Island-Sity

I was the Governor of the Commonwealth at that time and the Three Mile Island nuclear accident occurred after I'd been in office for about 72 days and we had similar challenges to what they're facing in Japan so there's a strong sense of déjà vu when I read about what's going on there.

LISA MILLAR: And what were those challenges in perhaps the first 24-48 hours?

DICK THORNBURGH: Within the first 24 to 48 hours the major problem was getting a handle on the facts. There was great difficulty in obtaining reliable sources as to what was going on inside the reactor and how to best handle the prospect of a nuclear meltdown.

We relied initially on the utility company that ran the reactor but very quickly their credibility dissolved. They gave us information that was false or incomplete so we had to set about on our own to get alternative sources of information and there were many of them out there, a lot of self-styled experts, people who would tell you more than they knew or less than they knew.

And it was a very confusing period for about the first two days following the accident and then we had the arrival at my request from president Carter of a personal emissary Harold Denton from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, who was able to express the condition of the reactor in plain English and empower us to take the steps that were necessary to end the emergency.

LISA MILLAR: And that would certainly seem to be the problem for Japan at the moment, that there are so many inconsistent reports.

DICK THORNBURGH: I'm not surprised. This is an evolved technology, this is an invisible kind of threat.
It's not like a fire or a flood where you can see where the threat is coming from. Here it's a matter of eventually trying to get a cold shutdown of the reactor that is to reduce the pressure on the containment building and to begin somehow to circulate the water necessary to prevent the uncovering of the radio-active core.

That's difficult because of the loss of power, the backup generators have a limited life in the batteries that they've used so there's still a challenge remaining to put this on a path to successful shutdown.

LISA MILLAR: Looking back now 30 years, would you have done anything differently in those first couple of days?

DICK THORNBURGH: I'm sure there are a lot of things we would have done differently but in the final analysis the principle decision that was my responsibility was whether or not undertaking massive evacuation of up to a quarter of a million people out of the area where the reactor was located.

We didn't want to do that without real cause because evacuations have known risks to them when you're moving people who are elderly or people who are in intensive care units or babies in incubators, I mean the list goes on, it's a high risk operation and to do that unnecessarily would be a tragic mistake.

So our job really as I said to get the facts to carefully monitor what was going on and I'm confident we made the right decision and subsequent studies have confirmed that there were no adverse health or environmental consequences flowing from the Three Mile Island accident.

LISA MILLAR: And just finally what advice then would you be giving for authorities in Japan as they try to grapple with this crisis?

DICK THORNBURGH: I think the principle advice goes back to what I stated was the major challenge at the outset and that is, you've got to get facts that you're sure of. You can be the best decision maker in the world and if you're operating on facts that are incorrect or are untrue you're not going to make a good decision.

So it's a constant process of review and monitoring and in fact in some ways I made it, I used to be a prosecutor and I ended up cross examining a number of the people that we had to look to for sources.

But you've got the Marshall as well, all the expertise within the scientific community and the technical community because these are challenges that occur so infrequently and are so idiosyncratic in their nature that you really, there's no play book you can pull down to say how to handle a nuclear reactor going bad on you. ELEANOR HALL: That’s former Pennsylvania governor Dick Thornburgh speaking to Lisa Millar.