When the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) erroneously reported there was a potentially explosive hydrogen bubble inside the reactor to the news media on the morning of March 31, jounalistic hell broke loose.
In most parts of America, all television programming was interrupted to "follow" the "breaking" events at TMI, largely because of the "explosive" hydrogen bubble that threatened to destroy the reactor and unleash enormously toxic amounts of radioactive material into the atmosphere on an "unsuspecting public". That evening, America's most trusted News Anchor, Walter Cronkite, made the following, startling announcement, "The world has never known a day quite like today. It faced the considerable uncertainties and dangers of the worst nuclear power plant accident of the atomic age. And the horror tonight is that it could get much worse. The potential is there for the ultimate risk of meltdown at Three Mile Island....". Again, no one knew meltdown had already occurred.
By the time America had been shocked by Cronkite's words, the NRC discovered their mistaken assumption about the hydrogen bubble being explosive. Reporting this good news to the press literally fell on deaf ears. Not yet knowing of the NRC's admitted mistake himself, Governor Thornburgh of Pennsylvania suggested that pregnant women and women of child-bearing age within 50 miles downwind of TMI might consider leaving the area. This "suggestion" was entirely predicated on the no-safe-level hypothesis relative to low level radiation exposures. It spawned a mass voluntary evacuation of roughly 140,000 people. Realizing the communications network between the reactor operators, the NRC, the State of Pennsylvania, and the news media was in a massive state of confusion, the NRC's Head of Reactor Regulation in Washington, Harold Denton, flew to TMI and became the sole source of further information. Too little, too late. Panic had set in. Nobody believed anybody "official" any more. On April 1, President Jimmy Carter and Gov. Thornburgh visited TMI, with as much media coverage as they could muster, in the attempt to quell what had become a national panic. That didn't work either, mostly because the press repeatedly reminded everyone that the governor's "evacuation advisory" was still in effect. America remained on edge for another 5 days.
http://www.hiroshimasyndrome.com/three-mile-island-and-the-china-syndrome.html
