of the reactor's core. Tons of enriched uranium was hurtling toward meltdown.

WHAT WE HAVE HERE IS A FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE

Perhaps the most damning thing Tom Kauffman will admit about his company's role in the accident is how poorly it handled the public.

TMI didn't have a communications team on-site at the time, and the media had no reliable means to access and report information. Rumors were allowed to fester. The biggest one, Kauffman says now, rolling his eyes, was of the hydrogen bubble that many nearby residents believed would make like the Enola Gay over Hiroshima.

From his Reading office, Blain Fabian, the utility's spokesman, assured Pintek, "There's no danger off-site to the general public."

An hour earlier, Fabian and Jack Herbein, a vice president for the utility, drafter the first official statement on the accident. It read simply:

"The nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island Unit Two was shut down as prescribed when a malfunction related to a feed-water pump occurred about 4:00 a.m. Wednesday. The entire unit was systematically shut down and will be out of service for about a week while equipment is checked and repairs made.

Suspecting there was more happening at the plant than Fabian himself might know, but not wanting to cause a panic, Pintek aired a cautious spot and awaited updates.

He didn't tape that initial newscast -- something he still kicks himself for, considering the number of people who have approached him wanting to buy copies.

UNEASY PEACE

For the first 48 hours of the crisis, Debbie Baker, like most locals, went about her life as if nothing had happened. Of course, she didn't yet realize that anything had.

A friendly, energetic 42-year-old, Baker grew up just a few miles from Three Mile Island. As a kid in the late '60s, she watched the towers go up with childhood detachment.

The concrete behemoths were clearly ugly, but she never thought much about them. Soon after high school, she married a local man, and by the spring of '79 the couple had a 9-month-old daughter and their dream home in nearby Fairview Park.

The house was just five and a half miles from the plant, whose towers were visible this time of year through bare tree branches. her mother lived not far away in Grandview Acres.

On Friday, day three of the accident, Baker's boss announced he was taking his family to Philadelphia. When she asked why, he told her what he knew about the accident at TMI.

Earlier that day, Governor Thornburgh had issued an evacuation order for pregnant women and preschool-aged children. Debbie Baker caught wind of it almost accidentally.

Baker then tried to call her husband, who worked for the phone company. Ironically, she couldn't get through. In fact, few calls got through that afternoon, local lines entirely jammed by those making evacuation plans.

Unable to reach her husband, Baker left work early to pick up her daughter. When she arrived at the sitter's, the woman was preparing to evacuate Baker's daughter with her own kids.

Most of the Bakers' immediate neighbors evacuated that afternoon. But others in the surrounding area stayed behind. Royalton Mayor Judy Oxenford was among them. She recalls sitting out on her porch in the sun after she learned about the accident.

When President Carter visited on Sunday, day five of the accident, the reactor core was as unstable as ever. Though locals viewed his visit with relief, control room transcripts later showed the plant had some of its scariest moments while the president was on the premises.

I SURVIVED THREE MILE ISLAND

Sitting on metal folding chairs in a quiet Royalton Borough Hall several weeks before Christmas, Middletown Mayor Barbara Layne joins her Royalton equivalent in an extended flirtation with a maintenance man who's dragging his feet about installing holiday lights. Ostensibly, they're here to tell yet another reporter about what happened here 20 years ago. But neither has much new to add.

Suddenly, Layne recalls that when the accident happened, Middletown High was weighing whether to cancel a student trip to France. The kids wound up going, she laughs, but armed with T-shirts on which they had printed "I SURVIVED THREE MILE ISLAND." Apparently, they were a big hit that spring in France.

Though she was not in politics at the time, Layne, a bright, stately woman with short russet hair, probably knew more about what was happening at TMI than most of her neighbors. Her late husband was a nuclear engineer and she worked as a cardiac nurse in Harrisburg.

In 1992 Layne was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Contending she got more radiation on the job than she could ever get from the scant amount released at TMI, she says she "never for a minute" questioned the cause of her illness.

Layne has her own theory about her cancer's origins. "I think it was because of the chemicals I've put on my head," she says, adding that she was a "bottle blonde" for 24 years before she contracted cancer.

Oxenford, too, has sickness stories. Spunky and irascible, the 56-year-old has a hard time moving up and down steps some days because of rheumatoid arthritis, for which she receives chemotherapy. And her grown daughter has Lupus.

Though none of these diseases are all that uncommon in society at large, if you hang around long enough near TMI you can't help wondering.

