What I had said in the morning was that this is what we know has happened, but there has been no significant off-site release. Only to find out moments later that, in fact, there had been an off-site release. I still haven’t gotten over that.

I was scheduled to give my first official press conference that morning anyway, ’cause I was chairman of the Governors Energy Council and I was making a press conference with regard to energy policy.

You need a graphic understanding of a situation to make a complete judgment and we didn’t have that.

Another very strong image from the first day was giving my initial press conference in the morning – going down and finding out that everything I had said, the essence of what I had said, was wrong.

The first one, obviously, was walking into my office at eight o’clock in the morning on Wednesday, and being told there was a telephone call saying that there was an incident at Three Mile Island, and that it had shut down and that beyond that we didn’t know.

And if you’re not going to have a clear health threat, you don’t want to panic people.

By Thursday morning, we’d gotten over the worst of it.

You clearly have radioactive air. The situation is still not under control because there's still radioactivity coming out into the atmosphere.

I mean, obviously, people don't like to know that somebody's venting that, but you have sulfur dioxide coming out of power plants.

You're in an unfriendly, to say the least, atmosphere, so you have to be completely protected from it, from every molecule of oxygen that's there.