Signing up: A year after the accident at Three Mile Island, protesters gathered at the site to mark the anniversary and to demand that the nuclear power plant shut down. The industry stopped planning and building new reactors for decades, but interest has lately revived. Credit: Wally McNamee/Corbis

Thirty years ago, in March 1979, a group of badly trained operators in the control room at Three Mile Island's unit 2 confronted a minor malfunction. The problem, a simple pump shutdown, was quickly made worse by an instrument panel that failed to inform the operators about a stuck valve and by an alarm system that overloaded after the first malfunction. The operators botched an attempt to solve the rapidly escalating problem, allowing a small leak to drain most of the cooling water out of the $700 million reactor. In about two hours, they converted America's newest nuclear plant, which had begun commercial operation just three months earlier, into a $1 billion liability.

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