"We're trapped in this land occupied by Franz Kafka, Abbie Hoffman and Albert Camus," says Eric Epstein, assistant professor of humanities at Penn State Harrisburg and chairman of TMI Alert, a watchdog group founded two years before the accident as TMI's Unit 2 was preparing to go on-line. Epstein was born here and like most locals, has no plans to leave -- even though he says both TMI units still pose danger to the community.

Though Unit 2 was defueled several years ago, its reactor will not be fully decommissioned until Unit 1 is (probably in 2014). And though 2.3 million gallons of radioactive water have been pumped from the accident site, critical areas remain sealed off, with no humans having ventured there in 20 years.

Unit 1, meanwhile, is aging. And the periods between refueling outages -- when a month of general maintenance takes TMI off the grid of plants providing electricity to four states -- gets ever longer. Such outages cost the utility about $350,000 a day. Needless to say, the business office doesn't like them.

Most locals long for a permanent outage, though the pressure to bring one on fizzled years ago. "It's very difficult to keep something a public issue for 20 years," says Epstein. He says locals are "resigned and apathetic" about living next door to infamy. And their desire to fight it fell markedly after TMI Unit 1 was returned to the grid in 1985, following six years of non-operation in the aftermath of the Unit 2 accident.

"When the plant started back up," Baker says, "people felt like they lost their voice. It was the most devastating thing." But for Baker, the devastation began five years earlier.

The symptoms were small at first. Her mother's dog developed blinding cataracts in both eyes shortly after the accident. And when her mother's cat had kittens later that year, each one of them was born deformed. But Baker's doubts about TMI's long-term impact crystallized the first week of 1980, when her son was born with Down's Syndrome. These things occur normally, says Baker, but the speed and frequency with which they developed in neighborhoods downwind of the plant seemed extraordinary.

Shortly after her son's birth, Baker and a couple hundred others sued the plant, the utility that owned it and the designers of the reactor. It took them five years to win a settlement, and though Baker can't disclose its terms, her portion was reported to have exceeded a million dollars. So far, settlements from the accident -- to cover health claims, loss of business income, and emergency and relocation expenses -- have topped 50 million dollars. Since the first wave of settlements, about 2.000 new suits have been filed, all of then now stalled in court.

In 1990, a Columbia University researcher determined that radiation exposure to those living near TMI at the time of the accident was slight and that "no excess cancer" resulted. Several other studies have reached similar conclusions.

In early 1997, a journal for the National Institutes of health published research debunking the findings of most previous studies. It also revealed reports of "erythema, hair loss, vomiting and pet death near TMI at the time of the accident and of excess cancer deaths during 1979-1984."

Who knows how the facts will be reinterpreted by future studies? But as people move away and die and make room for those now born in the lush green valley surrounding Three Mile Island, the mysteries about what actually happened here 20 years ago will be lost in the mists of time. Perhaps someone like Gary Prinkey will dig them up on his lunch hour hundreds of years from now.

LA, LA, LA, LA, LIFE GOES ON...

It's the Sunday before Christmas at the Emmanuel United Methodist Church in Royalton. Mayor Judy Oxenford is holding court among several community elders, a handful of parents and teens, and a small crush of children waiting to see Santa.

Oxenford departs as helpers fill plates with cheese puffs and cookies. When she returns a half hour later, she's wearing reindeer antlers and riding a fire truck with Santa, who happens to work at the plant.

Though Oxenford claims no concern about the threat of radiation from TMI, she encourages others to talk about their fears and experiences, even setting up an assembly line of willing interviewees. The locals try to help, but before long, their stories all start sounding the same. There was a lot of confusion after the accident. We went up to the mountains for a while. We thought our town would be destroyed by an exploding hydrogen bubble and we'd have no homes to return to...

The Biesecker family returned to their Royalton home soon after President Carter's visit. If the president could brave the winds of TMI, so could they. For the most part, things were as they'd left them. There was a lot of cleaning to do -- walls to be washed with bleach and water, and all remaining food to be tossed.

Aside from a tank of fish that died -- even with a feeder that should've worked all week -- it was hard to tell what all the fuss had been about. They got their first hint that things weren't entirely all right in Royalton when their restocked fish died, too. Seems the aquarium rocks were radioactive.

Sam Biesecker, a hefty, bespectacled 28-year-old in a Steelers shirt, says he doesn't like living in the shadow of Three Mile Island. But he's rooted here. His father helped lay the stone on the Island's north end. And if that alone weren't enough to tie the family to the land, his father's grandmother was a Susquehannock Indian. And that's why he says he knows the secret to TMI's problems. he claims the plant was built on an old Indian burial ground, and the place is cursed.

