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?").

It was in this atmosphere that President Jimmy Carter appointed a commission to investigate the accident. To head it, he selected John Kemeny, then president of Dartmouth College, a noted mathematician and computer scientist who had also worked on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos. But he was not an expert on nuclear power, and Carter's pick surprised no one more than Kemeny himself, as he revealed in a June/July 1980 article for TR.