The investigator: John Kemeny, chairman of the president’s commission on the accident at Three Mile Island, in the control room of the plant two months after the accident. Credit: Bettmann/Corbis

By the spring of 1979, when a partial core meltdown at one of two reactors on a long, thin island in Pennsylvania's Susquehanna River caused a national panic, the movement against nuclear power had been building for decades. (The China Syndrome, the movie thriller about a near-meltdown at an unsafe nuclear plant, came out two weeks earlier.) Not long after the crisis had ended, the editor of the American Nuclear Society's monthly magazine was forced to concede that Three Mile Island had "put the nuclear industry on probation." But even he might have been surprised that the probation would last 30 years (see "Nuclear Power Renaissance?").

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