Biesecker says this with a smile -- as if enjoying the distinction of living in one of the most infamous places in America. And while the locals hardly let their notorious neighbor affect their daily lives, few relish the distinction so readily.

June, and older woman boiling hot dogs in the church's basement kitchen, talks about her bouts with cancer. One of the few to suggest that cancer rates are observably higher around TMI, she knows local families in which every member contracted the disease. While she agrees that some people tend to blame the plant for everything, she knows what she's seen.

In the months and years after the accident, locals started seeing strange things. No, nothing looked much different. But, then again, the locals had a hard time knowing exactly what they were seeing. And outsiders, for that matter, weren't entirely sure what to make of them.

Even now, when people from around TMI venture beyond the immediate area, they've got a dozen punch lines at the ready. Nearly everyone here today tells an almost identical story about going on vacation after the accident and encountering wary clerks and waitstaff who wanted to know if they were radioactive. "We don't glow!" became their oddly cheerful mantra. And perhaps that's for the best. There's nothing like laughing about something to neutralize its capacity to terrify.

A week after the accident, most of those who had been evacuated were at last back home and things around Harrisburg were finally returning to normal. People took to streets that had been abandoned days earlier, exuberant that the danger had passed and their homes and families had been spared.

As fate would have it, the big movie playing in Harrisburg was The China Syndrome. And with so many unanswered questions still plaguing locals, the theater was packed the night Mike Pintek attended. Explaining the China Syndrome (the erroneous belief that a nuclear meltdown would trigger a chemical reaction that would burrow clear through the earth's core all the way to China), a scientist investigating an accident at a fabled nuclear power plant in California, uttered the irony-laced words: "It would render an area the size of Pennsylvania permanently uninhabitable, not to mention the cancer that would show up later."

The audience erupted in cheers.

NO (NEW) NUKES

There is only one fairly major point on which Epstein, the activist, and Kauffman, the PR man, agree. And that, surprisingly, is the future of nuclear energy.

"Nuclear power is dead," says Epstein. "There will never be another nuclear power plant built in this country."

Kauffman takes things a step further, predicting that "within the next 50 years, every currently operating nuclear power plant will be shutting down."

While Kauffman's prediction is hardly soothsaying (nuclear plants are licensed to operate for just a few decades and no new plants have been built in this country in the last 20 years), it's also true that plants such as TMI-1 can apply for an extension. But given the prevailing attitude toward nuclear power, it's hard to imagine any will.

Surprisingly, the demise of the nuclear power industry has less to do with incidents like TMI's partial meltdown and more to do with economics. The operating costs are high, explains Kauffman, and the price of fuel has decreased since the first nuclear power plants were built.

When TMI-2 went on-line, demand for fuel was high and we were increasingly uncertain about our access to it. Nuclear power made sense. Or did it?

Some, like retired University of Pittsburgh physics professor Ernest Sternglass, contend nuclear power never made sense. An expert on radiation's effects, Sternglass argues that catastrophic events like the nuclear accident at Chernobyl and even the normal daily operations of nuclear power plants have compromised the world's health.

Sternglass believes that in the Cold War rush to embrace atomic weaponry, the U.S. government hurried to establish nuclear power plants before enough was known about the effects of long-term, low-level radiation exposure. Besides, many of Sternglass' peers -- Einstein once among them -- were anxious to atone for the sin of helping build atomic bombs during the war. And the government wanted to show that there were also "peaceful" uses for the atom.

REVELATIONS

When the sun is out and the skies are clear, it's hard to imagine a more peaceful place than the rolling green hills surrounding Three Mile Island. And it's hard to imagine that each day Unit 1 operates, it's sending small but constant doses of radiation into the air.

The doses are slight -- less than most of us get in the average year from X-rays or metal detectors at airports. But while X-rays are quick and concentrated, for people living near nuclear power plants exposure is slow and steady. And that, says Sternglass, is the difference between casual exposure and a lifetime of risk.

Meanwhile, Debbie Baker -- who now lives 15 miles from the plant in Camp Hill -- monitors radiation levels around the plant each morning and records her findings on a voice-mail hotline. She may never know why her son has Down's Syndrome or even why her mother's cats were born deformed, and it's the uncertainty that's tough to take.

Like the parent of an abducted child, Baker is constantly digging for clues. Along with her daily monitoring ritual, she voraciously consumes each new study of radiation's effects in the hope that she will someday be "100 percent" certain of what happened at TMI 20 years ago.

But there's hope, she says. WIth so many aging nuclear power plants still operating around the country, one of them is bound to melt down or blow up one of these days. And this time, thanks to Three Mile Island, we'll all be paying closer attention. •